Civilization 7 is officially 2025's Most Wanted PC game, and the creative director told us how he’s going to get you to finally finish a Civ campaign
Okay, be honest; you’ve probably not finished too many full campaigns in the Civilization series. It’s okay, neither have I—there’s always some reason to tap out and start fresh. We’re not alone, and Firaxis has the numbers to prove it. Answering an assortment of interview questions from our sagely Council for The PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted—where Civilization 7 was just voted the #1 anticipated game for 2025—creative director Ed Beach got on camera to let us know what’s going to be different this time, and how Firaxis is going to be re-defining the genre after 34 years of iteration.
«We had a lot of data that people would play Civilization games and they would never get all the way to the end. They just wouldn’t finish them. And so we wanted to do whatever we could—whether it was reducing micromanagement, restructuring the game—to really address that problem directly,» said Beach while standing stoically against the backdrop of a US Civil War-era fort.
The solution is to let players make a clean break if they’re starting to feel their attention flagging. It’s a bold design decision, but in Civilization 7, «you don’t stick with a civilization throughout the entire course of the game,», he said. A full campaign is broken up into ages, which are both notable shifts in technology and aesthetics, but also break a single playthrough up into three more easily digestible chapters.
As one age ends and another begins, players will have the option to switch who they’re playing as and continue on as a civilization at the peak of its power and influence. It’s a big option to present to players, but should provide an interesting option to shift gears if you’ve been operating as a quiet background player up until that point, with little opportunity to break into the limelight.
Beach said that this also helps sell the fantasy of experiencing the history of our strange, flawed species: «We’re challenging players to not look at the history of an empire as something that started in
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