However, it’s important to note that neither of those metrics gives as complete a picture as some Internet discussions suggest they do; Civilization VII launched on other platforms and game stores like the PlayStation 5, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and Epic Game Store, and those wouldn’t be captured in Steam numbers—even though it intuitively seems likely that Steam would account for the significant majority of players for this particular franchise. Twitch viewership is also not necessarily representative of sales or the number of players.
It’s also difficult to know for sure whether the layoffs are tied to the game’s performance.
Just a month ago, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said that while the game had a “slow start,” he believes “Civ has always been a slow burn.” He said the projections for the “lifetime value of the title” are consistent with the company’s initial projections.
There have been numerous other examples of studios and publishers laying off staff from teams that worked on both successful and unsuccessful releases as the industry continues to roll back pandemic-era over-hiring and respond to inflation, rising borrowing costs, global economic instability, trade uncertainty, ballooning development costs, and efficiency pressures.
There’s also a new loading screen with more detailed information and more interactive elements, which Firaxis says is a hint at other major UI overhauls to come. That said, players have already complained that it doesn’t look very nice because the 2D leader assets that appear on it have been scaled awkwardly and look fuzzy.
The remaining changes are largely balance and systems-related. Trade convoys can now travel over land, which means treasure ships will no longer get stuck in lakes, and there are broader strategic options for tackling the economic path in the Exploration Age. There has been a significant effort to overhaul town focuses, including the addition of a couple new ones, and the much-anticipated nerf of the Hub Town focus; it now provides +1 influence per connected town instead of two, though that may still not be quite enough to make the Hub Town, well, not overpowered.
You can find a bunch of other small balance tweaks in the patch notes, including new city-state bonuses, pantheons, and religious beliefs, among other things.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly to some, you can now issue a command to pet the scout unit’s dog.
Next steps
As far as I can tell, there are still two major traditional features fans are waiting on: autoexplore for scout units and hotseat multiplayer support. Firaxis says it’s working on both, but neither made it into 1.2.2. Players have also been asking for further UI overhauls. Firaxis says those are coming, too.
When Civilization VII launched, I wrote that I quite liked it, but I also pointed out bugs and balance changes and noted that it won’t please traditionalists. For some players, the review said it might be better to wait. We did a follow-up article about a month in, interviewing the developers. But that was still during the “fix things that are on fire stage.”
More than any previous update, today’s 1.2.2 is the first one that seems like a natural jumping-on point for people who have been taking a wait-and-see approach.
It’s quite common for strategy games like this to not really fully hit their stride until weeks or even months of updates. Civilization VII‘s UI problems made it a particularly notable example of that trend, but the good news is that it’s also following the same path as the games before it that got good post-launch support: slowly, it’s becoming a game a broader range of Civ fans can enjoy.
Enlarge/ Firaxis has upped the ante on presentation for the cities. It’s still a bit abstract and removed, but they have more vibrancy, detail, and movement than before.
2K Games
2K Games provided a flight from Chicago to Baltimore and accommodation for two nights so that Ars could participate in the preview opportunity for Civilization VII. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.
From squares to hexes, from tech trees to civic trees, over its more than 30 years across seven mainline entries, the Civilization franchise continues to evolve.
Firaxis, the studio that has developed the Civilization games for many years, has a mantra when making a sequel: 33 percent of the game stays the same, 33 percent gets updated, and 33 percent is brand new.
Recently, I had the opportunity to play Civilization VII, the next entry, which is due to launch in February 2025. The build I played was an early alpha build, but the bones of the game it will become were there, and it’s interesting to see which third Firaxis kept the same and which third it has reimagined.
It turns out that the core of the game that its developers won’t much want to change is the turn-to-turn experience. But in the case of Civilization VII, all bets are off when it comes to the overall arc of a long journey, from sticks and stones to space travel.
Rethinking the structure of a Civilization game
Most of the time, playing Civilization VII feels a lot like playing Civilization VI—but there’s one big change that spans the whole game that seems to be this sequel’s tentpole feature.
That’s the new Ages system. The long game is now broken into three segments: Antiquity, Exploration, and Modern. Each Age has some unique systems and gameplay, though most systems span all three.
Within each age, you’re given a handful of “Legacy Paths” to choose from. These map closely to the franchise’s long-standing victory conditions: Science, Economic, Cultural, and Military. The idea is that you pick the Legacy Path you want to pursue, and each Legacy Path has different success conditions that change across each of the three Ages.
These conditions are big and broad, and Firaxis thankfully hasn’t gotten too jazzy with them. For example, I played in the Age of Antiquity and pursued the Cultural path, so my goal was to build a certain number of Wonders before the end of the Age.
In some ways, this is similar to the boom-and-bust cycle of Dark and Golden Ages in Civilization VI, but I found it much more natural in VII. In VI, I often found myself making arbitrary-seeming choices I didn’t think made sense for my long-term strategy just to game the system and get the Age transition I wanted. In this new game, the Legacy Path objectives are likely to always be completely in line with the overall victory strategy you’re pursuing.
One of the advantages of this new structure is support for shorter games that aren’t just hyper-compressed versions of a larger game. Previously, the only way to play a game of Civilization that wasn’t a dozen or more hours long was to pick one of the faster game speeds, but that fundamentally changed how the game felt to play.
Enlarge/ This is a Roman city, but you could have a non-Roman historical leader, like Egypt’s Hatshepsut, at the helm.
2K Games
Now, Civilization VII gives you the ability to play a match that’s just one Age, if you choose to.
The new Ages system is integrated with another big change: your choice of leader and civilization are no longer tied together when you start a new game, and they’re not set in stone, either.
Now you pick both a civilization and a leader separately at the start—and you can do some weird, ahistorical combinations, like Greece’s Alexander as the leader of China. Each leader and civilization offers specific bonuses, so this gives more customization of your playstyle at the start.
It doesn’t end there, though. At the end of each Age, you can essentially change civilizations (though as far as I could tell, you stick with the leader). Firaxis says it took inspiration for this feature from history—like the fact that London was a Roman city before it became an English one in the Medieval era.
Which civilization you can transition to is dictated by what you did within the Legacy Path system, among other things.
The amount of time I had to play the game was just enough to almost finish the Antiquity Age, so I didn’t get to see this in action, but it sounds like an interesting new system.
