Firaxis was not prepared for the success of Civilization 6 on Nintendo Switch.
The iconic strategy developer, which is also known for the XCOM series, is a specialist in making PC games. It puts all its energy into building titles for that platform and then, somewhere down the line, it’s the job of another studio to make those games work on consoles (and even mobile).
Firaxis’ core audience has always been on PC. And although the console versions allow the studio to reach more players, if you want the best Civ or XCOM experience, you’ll want to download them on PC.
But with Civilization 6 on Switch something interesting happened. Yes, the developer was able to reach new (and lapsed) players via the platform, as you’d expect. But also Firaxis’ core audience, the ones with the powerful gaming PCs, were buying it, too.
“We weren’t sure when [the game] first came out on Switch,” admits executive producer Dennis Shirk. “We were like: ‘Are people going to play it for that long on a handheld?’ And the answer was yes, yes they will.”
He continues: “We hadn’t expected Switch to be a huge thing. But suddenly, it became a really huge thing. We found that a lot of our PC players were getting the game on Switch because they could take their game with them. And so with [Civilization 7], you can transfer your save game and keep playing. It’s compelling.”
As a result of player’s behaviour around Civilization 6, plus the fact that PS5 and the Xbox Series X have “the same power as most modern PCs”, Firaxis took the “natural” decision to make Civilization 7 for all platforms and release them at the same time.
“It is a big lift,” acknowledges Shirk. “We’ve got a great team and getting that huge game on the Switch is always a challenge.”
It’s not doing this by itself. It has teamed up with Behaviour Interactive to help with the console ports, but Firaxis is actively involved.
“We have a whole new way that we’re working,” Shirk explains. “The porting model… we’re not comfortable with that. We wanted to stay in control. We did all the renders in-house, the whole nine yards. [Behaviour is] connected with the development environment and working closely with the teams.”
The result of being actively involved in the porting process has naturally changed how Firaxis is approaching game development, particularly when it comes to building assets.
“Do you know what LOD is? Level of detail [where the game adjusts how complex the 3D models look based on their distance from the camera]?,” asks Shirk. “In the past, the Civ team has never had to make an LOD, because we just released on Steam. If we did console versions later, we would worry about that then.
“For the first time, every single asset, we’ve been creating LODs by the shovelful. Because we need multiple levels of LODs for something like that to work on Switch. And we have to down res a lot of stuff to work on consoles.
“We have a team that is hungry to do it. We have a custom engine, so they could make renders that are specifically tailored for each console… and they loved it. When you’re building just for Steam, for example, there are no limits. You can just fly and go. This has limits, and our graphics team in particular took it as a challenge to create this engine that had previously only had to exist on Steam and PC, and to make it work on the lowest common denominator. It’s been interesting.”
“If we weren’t doing scary, we probably would have released something in 2023”
Even before the multiplatform approach, the new Civilization was quite the undertaking for Firaxis. Previously the team adopted the 33/33/33 model, where 33% of the game is new, 33% is the same, and 33% is improved. Yet Civilization 7 is a departure from previous titles in terms of how it progresses and evolves. And such a high level of change has been a little scary, Shirk admits.
“If we weren’t doing scary, we probably would have released something in 2023,” he tells us. “It takes a lot more effort to really find the magic this time, because we had to do a lot of iteration to make sure we did it right. We didn’t want to just phone something in, we didn’t want to just bolt something on top… we wanted to create something unique.
“Ed [Beach, Creative Director] wanted to introduce a game where the core is the same, players will recognise it, the DNA is all there, but they have to try and play it with fresh eyes. They just do. There’s no way around it. You have to have a whole new strategy. The old ways won’t work this time.”
He continues: “Ed likes to lean into the 33/33/33. This time we might have weighted the top a little bit heavier than we usually would. But it’s for the better. We really shot for the moon and came out the other side looking awesome.”
The Civilization team is bigger this time to deliver the changes, Shirk says. The AI team has grown, allowing for more variety in the units. And this time there’s a narrative team for the game. Civilization is a game where the players create their own stories, but with this new game there’s a whole narrative system built around the things people encounter in the game.
“You’re going to find these things like abandoned fighting pits, trading encampments… you can catch thieves,” Shirk says. “And when you find them, the narrative system presents a decision that you need to make based on what you’ve found. It might be that you find relics, and you could go off and find the tribe that left those relics there, or take them back and put them in a museum. There are these story bits that are scattered throughout that world. Additionally, each Civ leader has a primary quest line that is tied specifically to them historically.
“It’s not that there’s an overarching narrative to the game. It’s more additional worldbuilding that we’re doing within each age, to support your own internal adventure.”
By the time Civilization 7 is released it will have been over eight years since the previous game, the longest gap yet for the series. Part of the reason for that, alongside the game’s ambition, was that it was partly developed during COVID-19. Firaxis began development before the pandemic, and so much of its early development was spent during lockdowns. And this was a challenging experience for the studio.
“We are a close-knit team,” Shirk explains. “Most of the leads have the same grey hair, because we’ve all been doing this for a while. And we found out we did not work very well remotely. Because a lot of our best ideas came from literally popping into someone’s office.
“We had this thing in the studio at quarter to the hour, if you’re not in meetings, we go off site and walk twice around the building to just get away from our desk. And a lot of amazing ideas came out of that. The Leader Pass for Civ 6 came out of those walks. So when you put us all remotely, and force us to schedule meetings to talk to each other, it just wasn’t working very well.”
He concludes: “We work in a hybrid environment now. We make sure the core team is in Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday so that we can all talk and interact and play games, and all that stuff we do together. So yeah, the pandemic was a hard time for us.”