Fans of Civilization have been waiting nearly a decade for the latest installment in the legendary video game franchise.
Now it has been discovered that the concept of time passing is rather appropriate: the idea behind Civilization VII, which will be launched in February, is how the UK capital has changed from the Roman era to the present.
It all began with a map of London, as the Romans knew it.
“Londinium looked like pretty much any frontier Roman town, with an amphitheatre, baths, and a shaky bridge that crossed to the south side of the Thames,” said the game’s main developer, Ed Beach, as he showed me the map below, which is courtesy of Encyclopaedia Britannica.
“But I wanted to look at how this evolved and how this changed as London grew and prospered.”
The new game will be built around the lessons learned from those changes.
Since its inception in 1991, the Civilization series has sold 70 million copies; the most recent version was released in 2016.
Fans have been wondering where developers Firaxis will take the game’s next update.
I belong to that cohort; my brother introduced me to Civ II on our PlayStation in the 1990s, and I was just mildly startled to realize that I’ve spent more than 500 hours playing the sixth iteration of the game.
For those who are unfamiliar, civilization can feel more like a board game than a video game. You move forces around a map, establishing and building cities while fighting others to claim their land.
Previous games in the series required players to play as a specific leader and civilization combination, such as Teddy Roosevelt and the United States or Cleopatra and Egypt.
However, the developers argue that this is not genuinely typical of how cities evolve, as multiple ruling factions leave their mark, as they have in London.
In the new game, a player can start as the Romans and develop their own Londinium during the Antiquity era.
However, after going to the next level, known as the exploration era in the game, players may become Normans and build on what has come before.
The game’s developers were inspired by Ludgate, the site of the west gate on the former London Wall, and dug out additional old maps to examine how the area had changed 1,000 years after the Romans departed London.
“London changes, and it grows, but you can see that core Roman encampment,” Mr. Beach said.
The map, created by Layers of London, a division of the UK’s Institute of Historical Research, shows that the River Fleet still runs, but many of the Roman-era buildings are no longer present.
“It’s all been built over by the buildings that you would expect in a medieval or Renaissance-era city,” Mr. Beach added.
“We have inns, we have taverns, we still have religious buildings to the east side of the wall, but it’s now St Paul’s Cathedral, the very first version of it, before it got burned in the Fire of London.”And we notice that the river has been redirected somewhat so that they may build a prison to house some of the miscreants from the Middle Ages and keep them at bay.”
This distinction served as the cornerstone for the new game, with each era building on the previous one.
Finally, the developers traveled back in time to the Victorian era to see how the Ludgate neighbourhood had evolved once more.
This image, reproduced with permission from the National Library of Scotland, depicts another notable set of alterations, with the River Fleet no longer visible after being redirected underground for sewage in the mid-1800s.
“Now that the prison is totally replaced, the needs of the industrial revolution dictate we need a rail line in there, and Ludgate rail station is exactly on top of where the prison used to be,” Mr. Beach explained.
“All those buildings that used to support religious activity have pretty much been overtaken, except for St. Paul’s Cathedral.”
This third stage of transition, which the new game refers to as the contemporary era, helped the developers solidify their notion.
In London, for example, players could play as the Romans, then the Normans, and finally as Britain, all while creating a rising England that extends beyond the capital city.
Wishlist of Changes
While the dramatic change in style may be exhilarating for some, die-hard fans of the series may be apprehensive about how different it is.
It comes amid a slew of other improvements that will be meaningful to aficionados but may not make much sense to those who haven’t played the game before.
The game’s developers tell me that computer-controlled civilisations will behave more wisely. They tick off the seemingly infinite changes like a checklist: each civilization has its own distinct set of civics to uncover, units may now move across rivers, and there are no more builders.
There are expected modifications, such as a graphics upgrade to make the game more modern, as well as surprising ones, such as changing the leaders you play to include notable historical individuals who did not rule their countries, such as Benjamin Franklin and Confucius.
Meanwhile, Hatshepsut, one of Egypt’s legendary female rulers, is now playable. The game’s narrator, Game of Thrones and Star Wars actress Gwendoline Christie, adds weight to the visual enhancement.
However, not everything was pulled directly from a fan’s request.
Traders will continue to build roads automatically, which has long been a source of frustration for some gamers. The game’s approach to religion has changed slightly, but it still appears that players will be micromanaging missionaries around the continent.
And large promises to cure the AI are well accepted, but without seeing the finished product, it’s difficult to be convinced.
Moving between ages appears to be linked to crises such as barbarian invasions, civil wars, and plagues, though the specific mechanism is unknown.
Mr Beach stated that it creates a “cool cycle that you go through three times in the game that we’re releasing here at launch,” which I told him sounded suspiciously like Firaxis would consider adding more cycles and empires in the future.
He would not be drawn to it
But one thing is certain: with what amounts to a large reset button between eras, no single player will be able to blitz ahead and gain an unbeatable lead at the start of each game, which will be music to fans’ ears.
We will find out when the game is out next year.
