Civilization 7’s creative director on the new Ages, leaders, and cultures ‘without any written records’

Civilization 7, one of the most highly anticipated games of 2025, will include a slew of significant changes, perhaps most notably the new Ages mechanic. A game of Civ 7 will span three different Ages — Antiquity, Exploration, and Modern — but players will maintain the same leader throughout. In 2024, Polygon had a hands-on preview of the game at Gamescom as well as the opportunity to talk to some of the team at Firaxis Games, such as executive producer Dennis Shirk. According to Shirk, Civ 7 creative director Ed Beach “didn’t want to make a Civ 6.5; he wanted to do something that would make our fans have to start over. The old strategies aren’t gonna work. They have to open up and look at it with fresh eyes to understand how to play this game.”

Now, we have an interview with Ed Beach about those decisions, as well as how the process of designing Civilization games has changed over the years. A lot has changed since Civ 6 came out in 2016, and Civ 7 is going to be a whole new experience.

Polygon: How do you choose the civs? And the leaders? Has that process changed over the years? 

Ed Beach: As the Civ franchise has grown over the years, so too has the process of selecting which civs and leaders to include in the game. 

Early on, if a designer thought a civ could be fun or interesting to play as, that might have been enough to add them. However, as the Civ community has grown and more players from around the world become Civ fans, we have both the desire and opportunity to be more thoughtful about who gets represented on the world stage. 

Generally, civs and leaders are selected when they have the right combination of a few things: their prominence in history, how well they represent our playerbase, and the gameplay opportunities they offer. 

For Civilization VII, this process has evolved further. Civs and leaders can now be selected separately from each other, and your choice of civ no longer persists across the entire game but instead is tied to a specific Age. 

For leaders, being able to select them independently means that we can actually explore figures from history beyond traditional heads-of-states. We still have kings and queens and emperors, but we now have renowned figures such as Harriet Tubman or Machiavelli, neither of whom led a nation but both left lasting impacts in history.

For civs, because they are tied to specific Ages, we’re able to “dig deeper” into historical time periods and select empires that may not be as well-known overall — but were incredibly important and powerful during these periods in history. And with multiple Ages, we’re even able to represent the evolution of some empires such as India, from Maurya to Chola to Mughal. 

What is the research process like when integrating new civs? Are there cultural consultants and/or historian teams you work with to ensure the information is accurate?

The research process for integrating civs is a lot of fun and a good amount of work. Many developers at Firaxis Games are — as you might guess — naturally interested in history, and we do our best to authentically represent cultures, whether it’s the language they speak, to the clothing they wear, and more. 

During the development of Civilization VII, we had two resident historians at Firaxis Games— one specializing in East Asian history and the other specializing in Scandinavian and Medieval Studies. Both were essential in not just helping us represent cultures with care, but also crafting the Age experience and figuring out which civilizations were good candidates to explore.

As some might be aware, we also did directly consult with the Shawnee for their inclusion in Civilization VII. It’s been a really wonderful partnership.

In terms of researching these civs, have you discovered anything unexpected about any of them that proved to be challenging to adapt?

We have always had huge problems representing cultures without any written records. We’ve always wanted to include an early North American native culture such as the Mississippians, but never had any idea how to create a leader for such a civilization that left no documentation on specific people. Thankfully, our new Civ VII approach to loosely couple leaders with civs has solved that problem. Now any leader can be paired with the Mississippians, though other indigenous North American leaders such as Tecumseh and Pachacuti are especially recommended.

Are there civilizations/leaders/time periods you’ve always wanted to include but haven’t had the chance yet — or perhaps haven’t because they would be too difficult to adapt?

Because of the original structure of Civ, where you play as the same civilization from start to finish, we’ve always had a creative challenge of trying to figure out which “version” of an empire to choose as representative throughout all of history. This gets further complicated when you have civilizations who weren’t around in 4000 BC, such as America. 

This is what Ages helps us solve — by splitting history into distinct playable chapters and making each Age rooted in particular parts of history, we can select civilizations that exist during the Age and show how empires rise, fall, grow and evolve. A civilization such as Songhai, who may not be as well-known in popular culture today, was enormously influential during its time – and fits perfectly for the Exploration Age as a representative then from West Africa. 

Did the team ever consider the reverse of what they settled on with the new leader mechanic change? (This would entail playing as multiple leaders but with the same civilization.)

We did consider this approach, but quickly ran into a few issues. If we were to have different leaders across Ages but you keep the same civilization, we would be limiting ourselves to only selecting civs who have clear representation across all three Ages – like China or India. If you were to select America, for example, which leader would lead America in 4000 BC? Or the Inca today? 

We’re also conscious that with so many things changing from Age to Age, it’s important for you to have a cohesive experience. We’ve found that most players’ understanding of what goes on in a game of Civ tends to focus on the leaders — Gilgamesh was your friend, as opposed to the Sumerians. Having the leader stay the same across Ages lets you develop a narrative about your opponents since they remain constant.

Will there be any mechanics tied to ideology? Or will that be relegated to civics like in Civ 6? 

Yes! We recently revealed in our Modern Age livestream that Ideologies play a critical role during that Age. Essentially, after you study the Political Theory civic, you can choose an ideology to pursue which you’ll be locked into for the rest of the game. This has a major impact on how diplomatic relationships with other leaders proceed; shared ideologies strengthen alliances, while conflicting ones create friction. Ideology also plays a big role in the Modern Age’s Military legacy path, one of the routes you can pursue to unlock the final victory conditions for the game. 

Since the launch of Civ 6, we’ve seen a pair of games attempt to challenge that 4X mantle (Humanity and Millennia). Is there anything specific the Civ team may have learned from those titles, or perhaps from other titles over the years that have taken inspiration from Civ?

It’s been very interesting to see how other games in the 4X space tackle some of the same questions we look at, and see how players react to their solutions. For Civilization VII, we have the unique benefit of having a very long history of games within our own franchise, and thus our efforts in Civilization VII are really focused on finding ways we can improve on some of the weaknesses we identified with our own titles. Hopefully, we create another Civ game that can stand the test of time. 

Is there anything you wish someone would ask about, but no one ever does?

I think maybe the question “What’s the regular part of your work week that is the most fun while developing a Civ game?” And I’d have to answer with our Tuesday afternoon multiplayer sessions. We’ve been holding those regularly throughout the project and with our new Ages system, multiplayer matches can be wrapped up within a 2-3 hour period. That’s made these sessions even more interesting as you can imagine!

Civilization 7 will be released on Feb. 11 for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and Windows PC .