Interview with Andrew Frederiksen - Lead Producer Civilization VII
Feature
Hooked Gamers
OK, so do you get to work with the great Sid Meier?
Andrew Frederiksen
Sid is an active member of Firaxis. You know, obviously Ed Beach was the creative director for Civ VII. But you know, Sid has given a lot of great feedback and useful information, guiding the project and pretty much everything at Firaxis.
So what's it like working with him? Do you get to work with him personally?
I've worked with him on some other stuff. In terms of Civ VII, Sid and obviously Ed, they're our creative visionaries. As a producer, I'm not usually directly involved when they go into the deep magic. But you know, obviously just being around Firaxis - I have been there for 10 years - I've gotten to know no Sid and he is just an awesome guy, as you would hope to imagine.
So as the lead producer, what exactly is your role within Civ VII development?
Man, that's a hard thing to say in a short time, but you know, obviously a big part of my job is just helping get the game out the door on time, in budget and meeting the vision that the design team establishes, and the art direction. Basically just a lot of support across the board, as well as setting up the processes and just working through all the demands and balancing everything. So I guess it's like a finger in every pie, but owner of not many of them.
So with the Civ VII team being a large team, how do you manage the large team involved in Civ VII and what strategies do you use to help keep everyone motivated and aligned to the game's vision?
Well, I think the nice thing is that with Civ and the excellent franchise history that it has, motivation is not the hard part for us. You know, people are very excited to work on Civ and to keep carrying the torch forward on something so awesome. So that's really great. In terms of our processes, we're still learning too. It is the biggest team that we've had making Civilization. We've got a lot of veterans who've worked on Civ for many, many years, and we've got a lot of new help as we've grown over the last few years. So, I think there's a lot of balancing that we have to do in many different ways and it comes through everything from production processes, about how we put tasks into Jira and how meetings are run and how teams are organised. We make sure that we have regular Sprint reviews where everyone gets to show off all the fun stuff they've done, and reminders of the deadlines.
Civ VII isn't your first foray into the Civ series, which previous tiles have you worked on?
So, I actually joined Firaxis almost exactly 10 years ago - 10 years in January. I took over as lead producer for Civilization: Beyond Earth - Rising Tide, the first expansion pack for Beyond Earth. And I got to work on that, I did a few other things here and there. I took over the Civ VI production actually on launch day. It was a really funny story. Dennis Shirk - he's our Executive Producer on Civilization VII. But he was the lead on Civ VI to get it to launch and then he handed me the keys to Civ VI on launch date and, I love it because it was literally the Steam keys, so he literally handed me the keys - so that was very fun. I got to work on all the DLC that we released, Rise and Fall,and then I was around for half or so of Gathering Storm, and then I went off and I worked on a few other things around Firaxis. I helped with some XCOM, I worked on some Marvel Midnight Suns, and then I came back to Civ to help get Civ VII out the door.
So, what is the overall vision and goals of Civ VII as opposed to the previous instalments?
So, I think the design, the pillar that we talk a lot about - I don't know if you've seen Ed's talk about - History comes in layers - and I think that when we use that one, that sort of expands into a lot of our other things. Obviously, I’m going to let the artists talk about the art vision, there's a lot of excitement that they'll be able to dive into there. But that history and layers, that was sort of a beacon for the game design, and it allowed us to develop the Ages system, which unlocked a lot of the other changes. Like the way victories work has been iterated, because now you're not playing just a single march, you've got these blocks of gameplay that you're experiencing then and how that contributes to the overall victory obviously has some big effects. That layer works in so many other systems and as you start adding those things, it was like "let's make sure we're stressing depth, not complexity wherever we can". Obviously no matter what you do with Civ, it's still a complex game, but we don't want complexity just to have complexity. Sid says, "Make sure the game isn't having fun, the player should be having fun." So trying to look at the decisions that we add and where can we streamline. That's why there's no more builders and no more workers because you still get to choose what you make. But now you don't have to do those extra steps. You just get to make the interesting decision right away.
You mentioned complexity. The Civ series adds complexity with each iteration. How do you balance the new mechanics for existing Civ fans whilst not making it too difficult for newcomers to the series?
Well, for one, we've done a lot of play testing. You know we do internal play testing, we've done some external stuff, and getting the feedback from not just our internal people, but external people has been really valuable to helping say, "OK, is this enjoyable? Why? Why not? What parts are concerning? What parts are confusing? How can we smooth that out?"
So, just lots and lots of iteration. As you said, the game itself has an iteration, but iteration that we're doing during the development cycle to say "Have we gotten it down to the interesting point, the interesting decision that the player agency without steps and confusion that aren't necessary?"
How do you balance the expectations of long time fans with those of newcomers?
Yeah, I think that's a great question, and I don't want my answer not to be trite - but, carefully. It is something that we think about. Just because something's good doesn't mean it's Civ. Just because something is Civ, doesn't mean it's good. We sort of have to look at all of those things along the way and say, “Why are we making this change, this addition or this removal or adjustment?”. And I think that being very careful to add things that add interest and fun where we want it and and take out the things that aren't necessary. Like the whole thing about builders and workers - did we need that. Turns out we didn't. We came up with a new idea and I think it actually plays incredibly well. Obviously some Civ players who played for a long, long time are going to be a little taken back. I remember when we had an on-site and some people played it. And I mentioned that in our briefing and they were like "Wait, what?" You could see people reel back, and it's sort of like "Trust us. You're gonna like it. I know it's a little bit different". And as soon as they played, they liked it and it was like "I couldn't believe it, but then I played it, and I get it".
So, I think that it's just, be willing to take some risks, but then also be willing to admit when that risk didn't go the way you wanted it to, and then iterate and adjust from there. Anyone who's played any of the last Civ is going to sit down and immediately have a degree of comfort. It's going to be comfortable and familiar, it's also going to be something where because we've taken some of those areas of complexity - and been a little bit more intentional - we had way more focus on our tutorial or as we call it our 'first time user experience'. We focused a lot on that to help get not just new players, but also players who played before, to transition into what's changed. So that extra effort that we put there I think is going to really pay dividends to both groups.
What were some of the biggest challenges you faced during the development?
I don't want to scare anybody, but you know, doing multiple platforms at launch is a big challenge. It's a big change. Any team that does that has my respect. Because it forces some decisions to be made earlier. You're like "Well, can we just finish this game?", but it's like "Now you have to finish the game - and make it work on everything." So that obviously was a big challenge. I think dealing with the ramifications of some of the changes is a challenge. It’s an exciting challenge though.
So I think just unpacking all of the changes and figuring out the ripples and making sure they all come together well is a challenge. But it's a good challenge. It's the largest Civ team we've had, so it's exciting to have a lot of new team members, but it's also a lot of growth.
There have been dozens of nations and leaders that have been able to select throughout the series. How is each determined and how do you assign their bonuses unique abilities?
Yeah, there is no easy answer for how, but I think it's also one of the coolest parts. Every leader that I can think of that I've been a part of, I feel like they all came from a different source. Sometimes it's this designer, sometimes it's that designer making a suggestion. Sometimes it starts with "We need this person, can we get them in the game? Can we get this person then as a leader?" Other times it's because we need to figure out someone from this period of time, or this region of the world. There's so many important people, and we want to be diverse. We want to be represented. We can't represent everyone right out of the gate. But we want to keep a balance in every possible way that we can. And I think that it's just exciting to go through there and debate “We like this person. But if we do that person, that's too many of that type”. Maybe we're not really hitting the diversity, we may hit global coverage, geographic coverage, but it's too many people from this other identity, or this other factor. It could be that we don't have someone who represents the economy yet. So we need to look at who we could swap in and out. Or we need to have more female leaders, or we need to have different representation of other cultures, and sometimes geographically we may be covering it well, but that area that is geographically small actually has a lot of different cultures.
So you could pick a lot of different areas and be like, "Wow, why'd you only pick one leader from that area?" My ancestry is Scandinavian, so I'm like, "Well, I want a Norwegian, Swedish and Danish and Finnish person" But I know we're not going to do all that. It would be a little heavy handed in one region. So, just trying to be as diverse as possible and also think about themes. Like I said, we need to make sure we have someone who covers an economic bonus or a military bonus.
And then I think that's one of the really exciting things. Once we have that, we kind of know the theme that a leader will hit, and then the design team can say “With the mechanics that we have available, where are we going to go with that?” You know, you can get an economic bonus from science or you can get it from culture. It's not a horse and cart question, it's a chicken and egg question.
So you mentioned before about the Age transition, which is probably the biggest update for Civ VII. How was that mechanic inspired?
There's a lot of inspiration that you can draw from many different places. I think that you look at what Rise and Fall added with the increased importance of the Era transition. That was sort of, in many ways, kind of a precursor, but it wasn't just that. We also look at the content space that we have and you know in Civ previously you might pick America and you're playing in Antiquity and all the way up. And it's not until you get to modern times with bombers that America's power really matters.
So how do we focus on a time where every civ can do things. These things start to connect and it's like, OK, cool. I don't know if you've heard Ed talk about how history comes in layers. There's a great example of him talking about London and how you can zoom in on a few parts of London. It was a Roman settlement, and then I think it was the Normans who came. So, you see how that city changed tremendously and grew over time. But the decisions and memories of one time carried forward, but still changed so dramatically, and all that sort of mixes together and becomes a game feature that helps simulate those ideas as well as solve problems with the design.
Sometimes in Civ there's, the occasional mid-game slow down and you're sort of looking for the next thing to do. Was the Age Transition developed so that it relieves that sort of issue?
Absolutely. I think that keep making sure that you've got both long term and medium term and short term things to keep focused on, and keep moving the game forward is really one of the strengths that comes out of the Ages. You know that your power, your bonuses are going to be relevant and you also know that if you're losing, you're going to have a chance to slingshot back. You're gonna have a chance to make a strategic pivot, or double down at the transit. You can say like, "well, maybe my military strategy wasn't working. I'm going to go a different way after the Age transition because I'll pick a civ that kind of goes that way." Or you'll say, "You know what, I'm really going to dive in on this and now I'm going to leapfrog ahead."
So when you get to make that transition based on what you've done, you'll have the different civ choices, and you can make legacy card choices and get to move forward from that front.
We have a couple of Civ 2 players on the Hooked Gamers team and we wanted to know if the design team took any inspiration from older games in the series, or is it just basically coming off Civ VI?
I mean, there's always looking back, you know? Just like there are players who have, as you said you play Civ 2, there are players who have played all the Civ series but say "My favourite is three or four or five." There are developers here like, "I love working on this and I love this feature from Civ V, I want to look at that." So, there's always looking back. I mean, how can you make a game about history and not look back at your own history? Seldom do we take an old system and just copy and bring it forward, because so much has changed around that. But the inspiration, the concept, the ideas of the goals, those can absolutely be very useful in planning the next one.
What are the long term plans for the Civ series? Are there any specific areas or features that you'd like to explore in the future?
Yes, there are ones I'd like to explore, and the plan is something I don't think that I'm allowed to go into much detail. But I think you can say that our goals are to make sure that we live up to and honour the tradition of the franchise. And obviously we've supported it every game post launch in a variety of ways that our players have clearly enjoyed. And we're going to do our darndest to repeat that as well. But I've got to hold the details for now.
On behalf of all the Hooked Gamers readers, thank you for your time today, it is much appreciated. Enjoy the rest of your time in Melbourne.