The Art of Civilization VII - an interview

Hooked Gamers
Welcome to Melbourne.
John, Matthew and Ryan
Thank you...great to be here.
The visuals in Civ have come a long way since the original, but one thing that hasn't changed substantially in the last few iterations are the units themselves. How much work goes into designing them and their animations?
John: A tremendous amount of work has gone into the units. I mean, I'm supremely proud of the before and after on the unit front. The major changes that we've seen for units has been the introduction of what we call continuous combat, right. So instead, each unit kind of pairs up and then attacks one another.
We just wanted to give you the most interesting aspect of combat and you just warp directly into combat and then you stay in that combat state until the conclusion of the turn. And what that does is, it keeps the gameplay really responsive and it also just presents a tonne of visual diversity. So when you're playing, you can just make a couple of clicks and a battle is just raging on in front of you. So there's been a lot of innovations for combat.
There's also a huge push for naval combat as well. We have boats now that go engage in melee combat where they smash into each other. They kind of lash each other up, and then the crew on the deck of the ships get into a brawl on top there, which is historically how naval combat would play out until cannons came online, and that's represented as well. The fidelity of each unit has gone up substantially. And that's like smaller details like the guys buckle and armour and that sort of thing, but also the fidelity of the Ages, the different time periods that we're exploring, the cultures that we're exploring and every single unit is just a smaller member of an overall army. That is also very visually consistent as well.

With the more recent Civ titles you get to zoom in right into the units, whereas in early titles it was just a static isometric view. How hard is it to get the level of detail for the zoomed in view?
John: Well, it has been a great challenge, but it's something that we wanted to take on. We wanted to make sure that, well, around the office we have this term called 'readable realism'. And what that means is we wanted to keep it realistic so that your actions have weight to them. But we also wanted to make sure that it's readable from a distance. So we kind of took a nod from miniatures, the tabletop gaming dioramas. And they look great as a member of an army together, but you can also pick that up. And they're like, "Whoa, look at that." And that's something that we've started to implement with independent powers. Independent powers is a brand new feature for the game. So we were like, "Hey, can we use the unit content to kind of give them an identity and a culture."
Matthew: On the building side too, we had the same problem and when we originally talked, we said "that camera can come right up to the front door" and so we put a lot of effort into like our textural detail to make it so that it feels really believable and has a lot of grit and detail up close. But then we also look at it from a really zoomed out standpoint and say, "Well, there's a lot of textual information in the bricks, but we need less rows of bricks so that it's readable from the camera out here". And that's how we sort of balanced out the two.
So how did you approach the overall aesthetic art style was Civ VII and where were your inspirations and references?
Matthew: John was kind of mentioning earlier about the readable realism and yeah, so when we originally got together, we started to look at dioramas. That was probably the biggest thing for us, looking at different tabletop dioramas and things like that to use for inspiration because a lot of times dioramas are made with that in mind, right? Like they can't put all the detail into it. So, how do you extract that information out?
John: And some of us worked on Civ VI and we love that game and we wanted to do something that is a right fit for the franchise. But we also wanted to kind of get a little bit more weight to your actions and we wanted to go with a more serious sort of tone inspired by, if you were to go to a museum and you saw a diorama of Ancient Rome or Egypt? What would be there? And then you want to see more, you want to go around the city and see what's going on at the riverside. It's a visual style that communicates a lot of information - first and foremost - gameplay information. But it's a look that is just encouraging you to visually explore more.
You sort of touched on it before, the leaders in Civ VI had a little bit more cartoonish look, and it sort of flows through a little bit to Civ VII from what I've seen, but it's a little bit more on the serious side. Is this something that your team had a big say in?
Ryan: I can take this one. I think I have the closest ties to the Leader team. So we're trying to bring everything in the game a little bit more towards readable realism. So that means taking the cartoony proportions and textures from Civ VI and making them a little bit more, not quite miniature like, because we see these pretty close up. Whereas the units we have to worry about how to read down there, the leaders are always going to be pretty big, so we can get generally more realistic with those. But we're still trying to make sure they sit in that same universe.

So what were some of the most challenging artistic problems that you encountered during development?
John: Well. We have a goal of trying to recreate all of human history. That's all time periods, all peoples, all cultures, you know, and that's a big task. So, the introduction of the Ages, the Age system really helped us kind of contextualise that goal. It was very helpful for us to identify a strong start, middle and end as you grow your empire through the Age. That helped to give us some boundaries and some guidelines. And I think one of the biggest challenges, I mean there's plenty of challenges, and we've had some amazing victories along the way internally as we've developed it, but it's just making sure that we try to cover that huge goal, all of human history in a realistic time frame and fashion. We had to identify what's the highest priority and secondary and tertiary and kind of move through those sorts of things.
Matthew: In Civ VI every city had its own sort of look to it, but when you would place down an individual district, they were all pretty much the same. So when we came to Civ VII, I pitched this idea of like, "Hey, I want to make every building to reflect that civilization."
And how did you design the distinctive aesthetics for each of those civilizations?
Matthew: Yeah, so we had to come up with this plan. We have all of these civs and we want them to look distinctly unique from each other. And that comes from a combination of, obviously Ryan's team and the concepts that they came up with on some ideas and things that they would like to see, we have a historian on staff that provides information to us, we have people that are just passionate about certain civs.They grew up like loving Egypt or they grew up loving Persia or whoever. And sort of like a combination of everything. And then we have all of these civs, we have all of this information we want to make a unique version of every building for that civ and how do we do that. And in Civ VII, I think we were really successful in doing that like we've never seen before.
And I think in some cases when it comes to the aesthetics, it's like, "Well, we want it to look like Persia, but we have India. Can we use similar architecture but maybe adjust the colours depending on regions?" Or maybe we want to make a civ to feel like it's more grand, so we add nicer materials like gold or marble to those civs. And we just look for the common elements that we see in a particular culture. What kinds of motifs did they use or did they have certain types of statues? What religions or beliefs did they have and how does that impact the look of their architecture? And then just bring it all together to make a cohesive city.

So with Civ, players get to zoom in and zoom out as I mentioned before, but do you guys add in little Easter eggs for yourselves or for gamers?
John: (after a bit of laughter from the team) Easter eggs. They have kind of a shifting scale, like the Civ Scout cat from the previous game. But for this game, I mean, it's really quite fun to work together as a team and you have to make tonnes of armour outfits and different props. And one of one Easter eggs that's kind of fun is like we make all of these different jars, and we'll have the potter initial on the jars. And of course those are our initials.
We have some great works and things signed by one of our unit team members. So there's little things like that. You know, it's just for us more than anything.
Matthew: But also I want to point out too, like how we absolutely do have Easter eggs. There are some that I would love to talk about, but that'll have to wait. But just like how we take imagery from one civ to another or from one building to another and incorporate that. Maybe a player won't notice right away. But for example, for the Shawnee, while we were working on the Bank, we have a coin that's in there to indicate that there's money there. But we got to the Shawnee, we are using wampum and we just incorporated that sort of coin design pattern into the patterning of the wampum because of their differences in currency. So just thinking about that is a lot of fun.
How have the advancements in technology influenced the art direction and the capabilities that you can add into the games?
John: Well, each game has advancements in CPU and computer hardware power. But one of the great advancements that I have seen, as a developer has been the tools integration and the tech behind that. Going from Civ VI to Civ VII, of course I'm very excited about the visual presentation aspect, but I know that there is a huge team of dedicated engineers, tools developers and they have brought it as well. They are excited for the advancements that they've made. One of the things that I use all the time is what we call The Civ Editor. It has a whole suite of options to simulate game play and you can just simply test your work and you can see it in a realistic space. So, yeah, the tech advancements have allowed us to make more content in a more efficient sort of way. But our engineers have also just done an amazing job of making advancements in the editor and the tools.
And how much work goes into ensuring that Civ VII can be played by the most number of people across the various platforms (rather than just those with a high spec PC)?
Matthew: I mean, a tonne of work goes into that. For Civ VII we had to completely rethink it. As I mentioned to you earlier, we wanted to create a tonne more content. We also wanted to have a much higher visual fidelity, so that required us to do things like make more LODs or have you know have a robust LOD system that we could allow those things to be displayed on the screen.
But to John's point earlier, just looking at the optimizations on the engineering side. They do all of the processing to make the terrain and make it so that it's as optimal as possible and they do work to make sure that all of that stuff Is performant. We have things like LOD's to make sure that we're performant on the architecture side and it's a combination of everybody pulling together to do that.
And the cool thing about Civ VII - simultaneous launch on all platforms? We can't afford to be like, "Oh, we'll fix it later." So we had to think about this really early on and continue to work on it as we were developing it instead of pushing it off till later.
John: Yeah, just to jump in - the other thing is like the team dynamic as well. During production, we kind of reached this amazing stride where we're building content quickly, reliably and performing towards the polish phase of the game. We're all like this well-running machine and we're able to take on the additional challenges of “How do we optimise for Nintendo Switch and lower end PC's?” Well, we’ve got all the tools right here and we have got all the talent right there, so we're ready to go on that endeavour.
Well, thank you very much for your time and enjoy the launch next year
Matthew: I'm very excited.
After speaking with both the art team and Andrew Frederiksen, it is clear to see that they are passionate about Civiliazation VII, and as a result, we at Hooked Gamers are eager to check out the game when the epic strategy video game franchise launches on February 11, 2025
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