Sid Meier’s Civilization VI turned one year old just a few days ago, and developers Firaxis are thinking about the future. Lead designer Ed Beach spoke with us today about their plans to further extend a game that had already launched with most of the series’ traditional systems.
Get the lowdown on all the world players with our Civ 6 leader guide.
“I think it is probably the back half of the game in Civ VI that could stand to have some more content added,” Beach says. “We’ve talked about systems along the lines of the World Congress that we had in Civ V, where all the leaders of the world took stock of the global situation and made decisions based on that. That’s an area we haven’t addressed fully in Civ VI that we’d definitely like to get back to.”
We ask if this might extend to a diplomatic victory, but Beach is understandably careful not to make any specific promises.
“I’m not sure whether [such features] are going to be specifically in the same form that we have them in Civ V, so I’m not going to promise anyone a diplomatic victory. But those types of global interactions between leaders, and leaders getting together and anlaysing: ‘oh my goodness, something needs to be done’, or ‘oh, we need to come to an agreement’ – those are absolutely things that we would strongly be considering as great new things to add to the system.”
It probably won’t surprise fans that Civ VI will keep to the same cadence as recent games for its development; systemic additions like this are likely to come in a fully-fledged expansion.
“It’s the kind of thing that you don’t add in the patches or DLC packs, like we put out this year,” Beach says. “We would have to wait for a larger expansion for us to add significant new gameplay systems like that.”
On a smaller scale, I’ve personally always wondered why Greece is the only civilisation to have more than one leader. It’s an ability that makes a welcome return from Civ IV, having skipped V, but seems sadly under-utilised right now. Do Firaxis have plans to embrace it and add more alternate leaders?
“We definitely will lean into it more,” Beach tells me. He points out that this is a great opportunity for the game’s vibrant mod community to make their own contributions, so it’s not necessarily something that has to be done by Firaxis, “but we have been doing some thinking about which would be interesting civilisations [for us] to add a second leader to, so I think you’ll probably hear more about that.”
Check back with PCGamesN next week for a full write-up of our interview with Ed Beach, in which we go into more depth on the above, and touch on modding, multiplayer, and expanding Civ VI into all-new territory for the series.