Author: Game Infliction

We finally got our first glimpse of Civilization VII’s gameplay during gamescom 2024, and it’s already looking much different than anything we’ve ever seen from the legendary series. That includes a huge shakeup to the way that Civilization VII progresses thanks to its new “ages” system, which is designed to break its progression into something like chapters.

We already checked out Civilization VII in first preview, which left us with a pretty positive outlook on the anticipated sequel. Still, we had plenty of questions for creative director Ed Beach, who sat down with us for an interview at gamescom. Read on for his thoughts on Civilization VII’s new structure, whether it will incorporate elements from the previous game’s Gathering Storm expansion, and much more. And for everything else announced during gamescom 2024, go here.

Civilization VII will release on PC, PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and Switch on February 11, 2025.

I was telling you off-screen that I just got into Civ VI and now I have to relearn Civ VII, but I think that’s fine.

Ed Beach, Creative Director, Firaxis: We’re trying to make it so the barrier of entry is a little bit lower than before. Civ VI could get a little dense in places. If you jumped in at the end with all the expansions and all the content there, that’s actually not the easiest place to start. So I think Civ VII might be just the move you want to make.

Yeah, I’m really excited. So you’re leading me into my next question. So you’ve been consistently updating Civ VI and there’s a lot of mod support. So why is now the best time for Civ VII?

Beach: Well, we’ve been thinking about Civ VII for quite a while. We started working on the game before the pandemic, so it is been in development quite a while. The design team had ideas that worked really well in Civ VI, but had some side effects in terms of the game takes a really long time to play. By the time you get late in the game, there’s an awful lot of cities and units and so forth to manage, and we wanted to think about that and come up with a different approach so that we could make the game more manageable, more approachable, and actually just get players all the way to the finish line more often than had been happening in previous Civ games.

Yeah, I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve stayed up till 3am playing just one more round. It’s got me. So Gathering Storm and its global warming and mechanics offer such a dynamic change for the core gameplay. Is that something that’s going to be implemented in Civ VII?

Beach: So we’re not talking a lot yet about what comes after the exploration age after the Renaissance. The first age we’re diving all the way into right now and we have demos and so forth of that. We’re not going to forget about climate change, though it was very personally impactful when we got to work on that with Gathering Storm. I was the lead designer of that expansion.

I looked up a lot of things about climate change… I mean, we’re not a simulator type of game, but tried to get some of the things right in terms of how sea level rise works and storms move across the globe and so forth. So we brought a lot of that forward with us and what you can see in the game right now that we’re demoing with the Antiquity Age is there still are floods, there’s still volcanic eruptions. We still have the storms that sweep across the map.

So a lot of that Gathering Storm mechanics, ideas, whatever, that we still have those.

So is that part of the crises that is being implemented into this new system?

Beach: So those are sort of adjacent but similar. We have several different crises. The one that we’re demoing right now is an invasion crisis, sort of imagine you’re the Roman Empire and you’ve gotten too big and everyone wants a little piece of your action. And so those barbarians are at your gate and knocking on down the door. So that’s the one that we’re demoing in the build we have here right now. But we’re working on other types of crises, things like unrest in your population or plagues and some of those systems for crises use the same random event system that we use for the natural disasters.

So why did you switch to the age system?

Beach: So it is part of the trying to get people to have a game that is more manageable. 4X games have the problem in general, that you start with just your first unit, you get one city down, you think, wow, this game’s great. It’s very manageable when I get tens and dozens of cities and so many units to manage. Everything bogs down. And we wanted to break our game up into chapters very much like maybe a long book series or TV series that you might be enjoying breaks itself up into seasons or books.

So we could have big traumatic moments like these crises that you’re talking about, but then also give players a chance to breathe a little bit and reset things and simplify things. And that allows you to pace the player through a long experience in a more satisfying way than just saying, “Oh no, it’s just going to get bigger and bigger and bigger and you just got to keep up.”

So it’s a nice new way to tackle that problem and we’re really excited about how it’s playing out.

As a new sort of player I’m very happy to hear that. But for returning players, do you think it’s still challenging enough that they’ll find this new system interesting?

Beach: Well, yeah. The experience is still just as long overall. So we actually do sort of a deeper, more immersive dive into the history of each historical age than before. And some of the gameplay mechanics, we can make deeper changes to them so that they unfold differently maybe in our antiquity age than in our exploration age, like our trade systems are different in all three ages.

So I think there’s plenty for people to dive deep in. We’ve recently demoed the game to a whole bunch of our community veterans. They’re really excited about the possibilities and theory crafting and everything. So there’s going to be plenty for everyone.

What was the best piece of feedback you got back from the community?

Beach: I think one thing we had to be really careful about is now that we’ve broken the game up into ages, we make you really think about who you are, which leader in civilizations are representing you in the game, and you get a chance to a unique historical pathway.

Maybe you start as Rome, and where did Rome evolve? Maybe it evolved into another European Civ and that would get you to a Germany or a Britain or France by the end of your game. And players like that historical storytelling and immersion. And we did allow some wackier combinations, and some of our fans love that because they love the theory crafting, I want to mix this with that and I’m going to be super overpowered in science.

But we also had to think about what those players who wanted the more historical pathway through our game. And so we’ve got the game set up so that that’s the default way that both the human and the AI proceed through the game and then you have to, it’s up to the player to opt into that wackier play style.

Okay. So you’re speaking about being able to change the leaders with each age.

Beach: Yes.

What is the wackiest combination that you’ve seen so far?

Beach: Well, we’re not talking about all the leaders and Civ’s that we have now, but you can do things like, you can have Augustus Caesar lead India, you can have Hatshepsut of Egypt lead Rome. So some of the things do strike you as a little bit wacky, but there are really good reasons and compelling reasons to try those things out… leaders that don’t normally go together might have bonuses in the same part of the game and you just want to explore, wow, what if I get really powerful in culture or in my military strategies?

And so those combinations are really compelling. Our quality assurance department who’s playing the game all the time is like, “Oh, you got to try this one with that one, because that’s amazing.” So it’s great to hear that kind of stuff.

Okay, great. I’m definitely more military forward… So I think I will try one of those combinations that sounds very compelling to me… Well, thank you so much for speaking with me about this. I’m very excited to start a lot of wars in Civ VII that I can’t finish.

Ed Beach: All right, well hopefully it just draws you in and you just stick with it because you want to see how it all ends and get all the way through.

Kat Bailey is IGN’s News Director as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.

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Nintendo fans are still anxiously awaiting news on the Nintendo Switch 2, which isn’t expected to be out until after April 2025. But Amazon Games CEO Christoph Hartmann says fans should be patient, praising the Switch as a “great device” and saying that the label will support the next-gen Switch whenever it arrives.

“Yeah, we obviously plan to develop games for it and I can’t wait for it to be out. I mean, honestly, I’d rather have them wait a year and get it perfect than rush it to the market and then we all complain about what doesn’t work,” Hartmann says. “Switch has been such a fantastic product, I can wait another year if I have to. And from development, I think most non-Nintendo developers are not exclusively doing titles for the Switch. They’re always part of a portfolio mix of platform mix. Just wait.”

Hartmann’s statement is especially notable given that Amazon Games has not yet released a game on a Nintendo platform. To this point, games like New World and Lost Ark have mainly been PC releases. While Amazon Games will be releasing Throne and Liberty on console this fall, it will be supporting PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.

Right now we can only speculate about the Switch 2’s specs, but previous rumors have suggested that it’s at least powerful enough to support the Matrix Unreal Engine 5 demo. As for the release date, we can only guess when the Switch 2 will actually be released. We may have a clearer picture of the Switch 2’s progress should it hold its customary Nintendo Direct in September.

In the meantime, Nintendo has several games planned for the fall, including Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom and Mario & Luigi: Brothership. Looking further down the line, Nintendo is planning to release Metroid Prime 4 sometime in 2025. You can find our complete list of fall 2024’s biggest releases right here.

As for Hartmann, he talked about a range of topics in his exclusive new interview with IGN, among other things touching on Tomb Raider, the Lord of the Rings MMO, AI, and more. For more, check out all of the biggest announcements from gamescom 2024.

Kat Bailey is IGN’s News Director as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.

The bosses in Crimson Desert are powerful. I mean really powerful. As the formidable Staglord grabbed me by the ankle and hurled me into a wall, the bone-crunching impact reminded me of how The Stranger’s blows catapulted Kratos through tree trunks and mountains in God of War. This intense, deity-like physicality lends Crimson Desert’s battles a sense of genuine spectacle – these are the gladiator battles of myths.

During an hour-long hands-on session at gamescom 2024, I was able to go toe-to-toe with three different bosses, each of which showcased a different side of this fantasy action RPG’s approach to battle. The first, the aforementioned Staglord, is perhaps the most simple (although that does the towering, barbarian-like warrior a disservice.) He’s a relentless attacker, charging across the battlefield like a bullet train that can suplex you at its final destination. But, despite his endless strength and capacity to throw you like a baseball, he’s only human. I force distance between us, quickly firing explosive arrows to knock him out of his attack pattern and open up a window to bury my blade into his back.

The Staglord proves a real challenge of a fight. Crimson Desert is not even remotely a soulslike, but it’s not afraid to make you work really hard for victory. I spend much of the lengthy fight learning the complexities of the combat system. There’s no lock-on, so I have to be mindful of where I position my character and where his sword will land. Rolling forward allows me to instantly follow up with a sweep-kick that surprises my foe, and then hitting both the light and heavy attack buttons together unleashes a wide, particle-effects spraying strike that cleaves a chunk out of the Staglord’s health bar. All this is speedy without sacrificing weight. It feels fantastic, but it’s also easy to let things run away from you – I soon realise I need to be chowing down on health-restoring food with addiction-like frequency.

With the Staglord defeated, I take his mighty sword and shield and move on to the next fight. The demo skips ahead in the story, meaning I sadly don’t get to experience any non-boss gameplay, and throws me into snow-coated lands. Here, my gruff protagonist is looking for children who have seemingly been sacrificed to some kind of mountain god. Such a ‘god’ turns out to be the White Horn; a sort of antlered abominable snowdeer that showcases just how different each of Crimson Desert’s bosses can be. This colossal creature moves like a bucking bronco and its galloping charges cause the mountains around us to break out in miniature avalanches that leave me temporarily frozen in place. Thankfully, after striking it so much that its white fur is stained almost completely red, I’m able to clamber onto its back in the fight’s second phase and stab away at its neck. The moment had me recalling my battles with towering monsters in Dragon’s Dogma 2 earlier this year.

Each boss has three health bars, with each one eliminated increasing the intensity of the fight. But where the Staglord and White Horn scraps seemed to escalate much like many other action RPG boss battles – the enemy gets angrier and starts using more devastating attacks – my final battle, against the Queen Stoneback Crab, demonstrated Crimson Desert’s ambition to create memorable moments through very different mechanics.

The Queen Stoneback Crab is colossally big. It fills the screen. And, smartly, you can’t fight it by just hacking away at its shins. Instead, the battle is a puzzle set piece that’s clearly inspired by Shadow of the Colossus. I clamber onto the Crab’s stony shell and grab onto the grass and flora that forms its ‘fur’, holding on for dear life while pulling myself up towards a trio of rock formations. Using a special punch skill I shatter each of the rocks to expose a weak point that I plunge my blade into. Each opened wound causes a geyser of water to blast out, which not only provides a visual spectacle but also throws me high into the air. From above I’m able to float down, almost Zelda paraglider-style, and plan how to tackle the next stage. Now I’m tasked with destroying the pottery-like crown at the peak of the Crab’s mountain-like shell – a task a Pearl Abyss employee explained to me is completed by swinging Spider-Man-style from a web and colliding with the pottery at full speed. Seriously. I’m not sure how I’d have figured that out on my own, but I’m pleased such a mechanic exists. It’s all delightfully bonkers.

My hour-long session isn’t quite long enough to try all four bosses the demo has to offer, but a video presentation provided a quick insight into the only one I missed: the Reed Devil, a weird little guy who creates copies of himself that can only be defeated by destroying totems that are built during the battle. Along with the three I fought, all four bosses make a promise that Crimson Desert features an array of creative, unique centrepiece battles. If they’re all like this, then Pearl Abyss really could have something special on its hands.

I’m similarly impressed by the combat system’s fundamentals. Yes, it’s all quite fantasy RPG 101 – bows, swords, shields, parries – but it’s delightfully aggressive and properly impactful. There’s a seemingly deep combo system, too, and it’s because of that I wished the demo had a section that was a little more relaxed for me to sample. The heat of a relentless boss battle isn’t quite the space to learn and perfect button sequences, but I’ve got a good feeling you can pull off some cool stuff based on the combos I did learn.

Of course, I also wish I’d seen more so I could say if Crimson Desert’s adventure chops are as strong as its boss battles. What little dialogue and story there was to introduce each boss didn’t suggest anything remotely close to, say, The Witcher 3. But, even if its writing proves lacking, a strong approach to exploration and world design could carry it far. Hopefully Pearl Abyss will showcase that soon, because so far Crimson Desert’s mix of God of War’s weighty impact and Dragon’s Dogma’s creative spectacle has me very excited indeed.

Matt Purslow is IGN’s Senior Features Editor.