Beach acknowledged that the players from the early, sandbox-first-design era of the franchise “are the ones that are having the bigger problem adapting to Civ 6 and Civ 7,” and noted that the team has seen that players who are new to the series have had fewer qualms about the direction it’s going.
“I think if you look at from Civ 4 to Civ 5 to Civ 6 to Civ 7, in each iteration as we’ve gone further in, we’ve sort of deepened the cultural representation of what a civ is, how many bonuses they have, how true to the period of history they are,” he told me. “We’re really trying to help the players tell the story and trying to give them historical hooks that they can latch onto in their heads to help them understand what’s going on in the game world.”
By contrast, “back, 20, 25 years ago, that wasn’t there, but players just invented the stories in their head,” he said.
To try to bring some player voices into the mix alongside the designers, Firaxis hosted a series of community workshops to test the new update. “Once the workshop began, that created a really cool dynamic where the devs and the players in the workshop were directly speaking with each other in Discord, jamming in the channels, responding to specific feedback threads,” said Schembari.
Beach said the success of the new workshop program made him realize how much the team had been missing that. “You see a lot of negativity online these days, and it’s hard to avoid that,” he said. “But I have had lots of periods during my career where I have worked with fans as closely as we did during a workshop, and I think we’ve just gotten away from that for too long.”
When asked how the team at Firaxis has weathered the intense player feedback over the past year, Beach went on to say, “To be brutally honest, there were a couple times during the, say, three, four months after launch, where I had to make a few morale checks. But overall, once you really start digging in, I think what’s really cool is we were able to give people exactly the experience they were expecting, but without breaking the structure of the game.”