Interview - John FitzGerald, Matthew Quickel and Ryan Andrade of Firaxis - Civilization 7
During the PAX Aus period, I was lucky enough to be able to sit down with three key members of the Civilization 7 Art and Design team. John Fitzgerald (Lead Unit Artist), Matthew Quickel (Senior Lead Environment Artist) and Ryan Andrade (Lead Concept Artist, Sid Meier’s Civilization VII) were all kind enough to sit down with me, a big Civ fan and answer my burning questions about the upcoming Civilization 7.
Matt Hewson: Hey guys, thanks for spending some time with me, let’s get to it. This is the first time that Civ is getting a day and date release on console. Did this change how you went about designing the art for the game?
John FitzGerald: Optimisation is a big part of what we do in general. We have to provide a continent’s worth of information every time you zoom out so the idea of optimising assets is something that is long established with us. But I have to say the team really rose to that challenge with the tools that were developed and the multiple versions of the game. As we were making the game we were able to come together as a team, define and refine our process and really nail it.
Matt: Did you come across any issues, with say picture size, art styles or accessibility because of the joint PC/Console focus?
Matthew Quickel: Obviously if you are going to console you have to think about how the player experience is going to be there. When we did Civ 6 we did the PC launch and worked with other vendors to bring those console ports to life so this is a very different approach when you are thinking about it from the very beginning. So it was a matter of developing the tools, things like internal pages that help us to identify what our targets are and which assets are not meeting those targets. We also wanted to ratchet up the fidelity on this game more than any of the previous games that we’ve done so it was really refreshing to start and know that we were building these assets for a range of systems and know where we were going in the future
John: One of the other things we do around the offices is have an autoplay build of the game where it is displayed on TV screens. There are couches there where developers can sit back, relax and watch how this game runs as if it were on my TV screen at home. It is such a great way to get the team that perspective and feeling. So this is something we have done to accommodate this new challenge at the office during development.
Matt: When it comes to the design of famous leaders from history, how does that come about? What is the process that goes into mixing the realistic look of the person and the art style of the game?
Ryan Andrade: Civ 7 has shifted to a more realistic style when compared to previous versions and the Leaders are no exception to that. The difference with the gameworld is we have to consider how something looks from both close-ups and zoomed right out. Leaders are always up close so we can generally get more detailed and realistic. Building and units are a bit more complicated because we have such a range of sizes to consider, but with leaders, it is always the same so we can have a bit more fun there.
Matt: The new natural disasters look great in the trailer, were they fun to design?
Matthew: Our VFX artists do such a fantastic job bringing those things to life. Of course, they took a lot of reference from what we did with (Civ 6 expansion) Gathering Storm and brought a lot of those elements forward. But we did have some different challenges with this game, like navigable rivers and we do flooding differently. Each disaster presented some challenges and some were easier than others, for example, you take a sandstorm and it is relatively easy because while you are interacting with the environment you don’t have to displace or destroy the environment, like say a flood or volcano may do.
John: The VFX guys are awesome and they cover a lot of content. There are a lot of smaller effects like campfires and chimneys that need to be placed around the world but when it comes to natural disasters it’s their time to really shine and they go to that next level, it’s their signature piece. They love to design them.
Matt: How important was accessibility, for example being able to clearly identify the tile types, environments and other important information, when designing the different play areas of the maps? There is such a range of tech that this game is coming out on, it must have been a challenge to make sure that information is available at a glance.
John: Jason Johnson, the Art Director on the project, he’s a gifted artist for sure but he is an avid game player. He plays a tonne of Civ and as he talks to us about the artistic vision he comments on how good it is to be “next-gen” and “beautiful” but he keeps the design of the game and player experience at the forefront and that is something that I have really enjoyed and that is something I have really enjoyed working and collaborating with him on. For Units, we wanted to make sure every move was responsive, quick to your gameplay. If you need to take time, the game will adapt, but if you are in that Civ rhythm then the game will never get in your way. So it was really important to preserve that core experience which really informs how we make graphics.
Matthew: From the environment side, our prerogative is “Can we make it so you never have to look at resource icons?” Meanwhile, the UI guys are like “You are turning off all of my work.” For every asset we make in the game, there is a conversation about readability. For example, we made cocoa tiles, do those tiles feel different from a jungle tile, can players tell it is a cocoa tile just from looking at it? So we massage the size of the cocoa beans, space the trees a little differently or use a different hue to make sure it looks different to the jungle tile. That’s just one example but we literally do that for every asset we put in the game to make sure players can read it easily and are not confused at all, with the mindset of turning off the UI as much as possible.
Matt Hewson: How daunting is it to be this close to releasing a game in the civ franchise, considering it is without doubt one of the most well-regarded franchises in gaming history?
John: For me, it’s a huge honour and privilege. I absolutely love the franchise. My personal story with it is I was working in 2000 on an RTS and my bosses were telling me the game they wanted to beat was a game called Civilization, you need to play this game. Instantly I was like “We’ve got some big shoes to fill.” In many ways coming to Firaxis to work on this game has been like coming home. It is being a part of what I believe is the definitive historical game experience and with that, from a unit perspective, the amount of work that the team has put into this, I just can’t believe it, it has exceeded all of my expectations. I am just in love with it, so I cannot wait for people to experience it and play it and I hope they enjoy it.
Ryan: Excitement is the main thing for me, I am a big Civ player, my dad is a big Civ player, and a lot of my friends are big Civ players. I am just really excited to get the game out there and play it with them.
Matthew: I don’t have any nervousness about the game because I feel very confident in the work that we have done over the years we’ve been working on it. As a game developer working on something like this, you just can’t wait to get it out and have people play it. So it is certainly exciting, I feel confident and I also feel privileged that I got to work on this.
Civilization 7 is coming to PC, Xbox, PS5 and Switch on the 11th of Feb 2025.
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