“When we went into this, we looked into how people play the game,” says Busatti. He and his team combed through as many community screenshots of Civilization 4 and 5 as they could find, and the results taught them some important lessons. “Typically in a Civ game you want to see the world as a whole, so you’re pulling out a lot. That doesn’t mean people don’t zoom in, but for the most part. Some people even zoom all the way out and play in tactical mode.”
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That pointed to the need for an art style that looks just as good from far away as it does up close. “You want to make sure that things are readable from that distance, and one of the ways to do that is to really put an emphasis on shape and form. It’s obviously a little more readable if you have different silhouettes to things.” To that end, he says, the on-map characters we’ll see have more exaggerated proportions than those in Civilization 5, which makes them easily recognizable at a distance. “Warriors are definitely bigger. They’ve got a very thick silhouette and are just big massive guys, and you have smaller guys who are still heroic, but leaner. So you can tell the difference right away between an Archer and a Warrior.”
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Firaxis is creating unit variations to suit their home countries.
At the same time, we’re also promised greater detail up close than ever before. For instance, Busatti says we’ll see more customization in basic unit types in their representation from culture to culture than in past Civilization games. “We still have our unique units. Like, you see the Samurai, which are still unique the Japanese. But even the base units, like the Pikemen, all have a cultural flare to them.” Drawing from a collection of region-specific cosmetic pieces, Firaxis is creating variations to suit their home countries. “You still need to be able to read them as Pikemen – he still needs a long post, and it’s a very iconic shape. But we’ve gone a little further by changing up helmets, maybe the ends of the pike looks slightly different depending on the region the character is from. We’ve also got different skin tones, different ethnicity for the characters.” He adds that these cosmetic tweaks are the sort of thing modders will be able to put their own spin on very easily.
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On the user interface level, Busatti says Civilization 6 is getting its own distinctive style, too. “Civ 5 has a beautiful UI – we were really happy with how that turned out. The Art Deco theme was a great fit for that project. But we wanted to do something different this time, and one theme that kept coming up and seemed like a great fit – and I was surprised we hadn’t done it before – is the Age of Exploration.”
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“The big difference in our Fog of War from Civ 5 is that Civ 5 had the clouds. Now we’re treating the totally unexplored areas as a blank parchment with longitude and latitude lines on it,” says Busatti. “But as you explore that you start to open things up. The mid-fog, instead of being a darker version of the visible terrain, is now drawn in a map style. So we have shaders on it that simulate a pen-and-ink cross-hatch style map. It’s really cool and I’m excited to show that off. And in the empty spaces we have hand-drawn ships and sort of ‘here be dragons’ kind of stuff.”
The other major visual style element that Busatti’s extremely proud of is a callback to Civilization IV. “We had those pre-rended Wonder movies that show a sort of time-lapse photography sunrise to sunset. Everybody really liked those, and we got a lot of comments that they missed those as a reward for building Wonders,” he recalls. “So now we’re doing those in-game. Wonders actually have very intricate build sequences, so as you’re building Wonders over time you can see a certain percentage that’s done by looking at them massing. But when you’re done you’re rewarded by this movie – actually, the time of day in the world changes. So it goes from night to sunrise, so you see all the bricks building up in place until you get to sunset. Or some of the wonders end at night because they’re lit. And it’s all in-game in your world, and you can see all your buildings around it. It makes the world seem more alive, and that’s something we’ve put a lot of effort into.”
Yes, Firaxis built a whole time-of-day system just for that one feature. But its uses may not end there. “We’ve been experimenting. We’d also like to do a setting where you literally you see the sun rise when you start the game. But we’ve also had a setting where you can just keep rotating through. It doesn’t make sense to tie it to turns, but a looping two or three-minute cycle. And we also want to give people the option to set certain times, just say ‘6pm!’ and play that way.”
And even though those uses are entirely cosmetic, Busatti says a feature like time-of-day lighting could find other purposes. “There are plenty of ways to tie it in for the modding community. I could see someone making a Gettysburg game where the time of the day actually indicates when the game’s going to be over. So you start your battle at sunrise, and it gets incrementally darker every turn until it’s night time, and that’s the end of the game.”
Finally, because it’s 2016, I had to ask about playing Civilization 6 in virtual reality. Busatti definitely has some enthusiasm for it: “As a company we haven’t made any kind of decisions on that, but I think it would be cool. Pie-in-the-sky, just me talking, I would love to do that. Can you imagine sitting across the table from a leader?”
People are complaining that it looks like a mobile game or a Wii game.
Yeah, a lot of folks have their panties in a bunch over graphics. I can't help but laugh. Its a TBS, not a shooter. Graphics are about the bottom of my priority list.The problem is the game looks like a cartoony version of Revolution. It looks like a Wii game or a free to play mobile game.
I guess I really don't care too much about the graphic style, be it realistic, cartoonish or art deco or icons.
It's the gameplay for me. The series of decisions, the element of chance, the historical elements, that combine for a plausible alternative reality.