It's the last week of August, another summer is slipping away, the kids will soon be back to school, and for some reason that means Tropico 4, the banana republic management sim, is free for the next three days on GOG.

Tropico 4 is not the latest and great addition to the long-running city-and-politics simulator: That honor goes to Tropico 6, which came out in 2019. But you know what Tropico 4 has that Tropico 6 (and, for that matter, Tropico 5) doesn't? It's free. Come on, we've already covered this.

It's also a pretty good game: "It's not a great leap forward, but growing bananas and rigging elections remains remarkably entertaining," we said in our 72% review. And if you dig the Tropico 4 experience and want even more, GOG also has the Tropico 4 Complete DLC Pack on for half-price. That's a whole lot of Tropico for less than a tenner.

I don't think there's any sort of direct connection between back-to-school and Tropico, but GOG is also having a Back to School sale, which somewhat ironically appears to be targeted at people who don't actually have to go back to school: "If those days are behind you, then it just means more time for gaming!"

More than 5,800 games are discounted to varying extents—a few that immediately catch my eye include the Alien: Isolation Collection (80% off), Gris (80% off), Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 2 Master Collection (80% off), The Night of the Rabbit, which I will never not recommend (90% off), and—throwing one out for my man Joshua—Alpha Protocol (20% off). There's a lot more than just that to dig through obviously, but we don't have all day here. (That said I would be remiss if I didn't note that Deus Ex: Human Revolution Director's Cut is 85% off and that, my friends, is a steal.)

GOG's Back to School sale runs until September 10, but Tropico 4 is only free until August 29. Snag it while you can.

Beloved turn-based strategy series Heroes of Might and Magic suffered a renaming six games in, with the last two entries known officially as Might and Magic: Heroes 6 and 7 just to mess with the order of your library. Publishers Ubisoft have relented though, and gone back to the HoMM naming convention for the next in the series, the recently announced prequel Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era.

It's being developed by Unfrozen, the studio behind Iratus: Lord of the Dead. That game demonstrated their ability to recreate Darkest Dungeon with a twist, so the studio seems like a decent choice for recreating HoMM 3, which is what Olden Era is most reminiscent of at first glance.

One thing that's different about Olden Era is the launch strategy. It'll be coming out in early access to give time for community feedback (of which I'm sure there will be plenty), and balancing. While it promises to have a singleplayer story campaign set on Enroth's continent of Jadame before the events of the first game in the series, the focus is on multiplayer, with a classic multihero mode as well as a 1-hero mode for shorter games. If you want an even shorter match there will be a mode called arena that's a bit like drafting in Magic: The Gathering, only instead of choosing cards from boosters you're choosing a hero, units, upgrades, and artifacts from a random selection.

Olden Era will have six playable factions with more to be added as DLC, and a map editor. Local multiplayer hasn't been mentioned yet, but I hope it's included because hot-seat games were my way into the series way back when. The release date is currently set for the second quarter of 2025, and you can wishlist it on Steam. 

Earlier this week at Gamescom, Molyneux announced a new god game called Masters of Albion, and there are reasons to suspect it won't be any good. The last game put out by his studio, 22cans, was a blockchain business sim that earned its money by selling "land NFTs." And the biggest game the studio put out before that, crowdfunded god game Godus, isn't even available for purchase on PC anymore.

Among the reactions to the announcement were pleas to snuff out any emergence of a Molyneux redemption story. He hasn't really answered for failing to deliver everything the Godus Kickstarter backers paid for, and perhaps worse, he promised an 18-year-old kid godhood and gave him squat (more on that weird saga below).

The past decade of Molyneux's career has been full of blunders, but while reading those takes I was thinking, alright, true, but Masters of Albion does look kind of fun. Maybe I'm just nostalgic for one of my favorite Molyneux games, Black & White, but I just love little grasping hand cursors you can use to fling your subjects around. Is it wrong to give Masters of Albion a chance, not to redeem Molyneux in the eyes of aggrieved Kickstarter backers, but just to be a fun game?

My automatic reaction was, nah, it's fine, but that's not a satisfying answer, so to work out why I feel that way, I've examined the history of Molyneux's career below, as briefly as I could manage (which is admittedly not very briefly). Given that I was a teenager when Black & White released in 2001, this might also be helpful for anyone who reacted to Molyneux's Gamescom Opening Night Live appearance with the question, "Who's that?"

Acorns and oak trees

Following Molyneux's success with '90s sims like Populous, Theme Park, and Dungeon Keeper, he co-founded Lionhead and developed Black & White before moving onto the Fable RRG series. This isn't where Molyneux's habit of making wild promises began—a great 2014 Kotaku feature traces that behavior back to the start—but it's here that I recall his reputation as a loose cannon pitchman really solidifying as a stock subject of internet mockery.

He loved to tell press about the unprecedented complexity, player freedom, and emotional resonance he wanted his developers to achieve, but seemed not to care much whether or not they really could. Among many other examples, the designer famously told press that, in Fable, players would be able to plant an acorn and witness it grow into an oak tree as years of in-game time passed. That wasn't true, and the claim became one of the most repeated Molyneuxisms.

Molyneux caught heat for these verbal wanderings—he was called a liar and a scammer on forums—but people also loved Black & White and Fable. They were popular games and critical hits. And some of Molyneux's lofty remarks were genuinely ahead of the curve. In the same year that Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare were the best-selling Xbox 360 games, Molyneux was hyping up Fable 2 by talking about love, sex, and companionship.

For me and the people I was around at the time, Molyneux was endearingly over-excited about his own ideas, an incorrigible scamp whose words you couldn't take too seriously. After he left Lionhead in 2012 and founded a new independent studio, 22cans, however, Molyneux's relationship with the press and public dramatically declined.

Curiosity: Molyneux's weird cube

Molyneux took his hype-building skills to another level at 22cans. The company's first game, Curiosity, was a mobile app that contained a cube made of billions of smaller cubes. Players, working collectively, tapped on the small cubes to destroy them, slowly revealing the layers below. We were told that whoever reached the center of the cube first would win a "life-changing" prize, and Molyneux framed Curiosity's microtransactions, which allowed players to buy cube-smashing tools, as just a part of the social experiment.

"This is not a money-making exercise, it is a test about the psychology of monetization," he said at the time. 

Did we buy it? As I recall, the whole thing was regarded as weird, novel, and more or less ridiculous—classic Molyneux—but we did want to know what was in the cube. How could we not? Molyneux's reputation for overpromising meant that if the prize really sucked, he was going to be absolutely lambasted for getting us worked up about it. And if the prize really was amazing, we obviously wanted to know what Willy Wonka had in store.

If you weren't following it at the time, you can probably guess how it turned out. When an 18-year-old kid named Bryan Henderson clicked the final cube in 2013, it quickly became apparent that there was no "life-changing" prize, except in the technical sense that his life was briefly, mildly disrupted.

Godus: The Kickstarted god game

The cube's treasure was a special "God of Gods" multiplayer role in 22cans' first proper game, a Kickstarter-funded successor to Populous called Godus, as well as a percentage of the game's revenue. That would've been an incredible prize if Godus had been the next World of Warcraft, and Henderson was about to rule over millions of players while earning enough passive income to fund any lifestyle he wanted. It even would've been a pretty cool prize if Godus had been a modest success. But on PC, it was a dud, and the multiplayer features that would've made Henderson an in-game god were never even finished.

In a 2015 interview with Eurogamer, Henderson said that 22cans invited him to their office once, and then ignored him. Molyneux apologized at the time for the lack of communication, and insisted that they were still working on those Godus multiplayer features, even though by that point they'd announced another game.

Last year, Godus was removed from sale on Steam. Henderson never got his prize. The Kickstarter backers didn't get all the rewards promised by the campaign. A free-to-play mobile version of Godus made with the involvement of an external publisher, despite the point of the Kickstarter being "no publishers," continues to receive updates, and Molyneux said this week that it's "amazingly popular," but it isn't a replacement for the completed PC game backers wanted.

In an infamous 2015 Rock Paper Shotgun interview in which he was asked if he's "a pathological liar," Molyneux said that he had never knowingly lied. He said he'd had to change course and make sacrifices out of necessity, because making something new is unpredictable and hard: "Making a computer game that's entertaining and that's incredible and that's amazing is almost impossible, it's almost impossible to do."

It's not an unfamiliar story—lots of Kickstarted games have been delayed, gone over budget, and underdelivered, and the notion that 'game development is hard' is repeated constantly—but at that point, Molyneux was out of goodwill to turn in for forgiveness.

Also, there was that NFT game

For his next big move, Molyneux and 22cans teamed up with blockchain company Gala Games to launch a Web3 game called Legacy. If everyone's already mad at you, what's the harm in selling some NFTs, right?

Legacy is a business sim that, at the height of NFT fever in 2021, started selling "land NFTs" to speculators eager to get in on the Web3 gaming revolution that they kept saying was happening, and that was clearly not. 

In this week's interview with Eurogamer, Molyneux admitted that he never fully understood the "play-to-earn" economic model (me either!) and has since decided that it "doesn't really work financially, or in gameplay terms." He said that he'd become disillusioned with the free-to-play model, and that Gala Games sold him on the idea that blockchain would be the next big thing.

The people who bought those NFTs did not get rich, but for Molyneux and 22cans, it doesn't look like the project was a financial mistake. Molyneux says they didn't make $54 million off the game like some reported, but did make enough to fund Masters of Albion, the new god game Molyneux announced on stage with Geoff Keighley at Opening Night Live this week.

And now: Masters of Albion

So that's the score: a Kickstarter project that didn't fully materialize, a winner who's still owed godhood, a new game being funded by the poor investment choices of Web3's true believers, and Molyneux continuing to be Molyneux. 

After failing to deliver a complete PC version of Godus, it was certainly artless for Molyneux to get on stage this week and wonder aloud what the hell he'd been doing "messing around on mobile." Your backers were asking the same question!

It's also easy to be suspicious of Masters of Albion, which looks remarkably similar to the NFT game that funded it. Molyneux knows he has to overcome his reputation here: "It's got to go into early access and be really fucking amazing," he told Eurogamer.

If Molyneux were a serial crowdfunder who repeatedly failed to complete projects, I'd probably roll my eyes and leave it there, but he isn't. Godus is the only project 22cans has crowdfunded. Casual claims that he's some sort of serial grifter which rely on drawing a direct line between Godus and those old Fable interviews misrepresent how people actually felt about the Fable games. They were popular and praised by critics, like many of the other games he worked on. That's why Microsoft is making a new one.

If anything, the infamous Fable interviews make it more believable that Molyneux genuinely felt that 22cans could do what he said it could with Godus and release a hit game. A guy known for falling in love with cool ideas that he can't deliver on is really not who you want with the keys to a Kickstarter page, and it doesn't look like the studio plans to repeat that irresponsible mistake. 

It's disappointing that there's no comment from Molyneux this week on what he's going to do, if anything, to make good with disappointed backers or the god he neglected. I've asked the studio for an interview, and haven't heard back.

But 22cans is hardly the only developer to have ever botched a crowdfunding campaign, and we're in no danger of somehow being tricked here. Either Masters of Albion will be fun or it won't. While I don't recommend backing the Kickstarter projects of chaotic people like Molyneux, they do occasionally make cool games with their friends.

"Sometimes he'll shoot for the stars when he tries to instill ambition in his team," said Gary Carr, who worked with Molyneux for 20 years, in that 2014 Kotaku feature. "And if it doesn't always work, it can be taunted back at him. But I still remember those people who he dragged out of the gutters to some extent and made them into great developers. So I tend to have a much more balanced view of that. It's something he can't switch off. He's ambitious, he sells dreams, he sells people to themselves. So therefore if it works, it's great, if it doesn't always work, then I think that's just the chance you take."

I kid, of course, but not entirely. Molyneux's been on kind of a rough streak for the past decade or so, during which he's made multiple ambitious (some might say grandiose) promises that have never come close to being met. The most recent in that long chain of bad ideas was Legacy, a blockchain-based business sim "that allows real ownership and real rewards."

That's a fairly standard pitch for NFT games, and it had a fairly standard outcome for such things: Legacy tanked almost immediately after launching in 2023. It's still playable and was last updated less than a month ago, but I think this exchange from the Legacy subreddit—one of only two threads to be posted in 2024—sums up the situation quite aptly:

Before the wheels came off, though, Legacy raised a huge pile of money in pre-sales of virtual plots of land, which are required to participate in Legacy's real-money economy: More than $54 million at the time, according to reports. And what happened to all that sweet green, you may wonder? Apparently it's paying for the development of Molyneux's next project, Masters of Albion.

Speaking to Eurogamer, Molyneux said Legacy's reported $54 million haul was "exaggerated," although he didn't say what the actual number was.

"But it did give us the money to fund Masters of Albion," Molyneux said. "That's what we used the majority of the money for, to bring back Russell and Mark and Ian [Molyneux's former Bullfrog and Lionhead colleagues Russell Shaw, Mark Healy, and Iain Wright]. It's not cheap to do that. You've got to bring them away from their jobs."

Let's be honest: Until now, NFTs have never amounted to much of anything beyond hype, heartache, financial losses, and the occasional lawsuit. So the fact that Molyneux was able to turn them into something useful is noteworthy, right? It does feel a little superficially sketchy, sure, but unlike a traditional rug pull or, to stretch the comparison even further, a crowdfunding campaign that fails to deliver the goods, Molyneux's 22 Cans studio did in fact develop and release Legacy as promised. It just, you know, really sucked.

"People played it, but unfortunately, at that time, without the meteoric rise of cryptocurrency that fuelled the real play-to-earn gaming... I think play-to-earn gaming has been flat and gone down," Molyneux said. "Legacy is still playable on the Gala Games website, but the economic model doesn't, in my opinion—and I'm not a person that deeply understands it—but doesn't really work financially, or in gameplay terms."

Leaving aside the obvious questions about designing a real-money economy simulator without "deeply understanding" the economy that underpins the whole thing, Legacy certainly did seem to work financially for Molyneux and 22 Cans. If that ultimately nets us a real, no-foolin' Peter Molyneux comeback—which, despite everything, looks like it maybe might be somehow actually possible in Masters of Albion—well, then I guess NFTs are good for something after all, at least in very specific use cases. I still wouldn't recommend wasting any money on them, though.

"We would like to get your help with figuring out the price for this DLC," CEO of Lavapotion Magnus Alm says in a Steam blog post. "We've prepared a simple poll where you can give us your opinion. It's very important for us to get this right, and all replies matter!" 

The poll in question gives players four price options to choose from, $4.99, $5.99, $6.99, and $7.99. It also highlights what will be included in the DLC. There'll be one new wielder, a new campaign with four maps, and a handful of new map objects and artifacts. The story focus will let players discover more about the Aerbor and uncover a few secrets. 

Those sound like pretty decent prices, considering what's included in the DLC, but even with the choice, some players still aren't happy. "I prefer paying $20 for a proper expansion [rather] than $5-8 for something smaller," one player says. "It's annoying to have to buy something over and over again." 

It's a fair point to make and one that Alm seemingly takes on board: "Makes total sense and to be very clear: We are also working on a large expansion with two new factions and a large campaign. These smaller DLCs are a way for us to make sure we can keep revenue at a level where we can pay ongoing wages, office rent, software licenses, etc."

The obvious choice is to pick the cheapest option, which seems to be what most players are thinking. "I love the game, and I'd really like to support you guys going forward," another player says. "But $8 for a short campaign (because I consider four maps to be short), one character, and a few map objects aren't going to fly. I'll pay $5 for it, but even doing so feels like a contribution, at least as a "price." What I would love would be a really EPIC campaign."

If you've got the same dreams as this player, then you're in luck. Songs of Conquest isn't just getting more DLCs after Rise Eternal—there's also a full expansion scheduled for 2025. Called Bleak East, it will add two more factions, the Vanir and the Roots, as well as a single-player campaign that will reveal how these factions came to be and how they affect Aerbor.  

Blasphemous creator The Game Kitchen revealed a brand new title at last night's Future Game Show, and while it's a very different beast from the studio's challenging 2D soulslikes, it does carry over the team's fascination with Catholic imagery and doctrine. The Stone of Madness is a real-time tactics game in the vein of Shadow Tactics and Desperados 3, but set in a haunted 18th Century Jesuit monastery which you must escape from before your ragtag team of talented prisoners all go insane.

The Stone of Madness puts players in control of five different characters, all of whom are trapped in said monastery located deep in the Pyrenees. As with other real-time tactics games, each character has a different set of skills that, according to the game's Steam page, let them "cast spells, assassinate targets, distract enemies" among other things. You'll be able to swap between characters at will to evade the monastery's guards, and solve puzzles.

Yet while mechanically similar to games like Shadow Tactics, it sounds like the Stone of Madness will be structurally quite different from Mimimi's games. The monastery will be a single, open space that you'll gradually peel back the layers of. Conditions within the monastery also change depending on the time of day. During daytime, you'll be able to explore semi-freely, although there will be restricted areas where guards will punish you if you're caught snooping. At night, however, things take a supernatural turn, with ghosts as well as guards roaming the monastery's cloistered hallways. This makes sneaking around at night much more dangerous, although with that apparently comes the potential for greater rewards.

This paranormal element also plays a key role in The Stone of Madness' other differentiating feature. Your crew of prisoners may be skilled, but they're also psychologically traumatised, with each having a set of negative traits alongside their unique skills. These psychological traumas can be triggered by various events and circumstances, which will further impact that character's sanity.

Frankly, it sounds rad as heck. I had my issues with the Blasphemous games (some of the platforming could be pretty iffy) but I loved their worlds and art direction, so I'm extremely up for The Game Kitchen bringing those talents to a different genre. As you can already see in the above trailer, The Stone of Madness is no slouch in this department. The isometric art and character animations are really striking and distinctive. The developers say the game's visuals are inspired by the works of Goya, which, of course they are. I'm also keen to see how The Game Kitchen delves back into the wilder fringes of Catholicism, something the Blasphemous games likewise excelled at.

There's no hard release date for The Stone of Madness yet, but Steam lists it as coming out in 2025. Between this and the upcoming Commandos: Origins, I'm glad the real-time-tactics genre is continuing to sneak new titles onto my PC despite the sad closure of Mimimi Games last year.

A new Civilization game means a new Civilization narrator, and for the upcoming Civ 7 the task will fall to Gwendoline Christie, best known for her portrayal of Brienne of Tarth in HBO's Game of Thrones series.

Christie will join a long time of famous Civilization narrators with distinct voices, a tradition that began in 2005 with Leonard Nimoy in Civilization 4:

Civilization 5 followed in 2010 with William Morgan Sheppard:

Civilization 6, in 2016, gave us Sean Bean in one of the few roles in which he doesn't die midway through the second act:

And now, Christie steps in to take over. She'll be the first woman to narrate a Civilization game, and the new "narrator reveal trailer" erases any doubt that she's an excellent choice.

Civ fans on Reddit seem very pleased with it as well, and not just out of Game of Thrones nostalgia—although of course we're not going to avoid that completely. This is the internet, after all.

Following an initial tease earlier this year, Firaxis and 2K Games lifted the curtain on Civ 7 in a big way this week at Gamescom. We've got a detailed breakdown of the game's new features, a hands-on preview and insights from creative director Ed Beach, and even a release date: Civilization 7 is set to launch on February 11 and will be available for PC on Steam and the Epic Games Store.

The most fundamental change, and the one I think will be the most controversial, is a revamp of the game structure. Instead of lots of eras—Ancient, Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, and so on—a game of Civ 7 is divided into just three ages: Antiquity, Exploration, and Modern. At the start of each age, you'll be prompted to pick a new civilization, with options that depend on your current civilization and the choices you've made so far. Mongolia might show up in your Exploration age options if you've developed powerful cavalry units, for instance.

This also means that Civ 7's leaders are no longer locked to the civilization they're known for leading. 2K flew me out to the Firaxis office earlier this month, where I spent three hours building the Roman Empire as Egyptian pharaoh Hatshepsut. 

I explain how that went in my hands-on preview, but I know that Civ fans will also care about all the little changes and additions in Civ 7, so below I've listed absolutely every new thing I noticed during my hands-on session in the Antiquity age. I'm told that some features are exclusive to the other two ages, so I wouldn't have seen them, and even though I've tried to be comprehensive, there's no way I clocked everything that's new or different. Firaxis may also make tweaks before Civ 7 launches on February 11, so consider this a partial and not at all final list of what to expect.

Without further ado, here's (some of) what's new in Civilization 7:

Big structural changes

• Leaders no longer have to match their civilizations; you can pair any leader with any civ at the start of a game
• Games are now divided into three longer ages: Antiquity, Exploration, and Modern
• The Antiquity and Exploration ages climax with Crisis events, which require players to adopt more and more Crisis Policies—negative effects that we'll have to deal with
• You pick a new civilization when you enter a new age. Which civ you can choose depends on your current civ, and your actions during the previous age. This also means that each age has its own selection of civs.
• Leaders aren't necessarily historical heads of state; Benjamin Franklin is a leader, for example
• The standard victory conditions return (culture, science, etc), and now you'll also be encouraged to pursue an achievement in one of these "legacy paths" during the first two ages—for instance, by building lots of World Wonders in the Antiquity age to establish early cultural dominance. 

New feature: towns

• Settlers now found towns instead of cities
• Towns have no production queue: they convert Production directly into Gold
• You can use Gold to purchase units and buildings in towns
• Towns can be turned into cities by spending Gold; the cost increases with the number of cities you already control
• Towns can adopt permanent specializations with bonuses: farming town, mining town, military fort, trade outpost

Changes to cities

• Cities no longer expand onto new tiles automatically. When a city grows, you're prompted to select an adjacent tile for it to annex. (You can still purchase tiles, too.)
• Workers are gone. Improvements like Farms and Mines are added to new tiles automatically.
• City tiles are now classed as "rural" or "urban." Rural tiles contain improvements (Farms, Mines, etc), and become urban districts if you add buildings to them. There are no longer predefined district types; you can place any combination of two buildings (as far as I observed) in an urban district.
• Some buildings are now classed as "Warehouse" buildings and work differently than in previous games: Granaries, for example, now provide +1 Food per farm improvement (In Civ 6, they provided a flat +1 Food/+2 Housing)
• Walls can now be built in each urban district; to capture a city, an invader must breach all of its fortified districts
• Resources can now be assigned to cities and towns, providing bonuses to them (I didn't play around with this too much, but I like that it makes resources more than just trade items; it seems like a significant feature that I just didn't get to see the full implications of)
• When you enter a new age, old buildings lose their special effects and adjacency bonuses, encouraging you to replace them with new buildings

Changes to units

• When told to fortify, military units actually build a little fortification (I didn't write down exactly how this works, I was just so excited to seem them build their little fort)
• Scouts can now construct temporary watchtowers to see further
• Units can embark over shallow water by default (I tested this with some early units, not sure if it applies to all units)
• Units no longer gain XP and receive promotions, except for new Commander units

New unit type: Commanders

• Commanders are special military units and are now the only units that gain XP and can be promoted
• Commanders provided passive bonuses to nearby units, which is one of their attributes that can be upgraded with promotions
• Units can also be stacked "inside" Commanders and moved as a group, and then unpacked at their destination
• Commanders can issue orders to all nearby units, such as to focus fire on a single enemy—with an attack bonus for using the special command

New feature: Influence

• Influence is a new yield that is spent on all kinds of diplomatic actions
• Influence can be used for positive actions, such as gaining the loyalty of city-states and making agreements with other civs, such a military pact which provides a bonus to the attack power of both civs' units
• Influence can also be used for negative actions, such as sanctioning a civilization, or attempting to infiltrate its military
• In some cases, you can spend Influence to avoid negative effects, for example to stop another leader's relationship with you from worsening

Misc features

• Navigable rivers! Navigable rivers! Navigable rivers!
• There are new narrative events of the kind popularized by other recent strategy games. Example: An artist painted a portrait of me that I found unsettling, and my options were to hang it up (+25 culture), destroy it (+50 gold), or pay to have it redone (+2 culture on the palace, -25 gold).
• Barbarians have been replaced with Independant Powers, which may or may not be hostile, and whose camps can turn into City-States
• Religion and natural disasters are back, as well as other features from Civ 5, Civ 6, and their expansions (I don't have a comprehensive list, and I expect there'll be tweaks to these systems, but I didn't have time to dig into them)
• A fact sheet about the game promises "progression bonuses for your leaders across multiple gameplay sessions"

Multiplayer and launch info

• Civ 7 is releasing on a ton of platforms at launch: Windows (Steam and Epic), Linux (Steam), Mac (Steam), Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S
• There will be online multiplayer with PC/console crossplay. The 2K Launcher is being ditched, though you'll need a 2K Account for online multiplayer
• Multiplayer matches can span all three ages, or just one age "so you can enjoy an entire game in a single session"
• On Xbox, PlayStation, and PC, five players are supported in the Antiquity and Exploration ages, and eight players are supported in the Modern age (I'm not sure why this is!)
• The Switch version supports fewer players, four in Antiquity and Exploration, and six in Modern

Over 30 years ago, Sid Meier sat in that very chair and used that PC to create 1991's Civilization, the first game in a grand strategy series that's getting its 7th numbered release in February. The computer is a Compaq Deskpro 386 which, according to Firaxis learning and development manager Pete Murray, cost $10,000 when it was purchased. That's somewhere over $23,000 in today's dollars.

It was money well spent given the millions of copies the Civilization series has sold, and it was no lemon, either: Apparently, the old fella still boots.

So, what's inside this bad boy? Firaxis didn't have a full spec list to share, but we have a few details. It would've had 640 KB of useable RAM, because that was an architectural limitation of IBM-like PCs at the time (and the amount Bill Gates famously denies saying "ought to be enough for anybody"). There would've been expanded memory on top of that, and Murray said that the machine contains "16 MB of memory," which seems to be the upper limit for the model. It's unclear how large the hard drive is. The PC also contains a Sound Blaster audio card, which is just the kind of high tech hardware you'd expect in a $10K PC from the early '90s.

With the help of some parts from Ebay and "creative salvage," Firaxis's IT department got the PC to boot as recently as last year.

"The hard drive is nearing the end of its life," said Murray, "but if you fire it up, there's a build of Civilization 1 on there that is just before the release version of Civ, and it is playable on that machine."

As for the leather chair, that was apparently the idea of one of Sid Meier's business partners, Bill Stealey. The first Civilization was not developed and published by Firaxis, which didn't exist yet, but by MicroProse, which Meier founded with Stealey in 1982.

"As I recall, Bill Stealey wanted a cool executive chair and he decided I should have one too—apparently ergonomics was not yet a thing," says Meier, via a description of the objects printed on the wall above them.

Meier left MicroProse and formed Firaxis with two others in 1996. It's common for development artifacts to be lost in that sort of transition, so it's nice to see a bit of PC gaming history in such good condition. 

I also strolled past Meier's closed, but not unused, office on my visit to Firaxis's building earlier this month. The Civilization creator still comes in and works on game prototypes, I'm told—he just happened to be on vacation when I stopped by.

2K Games of course didn't fly a bunch of press to Maryland just to look at Sid's old PC: We were there to play Civilization 7, which you can read all about in my hands-on preview.

In response to this revelation, Firaxis has substantially changed Civilization's structure for the next game, which is out in February. In Civilization 7, you no longer begin in the Ancient era, advancing through and beyond the Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, Industrial, and Modern eras. There are just three ages in Civilization 7—Antiquity, Discovery, and Modern—and the tech tree has been somewhat simplified.

It might turn out to be the most controversial change since Civilization 5 ditched unit stacking, or since Civilization 6 adopted a cartoonier art style (which has been walked back in Civ 7). But before the word "simplified" causes too much anxiety, I should elaborate: I think the changes are exciting, and Firaxis has also added, tweaked, and expanded. You can now build towns, not just cities. There are powerful new units called Commanders. You'll find navigable rivers for the first time (yes!), so you can have your own Mississippi or Nile. Major features from the Civ 5 and 6 expansion packs are here, such as religion and natural disasters. 

It's still Civilization, a judgment I arrived at after playing for three hours, and that creative director Ed Beach, who was also the lead designer of Civilization 6, expresses in numbers.

"We're very mindful of exactly how much we were changing," Beach said to a group of press, including myself, who were flown to Firaxis's office in early August to try the game. "You've probably heard the Firaxis mantra that 33% of the game stays the same, 33% of it gets updated, and 33% is brand new. We absolutely followed that again."

History in layers

Here's one big change: Despite leading Rome, I played as Egyptian pharaoh Hatshepsut. Your leader no longer has to match your civilization.

This relates to a key part of the new three-act structure: In the transition to a new age, you'll select a new civilization. Each age has unique civs, and the choices available depend on your leader, but also what you've accomplished so far. If you've amassed a huge stable of powerful cavalry units, for instance, you might be granted the option of swapping to Mongolia for the Exploration age.

Beach's big theme for Civilization 7 is the idea that "history is built in layers." The thought was inspired by London, which began as Roman outpost Londinium before being abandoned, occupied by the conquering Normans, and then transformed by the Industrial Revolution. 

"Now we have a new version of Civilization where I can play a single pathway through history, and I get to be the Romans, I get to be the Normans, and then I get to be Britain," he said.

In the transition to a new age, old buildings lose their special effects and adjacency bonuses, so you'll be encouraged to literally build in layers, replacing the old with the new. The pre-defined districts of Civ 6 have been dropped in favor of general urban districts that the player defines by the buildings they opt to place in them. Cities should be more compact as a result.

Along with sub-goals that break up the journey toward one of Civ's victory conditions, getting to adopt a new culture's architecture, units, and bonuses along the way—an idea you'll also find in 2021 strategy game Humankind—might just tempt me to finally start sticking things out to the end. It's hard to say, though, because Civ's early game remains as compelling as ever, and some of the changes in Civ 7 make it even more exciting.

Settling in

One of those changes has to do with how cities come to be in the first place. Settler units now found towns instead of cities, which are a much more sensible thing to found, I think. Don't get ahead of yourself!

Towns are like cities, but have no production queue. Instead, their productive capacity is converted directly into gold for your coffers. You can add buildings to towns, but only by purchasing them. You can spend gold to transform a town into a proper city, but you don't have to. You can leave your town as a town, and optionally select a permanent specialization, turning it into a mining town, a farming town (which includes a fishing bonus), a trading outpost, or a military fort. Strategic Civ players already specialize their cities; now there's a built-in way to optimize your settlements based on their geographic and political situation.

I like this change a lot, not because I care about min-maxing, but because my love of expansion conflicts with my desire to actually manage 12 cities. In Civ's blissful early game, when I'm making my most creative and consequential decisions, I enjoy sticking cities wherever I think cities should go, sometimes for purely aesthetic reasons. If I see a cute bay with fish, you better believe I'm hitting it with a cute bayside fishing town. But now it can actually be a fishing town.

My overall impression of Civ 7 is that Firaxis has sought to remove low-impact decisions—stuff players always do, or choices they don't take seriously—while emphasizing actually important decisions.

A good example of this trend is the removal of Workers. RIP to the little guys you previously had to send hiking across the countryside to build land improvements like farms and mines. Improvements are now constructed automatically when a new land tile is annexed by a city. However, cities no longer expand into new tiles automatically. You're instead prompted to choose a new tile whenever a city grows. With that new level of control, I developed my capital, Rome, as a very long city, capturing resources on the either side of a river.

Spreading influence

Barbarians are gone, replacing another obvious choice (beat up on the barbarians) with something slightly more complex, if not by much. Replacing those early game foes are Independent Powers, who may or may not be hostile. If they're peaceful, you can spend the new Influence resource to befriend them. If they're allowed to develop, they'll later form a city-state, and getting on their good side is helpful if you want to become their suzerain.

Influence can also be spent to cooperate with or sabotage other nations. It's an all-purpose diplomacy currency, basically, and might be too universal. I could spend it to enthusiastically accept a neighboring country's proposal for an international farmer's market, and also to sanction them or attempt to infiltrate their military.

The system did get me more involved in international relations than I usually am early in a Civ game: I used Influence to befriend an independent power, to make military pacts that increased my unit strength, and to weaken my antagonistic neighbor, Egypt—which by the way was run by Roman emperor Octavian, who traded places with Hatshepsut. 

In command

The AI leaders still behave like kids who are making things up as they go, leaping from negotiations over fruits and vegetables to declarations of war, but I'm not sure more human-like computer players would be a profitable area for Firaxis to invest in. If they behaved like real players, the AI leaders would probably focus all their early-game energy on building cool Wonders and then quit the first time they suffered a significant military loss.

I concluded my session in the middle of a protracted war between Egyptian Rome and Roman Egypt that I refused to end—mainly out of spite, but also because I wanted to play with the new Commander units. They are now the only units that get promotions, which buff their abilities or the abilities of units around them. More interestingly, you can stack multiple units 'inside' a commander, send them to the front line, and then unpack them. Commanders can also issue orders to nearby units, telling them to focus fire on a particular enemy, for instance, which confers bonuses. There's a whiff of XCOM here: I can imagine getting quite attached to a max level general who's overseen my greatest military victories.

As curious as I am about big additions like Commanders and the new three-age structure, I walked away most excited by little tweaks to ancient Civ conventions, like the addition of towns. Even smaller, but also exciting: When you tell a unit to fortify, it actually builds a fortification, and Scouts can now put up little watchtowers to see further—I love that.

But there are also good signs for Firaxis' plan to get more of us to play Civ games till the end. One, I'm curious to experience a Crisis event—I didn't get that far in my session, but I'm told that these events act as climaxes to the first two ages, requiring players to select a series of Crisis policies that negatively affect their civs.

And beyond that, I'll be interested to know just how different the Exploration and Modern ages are from Antiquity. During our brief interview, Beach gave me some hints about what to expect in the Exploration age. It's themed around the part of any Civ game (and of world history) when deep ocean tiles become traversable, and you start to discover what's going on outside of your own continent. Exploring "the distant lands," as they're called in Civ 7, will lead to the discovery of valuable new resources.

The real history of global exploration of course did not involve everyone venturing across the oceans at the same time and on equal footing—some explored, and then they violently exploited the people they found—but Civ isn't meant to be an accurate replay of history. Still, I already know that I want to try to defy Civ 7's structure and themes to, for instance, play an isolationist nation during that second act, engaging with just a few foreign traders from behind my walls. 

That's the plight of a strategy game designer, I guess: Give us a structure, goals, and themes meant to help us progress through the game and take advantage of all its systems, and of course the first thing we want to do is reject them all to see what happens. Another headache to sit alongside Civ 4 designer Soren Johnson's observation that "given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game."

Civilization 7 will release on February 11, 2025, and it's coming to Windows, Linux, and Mac at launch (here's its Steam page), as well as Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch. 

For more details, I've compiled a big list of Civ 7 changes and new features I saw during my gameplay session, and heard about from Firaxis. The studio has also broadcast a gameplay showcase on Twitch.