“We were a bit afraid of hexes at the time.” But many features developed or established in Civilization IV have continued through the last two games. The changes to the map weren’t kept in its successor, Civilization V, which made the move to hexes. We actually made a lot of progress just by being able to base it off these play sessions we had every week. “They were rudimentary, but you don’t really need a lot of mechanics to have a fun experience with other people. “We were playing multiplayer games during the first two or three months of development,” Johnson continues. So we knew that every system worked in multiplayer. One of the defining features of Civ IV is we also built it, initially, as a multiplayer game, not as a singleplayer game. “It’s no secret that Civ has had a problematic history with multiplayer.
“There were a lot of things that were really development and productionstyle innovations or priorities,” Johnson recalls. But many of these resources were locked behind era-specific technologies, meaning when and if the player got access was largely up to them.įor all the new features, Civilization IV’s most dramatic changes were broader in scope.
The map became littered with resources that ranged from cotton to iron, luxury and strategic goods that could be harvested by placing the appropriate building on them. Johnson’s first designer job was on Civilization III, and he now runs Mohawk Games. This philosophy is also echoed in how Johnson approached the development of civilisations. The Civilization IV version is simpler, but keeps the essence, the important decisions and different paths. Johnson had played Alpha Centauri, and was inspired by the armoury system. From other games came ideas like unit upgrades. He wanted to place the focus on the big picture, not the tiny details, removing things like corruption and introducing religion. It’s not necessarily the most high-minded concept, but it meant that I was going to start from scratch and re-evaluate everything.” “We weren’t going to adopt anything from the previous games by default.
“One thing I had a strong conviction about was that we weren’t going to do anything by default,” Johnson explains. And when it came to deciding what shape it would take, Johnson wasn’t going to give any feature a free pass. It was the first in a new generation of Civilizations, built with a new 3D engine, accessible modding and multiplayer.
After cutting his teeth on Civilization III, Soren Johnson became the next torchbearer.
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