The development and release of Civilization 7 has been a rollercoaster for both fans of the series and developer Firaxis. The most recent entry in the long-running 4X series shipped with an age-transition mechanic where players would switch between civilisations at multiple points during a game. It was a radical design shift that divided the community, received well by some players, but going down like a glass of cold sick with others.

Earlier this year, Firaxis introduced an update to Civilization 7 that made age transitions optional and reimplemented the traditional, single-civ mode of play. Yet according to Firaxis, this was not a decision the studio made easily, and was particularly tough for creative director Ed Beach.

This was revealed in an expansive oral history of Civilization by Polygon, which charts the trajectory of the series game by game. The roots of Civilization 7, it seems, were in a long-held frustration of series' creator Sid Meier:

"I was always frustrated by playing a Civ game and having a civilization with one period of time, where I had special abilities and special powers," Meier explains. "And for the rest of history I would just play sort of as a vanilla Civ where I didn't have anything unique about what I was doing."

This idea was carried forward by Beach, who made it a central feature of Civ 7. "I know, just as a fan of history, that all civilizations have a long lineage where the came from Rome, or they came from Greece, or they came from an African civilization or a Mesoamerican civilization, and all those cultures were all very unique in history," Beach says.

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