Inside Civilisation: Revolution

According to Caudill, Revolution is not based on any one game in the series – the team has drawn on all of the previous ventures for inspiration. Visually, it resembles Civilization IV, the most striking change being a slimmer, streamlined interface.

With the mouse and keyboard combo out of the picture, Firaxis had to carefully consider its options.

“Since Civilization is a turn-based game we don’t have to sacrifice any of the depth – the game will wait for you to make your decisions,” says Caudill. “In the process, we discovered that mapping the game to a controller was even easier than we thought it would be since the game has always controlled the player’s choices, so there’s never more than a couple choices at any given time. The depth comes from the way all of the individual decisions add up to create something epic.”

Obviously, the UI is just one part of the bigger picture. An important one, yes, but comparable to the gameplay itself. Caudill already mentioned that much of the depth of the PC Civs has been retained in the new title, but there have been tweaks here and there to make it more accommodating of console gamers. For example, Firaxis has increased the speed at which the game progresses.



“Civ IV games can take multiple hours to complete, but games of Civilization Revolution will be finished in a few hours or less,” states Caudill. “You’ll still experience all of the goodness that is Civ and the whole sweep of time from the Stone Age to the Space Age, but you can complete a game in an evening.”

According to Caudill, many of the changes have been made to draw in a broader audience, something that’s bound to happen when a game that’s been exclusive to one platform for almost two decades finds itself on multiple new ones. To this end, a lot of effort has gone into making the game more vibrant visually, mostly by zooming closer to the action by default and emphasising the style seen before in Civ IV.

“We approached the design of the game in such a way that we didn’t have to leave anything behind; rather we took all of the things from the previous Civs that made them such fun games and brought them into the Civilization Revolution design and then built the game from that foundation,” says Caudill.