Civilization 7's Creative Director says Nintendo Switch is "most challenging platform" to develop for
Civilization 7 will come to PC and consoles, but I caught up with the game's Creative Director Ed Beach to talk about it scales for the Nintendo Switch.
27th Aug 2024 16:01
Images via 2K
Civilization 7's Creative Director says Nintendo Switch is "most challenging platform" to develop for
Civilization 7 will come to PC and consoles, but I caught up with the game's Creative Director Ed Beach to talk about it scales for the Nintendo Switch.
27th Aug 2024 16:01
Images via 2K
I was able to preview Civilization 7 at Gamescom last week, and I was struck by Firaxis' commitment to launching simultaneously on multiple platforms.
Not only will the 4X title be found on PC on February 11, but players can also jump in on PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch. I was curious about the challenges that go into that, and asked Ed Beach, the franchise's Creative Director, about them.
Civ 7's Creative Director admits the Switch is "most challenging platform" to develop for
"I'm the head of the creative team, so thankfully I don't have to worry about too much [on the coding side]," Beach jokes.
"But I do have a computer science background. I do write code and contribute code to the game. So, I understand the complexity of all that pretty well. We were able to get to all of these platforms by the time Civ 6 wrapped up, but some of these platforms were several years deep into the release cycle."
"Now that we had grown communities on all these platforms, we didn't want to have to send them the message that "Oh, Civ is coming out for everybody else, not for you," so it was really mandatory for us to do it this way."
"Our engineering team wanted the challenge to be coordinated and to do it all in-house and not have as many external partners doing it, as in the past," Beach adds.
"Overall, it's been the right decision for us and we're on track for everything, and there have been times where it's like, "Duh, this one platform has so little memory, what are we doing?"
When it comes to the Nintendo Switch, which will be almost eight years into its lifecycle by the time Civilization 7 arrives, Beach concedes that "it's the most challenging platform".
Pointing to our preview (played on PC) he said "Units you were moving around the map might have had five or six swordsmen together."
"On the Switch, they'll have fewer. The number of polygons for buildings and units and things like that does decrease on those platforms."
"But it's a very scalable system that we put in place for that. And, if you get Switch working, then some of those older consoles aren't as tricky."
About The Author
Lloyd Coombes
Lloyd is GGRecon's Editor-in-Chief, having previously worked at Dexerto and Gfinity, and occasionally appears in The Daily Star newspaper. A big fan of loot-based games including Destiny 2 and Diablo 4, when he's not working you'll find him at the gym or trying to play Magic The Gathering.
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