Most of that comes in the revised victory types. , there's a lot focused on that second half of the game to make that race really compelling." "Once the world is all discovered and you're going through that threshold into the Industrial Age, you start running out of things to do as everyone is running up to finishing the game. "If a player is going to run out of things to do, it will be in the second half of the game," Shirk said. The two said that this is targeted towards late-game, both to make up for the developer not having the chance to address those systems in the first expansion, and to add more depth to a part of the game that speeds toward the finish. The second is really meant to work with the first, combining to create a marked shift in the experience. The two are are complementary in the pieces of the game they address-so much so that Brave New World will include many of Gods and Kings' underlying systems for players who didn't buy the first expansion. In a way, Brave New World is the other half of Civ 5's last expansion, Gods and Kings. We talked with lead designer Ed Beach and senior producer Dennis Shirk about the expansion's focus and goals.
The Brave New World expansion, which launches July 9, is going to make serious shifts to the late-game content, revising both the cultural and diplomatic victories.
It stands alongside the likes of Fall of Rome as some of the most fun I've had with Civ V.Civilization 5 is preparing to reinvent itself, again. Each of the three groupings of civs-Europeans, North Africans, and Sub-Saharan Africans-have very different goals, and because the map is different each time, playing the same culture group twice doesn't diminish the scenario's great sense of discovery. This latter option is a deep, extremely replayable map, featuring a randomly-generated, explorable interior for the continent and three different victory conditions. It's probably the most out-of-the-box civ in the franchise's history, and playing it is a whole new experience.įiraxis has also thrown in a group of new historical scenarios: the lackluster American Civil War, and the Scramble for Africa. Essentially a playable city-state that can never found or annex new cities, Venetians rely on the ability to build double the number of trade routes as anyone else, which becomes a licence to print money in the late game. Of the nine new civilizations added for this expansion, I was especially captivated by Venice. The new systems take Culture Victory from probably the most boring way to end the game to one of the most active and engaging. Tourism is generated by Great Works of Art, Writing, and Music, each created by a new or revised form of Great Person. Doing so with all remaining civs is the new means of achieving cultural victory. If your Tourism outpaces their Culture, you can eventually become Influential among their people. The other new mechanic is Tourism, a resource that opposes the culture value of other civs. Now coming into play in the late Renaissance/early Industrial era (when things used to bog down), the nations of the world and their city-state allies can vote on measures like banning nuclear weapons, building cooperative wonders, or embargoing a given civ-with truly devastating economic consequences, given the moneymaking potential of the new trade route system.
The most noticeable chunk of these improvements comes in the form of the World Congress, an expansion of the United Nations that was (and still is) the path to diplomatic victory. Overhauls to the cultural and diplomatic victories have made achieving either of these a more hands-on, aggressive process that will keep you making meaningful decisions and planning ahead. Brave New World creates an endgame that is as varied, textured, and tense as the early and mid game already were.
The new mechanics added in the previous expansion, Gods and Kings, grow less relevant, and you're either well on your way to your chosen victory condition, or pretty far from it. Civilization V was always the most fun just before the end of the Renaissance, with the experience sliding into a slog post industrialization.