Firaxis details the arduous process of bringing Civilization VII to Switch
Rome wasn't built in a day
Civilization VI coming to the Switch with feature parity for other platforms was a real shocker, but developer Firaxis thought there’s be an audience for the game on Nintendo’s platform. Turns out they were right, and to a degree they weren’t even expecting.
In an interview with Games Industry, producer Dennis Shirk reveals that the team “hadn’t expected Switch to be a huge thing…but suddenly, it became a really huge thing.” That success convinced the devs that Civilization VII on Switch was a must-have, even if it brought some serious challenge with it.
Shirk says that Firaxis partnered with Behaviour Interactive to get the job done, but Firaxis is still very much involved with the project. This isn’t a hands-off port, and as a matter of fact, it seems Firaxis is more deeply involved than ever. You can see just how much Firaxis has their hands on the Switch version of Civ VII in the snippet below.
“We have a whole new way that we’re working,” Shirk explains. “The porting model… we’re not comfortable with that. We wanted to stay in control. We did all the renders in-house, the whole nine yards. [Behaviour is] connected with the development environment and working closely with the teams.”
“We have a whole new way that we’re working. The porting model… we’re not comfortable with that. We wanted to stay in control. We did all the renders in-house, the whole nine yards. [Behaviour is] connected with the development environment and working closely with the teams.
Do you know what LOD is? Level of detail [where the game adjusts how complex the 3D models look based on their distance from the camera]. In the past, the Civ team has never had to make an LOD, because we just released on Steam. If we did console versions later, we would worry about that then.
For the first time, every single asset, we’ve been creating LODs by the shovelful. Because we need multiple levels of LODs for something like that to work on Switch. And we have to down res a lot of stuff to work on consoles.
We have a team that is hungry to do it. We have a custom engine, so they could make renders that are specifically tailored for each console… and they loved it. When you’re building just for Steam, for example, there are no limits. You can just fly and go. This has limits, and our graphics team in particular took it as a challenge to create this engine that had previously only had to exist on Steam and PC, and to make it work on the lowest common denominator. It’s been interesting.”
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