A new Civilization game demands a new art style. Civilization 6’s

“ Firaxis is creating unit variations to suit their home countries.

“ It’s a very appropriate theme for Civilization.

“ Everybody really liked those, and we got a lot of comments.

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“When we went into this, we looked into how people play the game,” says Busatti. He and his team combed through as many community screenshots of Civilization 4 and 5 as they could find, and the results taught them some important lessons. “Typically in a Civ game you want to see the world as a whole, so you’re pulling out a lot. That doesn’t mean people don’t zoom in, but for the most part. Some people even zoom all the way out and play in tactical mode.”That pointed to the need for an art style that looks just as good from far away as it does up close. “You want to make sure that things are readable from that distance, and one of the ways to do that is to really put an emphasis on shape and form. It’s obviously a little more readable if you have different silhouettes to things.” To that end, he says, the on-map characters we’ll see have more exaggerated proportions than those in Civilization 5, which makes them easily recognizable at a distance. “Warriors are definitely bigger. They’ve got a very thick silhouette and are just big massive guys, and you have smaller guys who are still heroic, but leaner. So you can tell the difference right away between an Archer and a Warrior.”On the user interface level, Busatti says Civilization 6 is getting its own distinctive style, too. “Civ 5 has a beautiful UI – we were really happy with how that turned out. The Art Deco theme was a great fit for that project. But we wanted to do something different this time, and one theme that kept coming up and seemed like a great fit – and I was surprised we hadn’t done it before – is the Age of Exploration.”In an elegant-sounding touch, that theme will extend to the Fog of War itself. “The big difference in our Fog of War from Civ 5 is that Civ 5 had the clouds. Now we’re treating the totally unexplored areas as a blank parchment with longitude and latitude lines on it,” says Busatti. “But as you explore that you start to open things up. The mid-fog, instead of being a darker version of the visible terrain, is now drawn in a map style. So we have shaders on it that simulate a pen-and-ink cross-hatch style map. It’s really cool and I’m excited to show that off. And in the empty spaces we have hand-drawn ships and sort of ‘here be dragons’ kind of stuff.”Yes, Firaxis built a whole time-of-day system just for that one feature. But its uses may not end there. “We’ve been experimenting. We’d also like to do a setting where you literally you see the sun rise when you start the game. But we’ve also had a setting where you can just keep rotating through. It doesn’t make sense to tie it to turns, but a looping two or three-minute cycle. And we also want to give people the option to set certain times, just say ‘6pm!’ and play that way.”And even though those uses are entirely cosmetic, Busatti says a feature like time-of-day lighting could find other purposes. “There are plenty of ways to tie it in for the modding community. I could see someone making a Gettysburg game where the time of the day actually indicates when the game’s going to be over. So you start your battle at sunrise, and it gets incrementally darker every turn until it’s night time, and that’s the end of the game.”Finally, because it’s 2016, I had to ask about playing Civilization 6 in virtual reality. Busatti definitely has some enthusiasm for it: “As a company we haven’t made any kind of decisions on that, but I think it would be cool. Pie-in-the-sky, just me talking, I would love to do that. Can you imagine sitting across the table from a leader?”For more information, check out my in-depth Civilization 6 preview with an interview with Lead Designer Ed Beach and Lead Producer Dennis Shirk.

Dan Stapleton is IGN's Reviews Editor. You can follow him on Twitter to hear all about how awesome PC gaming is, plus a healthy dose of random Simpsons references.