Humankind is the upcoming historical civilization game from Amplitude Studios, developers of Endless Space and Endless Legend, and it will avoid some of the major problems that new Civilization titles from Firaxis face.
“They have his legacy that’s holding them back,” said Jeff Spock, Amplitude’s narrative director. He mentioned that developers of Civilization can’t exactly make major changes to the core gameplay formula. This is something that Humankind is going to neatly side-step from the get-go.
“There’s riots in the streets when Civ changes gameplay and we’re not hampered by that,” continued Spock. “So we can come in and say, ‘We want to look at the unfolding and the development stages of human civilisation differently’.”
Humankind is going to feature a heavy focus on the representation of the evolution of any given human culture, and will even allow for one million possible combinations of cultures, which are supposed to develop and mesh together organically as matches progress.
“It all came from a concern that too many games under-represent the reality of the diversity that is human culture. And too many games show cultures and nations as monolithic, which doesn’t really reflect the way things happen,” explained Spock.
Spock explained the cultural mechanics of Humankind in practical terms, too: “Looking at it from a Google Maps point of view, every city really is an amalgam of everything that came before. And I think it’s unfortunate if the game somehow doesn’t show that and reflect the player choices and also the reality of human history and how that happens.”
It would be an understatement if we said we’re excited to see how this works in practice. Humankind is currently slated for a 2020 Early Access launch.
