Firaxis had huge expectations to live up to with Civilization VII, as previous entries were beloved by fans of the 4X genre, and the team felt that focusing on establishing narrative events throughout every playthrough would help engage players to both their booming civilization and the real history that inspired the game.That system was detailed during a Game Developers Conference talk by three narrative designers and one historian who worked on Firaxis's most recent 4X strategy game. The talk, like the game, included a massive amount of content that explored unique stories in the game and how they were implemented.Narrative director Cat Manning opened the talk by breaking down how Civilization VII's overall narrative systemconsisting of design elements like storylets and narrative tagslet writers tell stories across ages in any given playthrough. The system was so powerful and large that, once launched, Civilization VII included 1,262 narrative events.A powerful narrative system"We wanted enough events so that players would get a pretty good number," Manning said. "We also wanted those events to be relevant to the player's game state."Those narrative events relied on how well Civilization VII would track player actions, remembering the choices they made, the natural disasters their civilizations went through, the units that passed away, and many other elements that this narrative system considered important. Every writer on the Firaxis team could add narrative tags to certain events, those tags could then trigger events that would lead to other events and so on.Related:That system allowed Firaxis storytellers to engage players with fascinating stories that came from throughout history, including fascinating chapters like the The Great Republic of Rough and Ready, a California city that voted to secede from the United States during the gold rush and a fictitious character in Roman history that Firaxis called "the first wife guy."The first wife guy is a narrative event in Civilization VII that involved a man erecting a commemorative stone in honor of his wife, who managed the man's affairs while he was in exile. The monument was "a flashpoint in the discussion on civic virtue," as read in the description found in-game. The player could then choose to "repossess the exile's property, move the stone to an honored place, or even teach the inscription found on the stone as rhetoric" to their people.Civilization's VII's narrative system allowed this story to live on much longer, if the player chose to engage with it. Changes to the series archaeology system often led to players digging up artifacts that were sourced from events that took place earlier in their playthrough.Related:Digging up the pastPlayers who interact with "the first wife guy" narrative event may use the game's archaeology system to dig up a great slab of rock, described as a "funerary monument to a long-dead woman." It's the same monument that was established many years before by the wife guy."Archaeology is storytelling, not a cold [retelling] but a perspective on a sequence of carefully chosen events," said narrative designer Nell Raban. "When we use the narrative system to procreate a story with the player in Civ 7, we're building that history layer by layer. With archaeology, we're able to excavate that history."Civilization has always had a humorous relationship with historyas players often shared screenshots of Mahatma Gandhi threatening the player's Civilization with war. Narrative designers and historians working on Civilization VII wanted more from the game's relationship with world history this time around. It obviously would never be anything close to accurate the majority of the time, but could provide an alternative history that still had bits of truth in it.Related:"When we say fiction, the word comes from a meaning of being fabricated," said senior historian Andrew Johnson. "Here I want to think about fiction as not necessarily something that's not true, but as stories that fill in the gaps between images and snapshots and data points. They are what we in our everyday lives use to give meaning to the way that the world works."Stopping to rememberGameplay in Civilization doesn't seek to replicate the progression of history, instead it wants to reference it as a possibility, according to Johnson. Players are often given the power to explore histories that could never exist, like Abraham Lincoln fighting against the Roman Empire in previous games. It also pushes players to fill in the gaps of their civilization's history through the small narrative events they experience.But as Civilization games span the entirety of human history, it's important to stop and remember the stories of individual towns, relationships, and people. That's why Firaxis worked so hard to create narrative moments like that of the first wife guy."Clearly, this guy's love for his wife endures, and so does history if we care enough to preserve it," Raban said. "When you span all of human history, you need those moments when you stop to remember."