Here is a number: 471. That is how many hours of Civilization VI sit on my Steam account, accumulated across years of late nights, cancelled weekend plans, and the specific moral failure of saying “one more turn” at 1am on a Tuesday and meaning it. It is a number that represents hundreds of genuine, absorbing, joyful gaming sessions. A relationship, frankly.

Here is another number: 18. That is how many hours of Civilization VII sit on my Steam account. Those 18 hours were played in something between confusion and disappointment, like arriving at a party you’d been looking forward to all year and discovering it’s mostly a PowerPoint presentation about supply chain mechanics.

Firaxis’s answer to that disparity is called the Test of Time update. It’s a massive, free, expansion-sized overhaul planned for Spring 2026 that promises to fundamentally reshape how Civ VII feels to play. The ambition is genuine. The timing is either admirably tenacious or exactly fourteen months too late, and the jury is out on which.

Let’s talk about how we got here.

The Launch: A Study in How Not To Do It

Civilization VII arrived on February 11, 2025 with the sort of fanfare befitting a new entry in one of PC gaming’s most beloved franchises, and was received with the sort of reviews that make PR teams go very quiet at their desks.

The game launched to a bleak 44% Steam rating as early players savaged it. By May, Steam reviews had dipped to “Mostly Negative,” and the ongoing player count was barely cracking 10,000. For comparison, the nearly decade-old Civilization VI was still pulling 30-40,000 players at any given time. Civ V, which came out in 2010, had more concurrent players on Steam than Civ VII. That second fact deserves to be read twice and then stared at in silence.

The critical score from reviewers was decent. The user score was not. On Metacritic, the game sits at a User Rating of 3.8. On Steam, it settled into a “Mixed” rating based on 47% of reviews being positive. These are the numbers of a game that has genuinely upset a large portion of the people who bought it, not merely a game that didn’t quite click.

The question is whether the upset was justified. The answer is: mostly yes, with some important nuance.

The UI Was a Statement of Intent — Just Not a Good One

Let’s begin where Civ VII most immediately let itself down, because the first impression was appalling and first impressions matter.

The user interface at launch looked, not to put too fine a point on it, like an early access game made by a studio that had never seen a PC monitor before. Basic information was buried, missing, or presented in a way that implied the design team had confused “clean” with “empty.” One more turn wasn’t even available on release. Longstanding systems like proper map trading, AI diplomacy depth, and victory tracking felt half-built or absent.

The Civilopedia, Civ’s legendary in-game encyclopaedia that has helped confused players since 1991, was neutered to the point of near-uselessness. You could not efficiently manage your cities from a city list because the city list barely functioned. You could not at a glance understand what your empire was doing because the game would not tell you clearly.

The UI was immediately criticised and still needs work a year later (Image credit: Firaxis Games)

The UI on launch was described as looking like an indie game made in the early 2000s, not a AAA title in the 2020s. That is, if anything, slightly generous. It was a UI that seemed to have been designed for a console release first and then ported to PC as an afterthought, which is an interesting choice for a game in a franchise that has always been a PC-first institution and charged PC players accordingly.

The basic gameplay sins are fixable. Firaxis has been fixing them, update by update, for fourteen months. But the UI was a statement of priorities on day one, and priorities don’t get patched out. They have to be rebuilt.

The Age System: Bold, Interesting, and Largely Resented

Here is where Civ VII gets more complicated, because the Age system is not a bad idea. It is an idea that was executed poorly, communicated worse, and then defended by the developers for far too long in the face of overwhelming evidence that it wasn’t working for the people buying the game.

The concept: rather than leading a single civilisation from stone age to space age, you guide a leader through three distinct historical ages. Antiquity covers the ancient world, the Exploration Age the age of sail and discovery, and the Modern Age the industrial era onwards. Each age has its own mechanics, its own units, its own structure. When you transition between ages, your civilisation changes entirely.

The intended effect was a sense of civilisations rising and falling across history. Your ancient Rome becomes your Renaissance Spain becomes your Industrial-era America. History in layers. The rise and fall of empires as a mechanic rather than a backdrop.

The actual effect was that players felt they were being asked to start over every time they’d just started to care about something, while their carefully built cities reset to towns and their accumulated relationships with city-states vanished as if they’d never existed. As one Steam reviewer put it: “Civilization VII doesn’t let you build an empire that will stand the test of time. Your empire will fall, off camera and without drama or even player involvement, at predetermined intervals.”

The leader-civ disconnect compounded this considerably. In Civ VII, leaders and civilisations are completely decoupled. You can play as Benjamin Franklin leading the Mongols. You can play as Augustus Caesar leading Hawaii. There is no inherent relationship between the historical figure you’ve chosen and the civilisation you’re playing. Freely combining historical leaders like Augustus, Ben Franklin, and Isabella with different historical civs like China, Hawaii, and Mexico is a strange pill to swallow for a series that is so painstakingly detail-oriented.

Good idea, poor execution (Image credit: Firaxis Games)

The argument for this system is historical flexibility and strategic experimentation. The argument against it is that it makes the entire thing feel like a dress-up game rather than a historical simulation, and that the emotional connection to a civilisation over a full campaign, which has always been the soul of the series, is severed at regular intervals whether you want it to be or not.

Firaxis also managed to design the age transitions in a way that felt punishing rather than exciting. At the start of each new age, the game scatters all your units around even if they were organised under military commanders. City-states simply disappear at the beginning of each age. Religion, which exists primarily in the Exploration Age, simply stops being relevant. Faith no longer exists as a resource. These aren’t design refinements. They’re design amputations.

The Legacy Path system, Civ VII’s replacement for traditional victory conditions, was supposed to give structure to each age. In practice, consistent feedback from players described the structure as feeling “railroady,” forcing you into a narrow set of objectives that didn’t always align with your actual empire’s strengths or your unique situation on the map, making the endgame feel like a race toward a predetermined checklist rather than a culmination of your civilisation’s story. The sandbox had been turned into a guided tour.

The creative director, Ed Beach, has since acknowledged that the team “violated the 33-33-33 rule” for sequels and “didn’t realise quite how strongly players identified with” keeping one civilisation throughout a game. That’s a gracious admission. It would have been a more useful realisation in 2023.

The Monetisation Question

There is a third category of complaint, less existential than the age system but more immediately insulting: the day-one DLC structure.

This is a practice that is difficult to defend with a straight face

Civ VII launched at £69.99 for the standard edition. It also launched with a Deluxe Edition and a Founders Edition. Some of the content was pre-installed on your computer and required payment to unlock. This is a practice that is difficult to defend with a straight face, and the Civ community, which tends toward the patient and thoughtful end of gaming fanbases, declined to try.

Players pointed to day-one monetisation, including pre-installed DLC requiring payment to unlock and upgrade packs that felt like content amputated from the base game, as evidence that the commercial model had been designed around extraction rather than generosity. Given that Firaxis has since offered substantial free content including free leader packs, a free DLC collection, and now what amounts to an expansion-sized overhaul at no charge, the initial approach reads in retrospect as a significant miscalculation of community goodwill.

Has Civ VII Been Here Before? Sort Of.

The Civ community’s argument for optimism is the precedent of previous entries. Both Civ V and Civ VI launched to criticism and became beloved games over time. This is true, and worth taking seriously.

Civ V’s launch in 2010 removed the “stack of doom” mechanic that had defined Civ for decades, and the community was furious. The AI didn’t know how to handle the new one-unit-per-tile system. Diplomacy was broken. Large swathes of mechanics were underdeveloped. With the Gods and Kings and Brave New World expansions, Civ V became genuinely great, a game that still pulls more than 15,000 concurrent Steam players today.

Civ VI continued to improve long after it’s own rock release (Image credit: Firaxis Games)

Civ VI launched in 2016 to a more positive initial reception, but the base game was also a work in progress that reached its definitive form with the Rise and Fall and Gathering Storm expansions. The Gathering Storm era Civ VI is one of the finest strategy games ever made.

The difference is one of degree. Civ VI launched with 78% positive reviews in its first month and 87% positive in its second. Civ VII would have needed to kill for a 75% positive review ratio and didn’t come close. The problem isn’t that Civ VII launched rough and needs polish. Civ games always launch rough. The problem is that Civ VII’s core mechanical philosophy was the thing players objected to, and you can’t patch out a philosophy. You have to rebuild around it.

Enter Test of Time

Which brings us, finally, to the reason we’re all here.

The Test of Time update is a massive, free, expansion-sized overhaul tentatively scheduled for Spring 2026. It is built on three major pillars designed to reshape the entire gameplay experience from start to finish.

The first and most significant pillar is the one that should have been in the game from day one: the ability to play as one civilisation continuously through all the ages. In the Test of Time update, there is now a new choice to make during the Age Transition process: select a new civ, as you do today, or continue playing as the same civilisation into the next age. This is not a separate game mode. It is an option that sits alongside the existing age-switching system, letting players choose their own approach.

To make this work, Firaxis has had to fundamentally rethink how civs operate across ages. Each civilisation has an Apex Age, the sole age where it was at the height of its power. Outside the Apex Age, a civ retains a core, defining part of its kit.A new Syncretism mechanic will once per age allow you to adopt a unique unit or infrastructure from a different civilisation currently experiencing its own apex age. Rome in the Exploration Age, denied its ancient legions, might borrow the Norman Motte and Bailey to compensate. It’s inventive. It’s exactly the kind of creative problem-solving the age system needed from the start.

The second pillar is a complete rework of victories. Legacy Paths are gone. In their place is a more freeform system where Military, Cultural, Economic, and Scientific Victories are now point-based models of Dominance. To achieve Victory, you must reach a specific point threshold over the second-place player and maintain that lead for a countdown, with the threshold decreasing as the game progresses to allow early victories for players who dominate convincingly.

Test of Time will be making some pretty meaningful changes (Image credit: Firaxis Games)

The third pillar replaces Legacy Paths with a new system called Triumphs: optional challenges tied to six playstyle attributes that reward completion with instant empire bonuses or strategic cards. Classic Set Triumphs represent the same goals as the original Civilization VII Legacy Paths for those who enjoyed that system, while the new ones offer more variety and player choice.

Together, Firaxis says these updates are similar in scope to an expansion in terms of gameplay systems and functionality, and will fundamentally change the way Civilization VII feels and plays from start to finish. The update is free.

The last two words there are worth dwelling on. After the day-one DLC fiasco, Firaxis is delivering what amounts to their biggest update ever at no charge. Make of that what you will.

Will It Actually Work?

Here is the honest assessment, delivered with the warmth of someone who wants it to succeed and the scepticism of someone who has been disappointed before.

The Test of Time update addresses the right problems. Playing as a single civilisation through all three ages was always the obvious fix for the emotional disconnection that gutted the game’s soul. The victory rework addresses one of the most persistent structural complaints. The Triumphs system looks thoughtful and flexible. The changes are ones that players have been screaming about since before the game even launched, which raises the question of why the screaming had to go on for fourteen months before Firaxis acknowledged it, but that’s a conversation for a different article.

The concern is not whether these changes are good. They look genuinely good. The concern is whether the game’s relationship with its community can be repaired by an update alone, however substantial.

As one long-time Civ fan put it on the CivFanatics forums: the fundamental changes to the game have mentally shifted the franchise “from being ‘that thing you love that’s basically a hobby’ to ‘a new game with new mechanics that might be good or might not be good, but really you’ve got tons of other games to play.’” That is the most honest articulation of the problem. The test is not whether Test of Time improves the game. It almost certainly will. The test is whether it can make the people who walked away want to come back.

The earlier Civ games that recovered from rough launches had a crucial advantage: they were rough in the sense of incomplete, not rough in the sense of philosophically misaligned with what their audience wanted.

The people who are still playing Civ VII will benefit enormously. The people who bought it, bounced off it, and went back to Civ VI, which remains one of the most player-retaining games on Steam despite being nearly a decade old, may look at the update notes with interest and choose not to reinstall. That is the result of fourteen months of erosion, and it is the result Firaxis will spend the rest of 2026 trying to reverse.

The earlier Civ games that recovered from rough launches had a crucial advantage: they were rough in the sense of incomplete, not rough in the sense of philosophically misaligned with what their audience wanted. Civ V’s launch issues were about execution. Civ VII’s were about design intent. Execution can be polished. Design intent has to be walked back, and walking back design intent in a public-facing way, which is essentially what Test of Time represents, is a thing that takes time and goodwill that not every studio gets.

Firaxis may have enough residual goodwill. The Civilization name still means something, and the community, while disillusioned, has demonstrated through fourteen months of continued feedback that it wants the game to succeed. That’s not nothing. That’s actually quite a lot.

The Verdict — or Rather, the Verdict We’ll Give in Spring

The Test of Time update has the right ideas. Whether it has them at the right time is something we’ll know soon. The update is due this spring, which by the time you’re reading this, may be any number of weeks away or may have just arrived.

What we can say is this: if you bounced off Civ VII and the single-civ option was any significant part of why, Test of Time is reason enough to reinstall. If the hollow age transitions killed the campaign feeling for you, there is now a version of the game that does not do that. If the Legacy Path victory railroading made you feel like you were playing against a checklist rather than writing a history, it’s gone.

If what you actually want is Civ VI with updated graphics, Test of Time cannot help you. Civ VII is still a fundamentally different game, with fundamentally different priorities. Some of those priorities, freed from the worst of the launch’s missteps, are genuinely interesting.

My 471 hours of Civ VI aren’t going anywhere. But for the first time in fourteen months, I’m considering whether Civ VII might finally be ready to earn a few more than 18.

Come on, Firaxis. One more turn.