Talking to Jean-Maxime Moris and Jeff Spock, Amplitude’s executive producer and narrative director on Humankind, I can’t help but feel a little bit guilty for immediately bringing up Civilization. There are more 4X games than Civ – and older ones at that – which means comparing every new 4X game to it can feel more than a little trite. But Sid Meier’s influence is the one that lingers. It’s also the closest, by far, to what Endless Space and Endless Legend developer Amplitude is aiming for with Humankind: a historical, diverse, and deeply optimistic game about the miraculous progress of the human race.
Humankind previewDeveloper: Amplitude StudiosPublisher: SegaPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: 2021 on PC
It’s not perfect – certainly not yet, as the build I played was still waiting for a number of pretty crucial systems to be finalised, or even implemented at all – but what makes Humankind immediately stand out from its illustrious cousin is its approach to one of the genre’s biggest frustrations. Humankind is trying to solve the problem of culture, that weird and conceptually squishy amalgamation which feels essential to any game about human history but has, so far, proved to be a bane of the Civilization series and others like it – and the team at Amplitude’s Parisian studio might actually be onto something.
5 Reasons Humankind Is More Than Just A Civ Clone Watch on YouTube
Amplitude’s approach with Humankind is to make you choose a new culture for your civilization each time you progress into a new era. You don’t choose a civilization at the start and play with them throughout, and instead all start from the same blank slate – with a customisable avatar representing you as a sort of detached ‘leader’ through the ages. The scenario I played lasted a couple of hours, up to a maximum of 60 turns or two eras, from more or less the very beginning of the game, which meant I was able to get a decent sense of how the culture-hopping worked out. The immediate thing you notice is how it maps much more sensibly to actual human history. Societies – speaking very generally here – tend to evolve according to the natural and social surroundings, so ones with fewer military rivals nearby and lots of lush, arable land might move more towards a peaceful, agricultural society, such as the Harappans (or Indus Valley Civilisation), which were based in what is now north-east Afghanistan, Pakistan, and north-western India in around 3300 – 1300 BCE.
On the other hand, you might be surrounded by expansionist rivals and have access to early metals like bronze, such as the Mycenaeans. In Humankind that is essentially the logic you follow as a player: after some early exploration you’ll settle, and then have a choice between the Harappans, Mycenaeans, Egyptians, and Babylonians, which lean towards the specialisms of food, military, production and science respectively – and if you want to get anywhere you’ll need to think about how that choice ties into your own situation at hand. Each of these also comes with a legacy trait, which is an ability that this culture allows you to keep using throughout the game, an emblematic quarter, which is a unique city extension (basically a district, if you played Civ 6), and an emblematic unit unique to them too. Later on, as you advance to the next era, the choices widen – similarly to how the number of different established civilizations widen in history as you progress through the years – and as such so do the specialisations within them, with things like commerce, order, and aesthetics coming into play.
Part of this, executive producer Jean-Maxime Moris explained to me, is simply a case of giving you more things to play with. “It is a much more dynamic approach to history, I would say. You could argue that it doesn’t make sense to have the Olmecs with the Huns [in the same region], but it’s part of the fantasy… what if you had access to the most renowned cultures of the world and you were able to build your ‘super culture’, your civilization with them?”