Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a Facebook post announced that the Civilization series is making its way to virtual reality with Sid Meier’s Civilization VII – VR, set to launch this spring on Meta Quest headsets. The game will support both the Quest 3 and 3S models, though pricing details and an exact release date have yet to be confirmed.
Zuckerberg made this announcement while tagging his older post that read, “I’ve been playing Civilization since middle school. It’s my favourite strategy game and one of the reasons I got into engineering. Today Civ VI is finally out, so this weekend Beast and I will be sitting here until I beat it on deity.”
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How Will This Happen?
According to a Meta blog post, the game features a “board game-like layout” that can be projected into your real-world environment using the Quest’s passthrough cameras or experienced within a virtual museum setting, complete with a view tailored to your selected leader. Players can seamlessly switch between these two modes. In multiplayer sessions, opponents will appear around a virtual table, represented by digital avatars of their chosen leaders.
Meta in the blog post added, “Civilization VII – VR leverages the classic, top-down view of Civ, putting you at the Command Table, a board game-like construction where the world is laid out before you and has come to life. You’ll be able to peer down from high above the Command Table to strategize your moves or lean all the way in to appreciate the finer details of your scouts, cities, armies, and Wonders. Watch your empire grow from your own museum looking out onto a vista personalized to your leader, or toggle to mixed reality at any time and the Command Table will adapt to its placement in your physical space.”
Meta while talking about the multiplayer setting said, “Civilization VII – VR supports a single-player mode, as well as both co-op and competitive multiplayer modes for you and up to three other Quest 3 or 3S players.* You can fill games with AI-controlled opponents to take on with your friends, or face off against human opponents to see whose civilization can withstand the test of time—and whose will crumble into dust and memory. You’ll see your friends and opponents in VR and MR as their chosen world leader around the Command Table, allowing you to go even further in creating your own version of history.”
