Written by: Lars Erik Ødegaard
Humankind is a new turn-based strategy game from Sega and Amplitude Studios. The goal of this game is to build up civilization which evolves starting straight after the stone age up to the modern age. When the game was revealed at the opening day of Gamescom I think most people thought “Hmm, looks like civilization”. I visited a “speedy” hands-off presentation to try to find out what was different.
The main goal of humankind is to build the most famous civilization of all time, and it looks like there are multiple ways to achieve this goal. The beginning of the game is set right after the stone age, after which you have to find the best possible placement of your base and what culture you want to go for. From here you can expand your city/civilization by building structures, and collect knowledge to evolve to a new culture.
There will be 6 stages throughout the gameplay where you can choose to upgrade to a more recent culture. One can choose to not upgrade the culture in order to gain more fame (but be less modern technology). When approaching the final stages of the game, your civilization will consist of structures and soldiers from a mix of different cultures. Some of the cultures mentioned in this rapid presentation were Ming dynasty, Vikings and Germans, Egyptians. Other features, such as natural wonders (e.g Vesuvio) and religion will also be included in the game, but it is still unclear what role it will play.
From the presentation, It looks like one of the ways Humankind hopes to differentiate itself from the civilization series is by reducing the amount of micromanaging needed. An example was shown of how you did not need to build cities to expand your territory but could build an “outpost”. The “outpost” claims a certain amount of territory, just as the cities, but would be harder to defend and no need of micromanaging. The fact is that the game is still not finished, and things may be added or removed before the release. So guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
Humankind’s release date is for now in 2020.
