2025 in Two Historical Games

Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Ghost of Yotei, Europa Universalis V, Hades 2, Despelote… 2025 has certainly been a landmark year for games set in the past. While it would not be hard to make a beautiful top 10 of historical games this year, two particular titles stand out: Sid Meier’s Civilization VII and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2.

These are both historical games, but in the way they let us experience the past they are nearly polar opposites. Civ7 simulates the process of civilization. It is content to hit the major notes of history: characters that are larger than life, fast strokes through centuries of technological and societal progress, with urban spaces as the focal points layered in the dust of ages gone by in a ‘one more turn’ flash. In KCD2 you play as Henry, a bastard of a noble son who becomes even more of a nobody after being robbed. Henry has to work his way up in the medieval hierarchy to complete his quest. Or, if you like, you can also just soak up the atmosphere, wandering through the woods and living off the land in a cottage-core version of Bohemian rhapsody.

This, by itself, is not really noteworthy; we have long known that more simulational, grand historical and immersive, granular histories can happily exist next to each other. What is interesting about Civ7 and KCD2 is not that different ways of telling and playing with the past (co-)exist, but that the first has had a terrible, no good year, while KCD2 is on top of the world — not just among historical games, but across computer and console games more broadly. This is all the more interesting because they came out in the same month, only one week apart.

A Tale of Two Games

Civ7 was released on 11 February, to lukewarm reviews from critics and an even more mixed reception among players, sitting at a roughly 50/50 split on Steam. This is not great news for any game, but it is particularly bad considering the long tradition of Civilization hits. To provide some perspective, Civ5 and Civ6 hold overwhelmingly and very positive review ratings on Steam and at launch had record-breaking player numbers. Sales numbers for Civ7 are not public yet, but the new entry consistently trails behind Civ6 and Civ5 in concurrent player numbers. While a direct relation cannot be drawn between these two things, the Firaxis studio has sadly been hit with layoffs later this year.

Contrast the lukewarm reception of Civ7 to Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, a relative newcomer to the historical game scene. In 2014, Warhorse Studios promised to deliver a ‘real medieval RPG’,  all dungeons and no dragons. (And, in a decidedly unrealistic, no good very bad take on medieval history, also no non-white people either). In KCD1, this realism meant Henry lived through a raid and rags to riches story, and the player had to deal with punishing save mechanics, fingertwisting swordplay, unclear dialogue choices, lots of very civilized folk pointing out that you really need a wash, and the most aggravating lockpicking system ever. Suffice to say, I did not really like the game. KCD2 continued this tradition, but made things a bit more accessible, diverse and open-ended. Building on an already sizable community of people that had gotten on well with the first game, KCD2 launched on February 4 and found enormous success.

It may be tempting to read this respective low- and high point of the Civ and KCD series as two historical games competing directly with each other, with one clear winner, but I don’t think that is what is going on here. Some historical-game players may well have chosen to play KCD2 instead of Civ7, but a major overlap between these communities seems unlikely. These are simply different games, marketed to and played by different audiences. Indeed, there is an overlap of only about 2% of Steam users who reviewed both games by the end of this year — based on some current research on historical games on Steam that I hope to share more about later in 2026. So, it is unlikely that the success of KCD2 translated into the poor player engagement we are seeing for Civ7.

The bad news for Firaxis and other developers of 4Xs and historical simulations is not a case of two games competing, or some other temporary fluke, but what appears to be a broader trend. In the last few years we have seen a series of releases in this genre that were, at best, mixed successes: Humankind has been nearly forgotten, the same applies to Ara: History Untold, and I am sure Paradox Interactive would like all of us to forget about Millennia. This is not because these are categorically bad games. Sure, Civ7’s UI is not great, Humankind’s era-based gameplay lacks real ‘one more turn’ potential, and Millennia handles like Civ2, but mostly these games play by the rules of the good book that Sid Meier wrote in the early ’90s.

It is also not the case that people do not want to play these games anymore. Right now, about 50,000 people are playing historical grand strategies—more if you count Crusader Kings, Hearts of Iron, and other Paradox series. Many of these players have hundreds, sometimes thousands, of hours in these games. They are perfectly happy playing Civ6, Civ5, or even Civ4 and Civ3.

Something Old, Something New?

This is the real ‘problem’ for Firaxis: how do you get players unstuck from your old games and into the next entry in the same series? The added complication is that these older games have accumulated years of additional features through DLC. The only way forward, then, is to present players with something genuinely new — something they actually want.

Civ7 does introduce new ideas, most notably its system of age-based play, in which you pursue different goals and play as different civilizations across the Antiquity, Exploration, and Modern Ages. Each age ends with a crisis and begins with something close to a blank slate. It came into being because the previous entries in the series had an interesting problem: people did not finish their playthroughs. While I still do not love how this system is implemented, from my point of view it represents an interesting attempt to inject innovation into a very long-running series. Still, for a sizable part of the old school player base, this new perspective on how history builds up landed with a thud.

Contrast this once more with the glowing reception of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. Players of the first game and newcomers alike were ready for another entry in this particular tradition of historical medievalist roleplaying, leading to both commercial and critical success, including several game-of-the-year awards (or nominations). Regardless of the actual originality of its pitch, the dominant response to KCD2 is an appreciation of its uniqueness. For example, players praise how the game lets them discover this detailed past in an emerging narrative that does not hold their hand. While it still has a chonker of a learning curve and opaque controls and systems, in medieval Bohemia obtuse UI is not a bug, but a feature. 

With its ideas for change, Firaxis has split the party of Civ players. Warhorse, on the other hand, have succesfully taken an age-old recipe for medievalist games, bolted a hi-fi graphics, lo-fi world, systems-heavy roleplaying game on top, and made a bigger pie for themselves.

What lies beyond?

What 2025 reveals most clearly is not that historical games are thriving or failing wholesale. I also do not think, and certainly do not hope, that we are seeing the end of Civilization. What this year shows is that historical games are a very tough design space in which to find success by launching or simply proposing something new, in particular for developers making grand strategy games. They need to walk a tightrope between a core audience that likes what they have and new ideas that will get the regulars comfy in their corners and, ideally, new folk excited.  

Currently, successful innovation in terms of gameplay rhythm and historytelling is found on the immersive, ‘realistic’ side of the historical game spectrum, represented by the somewhat unlikely candidate of a hardcore, medievalist roleplaying game. If this trend holds in the new year — and what this means for game players and makers that love playing with and in the past —  remains to be seen. But for me, as a researcher of these types of games, this is the most interesting story to come out of this historic year for historical games.