Fame! Humankind's unified victory condition will measure whose culture is gonna live forever

A new video developer diary for Humankind explains more about its single victory condition, the pursuit of Fame points. It's a system building victories from all facets of your cultural legacy, with points coming in everywhere from military victories to building wonders. Humankind is coming from the makers of Endless Space and Endless Legends, two cracking and fascinating 4X strategy games, so I'm mighty curious about their take on the big daddy of 4X: Civilization. Come watch the video to learn more about Fame and about switching cultures across eras.

"Humankind is all about your journey through history, the mark you leave on it, and the civilisation you build along the way," producer Jean-Maxime Moris explains in the video. "In Humankind we created a single unified victory condition called Fame, and Fame is going to reward you for every great deed that you accomplish, every discovery that you make, every wonder that you build... all these ways that you can leave your mark on history. This is about the journey through history and not the destination."

In something like Civ (I know, I shouldn't always compare this to that), it's important to decide which victory condition you're going for early on (like science, culture, religious, military, or diplomatic) and work towards that across thousands of years. You can pivot a bit, but really it's best to decide when picking your civilisation. That's not quite how it'll go in Humankind, where players can change to a different civ across each of the six eras. Different civs have different unique units, buildings, and enduring perks so there are benefits to switching, though not switching will get you bonus Fame instead. I think that's how all this works?

I'm very interested to see how all this comes together. It's hard to speculate about quite how such a complex game will come together, especially when my natural inclination is to imagine how these systems would work in Civilization. This isn't Civ. I can't wait to see what it is.

Humankind is due to hit Steam later in 2020. For now, you can learn more bits and pieces in Alice Bee's preview from August as well as videos about origins, terrain, and claiming territory.