Following up right after the recent “Meet the Developers” video, the Civilization VI team has put out a video focusing purely on the art direction.

If you’ve played any of the other Civilization games, you might remember Civ IV’s dull grey expanse or Civ V’s endless clouds covering the map, but that’s not the case with Civilization VI. In Civ VI, the world unfolds and recovers itself as a rustic cartography map with inked-on illustrations of barbarian camps, forests, and seas. As you explore you’ll meet new civilizations and see new lands of course, but your discoveries will be drawn and redrawn as wonders are built over time or specific tiles are bombed/pillaged.

Brian Busatti is the head art direction, and his focus is that old cartographers map look as well as visual storytelling through the world changing. The example given was of Cleopatra’s Sphinx which was built and complete, but after a war had changed to become headless and damaged.

Sid Meier’s Civilization VI is launching on Oct 21st for Windows PC.