DevBlog: The Echoes of Kassandra Cosmetic Pack

Bring some Greek vibes from the world of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey into your game with the “Echoes of Kassandra” Pack!

We’ve already given you a broad overview of this upcoming cosmetic pack in our gamescom recap last week. Now it’s time to dive a bit deeper and give more details about this pack themed around the world of the famous Spartan hero Kassandra.

Portraits and Sigils

Leading the way is the namesake of this cosmetic pack: Kassandra herself. She’s joining you as a profile portrait alongside a masked member of the Cult of Cosmos. Like any other portrait, you can switch to a “new you” at any time during the game by opening the “game setup” screen. Here you can also change your player colour and your sigil.

Talking about that, the “Echoes of Kassandra” Pack also adds five new sigils, including Kassandra’s own, which you can then proudly display on – for example – your ship’s sails and your villa’s banners.

Skins

Talking about ships, your flagship also receives a new coat of paint – and a mighty golden eagle figurehead – with a skin modeled after the “Adrestia”, Kassandra’s flagship from Assassin’s Creed Odyssey.

All your Tier 1 residences (across all provinces) also receive a new and very bright paint job: inspired by Mykonos, these white and blue skins bring a very unique look to your cities and maybe also inspire some holiday feeling! A suspicious haystack has also been sighted…

This paint scheme is also extended to all City Watch buildings (Vigiles, Custodia, Medici) as well as their smaller variants (Well, Watchtower and Latrine. The latter now having an open roof, as our Art Director loves pointing out).

Are you building a small Greek-inspired district in your city or use the skins for a small fishing village on a remote island? We’re curious how you’ll use these new paint schemes.

Statues

Both the Greeks and then also the Romans loved their statues, even if size and style may have differed a bit between both cultures, historically.

In Anno 117: Pax Romana, a variety of statues of different styles and sizes are being added with the “Echoes of Kassandra” Pack.

Leading the way is the mighty statue of even mightier Zeus: placeable in the harbour area, this statue towers over your ships and is – for the ones of you who did play AC: Odyssey – inspired by one of the first large monuments you encounter in Kassandra’s game.

To assure ships aren’t accidentally crashing into it, two tall pillars with fire bowl at the top can help illuminate the harbour area as well.

Mighty impressive are also the two giant rock carvings: the scary medusa head staring right into your soul as well sisyphus during his endless labours of trying to roll a rock up a mountain.

Added to that are a total of 9 further statues which may fit better IN your cities: be it the mighty Athena statue, Apollo fighting with the python or the great Leonidas himself – proudly waving your banner – they make for great pieces to decorate plazas, gardens or your governor’s villa.

Hall of Echoes

Finally, there’s the Hall of Echoes. Here we wanted to do two things: have a cool larger centrepiece for our players and also use it as the base for the integration of a portion of the soundtrack of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey.

The Hall of Echoes is inspired by the Mykonos Temples in AC Odyssey. I fell pretty much in love at first sight with the wooden structures and paintings and thought it quite interesting and different from the usual stone temples we have all over the place already. Also it fits in quite nicely with the Mykonos Skins we did, so I makes for a more complete Mykonos Package Deal. – Laura, Senior Prop Artist

Click on the building to activate and deactivate the Odyssey soundtrack. Upon activation it overrides the regular music of the game with roughly one hour of music from Kassandra’s world. The tracks are context-sensitive, meaning, like the main soundtrack the individual songs are chosen based on if you are at war, if there’s a fire in your city, etc.

Drawing both inspiration, as well as specific objects from Odyssey required a larger level of re-work to make them function in Anno 117: Pax Romana, since the assets themselves but also the way they work in the game engines of both titles take two different approaches, as Laura details:

All statues that we wanted to use from AC directly needed to be optimized, the poly count was way to high always to be used straight out of the library, but never high enough so we could use them as high polys to be baked down onto lowpolys to use as basis for Anno. Fortunately, the statues’ texture sets were most of the time usable enough and made the process less complicated. We needed to adjust tonalities and details, though: they all went through substance painter and got an extra layer of details and dirt, the statues bases were most of the time newly made and of course setting the models up in Bob (our internal tool where all graphic assets are configured in order to be integrated into the game) is also work we poor artists needed to go through. Some statues, however, were made completely anew, like so for the Apollo and the Kassandra statues. Kassandra is a brand new statue that was sculpted by our very own Reiko (Art Director).

The ship skin and the Hall of Echoes were on a whole different level though. AC works very differently than us, assigning dirt and all the gritty detail only in the engine. Also, they build their models upon a vast library, which leads to, for example, a single ship model having 30 texture sets or over. So for these two assets we had our Artist and Tech-Wizard David write a script to convert the millions of textures to be usable by us and our programs and then have them be baked down with Simplygon onto one mesh with only one huge texture. Extensive aftercare was necessary, and we had to clean up and add a lot of detail to the resulting models.

And here we are, this is the “Echoes of Kassandra” Pack, the third cosmetic pack of 2026. We’re looking forward to seeing what you’re doing with these new ornaments and skins.

Also, don’t hesitate to let us know what type or ornaments and cosmetics you’re still missing in Anno 117: Pax Romana.

The “Echoes of Kassandra” Pack and Update 2.1 are releasing on September 17^th on all platforms.

List of all ornaments and skins

• Ship skin “Adrestia”
• Zeus Ombrios harbour statue
• Pillar of Pharos harbour ornament
• Petrified Gorgon mountain statue
• Sisyphus mountain statue
• Leonidas statue with banner (large)
• Pallas Athena statue (large)
• Python and Apollo statue (medium)
• Kore statue (medium)
• Weary Boxer statue (medium)
• Asclepios statue (medium)
• Penelope statue (medium)
• Kassandra statue (medium)
• Artemis Kalliste statue (small)
• “Hellenic Blue” skin for T1 residences (all provinces)
• “Hellenic Blue” skins for city watch buildings (all provinces)
• Kassandra & Cultist of Cosmos portrait
• 5 player logos
• Hall of Echoes ornamental building
• About 1h of soundtrack from Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
  • Can be activated via the Hall of Echoes