Tag: Anno 117

Union Update: Patch 1.6.1 and Hippodrome teasers

Posted on by Ubi-Thorlof

Hey Anno Community,

We have just released patch 1.6.1 for all platforms. Find some highlights of the patch below. The full patch notes can be found here.

  • Fixed a crash related to major incidents
  • Expanded building space on Cinis
  • Fixed issues with vassalized islands
  • Fixed some savegame compatibility issues

The next update for Anno 117: Pax Romana is planned for mid-August, together with the release of DLC 02.

The Hippodrome

Following the release of the first part of the trailer for the upcoming “The Hippodrome” DLC, we also launched a community contest: create a sponsor for the chariot races.

This contest concluded yesterday, and we want to thank everyone who submitted their idea for a sponsor. There were many, many submissions, covering wine, oil, sandals, chariots, horses, postal services, jewelry, tools, weapons and much more. Not an easy task for us to discuss and agree on just four winners – but we’re making some progress. Right now, we are planning to have an update at the end of next week. The four lucky winners will then be contacted via e-mail to discuss the details.

 

Also coming up soon is part 2 of the trailer – we have to talk about the racers themselves, of course! Stay tuned.

Later this month and then throughout August we’ll have more details on the DLC for you, as well as on the content of update 2.0 releasing alongside it:

  • How do you build the monument and what does it do?
    • A DevBlog and a developer livestream will provide all the answers
  • How do quality of life improvements like the note function work and what else is in the update?
    • We’ll make sure to give you an overview of the changes and improvements separately from the patch notes as well.

Stay tuned for news and updates in the coming weeks.

Updates on the Anno Union

Finally, we have done a few updates on the Anno Union itself we want to briefly inform you about:

  • The “Community Page” has received an overhaul, updating various links and adding links to various resources created by YOU
  • There now is a dedicated modding FAQ page for Anno 117: Pax Romana
  • Following your feedback, we’ll soon be launching the “Roadmap for 2026” page, with information on some of the content of the planned updates for 2026
    • This page will be continuously updated throughout the year to reflect development reality

Summer Twitch Drops

As part of the Twitch Summer Drops Fest, you can now also unlock a new market skin for Anno 117: Pax Romana.

Watch any participating livestream on Twitch between July 10th and 24th for an accumulated 2 hours to unlock it. You will need to have your Ubisoft and Twitch accounts connected to receive the market skin.

Contest announcement: Put your horse race sponsor in the trailer

Posted on by UbiCecce

Hey Anno Community,

Have you always wanted to channel your inner Anno 117: Pax Romana entrepreneur and launch your own product line? This contest is your chance!

Design a logo and name for a product or brand inside the Anno 117: Pax Romana universe and win prizes! We offer you the best advertisement space in the entire empire: The famous Hippodrome!

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That’s right, the winning sponsors will be featured in the final trailer for our second DLC in August.

 

Soooo… are you opening a wine company with the slogan “Less whining more wine-ing!” or are you releasing a new type of soap called “Dorian’s Favourite” and advertise it with “True Roman soap for true Romans”? It’s up to you!

How to participate

To participate you will need to follow these steps:

  • Imagine your own brand or product within the Anno 117: Pax Romana universe and create:
    • a brand/product logo (at least 512×512 pixel) in PNG format
    • a brand/product name (max 27 characters)*
  • Send it all via email to AnnoCommunityContests@ubisoft.com using the subject “Community Contest: Hippodrome Sponsor”
  • The deadline for entries is the 8th of July, 10 PM UTC.

 

*name can be submitted in: English, French, Italian, German. We may translate them into English when featured in the trailer, however.

Find an example below – we’re sure you can do much better than that, however!

Rules

You can use any images, icons, artworks, etc. from the game in the creation, or create everything from scratch. You will need to edit whatever official Anno material you’re using and you’re not allowed to incorporate any copyrighted images, icons, fonts, etc. from other companies or products. We may ask for working files of digital entries afterwards.

You may submit only one entry.

You can also submit (optionally) a slogan for your product. It won’t be featured in the trailer but can give your submission more “flavour” and will be featured on our Anno Union article.

 

The full rules can be found here. Please make sure you review them before participating in the contest.

Winners & Prizes

A jury comprised of members of the dev team will judge the entries based on creativity, style & originality, and consistency with the Anno 117: Pax Romana universe.

We will select four (4) winners who will each win:

  • One Anno 117: Pax Romana mug
  • One Anno 117: Pax Romana trireme builder kit

Additionally, their creation will be featured in the trailer for the upcoming “The Hippodrome” DLC.

The winners will be announced on the 17th of July, the trailer with the sponsors created by the winners will go live in August on release day.

We’re also planning to spotlight the winners as “official sponsors” in a livestream in August.

Union Update: It’s Blooming Cities Pack release day!

Posted on by UbiCecce

Today we’re releasing the Blooming Cities Pack, the second Cosmetic DLC for Anno 117: Pax Romana!

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Featuring an organic system to place flowers and trees in all kinds of places on your islands, as well as fountains, a decorative wall and a large centre piece with the Temple of Flora.

Check out the trailer above for an overview of the content or get more insights into the pack via our blog article with a dev Q&A.

The “Blooming Cities” Pack is now available on all platforms.

Together with this Cosmetic DLC, we’re also releasing patch 1.6 which includes several more bug fixes. You can find the full patch notes here.

The garden system is such a useful tool, we wanted to give everyone a way to play around with it. Therefore, the update today also includes an Albion- and a Latium-themed garden brush for all players. You can find them in the Ornaments Menu under “Landscaping Patterns” and can use it in all provinces.

What are we working on?

Let us give you a brief overview of what we’re currently working on.

  • DLC 02, the Hippodrome, is in the “bugfixing and polishing” phase at the moment till end of June, after which we start full testing and then the validation before we submit the version to the various stores.
  • DLC 03, Dawn of the Delta, is still in production, entering the “polishing and bugfixing” phase only later in summer for a longer period. To mention a few areas we are working on:
    • The expansion of the tech tree & the icons for new techs
    • Some buildings are still “under construction”, and missing e.g. final textures
    • While some character portraits (e.g. residents) are still being worked on, others have first versions already implemented in internal versions
  • Patches have a much shorter validation and submission times when they’re not tied to storefront releases (and because they naturally contain less content to test).
    • Accordingly, version 1.6.1 (planned release date: July 9th) is still being worked on, validations only starting at the end of June. The patch tackles, for example:
      • Issues with taking over islands vassalized by rivals
      • Issues with raiders’ islands when they’re being added mid-game
      • The Numa Aquarius statue not sitting still on its pedestal
      • The issue with defeated villa troops not showing a timer for their respawn

So much for today’s Union Update on the release date of the Blooming Cities Pack.

Ready to channel your inner gardener with the new ornaments? Share your creations with us on Reddit, Discord or social! We’ll soon also show you how we used the new trees and flowers in our own cities.

Union Update: Livestream for the Blooming Cities Pack

Posted on by Ubi-Thorlof

Hey everyone,

we want to just share a short update today with some reminders on what’s coming up!

First of all: tomorrow at 5PM CEST we’ll be holding a livestream again, at the center is the upcoming Cosmetic DLC “Blooming Cities”. As usual, we’ll be streaming on the Annogame Twitch Channel.

Join us in chat, learn all about the content of the cosmetic pack and ask your questions to us.

 

Want to get an a teaser in advance? In the little video clip below you can already find some of the new ornaments in action. A DevBlog will follow the livestream tomorrow evening.

Alongside Cosmetic DLC, we’ll be releasing patch 1.6 next week Thursday – the full changelog for it will be ready by early next week.

Your Prophecies of Ash achievements

The “Prophecies of Ash” DLC is now slightly over one month old – a good time to look back at some of your achievements related to it.

We can only say: governors, you’ve been busy at work on Cinis, all the while the volcano threatened your crops and cities!

Union Update: Patch 1.5.2 and our plans for June

Posted on by Ubi-Thorlof

Hey Anno Community,

It’s patch day! Today we’re releasing Version 1.5.2 with several more fixes – including the issue with ships renaming themselves (which didn’t get properly fixed last time), flickering ground plates and some adjustments to rivals’ behaviour related to wars.

Please have a look at the full Patch Notes here!

Upcoming updates

The next planned update will be on June 18th and include some more fixes as well as the second cosmetic DLC: Blooming Cities.

We’ll follow that up with another update in early July. More details on those closer to their release date.

Livestream

On June 10th we’ll be holding a livestream to show you the “Blooming Cities” Pack in action with Art Director Reiko, Project Coordinator Dennis and Clémentine, Junior International Product Manager.

Aside from talking about the very flower-y content, we’re also looking forward to updating you on our plans and answering your questions.

The stream will start on June 10th at 5PM CEST | 3PM UTC on our Twitch channel.

Upcoming and what we’re working on

Looking further into the future, August is, as previously announced, the time of the Hippodrome! Our second gameplay DLC will release around mid-August letting you build an enormous monument in your cities and hold races to entertain your population. You won’t have to wait too long until we start talking about it.

This release will be accompanied by an update as usual, Update 2.0, further improving the game for everyone. To give you a little teaser:

  • An often-requested feature is making a comeback: the note function!
    • Leave notes for yourself as reminders for later in your play-session or when you load your savegame a few days or weeks later and attach them to specific objects (e.g. ships).
  • Take even more phantastic screenshots with the photomode
    • We have seen and admired what you can do with the postcard mode already – with a free camera and some effects you will have even more possibilities
  • Time limited challenges will be available via Ubisoft Connect
    • Aside from the challenge aspect itself, you will get XP for your Ubisoft Connect profile level and Fame points to use in the Hall of Fame

Additionally, we are working on a bunch of further fixes and improvements. Please note that these can still move into later updates depending on their complexity or in case of unforeseen issues. As usual, we will confirm the final changelog for Update 2.0 closer to the actual release in August. To mention just five things currently being worked on:

  • We’re planning to add field workers to farms/plantations after adjustments to the feedback unit system
  • We’re working on a solution to increase the value of the proconsul title, in order for it to be less easily lost upon taking actions the Emperor doesn’t like
  • In the first-person easter egg, groundplates/roads shouldn’t disappear anymore in certain angles
  • We’re looking into Raiders not being defeatable/spawning without their main building
  • Sandarac Tree Nursery will be reclassified as plantation

Talking about both DLC and patches, in the last weeks we’ve held both playtests for “The Hippodrome”, as well as a very early playtest for “Dawn of the Delta”.

Like the playtests we’ve done in the year leading up to the release of Anno 117: Pax Romana, our goals here were to gather feedback on both the overall state, but also the aspects “fun factor”, balancing and UI/UX.

These types of closed playtests will continue for all future gameplay content, and while we can’t go into the details of the provided feedback here, we received valuable input on the UI/UX side of the Hippodrome DLC and its connection to the rest of the game, as well as the province layout of DLC 03 and the clarity/onboarding of its features.

Community Spotlight

Closing the update with a Community Spotlight once more, starting with this website DukeEntropy created: it lets you pre-plan trade routes in preparation for our next Anno 117: Pax Romana session.

To quote them: “I made a website to plan my Anno 117 island and trade routes. Since I cannot play anno during work hours, but I can go to the internet and plan my anno game during work hours.”

Check it out here: https://antondemeester.github.io/anno-planner/

Moving over to the art side, Dulcamarra recently shared a comic summarising her experiences with the volcanic eruptions.

You can find more of her art on her Instagram.

Finally, we also want to feature here some of the awesome screenshots you took for “Prophecies of Ash”, capturing both the island itself as well as the volcano and its eruptions in particular.

DevBlog: Fire and Destruction – the job of a Technical Artist

Posted on by Ubi-Thorlof

Salve Anno Community!

My name is Oliver Mertins, Senior Technical Artist on Anno 117: Pax Romana. I’m with Ubisoft Mainz for 5 years and have started on Anno 117: Pax Romana at the very beginning.

 

Often, I get asked: “What does a Technical Artist actually do?”
Simply said, they are the glue between the Art (e.g. Level Art, 3D Art, Animation) and development departments (e.g. Game Play Programming, Engine Development, Tools Development).

While Artists tend to think in shapes, colors and timing, Programmers might think in game logic, code design patterns or data types. To bridge between them a Technical Artist is needed who understands both worlds and can support in meetings, write scripts and little tools to support the Artists, do research to explore new fields of interest or investigate into asset optimization to improve the game performance. They take care of the more technical art side, like building functionality out of node networks, creating control rigs for character or props, developing procedural materials or stunning visual effects using several techniques or even writing shaders.

When you think about Anno, you immediately think about building a beautiful-looking empire. But today I will show you how to burn it down to the ground, leaving destruction and chaos. Curious? Then read on

Creating a fire

In ancient times, fire was a central element for humankind to survive and prosper. It not only spent light at night but enabled us to cook and prepare food, manufacture goods and weapons and helped to protect against wild animals. But whenever we thought we had total control over the forces of nature, we were proven wrong, as the great fire in Rome under Emperor Nero showed, for example.
All these cases found its way into Anno 117: Pax Romana – but before we start to create and control an inferno, we need to start mastering small flames and sparks first.

For achieving a vivid blazing fire effect, we will combine multiple visual components starting with emissive flames at its core, sparks for tiny details, heat distortion and a light source to send out light and shadow to its surrounding, to behave believable in the game world. Some aspects will be artistically exaggerated compared to reality to be visible from the usual player-perspective or to create more dramatic imagery.

For creating animated flames, we jump into the most advanced tool for creating visual effects: Side FX Houdini. Here we gain the ability to create digital fire-based rules on how it would work in the real world. This is called a simulation and will be done for each element: the flame, smoke and embers flying through the heated air.

Since a high-resolution simulation contains too much data to process in a real-time game environment, we need to simplify the information by baking a single animated flame into a texture – the “flipbook”. It will be read from left to right and from top to bottom in a repeating fashion from a shader later.

Now we want to have the appearance of a three-dimensional object as well, so we create multiple moving points in space called “particles” and attach the flipbook at each point to create the overall moving fire shape. Here is an overview of the fire ingredients:

Of particles, heat effects and light sources

“But wait a moment, the flipbook texture is just black and white, where are the colors?”, you might ask.
By using a gray scale texture for the flames and a fire color ramp texture, we can later tweak the colors of all fires in the game at a central place. This makes iteration and achieving a consistent quality much easier. We go even further and split the color into two ramp textures, one for the emitting color and one for the pure albedo color. But this is just for a more vivid color shifting look. These will be used as separate inputs for our shader later.

What else would you expect from a fire? Right, sparks! Let’s add some:
Back in Houdini we create particles flying around affected by wind turbulence and gravity. We make them a bit bigger than in reality to have them visible even from greater distance.

Now that we have made the more obvious and “loud” components, it’s time to address the subtle ones. We want to feel the heat the fire sends out, meaning, we want to distort the air around the fire. So, let’s add a few particles for that as well. To achieve the effect, a normal map gets assigned in the shader which deforms the pixels behind it.

Since Anno 117: Pax Romana has a day and night cycle, our fire should light our way at night as well. For dancing shadows on surrounding walls or a gloomy atmosphere, adding a light source becomes essential.

In the real world not only, objects get lit but the air around the light source as well. Tiny dust particles fly through the air reacting and transporting the light further, creating what we perceive as beams or god rays for example.

And there we have it:

Combined with fireplaces and baskets it nicely illuminates the city:

Setting a city on fire (in-game)

Now that we made fire, let’s have a look at unloved fire city incidents.
In Anno 117: Pax Romana we have three types of incidents: fires, disease, and uprisings. The fire incident is what we want to have a closer look at.

 

Overall fire incidents were a complex topic because they required multiple departments to achieve the overall feeling. When the incident happens, residents panic and run away, resolver units come to the rescue, extinguishing smaller fires. The air fills up with smoke, rooftop holes become visible and multiple fires spread in dangerous rings across the city leaving ruins behind. Therefore, multiple types of fires and smoke effects in several sizes were created, position markers were added to every building and all pieces got balanced and adjusted. For example: in the first iteration the smoke was way too intense from the players’ perspective, hiding the actions of residents and resolver units.

Looking at a single residence building the visual dramaturgy can be explained:

First, smoke and small fires start to evolve, getting bigger and more threatening.
After the fire has eaten through the building, holes in the rooftop get visible, showing glowing and black burned wood beams. When the building has reached its end, it collapses to dust leaving ruins behind.

How to destroy a building

This leads me to the final topic: Building Destruction.
Since Anno 117: Pax Romana contains many different building types and creating an individual destruction animation would require significant extra hard drive storage, we came up with several solutions for specific cases.

The bulk of buildings which are not that often destroyed, get a shader solution with additional smoke and dust effects leaving the detailed destruction animation for military strategic targets like walls, towers, gates and the villa which get seen relatively often.

Usually, the buildings are created in an “onion style” meaning multiple single sided shells got added to compose a building. Unfortunately, this is not ideal for the destruction process for which a “solid” geometry – closed geometry from all sides – is needed.

Therefore, the mesh gets prepared to be solid first. Afterwards it gets cut into pieces – “fractured” as we say – by using simplified fracture patterns, each standing for a different material like wood splitting into long shards, while stone bricks stay as single bricks compared to concrete material crumbling into many pieces. Marble, for example, gets chopped horizontally into multiple pieces:

Now let’s have a look at how we achieved the destruction animation for the stone tower.

By having loose fractured pieces only, our tower would instantly fall apart in an uncontrolled way – but that is not what we want. So, to gain controllability, we glue the loose pieces together and remove the glue partly over time, exactly where and when we want. This results in areas where the tower crumbles first, then second and so on which looks much more realistic.

In our game engine – the Empire Engine – we use a technique called “vertex animation” to playback the animation of the falling pieces in a shader. This is an alternative method for animated meshes compared to the “bone with a skinned mesh” approach usually used for characters and animals. A vertex animation requires two animation textures, one for translation and another one for rotation of the fractured pieces in addition to the fractured mesh. All these get exported, converted and put together by a python script to speed up and smooth out the process.

This is only a high-level overview of the main process of how we destroy specific assets. The whole network to do all these steps bit by bit looks like this under the Houdini hood:

This brings me to the end of the insights into fire and destruction. I hope you will enjoy the effects as much as we do while playing Anno 117: Pax Romana.

Have fun,

Oliver

Union Update: Our plans for May and June

Posted on by Ubi-Thorlof

Patches and Updates

On May 11th, we released Patch 1.5.1 with various bug fixes you can find here. We also added an additional Tier for each Latium and Albion in the Hall of Fame with more ornaments and other unlocks.

 

Right now, we are working on Patch 1.5.2, with a release planned for May 28th. It will address some other problems like not-buildable obsidian groundplates, various “dead tiles” in harbour areas, and the problem with ships changing their name which didn’t get entirely fixed with 1.5.1.

We will share the patch notes when we have finalised the patch, early next week.

 

Beyond that, another update is planned for mid-June with additional fixes and changes, as well as the release of the already announced “Blooming Cities” Cosmetic Pack.

Encountered an issue? Use the Bug Reporter!

If you encounter issues like the ones mentioned above, the best place to report them (or check if someone else has already reported them), is the Bug Reporter website:

https://www.ubisoft.com/en-us/game/anno/117-pax-romana/bug-reporter

This website allows you to submit bug reports for us to investigate, and you can also follow their current status as we start investigating, working on and ultimately planning in a fix for the issues.

 

Please also have a look if the issue you encountered has already been reported by someone else. In this case you can upvote the report and – even more useful for us – contribute to these existing reports: provide additional details, screenshots or a savegame or simply give more context on how this issue is impacting your enjoyment of the game.

It helps us both with our investigation as well as with the prioritization of issues for future patches.

Next livestreams

After a break, we’ll soon be returning to livestreaming on the Anno Twitch channel.

Aside from devstreams for e.g. upcoming (C)DLC like the “Blooming Cities” Pack and later also dedicated dev insights, we’re also planning to start a series of pure gameplay streams with a completely new savegame that we’ll carry forward into all future gameplay livestreams.

Stay tuned for precise dates for those streams.

Upcoming DevBlogs

In the second half of May and beyond we also want to go back to giving you some development insights outside of DLC content, similar to our articles on UI Design and UI Icon Design in March.

Upcoming are blogs first give you insights from the Art Team, when we talk “Fire and Destruction” on Thursday, May 21st, before covering the topics of sound and music – which we already touched on last year in a dedicated livestream.

We also have some more topics on the UI & UX side we’d love to cover.

And, as usual, if there are other topics or departments you’d love to hear more about, don’t hesitate to let us know and we’ll see if we can make a dedicated article out of it later this year!

Upcoming Patches – A message from the Anno Team

Posted on by Ubi-Thorlof

Hello Anno fans,

 

Our last release for Anno 117: Pax Romana, Update 1.5, was not in the state it should have been, and we’re very sorry that this resulted in many of you not being able to enjoy the game the way you deserve to. The quality of this release did not match our own expectations for what an Anno release should stand for.

 

We also want to be completely honest about one specific mistake. While talking about our first DLC, Prophecies of Ash, we announced that the new island would be the biggest island in Anno history. That statement was wrong. The sizes of the construction areas were compared incorrectly between Crown Falls (Anno 1800) and Cinis (Anno 117: Pax Romana), comparing “buildable grids” for Crown Falls with “all grids” for Cinis (resulting in the mentioned 13% difference) – while it should instead have been a 7% “buildable grids” difference in favour of Crown Falls. These numbers made it into our communication without another review closer to release, and we apologize for the confusion caused by this.

Taken together, all of this didn’t meet our quality expectations.

So, what are the next steps?

Most importantly, we’re working on fixing those recent issues. The hotfix deployed on PC on Saturday and on consoles today addressed two types of critical crashes.

We have another patch lined up (1.5.1.1) that is currently being tested and planned to be released next week.

Among other things, we’re addressing several issues you reported to us:

  • Amphitheatre games can’t be started
  • Filter can’t be applied anymore in the trade menu
  • Ships names being changed upon province change
  • Ships being removed from their trade routes upon activating DLC 01

Full patch notes will follow in the next days and we are working on releasing another patch later this month.

Furthermore, we are reviewing our processes: How we plan, how we review releases and how we validate quality. That means: we’re not just looking for quick fixes to the recent bugs, but are also putting in the work to improve your experience for our future releases.

 

Thank you for sharing your feedback and concerns and for rightfully holding us to high standards. Just like you, we love Anno 117: Pax Romana and for many of us, working on this beautiful series has been a part of our lives for many years already.

We will keep working, listening and improving.

The Anno Dev Team

(Updated) Update 1.5 launch issues & HotFix

Posted on by Ubi-Thorlof

!Update!

We have just released a hotfix for PC addressing:

  • A crash for campaign savegames upon loading
  • A crash related to defeating a rival

Additional bug fixes are planned for the next patch.

Consoles will receive the hotfix as soon as the patch has been validated for their platforms.

Original Post:

 

Hey Anno Community,

the release of “Prophecies of Ash” certainly didn’t go as smoothly as we were hoping and we want to apologize for the inconveniences caused.

The issue with the DLC not being available in-game despite owning the Gold/Governors Edition and the Year 1 Pass should now be resolved on all platforms. Please do let us know if you’re still experiencing problems with accessing the new DLC content, and add information on which version of the game you own and which platform you’re playing on.

 

Furthermore, we’re seeing a number of automated crash reports coming in related to mainly campaign savegames.

We’re currently investigating these crashes in order to prepare a hotfix and will update you as soon as we have news on its release.

 

We’re also following your reports on Bug Reporter on other issues you are encountering since the update. We’re in the process of prioritizing them for upcoming updates and will also keep you in the loop here.

 

Thank you for your patience, we’re working on providing you with a smooth experience with the new content as soon as possible.

The Anno Team

Union Update: Release Delay, Player Milestone and Free Weekend

Posted on by Ubi-Thorlof

Hey Anno Community,

Due to a recently discovered potentially savegame-breaking issue in version 1.5, we decided to move the release of “Prophecies of Ash” and Patch 1.5 by a week to April 30th.

We always want to create the best player experience, so, thank you for your understanding.

 

The Patch Notes (originally announced for today) will also slightly move and be posted latest Monday (27th) here on the Anno Union. In the meantime, earlier this week we released a blog detailing some of the improvements and changes we’re adding with the patch; if you haven’t checked it our yet, we certainly recommend you doing so.

We reached a player milestone!

In significantly more positive news, we reached our first player milestone:

We’re celebrating 1,17 million governors for Anno 117: Pax Romana!

Thank you for all your support, Anno Community! We’re looking forward to improving your experience with our game further in the coming months.

Free Weekend

As you could already see at the end of the video above, Anno 117: Pax Romana will have another Free Weekend, starting tomorrow!

Play the game for free from the 23rd until Monday the 27th or have friends and family members join you for a nice co-op game.

The version includes the entire base game, is not time-limited and your savegame carries over if you decide to buy the game following the Free Weekend.