Announcing Anno 117: Pax Romana!

Hey Thorlof, thanks for taking the time to reply! I was expecting such a limitation; the addition of modding support to 1800 was a great move in my opinion, and it indeed brought some fresh things such as textures (trains! more trains!) or mechanics (Tisogno’s garbage collection being one of my favorites).

There’s one inconvenient side though (at least in my opinion) to how it is integrated into 1800: it only revolves around continuous games. As such, I feel like mods do not work well at telling stories; you couldn’t create a shorter scenario such as Eden Burning or Seasons of Silver, which not only work really well on their own to enjoy a new take on vanilla mechanics, but also bring their little something to broaden the world of Anno (or even link it to other games, as it was the case with Eden Burning’s epilogue)!

That bit of storytelling is one of the things I miss in Anno 1800, despite the expedition logs (Enbesa however felt more satisfying in that regard): I do not feel as much sympathy for 1800 NPCs as I did with 1404’s Lord Northburg, Grand Vizier Al Zahir (much less Giacomo Garibaldi, come to think of it) or even Barnabas getting angry and ready to teach that puffy red rose a thing or two, after hurting his lil’ Marie!

Of course we cannot determine characters’ personality and such, but what if we could’ve created a little side story about, let’s say, 1800’s Bente going on a trip in Enbesa after hearing rumors about where to observe coelacanth in their natural habitat, helping locals develop their own island to shine on the tourism market, ending with an advice of theirs so she goes diving with an exhausted Nathaniel that gave in to her enthusiasm, and finds a plentiful school of coelacanth fish? Add a few twists on mechanics such as settlement attractiveness or tourist season DLC content (so the studios may still reap benefits from uncertain customers, more about that later); then make it instructive by adding prompts here and there the player can choose to open or not about tourism in the early XIXth century, African history, seabeds or simply what coelacanth are, and there works the magic in weaving a story!

That’s where I think a proper scenario editor could work wonders in favor of the Anno franchise. It would be a friendlier tool to users for creating content, from which we could start from scratch: design our own islands, define starting point(s), triggers, create cinematics or dialogue boxes (obviously unvoiced), create mechanics from vanilla templates, and so on and so forth. Of course all of that is wishful thinking; I simply am nostalgic of 1404’s scenarios (the Barrens!) which allowed shorter game sessions, when you aren’t sure which personal challenge to set up next during a sandbox game!

I’m pretty sure it could provide interest in purchasing DLCs for customers who do not own them, whenever user content puts them at work. I mean, although Anno is my only exception for how long I’ve been enjoying it, for a cautious customer like me even the base game price is above my limit; at most I’d spend 40€ on a product, not 60 (the price tags being the main reason why I no longer mind Ubisoft products, indie gems also exist) so seeing the full product at 130€ is interdictive! However, if I notice the opportunity to have tens or hundreds of hours of extra content with different gameplay approaches for the same price, now that’s a different matter worth considering – base game first, the rest if it proves to be a pleasant surprise.

Anyway, there are many other considerations revolving around such a topic, about which only the team can argue; I’ll keep wishing for a scenario editor tool to exist someday, so keep up the already amazing work in the meantime! You’re getting closer to the Historical era that interests me the most (maybe a BCE iteration around Cyrus the Great or Alexander the Great periods?); I’ll patiently wait to see what you have in store for us, take your time to deliver another exceptional Anno! 🙂