Union Update: Recapping a busy February

Hey Anno Community,

We have a packed Union Update with news for you today, so, grab some coffee or some posca and read on.

First: As some of you noticed, we currently have some issues here on the website with the login and comment feature specifically. We’re working on a resolution and hope to soon discuss Anno with you in the comment section again.

Beta sign-up and playtests

A few weeks ago we announced that we’ll be having beta tests later this year and opened registrations. You can still sign up for those playtests by following this link .

Since we have received some questions since: No, don’t worry, invites haven’t been sent yet. These beta playtests still lie a bit further in the future – you can be sure that we’ll let you know both here and across all our other channels as soon as invites have been sent (just so you know when to check your inbox).

Talking about playtests: As mentioned previously, we have already done multiple smaller scale focus tests and diary studies for Anno 117: Pax Romana in the past. These are organized in collaboration with the Ubisoft User Research Labs who are organising similar smaller-scale playtests for all Ubisoft games. We tend to look for a variety of player profiles for those tests and are organizing tests with different focuses. If this sounds like something you might be interested in, you can register here.
Important: This registration does not guarantee you access to any such future playtests but merely adds you to a “pool” of people that the User Research Lab may select candidates from for future playtests.

IGN Fan Fest

For those of you who missed, Anno 117: Pax Romana was at IGN Fan Fest last week! Manuel Reinher, our Creative Director, presented a new feature that’ll be part of Anno 117: Pax Romana – modular ships. We’ve already seen much conversation about this on Reddit and Discord, so feel free to share your speculations and thoughts about it there as well!

Devblogs

After our very obvious hint about diagonal roads back in January, last week we published the first DevBlog dedicated to the road system in Anno 117: Pax Romana, in which we give an overview of what changed from Anno 1800 and what that means for your gameplay experience.

If you like the DevBlog, then we’ve got great news for you! In the next few weeks and months, more DevBlogs will be published here on the Anno Union: the second blog on the road system topic, where we’ll dive deeper into the technical details and the challenges of the new road system; a devblog fully dedicated to the new modular ships feature, to follow up on the IGN Fan Fest showcase; another devblog dedicated to game design, and much more! So, watch this space if you don’t want to miss out on super detailed blogs on what’s going on behind the scenes here at Ubisoft Mainz.

What about modding?

From Anno 1800, we already know very well: some of you love to create and use mods. In fact, the Anno 1800 modding community saw a fantastic increase over the years, creating some absolutely fantastic, creative mods as well as a bunch of useful quality-of-life pieces. We’re very much aware of their contribution to the Anno 1800 community as a whole, and it was therefore something that we were happy to support in 2023 with official mod support and the collaboration with mod.io.

For that reason, we also want to provide mod support for Anno 117: Pax Romana as early as possible.
For release, we can confirm that a mod loader will already be integrated into the game.

Additionally, our colleague Jakob is happy to help you with information to adjust community tools to changed data formats.

There are more ideas and things we want to do but that’s not something we are ready to discuss yet. For now, it was important to us to assure our (modding-)community that modding support is very much on our radar for Anno 117: Pax Romana.

Island Contest

Annoholics, we have a winner! As you may have already guessed from our social post: Congratulations to Logan!  Your design will now become an actual island in Anno 117: Pax Romana and we’re looking forward to sharing updates on its progress with you in the coming months.

As usual, we would of course also like to thank you all for participating in this contest – which quickly became the most popular one of the three, with more than 140 valid entries! The team, especially Level Art, was super impressed by your creativity during the selection process: selecting only 5 entries was a hard task. We’ve put together a collage with all your entries (if yours is missing, apologies: they were A LOT and some of them might have been accidentally missed from this image).

Governor Edition Voting

As you might have guessed from our latest social posts and news, there will be a Collector’s Edition for Anno 117: Pax Romana – the “Governor Edition”. A couple of weeks ago we’ve asked you to vote for your favourite design for the case and the artbook cover of the Governor Edition. The voting was a very close one – today, we share the results here on the Anno Union with you all: