A quick update this week, we’ll have a new Community Roundtable, the Anno Afternoon returns and a Community Spotlight.
Community Roundtable in the Annoverse Next week on the 27th, we’ll have another Anno Union Community Roundtable, where the Community Team will answer your questions live. As with the last times, we’ll hold this in the Annoverse Discord. For a better overview, this time we’ll take questions from chat and answer them on voice.
This roundtable will be held on English at 19:30 GMT, but if you are able to understand and/or speak German, then you can start at 18:30 GMT already. Join us and ask your questions!
AnnoAfternoon – Full Steam Ahead
This week we’ll have another AnnoAfternoon, this time with Guddy and John, who will continue our existing Anno 1800 savegame. This week, we’ll reckon they reach the Artisans and maybe even the New World?
Community Spotlight – Norkhey On reddit we recently found this cool megacity build in Anno 2070. User Norkhey expanded the island a bit with a mod and the result looks astonishing. Do you have screenshots of your most gorgeous cities from older Anno games?
Community Corner with Bastian Today, we invite you to our first Community Corner, a livestream with Community Developer Bastian Thun, where you can ask questions regarding the development of Anno 1800, while he tries to build a city in Anno 1800. It will start at 3PM GMT on our Twitch Channel or you can watch it here on the Anno Union below.
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In October we had our first Union Talk, a video where we talked a bit about the development of Anno 1800. Today, we’ll have a new one ready for you, where Dirk Riegert, Marcel Hatam and Bastian Thun discuss their Closed Beta impressions. Additionally, we’ll give you a look at the things to come this week.
Union Talk – Closed Beta
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Anno 1800 Vinyl Soundtrack Ubisoft Blue Byte and Black Screen Records are excited to announce the official Soundtrack to Anno 1800™ on audiophile 180g double vinyl in April.
The symphonic soundtrack was composed by an experienced team around Tilman Sillescu (Dynamedion), recorded by a 70-member-ensemble of the Brandenburg State Orchestra and will come in a beautiful gatefold sleeve with original artwork by Karakter Design Studio.
Fire and Sickness – City Incidents The promised City Incidents Blog will come this week. You’ll get to see, what can happen in your city, when you don’t pay attention. And more importantly: What to do when the fire breaks out and how to prepare for some of them.
Community Corner with Bastian On Thursday, we invite you to our first Community Corner, a livestream with Community Developer Bastian Thun, where you can ask questions regarding the development of Anno 1800, while he tries to build a city in Anno 1800.
Keeping it short and sweet today, as we’re in the middle of preparations for the Closed Beta! And we got a few details that could be of interest to you. Plus a small tease at the coming DevBlog!
Get ready for the Anno 1800 Closed Beta The Closed Beta will be a bit bigger than last years Technical Test. And if you were one of the lucky selectees, then you won’t have to wait too long. Invitations will be sent out in the coming days, so check your inbox (and spam folders 😉 ).
A few things to note:
As with the Technical Test, this Beta is not representative for the finished game, which we’re currently finishing and polish so it’s ready for the big launch in April. Some things won’t work occasionally or outright break. This is intentional, as the Beta gives us important insights into topics such as Balance and Performance of the game. So please use the Closed Beta Forums (which will be opened on the english Ubisoft Forums soon) to provide us with Feedback and Bug Reports.
No NDA: This Closed Beta won’t have an NDA. That means you can stream, record and share videos and discuss your experiences in public. And we urge you to do so! If you’re on Social Media, make use of Hashtags such as #Anno1800, #AnnoUnion, #AnnoUnionCB und #Anno1800CB, so other Annoholics and ourselves can find your messages.
The Closed Beta won’t encompass the full game. The campaign won’t be playable and you can only reach the third residential tier in Endless Mode. Additionally, you’ll be able to challenge or cooperate with other players in Multiplayer, as well as explore and build in the New World.
The Closed Beta will run from 31. January 2019 to the 4th of February 2019.
Registering for the Closed Beta If you’re still wondering how to get a chance to participate in the Beta: Log into the Anno Union with your Uplay Account or register a new Uplay Account if you don’t have one. You can do that using the buttons in the upper right corner of this website.
So if you haven’t yet logged into the Union for whichever reason, now’s the time to get that sorted. 🙂
System Requirements for the Closed Beta
There are only minimal changes from the specs since the Technical Test, but please keep in mind that these still aren’t final, as we’re still optimizing the game.
Current Minimum Specs:
CPU: Intel i5 3470 oder AMD FX 6350
RAM: 8 GB
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce 670 GTX oder AMD Radeon R9 285
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7, Windows 8.1 or Windows 10 (jeweils 64-bit)
Hard Drive: 60 GB
Current Recommended Specs:
CPU: Intel i5 4690k oder AMD Ryzen 5 1400
RAM: 8 GB
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce 970 GTX oder AMD Radeon RX 480
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7, Windows 8.1 or Windows 10 (jeweils 64-bit)
Hard Drive: 60 GB
DISCLAIMER: THERE ARE NOT THE FINAL REQUIREMENTS! As Anno 1800 is still in the middle of development and performance optimization, you should not consider these specs to be representative of the final game. This test specifically should help us to find some areas where we can further improve the game’s performance.
Language We are still in the middle of localisation of texts and recording voiceovers. Therefore we’ll only be able to offer this Closed Beta in English only. Sorry about that!
When we release in April, the following languages will be available:
Fully localised Text and Audio
English
German
French
Russian
Fully localised Text
Italian
Spanish
Japanese
Korean
Polish
Chinese (traditional and simplified)
Livestreams and Videos If you have no opportunity to play yourself or need to take a break from being at your computer, then you can still get some impression from the Anno 1800 Closed Beta. You can check out what other players show from the game on Youtube, Twitch and Mixer.
Last but not least, we’ll want to show off the Closed Beta Trailer here. It was first revealed during last weeks AnnoCast and gives you an idea about the Feature we’ll showcase in this weeks DevBlog.
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Welcome back to the newest Union Update, this time a bit shorter than usual to leave us enough time to prepare the upcoming Closed Beta.
DevBlog: City Incidents – Moved
This week we planned to publish a blog taking a closer look at the City Incidents that you’ll have to deal with when creating your cities. We are still going to publish this blog, however, due to some workload caused by the preparation of the upcoming Beta of Anno 1800, we decided to move the blog to February. That way, we have time to prepare the Closed Beta starting January 31st and bring you the hot insights about the incidents right after the test has concluded.
We teased to reveal another new feature for Anno 1800 last week and even though we had to move the City Incidents blog, rest assured that we will still raise the curtain on the new content before the Closed Beta starts!
AnnoCast moved to Thursday 24th & AnnoAfternoon this Friday 25th A reminder that this week we’ll hold another AnnoCast and AnnoAfternoon that you can watch live on http://twitch.tv/ubisoftbluebyte.
As a headsup from last weeks announcement, we had to move the date of the next episode of our AnnoCast gamedev stream to this Thursday instead of Wednesday and we hope that despite the change in times, you’re going to watch because we have some interesting infos prepared and lot’s to show you!
Follow our channel if you haven’t done so and use the links to the Events to receive a reminder when the Streams are about to begin.
That’s it for this week. Next week, we’ll have a huge chunk of information regarding the coming Beta and a DevBlog, so make sure you bookmark the Union and follow us on Social Media so you’re not missing out.
We are back from our short holiday break and ready to tackle the last 7 weeks before Anno 1800’s launch on February 26th. With this first blog in the year 2019, we want to give you a brief outlook on the content to come until launch.
Road to launch
Last year’s Technical Test provided us with lots of valuable data, from player behavior up to bug and feedback reports. Fixing, fine-tuning and polishing is now our top priority for Anno 1800’s Beta period. After the TT, we followed up with another focus test session to get feedback on recent changes but also allowing us to get in-depth detail on other aspects such as balancing and overall gameplay experience, including progression through all residential tiers.
With the upcoming Closed Beta on January 31st, you will be able to see the changes and improvements for yourself as once more, we will invite a large number of players from the Anno Union to test the game.
However, it’s not all bug smashing and polishing- we are also putting the final puzzle pieces together, including one all-new feature we haven’t even announced yet! Between that feature, as well as upcoming DevBlogs about City Incidents, Ornaments and of course Anno 1800’s story-driven campaign, there is still a lot to talk about on the Union.
You can look forward to the first of these DevBlogs to come next week, alongside more information about our Closed Beta. And if you haven’t done so already, keep in mind that you can still register for our Closed Beta by signing up here on the Anno Union.
And if you want to get reminded if a new blog comes fresh from the press or stay in the loop about anything #Anno, you can just follow our official Anno Twitter and Facebook channels.
Winner of the Expedition Event Contest: The Lost Civilization It was a neck-and-neck race between Hexagon19’s “Isla De Los Muertos” Event and Hojny87’s “The Lost Civilization”, with Argurino’s “Voyage Of The Beagle” also mobilizing many fans rooting for a throwback to Darwin’s journeys.
In the end, “The Lost Civilization” secured the 1st place and we congratulate Hojny87 for making the cut with his exciting expedition event.
This community-chosen event will now get the same treatment from our design team and together with the Union island and the ship variant, will find its way into the game itself.
While we want to continue to funnel the creative power of our communities in future contests after the launch of the game, we want to utilize the voting feature more in the future to allow you to voice your opinion on various topics like favorite game element or balancing.
Streaming schedule update
With more information out in the open and the big launch at our doorstep, we will start a new series of community streams, with the first show starting shortly after the Closed Beta has concluded.
Different from the AnnoCast, the show will be mostly run by our Community Developer and focus on answering your questions while playing the game rather than highlighting a specific feature in detail.
And to give as many Anno fans as possible a chance to direct their questions at us, we will host not only English but also a German episode.
But there is also the next episode of our AnnoCast game dev stream on the horizon: at the end of this month, we will have Narrative Designer Marie on board to demonstrate how we breathe life into the 19th century world of Anno with a great variety of quests and expedition events.
Speaking of streams- we know that many of you liked our ship preview during our naval stream. Hoist the flag and all hands on deck, as the video is now available on our Twitch channel. What is your favorite ship and will you rely on a bulwark of huge battlecruisers or a versatile wolf pack of fast gunboats?
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The year is ending and this will be our last blog of 2018. To send you off into the New Year appropriately – and bring you a bit closer to the launch of Anno 1800 – we prepared something special for you.
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Today we’ll present a short blog with our AnnoCast Specials from this week, where aside from special guests like Valle or Belannaer, we also had an open door policy and many of our developers dropped in and visited us during the stream.
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And tomorrow we’ll have another AnnoAfternoon with our Community Team from Newcastle. John and Chris will play Anno 1602 with you, which you can currently get for free through Uplay if you haven’t grabbed it already.
Has it really only been a week since last week’s Union Update? Time sure flies when you are as busy as we are. The final months of game development can be an exhilarating roller-coaster ride, but there is something quite magical about seeing the different strands of your game finally all coming together. And believe us, with a game as feature-rich as Anno 1800, that means a lot of strands to work with!
Between the actual development and the travel that is often necessary for various team members in the lead up to a big release, we unfortunately sometimes have less time to bring you new insights on the Union (though we have a feeling that you agree that we should first focus on finishing the game).
To cut to the chase – we will not have a new DevBlog for you all this week. We will return to our regularly scheduled programming next week with a look at Diplomacy in Anno 1800.
Community Spotlight
This week, we want to put the spotlight on the Facebook Group “Anno Polonia“, a polish-speaking Community:
Hej Annoholicy z Polski, Znacie język polski i checie poznać innych fanów Anno z waszego kraju? Sprawdźcie Anno Polonia na Facebooku! Jest to nowa, ciągle rosnąca grupa, dzięki której będziecie nie tylko na bieżąco z Anno-News, ale również będziecie mieli szansę porozmawiać z innymi fanami Anno.
Stream Highlights
However, as we do not want to leave you completely devoid of any Anno-tainment this week, you can relive your favorite memories from last week’s AnnoCast 6 with us:
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The livestream starts today at 10:30 EST on our Twitch-page.
You can also let Twitch remind you of the Stream start, by clicking “Remind me” on the Event-site.
Alternatively, you can also follow the Stream here on our blog. After the Stream, we will replace the Stream with the VOD.
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