DevBlog: “City Lights” Pack Cosmetic DLC

Hey Anno Community!

In this blog we want to give you some insights into the development of the “City Lights Pack” Cosmetic DLC, how it got its final name and what kind of ornaments you’ll soon be able to build in your city.

“City Lights” is the third Cosmetic DLC for Anno 1800 and focuses on giving you plenty of smaller ornaments to beautify your cities with markets, plazas and other recreational opportunities. Coming in close second after the “Amusements Pack” in the community vote in spring, your feedback as well as the success of the previous Cosmetic DLCs lead to the decision to also work on the back then still called “City Life” pack.

As we are aware of the big number of min-maxers and record builders who would rather cram a few more houses in the last corner of the island than “waste space” by building parks, Christmas markets or rollercoasters, the Cosmetic DLC can be purchased separately – à la carte, as we called it in the past. We think this flexibility allows every type of player to focus on the kind of content they want to see in their game.

Let’s now talk a bit about the development of the “City Lights Pack” Cosmetic DLC. The focus this time was on providing a variety of smaller ornaments to enable you to beautify spots all over your city, create markets and bring more variety to inner-city parks – instead of using the ornaments to create one or two big areas filled with ornaments, like the “Amusements Pack” often tempted players to do.

This meant that it was clear for the team that for example market stands needed to be part of this pack, together with food stores, tables and other objects that you will find all over any city, to improve the “City Life” feeling (hence the original name).

This brought with it its own challenges, since even seemingly unimportant objects like fences or a phone booth had to be designed in a way that enables players to give their city its own special character. The regular presence of phone booths, for example, will give a city a more modern, technologically advanced feeling – even if the object itself is merely decorative.

As you’ve noticed, during development we renamed the Cosmetic DLC, with “City Life” being replaced by “City Lights”. This happened rather organically, since it was during development, that one of our artists decided to attach lanterns to the new fence elements. After playing around with it, we quickly realized that adding additional light sources to the city was too cool to not implement – especially considering the awesome day and night system!

With these fence elements as well as stand-alone lanterns you can now bring some beautiful light sources to your cities’ parks and public spaces – and light up darker areas, to make sure your citizens do not get lost on their way home from the Pub.

Even though the “City Lights Pack” primarily consists of many smaller ornaments which can be placed in bigger numbers across your city, we knew we had to also create a big showpiece, an ornament that can be the centre piece of a vast park – or just stand on its own in a busy city centre, to help the residents relax from the busy world around it.

In contrast to for example the “Amusements Pack”, where it was clear pretty much from the start that a Ferris Wheel simply had to be part of the DLC, the “City Lights” showpiece idea (the large pond with swan paddleboats) only developed over time. In the end it combined several elements: decorative parts like statues and fountains, paths for your citizens to stroll along, a pond to not only bring a feeling of nature into your cities but also open up densely packed city environments and the paddleboats as a recreational activity for your residents.

Both the idea of an inner-city pond as well as the swan boats are not new, but inspired by real developments of the 19^th century.

Now that they developed three different Cosmetic DLC, we had to ask our art team: What’s your favourite of the three, which did you enjoy the most creating? The answer came quickly: The “Amusements Pack”. Not only did they like the theme itself, we also have amusement park enthusiasts in the team, who enjoyed creating an Anno 1800 counterpart to the modern ones they’re usually visiting. Additionally, this DLC gave them more creative opportunities concerning the design of the individual buildings – while for example the look of a Christmas market is much more set in stone in comparison.

Now that you learned about the development of “City Lights”, you might want to have a full list of all ornaments of this DLC? We can help with that:

1. Farmer’s Stall
2. Florist’s Stall
3. Grocer’s Stall
4. Fishmonger’s Stall
5. Cheesemonger’s Stall
6. Pizzeria
7. Bread Confectionary
8. Drinks Shack
9. Sandwich Shack
10. Couples’ Table
11. Solitary Table
12. Family Table
13. Steelwork Fence (5 different elements)
14. Sandpit and Slide
15. Children’s Playground
16. Water Trough
17. Public Timepiece
18. Steel Clockhouse
19. City Light
20. Telephone Box
21. Clearwater Pool

The last thing to cover in this blog is the exact release… and we’re happy to announce that our third Cosmetic DLC will release next Thursday, November 12^th, at 6PM CET/12PM ET for a price of 4,99€.

As we tend to do it, alongside the DLC we will release Game Update 9.1, addressing several issues you reported since the release of “Land of Lions”. More on that early next week.

Stay safe,

The Anno Team