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

Hey Anno Community,

Today we want to take you a bit behind the scenes and magic of your very own future amusement park, which will open its doors next week thanks to the release of the eponymous “Amusements Pack” Cosmetic DLC.

The downside is of course that such fully featured DLCs will take several months to develop, which inevitably means that there are always some lulls between new Anno 1800 content coming out. This is where Cosmetic DLCs come in, as they allow us to deliver some new Anno 1800 content in-between the major DLCs. Where a DLC like Land of Lions takes months of work from a sizeable team, the Cosmetic DLCs will take a few artists a couple of weeks to design and implement. This also gives us the opportunity to create some strongly thematic content that may not appeal to everyone (for example, anyone who is not into Christmas themes id unlikely to enjoy the Holiday Pack).

This is also why we do not include the Cosmetic DLC Packs in the Season Passes, as we do not want to drive up the price with content that we know won’t appeal to a big part of the community (the min-max’ers). That is why we think that an à la carte approach is the best way to go with the cosmetic packs, allowing everyone to get exactly the content they want to see in their cities.

As a next step, we took this list of community ideas to our artists to see where they saw the potential for a nice themed pack of 15-25 ornaments (depending on their size and scope), and to check the feasibility. For example, we saw a lot of players asking for some form of harbor ornaments, and we actually did some technical tests to see what form these could take, but found the idea clashing with the general lack of harbor front building space.

In the end, the team came away with three topics that we could see making for visually interesting Cosmetic DLCs: a circus, general props for urban life, and the amusement park. With this list, we decided that it would be cool to give the Anno Union who has been so supportive of the game throughout its development the choice of which pack we should tackle next.

That’s why we launched our latest Anno Union vote in April, to give you all the deciding vote between the tentatively named “Bustling City Life, “Trip to the Big Top” and “A Day at the Amusements” DLCs. Of course, every one on the team had their own favorite they were rooting for, so rest assured that we kept close tabs on the voting, and every change at the top of the polls was immediately shared in various chats! In the end, the Amusements Pack took the day, with the slimmest of margins over the City Life Pack.

It was during this phase that the idea for a rollercoaster as the second centerpiece of the DLC alongside the ferris wheel first came about, with everyone loving the idea of having such a massive ornament (one of the biggest in Anno history).

Of course, it would not be Anno if the world weren’t bustling with life, so of course the Cosmetic DLC packs also call for some customized feedback units. If you are unfamiliar with the term, “feedback unit” is our internal term for any kind of citizen walking around your city to give you visual feedback for how things are going (like the groups of tourists gathering around the rarest zoo exhibits). For example, our Christmas market from the Holiday Pack just would not have been the same if the man himself, Santa Claus, hadn’t been making an appearance in it!

Once all ornaments and their respective feedback units are finished, all that is left to do is to create the thumbnails for the construction menu to allow you to place these all over your burgeoning industrial empires, which is where our UI team comes in to help get the DLC over the finishing line. Speaking of the build menu, some of you may be curious about what exactly is included in the Amusements Pack? If so, look no further:

There is one last question to cover, and that is the “Bustling City Life” Pack, which put up a very brave effort in our Anno Union vote and came in an extremely close second. We have been receiving lots of questions about the possibility of doing this second pack as well ever since. The answer is that we would love to do so! Should the Amusements Pack prove to be as popular with players as we all hope, we would be very excited to do the City Life Pack for you all for release after Land of Lions, towards the end of the year, including a small pond with pedal boats to help your citizens cool down in the heat. For now, we cannot wait to see all our beautiful screenshots of the Amusements Pack next week!

Stay safe,

The Anno Team