• Union Update

Union Update: Story contest has ended!

  • 15.01.2018

Welcome to our latest Union Update, where we give you a glimpse of this week’s Union content and things headed your way in the near future.

As you might have noticed, the Anno Union suffered an issue last week, which prevented players from accessing the website. We are sorry for the inconvenience and can you tell that we found the culprit; everything should be back to normal now. While we have further plans to improve our website further, the downtime was not caused by a secretively rolled out update, as some Union members presumed. Not that we don’t like sneaking in updates from time to time…

Announcement: The writing contest is closed!
Thanks for all your contribution- we received some great stories and some really cool creative takes on the given task. We will announce the lucky winners in a future update but we can already say that picking the best story will not be an easy task for us. So please join us in a general round of applause for the creative Union task force!
If you liked our writing contest and would love to see more support for community creations such as contests, highlights and other nice ideas to push content creation, share it with us in the comments below!

3D Animation

In this week’s DevBlog, we continue the journey of a 3D asset during creation. Yes, a lot of handiwork went into the asset already but we are far from done here. You were always curious how we create that lively feeling in Anno, where you metropolis is brimming with life and small stories to discover?
Well in that case, you should not miss out this week’s DevBlog, when we give you an exclusive look how we create visual feedback and animation work for Anno 1800.

Let’s come together!
Also coming up this week is our first Union Community Roundtable.
Join the Community team this Wednesday evening for a cozy meetup and chat with us about the Anno Union where we are sure to have answers to one or two questions and discussions ready for you.
The English session will start at 9pm CET – Everyone is welcome! >Annoverse Discord<

While we are using a voice chat for communication, microphones are not mandatory. So feel free to ask us questions in the chat or just listen to the discussion.

What’s next?
We asked you a few questions during our update last week and got a ton of recommendations for future topics you would like to see tackled in the future. We picked some of your ideas and started to shuffle them into our ongoing content plan.

The best things often come at the end, right? We have some news for you that might get you pretty excited. During our last AnnoCast, we talked about our Alpha milestone and that now is the time where we need as much and as varied player feedback as possible. To make that possible, we are currently planning to kick off our online playtest studies in February.

For the first test groups, we need Anno experts who know the series inside out and are willing to provide us valuable reports and tons of data! As suggested by the community previously, we will give everyone a chance to apply for the focus studies with an application form, which should open in the coming weeks.

Well that is something to look forward to; many more things to come and we are – as always – looking forward to your feedback.

Comments

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13 Comments
  1. M MinneIceCube

    How will the focus studies work? Online or no?

  2. A Arkenophas

    Of course more contests ! It is a nice way to keep us active during you are working 🙂 I’m waiting for the 3D animation Devblog, sure it will be interesting ^^ (always asked me how all of this little people could walk ^^). Hope your playtest will consider life constraint ^^ For example, I’m a student, so it could be hard for me to test (as I really want it x) )

  3. S SirDavidFirst

    Hi, when you are testing the parts of the game, can we not have a sandbox on the website, so beginners get a chance to play, it one way of testing and bring in more fans?

  4. M Magdielll

    I would like to know if the Anno 1800 team is thinking of adding new languages ​​in the legend, as the Potuguese for exemple.

    • B BB_CR

      We are always thinking of additional languages we could localize the game into, based on the expected sales (and of course how previous games sold) and interest in the region. I can’t share a final list yet though, sorry.

      • M Magdielll

        Tank you for info 🙂

  5. S Swimming-Paul

    Thanks for all the info! I´m looking forward to the 3D animation devblog!!! And also looking forward to read the winning creations for the writing contest.
    Regarding the screenshot you´re including in this update, I think the yellow painting of the church and some other buildings does not look very good in my opinion. I already noticed this issue in the December´s live-stream, and I think it would be best to find a more cohesive architectural look for the whole of buildings, because right now it´s a bit all over the place. Warmest regards from a devote fan.

    • B BB_CR

      Though, to be fair, there is a church in my hometown in pretty much that yellow-ish color (actually, in two different yellow colors). So it did happen at the time 🙂

  6. S Soulridder

    Then let’s wait for the application form to go online. 🙂
    Also nice to see that the 3D Animation series is coming back this week.

  7. j joe_zavala

    Do you already have an idea for collector’s edition ??
    will it be like that?

    Regards

  8. r ruuti0

    Its been almost 20 years when I first time played Anno 1602: Creation of a New World, and fell in love for first sight, and still after 20 years Anno series feels like the best game series in history.

    Its very nice that you work interactively with community when you develope Anno 1800! It is surely great journey for both Anno developers and community members!

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