Union Update: Playtest coming soon!

This week on the Anno Union, we continue our behind the scenes insights and demonstrate how we create islands from scratch, share our verdict on the first community roundtable and provide details about the upcoming Anno 1800 focus playtests.

Islands are as much part of Anno’s feeling and personality as the design and animations of our buildings. Since almost 20 years, players begin their journey with a small settlement on newly conquered islands, before they expand their empire and claim new land across the sea. This week, we will show you how we create your future island paradise and as usual, expect many interesting insights about the daily work of a level artist.
While not the conclusion of the behind the scenes series, we will take a short break in order to focus on gameplay features and content in the next couple of weeks. Anno 1800 is quite a feature rich game and there are many important core mechanics to talk about, before we can cover the more advanced features of the game. That means that the Union can look forward to a big push of feature DevBlogs in the next couple of weeks.

Our first community roundtable
Our first community roundtable was a blast! Over 150 fans joined our community team to talk about all things Anno Union last week Wednesday. We had as much fun as you guys and the chance to have a real dialogue with the community gave us a lot of insightful feedback and pushed the Union to the next level.

Here a rough overview over the topics we discussed during the roundtable:
We started the roundtable with a feedback discussion around the Anno Union, where we talked about how we perceived the journey from reveal to the end of 2017 while sharing thoughts and ideas for the future. There was especially one thing you liked and would love to continue in future: transparent development and communication.
We will continue to bring you DevBlogs, insights and news about Anno 1800 while leveraging your feedback for the development, streams and events such as the roundtable should further improve interaction between the Anno Union and us.
We also talked about how much commitment from the team it takes to bring you weekly insights about the development and to discuss features with you in such an early state of the game.

Not surprising that we also got many curious questions about certain features and content of the game. As you might imagine, Union blogs and streams are the right place for us to show content but where able to provide some insights why we might not want or be able to talk about a specific topics right now. First off, we have to get many core features out of the way before diving into the more extended content. The logistics blog was a good example for that, as some core functionalities will allow you to give us spot-on feedback when we talk about the content built around these features. Of course, 2017 was also a test run for ourselves and you can expect a heavy emphasize on feature blogs, streams and playtests this year.

Another topic was general community support and if you think that programs like the Anno Union have an impact on Anno communities out there. We want to push that further by providing a dedicated community space for fansites, content creations and any other efforts from our communities out there. Asking you questions was as important as provide answers, we would like to know from you how we all can grow and support Anno communities out there in the comments below.

The first Anno 1800 focus-playtests
It is happening: our Anno 1800 Union playtests will start as early as this February. Throughout the year, we will give more and more Annoholics in the Union the chance to help us improve the game, as we need as much valuable feedback as possible. For the first tests, we call on Anno experts who are willing to provide us detailed daily feedback in a two-week long test session.

Application process
The idea for an application process was actually brought up by the Union itself and we think it is a good way to get useful information about our potential testers. “So how do I apply?”, you may shout at your screen.
We created a dedicated Union Playtest page, where you can find all details needed about the playtesting and application process.

Just head over to the Anno Union playtest page for further information how you can apply for a seat in one of our focus playtest: Playtest Page

Keep in mind that the application process has no deadline, as we will run several focus playtest this year and will choose players from the pool we continue to build up with the application process.

We bet that there are many questions and we will make sure that we answer as many as possible in the comments or next community QnA, which will come with the next community update.