- Anno 1800
- Live Stream
- Season 1
- Union Update
Union Update: Winter is coming
End of October, we invited the Anno Union to go with us on an expedition to test the waters of the upcoming DLC The Passage as well as Game Update 6. Over the last couple of weeks, hundreds of Union members tested the upcoming content inside out and provided a huge amount of valuable feedback and reports.
After weeks of analyzing your feedback and working on improvements and polishing, it’s now time to break the silence and open the doors of our testing vault, sharing the next steps for the Union and the upcoming content for Anno 1800.
AnnoAfternoon: The Sunken Dragon – Friday 22.11 at 5PM CET
After barely escaping a burning city with their settlers, Community Manager Oli and Anno veteran Wolfgang are looking for a new home in Anno 1701. And wasn’t there also something about a mysterious artefact…?
AnnoCast: The Passage – Wednesday 27.11 at 5pm – 7pm CET
Don’t forget to pack your parka as it is about to get cold. We thought “Show don’t tell” is the best approach and therefore, we will bring you the next AnnoCast already next week!
Join us on an adventure to our arctic outpost to see the Passage and Game Update 6 (this includes a lot of sweet statistics) in action while we answer your most burning questions. You really don’t want to miss this one, as we plan to have a bunch of developers on camera in this almost two-hour long episode.
AnnoAfternoon: “In den kalten Norden” – German Episode – Friday 29.11 at 5pm CET
And right after our developer stream, our community team will follow up with a new stream, this time with a special German episode in the frozen wasteland.
So not only a good chance to take a look at the Passage after our developer stream, the team is eager to answer your questions or pass your feedback on to the developers.
As always, you can watch the livestream on our twitch channel twitch.tv/ubisoftbluebyte
And as we love that outside window from our studio into the outside window, we are always eager for feedback about our content. Give the channel a follow if you don’t want to miss any future episodes.
Union Talk Episode 4
With the Anno Union, we invited you all to help us developing the next big Anno game. And in that spirit, we love to share as many development insights as possible.
In the now fourth episode of our developer podcast, we talk about the postlaunch journey of Anno 1800, conceptions and misconceptions about developing content after the big release and how we continue to work with your input and feedback.
And as this is a passion project from the development team for the Union, let us know if you would love to see more Union Talks in future and feel free to share your opinion on the topic matter of the latest podcast.
We will also drop new DevBlog’s in the upcoming weeks, where we talk about the development and show gameplay elements of the Passage as well as Game Update 6. Keep a keen eye on the Union for upcoming blogs and of course, we will soon share when The Passage and GU6 lands on your PC.
Annoverse Discord Roundtable Monday 25.11 at 7pm CET
And because feedback and communication matters, our Community Developer Basti and Community Manager Oli join another round of the Annoverse Discord Roundtable. The Roundtable is an AMA session in our Anno Fandiscord, where everyone can join asking us anything while the team answers your questions in Voice Chat, if it is development or community related.
So join us next Monday 25. November at 7pm for the German and a follow up English session at 8.30pm.
The Annoverse Discord is an great meetup place for great Annoholics new and old and we want to say thank you for the continues community support and for the hosting of the Roundtables. In that vein, we strongly encourage you to jump in the Discord yourself, as you will find hundreds of like minded Annoholics there to chat about anything Anno (and more)!
And that was it for this weeks Update but as you can see, it was mere the beginning. You can look forward to a lot of new and insightful content in the upcoming weeks to get you all prepared for journey into the frozen north – Winter is coming, after all!
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I do like listening to Union Talks, it would be nice to have more of them 🙂 I always appreciate transparency and open communication between devs and players.
I understand that some issues and bugs might be hard to notice by devs and are often found later only by players themselves. There are more examples of such situations in games, that’s especially when players find ways and playstyles that devs sometimes wouldn’t think of and that’s also applicable in case of Anno. That’s why it’s amazing to have patches and updates coming to the game after its release, without that many games would be much worse than they are generally thought to be.
When it comes to players’ feedback and Anno Union: before the release it indeed felt like we had more impact on how the game would look like. You presented some content, some mechanics of the game and we could comment and share our thoughts, hoping that you would listen to at least some of our suggestions. However, now, that the game was released a few months ago, we only get news about patch notes and occasionally about DLCs’ contents. But indeed the news about DLCs appear too late before their release to feel like our feedback could still matter. That does let us down a bit – first we felt like we had more influence on the shape of the game, and now it doesn’t feel like that anymore. Of course, all game updates are based on our feedback etc. But that’s happening mostly on the forums and not on the Anno Union.
That’s also why I haven’t been that active here recently, I felt like there is no point in posting my comments. But another important reason for that is playtesting. As you know, I have been participated in many focus tests so far and that’s where I feel like my feedback can be used to its best potential. What I’m saying is that the center of players’ feedback moved away from Anno Union to forums and discord/reddit etc. AU was mostly useful before the release and it lost its importance after release.
There is nothing wrong about it as long as we have multiple ways to share our feedback with you. I just sometimes wish Anno Union would come back to its pre-release glory, if you know what I mean.
I hope Anno fans’ journey won’t end with the Passage DLC, I still hope for more improvements and more DLCs (ASIA! :D).
Your faithful tester and Anno fan,
banan1996.1996
Thank you Basti and Marcel for another fantastic Union Talk. I really do like these talks. You both go into a lot of detail about the game and what is going on.
The Botanica content drop may have been murder when it came to stability, bugs, and other problems with the game. But I stayed with it, and took it to my own hands to report all feedback I could collect to help make you guys aware of the situation. While having sufficient proof that this is going on. I had been requested by customer support to deliver save game files and I have done so. Support was awesome with me. And we where able to send off the requested files to you guys. Glad that’s helped.
That was perhaps the worst case of stability and bug issues I have ever encountered in a ANNO game. But understanding the complexity and the massive scale of this ANNO game compared to previous titles; I can see why this may have happened. But now that you mentioned this in this Union Talk. That you guys did not have this going on your end, but we players had this going on on our ends. I find that quite odd. But then again anything can happen in game development. I was disappointed with the stability issues. As I love ANNO and agree with the developers to be proud of their game. To preserve ANNO’s healthy history and record. So I can imagine how infuriating this may have been to the team when reports started pouring in with loads of bugs and stability issues in the game. Considering that they had plans to start working on the Passage DLC right away, but the stability issues being so sever has pushed that back. Since time and resources had to be diverted to solving all to most of those issues. To at least get the game into a more stable build. So that it holds so that the team can focus their resources back on delivering the DLC.
I do have a suggestion. As there surely will be and there probably are still some known issues that do persist in the game. That perhaps once all the DLC has been completed and delivered on time. The team should focus then on further polishing the game. Since once all DLC has been delivered. There is no more time pressure and things to focus all resources of the team onto. So then more time and resources could be put towards polishing the game off and completing it completely. Unless of course another Season Pass is done. Or more content is added on in the future. But I do have the feeling that the team is aware of this already, and is focusing to polish off the game completely once everything is completed. Which is a wise decision since content drops, DLC’s, updates, etc. Can cause new issues to come up.
However the team should know that they still have support from players like me. I love ANNO and nothing will stop me from playing it. And if problems happen again, I’ll just spend hours trying to find out what is wrong and send that off to support for the team to look at. ANNO has been holding it’s positive reputation for being a unique and beautiful game. I would love to continue to see ANNO holding that reputation. I do hope that The Passage content drop will go smoothly and not bring up anymore stability problems, like Botanica did. I am very much looking forwards to the statistics building. If it really is going to be that big and amazing. I can only imagine how much more helpful of a tool that will be for players to efficiently set up their cities and production chains. One thing I would really like to see in that statistics feature is a tab that shows you how much of each need your people are consuming and how much you are producing. So you can tell if you are under producing, or over producing, and by how much. Sure forums and wiki pages are helpful for that. But I still would love to see that in the statistics feature in the game.
Thank you for another Union Talk. It was nice to hear from you both again. Please do keep up the great work. The same to be said to the entire team as well. I look forwards to the next DLC/content drop. And also all the other streams and fun things planned for the rest of this month and into December.
Best,
Feruda
Really enjoyed the Union Talk podcast. Please continue to produce content like this. Hearing the developer perspective on post launch build and support is enlightening. Transparency is appreciated.