ANNO 1404 – Interview



Last year, the popular city-building franchise has made its 10th anniversary. These 10 years we saw three games, plus three expansions, which were sold in nearly 6 million copies worldwide. As such best-selling success and strong gameplay the Anno series is now known as the most beloved franchise among the modern city-building games.
In year 2007, one of the biggest game publishers and developers Ubisoft acquired the German game developer and publisher Sunflowers, and put their hands on the Anno series. This deal includes a 30% stake in Related Designs (best known with Anno 1701, America, and No Man’s Land) and guaranteed the bright future of the Anno games.
We, from 3dzone.bg, sat down with the Producer of Anno 1404 Christopher Schmitz and discuss what should we expect from the new title.

3dzone: What kind of game is Anno 1404?
Christopher Schmitz: Anno is a building strategy game based in a big and beautiful island world in the middle ages. You set sail in your world to master the tricks of trade, diplomacy and economy, building up your own monumental cities. You need to plan very carefully and elaborately to fulfil your citizen’s needs. With the fulfilment of each new demand your city will grow and prosper.

For the first time a new faction was implemented – the Orient. With your diplomatic skills you will earn the trust of this nation, which will in return provide you with valuable technologies and goods, letting your empire grow and your cities become mighty metropolises. At a later stage the player will even be able to build his own oriental settlements. This way the player will have a lot of new room to express his vision and shape the character of his cities.



3dz: For this title you go back 300 years from the previous game – Anno 1701. Is this meaning that there will be fewer technologies to explore and more of something else?
CS: 1602, 1503, 1701 and now 1404 – already shows Anno never moved through history in a linear way. Much more important to the developers is to have the perfect setting. After 1701 the Community expressed a great wish to learn from different cultures – the Orient specifically suited this demand very well, as history shows, the Occident really learned a lot from them. This therefore was logic consequent for the choice of this setting.

3dz: Overall what are the improvements that we are going to see from the previous version of the game?
CS: We have listened to all feedbacks from the community and press and improved 1404 in many aspects like:
- Improved long time motivation
- Larger world size
- New military system
- New trade route system
- New community features
- Of course improved and state of the art graphics
- And many more…!

3dz: What about the micromanagement in the game? Are there more stocks to gather and to fulfill the needs of the villagers, for example?
CS: The population of each civilization level has certain needs, which need to be satisfied by the player. The higher the level, the more and manifold the needs become. If they are sufficiently satisfied, the population is happy and may advance to the next level, but if the requirements aren’t fulfilled properly, the population might rebel and descend a level.
There are two groups of needs:

Required buildings
Each civilization level requires certain buildings. This can be satisfied with special public building and different building types.

Required goods
Each civilization level requires different goods. Each need can be fulfilled with certain final products (produced in various production chains) of the specific category.
New to Anno 1404 are Requirement categories/Sub-needs:
Final products are categorized by the need they fulfill. All final products of one requirement category fulfill the respective need. In higher civilization levels, more goods will be needed to fulfill a need. If we take a look at the requirement “Food”, the requirement wheel shows how higher civilization levels make it more complex to provide the population with sufficient food due to the addition of new food products. Fish might be sufficient in the early stages to provide your farmers with food, but the aristocrats will also require spices, bread and meat. The Oriental population has the same requirements, but different products (e.g. dates) to fulfill the needs. Requirements with regards to buildings can also feature sub-categories, e.g. the want for religion. It can be fulfilled with the chapel, church or Emperor’s Cathedral (Occident). Here, the Orient also features the same need, but again different buildings (e.g. mosque).
Prosperity factor
The bigger the city, the more demanding it is to fulfill the needs of the inhabitants. Their tolerance for insufficient satisfaction of their needs decreases as much as the city grows. This effect is what we call the prosperity factor. It prevents the city extension from being to schematic. Hence, players with large metropolises will have to master special challenges



3dz: How many architectural levels are there for the player to see and what will be the differences between each one of them?
CS: In Anno you build up your civilization from scratch. You always start off with an office and a few resources – just enough to start building up your settlement. As you progress and start fulfilling your inhabitant’s needs, your settlement will grow – along this progression your inhabitant’s houses will become more and more impressive.

There are 5 civilization levels. In Anno 1404, this is symbolized by the upgrade rights.
These upgrade rights enable residential houses to evolve from the current to the next civilization level. For each civilization level, a minimum number of inhabitants is required to receive the upgrade rights for the next level. A certain number of inhabitants/houses in a civilization level ensure a certain number of rights for the next level. The player may manually distribute civil rights, trade privileges and titles. The advancement of the population may also work automatically.
These upgrade rights also make sure that the towns not only feature aristocratic buildings. This creates a credible and authentic medieval urban image.

3dz: In the previous games there was always a lack of construction space, the islands were not big enough and the construction terrain was full of mountains, rivers and other teasing obstacles. Has that changed in this installment of the series?
CS: Anno 1404 has four different game world sizes: small, medium, large and gigantic. The small worlds are ideal for beginners and such gamers that like to play on their own, whereas big worlds offer enough space and landmass for extraordinary building projects. For example: the island world of 1404 has grown in comparison to 1701. The giant island world even exceeds landmass, number of islands and seaways of 1503.

The islands of 1404 – compared to the previous releases – have a much higher diversion. They vary strongly in size, building space and form. You will find large, round islands with great building space that are ideal for large building projects. You will also find angled islands with many natural nooks and forms, which makes building settlements a challenging task. You can of course choose the frequency of each type of island when playing the endless game mode.

Another important factor for builders is the fertility of the southern islands. They have large building space, but are mostly dry and lack water or fertile land. It is only possible to vegetate the land when erecting norias – huge water wheels. Alternatively it is possible to build farms and plantations around the little oases. The small patches of small land only provide little fertility and alone prove to be a disadvantage when trying to still the needs of more than 100.000 inhabitants.



3dz: In most of the old titles of the franchise, the beginning of the game was always easy, in the middle part there was still plenty to see, to explore and research but in when you come to the end there was lack of content and you were only asked to trade and indulge the constant needs of the villagers. How will the player progress in the game this time? Are there any endgame challenges?
CS: Anno1701 tried to reach a broader audience by making it more accessible for both players with and without any Anno experience and trying to create a bridge in order not to disappoint the long time Anno fans. This lead to the point that Anno 1701 felt the game lacked challenges towards the end. This is the point where Anno 1404 will pick up on more game depth but without jeopardizing the accessibility for newbies. We will achieve this by providing long time motivation by adding more game features the further the player progresses. This way we will give the experts challenges that will keep them busy. We also reworked the interface to make it easier for novices to get into the game.


3dz: In Anno 1701 a key part from the endgame content was the construction of one main building: the palace. In the trailer that was released for Anno 1404 we saw a very detailed animation which showed the construction process of a cathedral. Does this mean that we will see some special buildings like the ones in similar titles like Zeus and Pharaoh, whose construction needs lots of different resources and game play time?
CS: The next big feature beside the Orient is more than just erecting monuments. In Anno 1404 the aim is to build up huge and gorgeous metropolises – bigger than ever before! Monuments therefore play a very important role! The emperor’s dome will not be the only monument – that’s for sure! We promise there will be several new and impressive buildings. We can say this much: Monuments such as the emperor’s dome are an important aspect of long-time motivation for the player, which will offer many new challenges in the later stages of the game.

Such a huge monument of course is very expensive and complex to build – only the most experienced master builders and richest players will be able to build a monument with such epic degree. The consequences of erecting this building structure are of course enormous for the player.



3dz: What can you tell us about the new foreign culture that the player is going to encounter: The Orient? How will the players interact with it and what can be learned from it?
CS: The gamer always begins his 1404 journey in the occident. He can set off to search for the Orient and initiate the cultural interaction at any time.

The player will also have the chance to build his own oriental settlements, cities, production chains, ships etc. The Orient is fully playable.

Both factions are interwoven with each other. The progress and speed of the cultural interaction is controlled by the city development and earned reputation by the player.

The point of which the interaction takes place is directed by the player and is therefore very flexible. In order to develop and supply big cities the player requires an advanced occidental and oriental civilization.

In the endless game mode you will find autonomous harbor islands. These are establishments of oriental and occidental factions. They provide the player with goods, offer errands and send merchant fleets.

3dz: We know from previous interviews that you have developed a completely new graphics engine for Anno 1404. How these visual improvements will affect the gameplay?
CS: The engine is a complete new proprietary development. We developed all components and tools from scratch. Our aim was to optimize the entire production pipeline and to form a sustainable technology, which all our future projects can build upon. After all, it’s not just about the 3D engine, but the entire production pipeline. The tools we have developed play an important role in dictating the workflow. We claim that our technology is the non plus ultra within the strategy game genre, other games will have to match with.



3dz: Can we expect a full DirectX 10 support or some special effects like a weather system to be included in the new title?
CS: Our engine supports both DirectX9 and DirectX10. We have put in a lot of work into our multi-core support. Several of our modules (physics, animation, effects, streaming) can be calculated on multiple CPU cores. The system scales to the number of cores without a problem.
We are very proud of our balancing tool (ToolOne). Our designers can adjust all values very comfortably according to the run-time. This way the balancing can be optimized considerably for each step of the iteration. Furthermore we developed a new terrain system, which offers the designers a lot more creative freedom. The water simulation is completely new. It includes real geometric waves and objects, which adapt dynamically to the swell. The lighting model has been renewed completely with HDR and atmospheric diffusion. Also the wind simulation is new – it simulates local and global winds as well as gusts and storms respectively. DirectX10 supports the autofocus of a camera in our postcard mode. Objects, which you focus on in the game world, become sharp, whereas objects in the background or very close to the “camera” obtain a slight blur. It looks pretty cool.
The 3D engine has been secluded to work as an independent unit next to the game engine. This way it is possible to exchange the 3D engine completely or to convert other games/products based on our render technology.
We could go on forever about the things that have been improved – we can definitely assure the player will encounter a much more authentic and dynamic game world.



3dz: The previous game Anno 1701 looked gorgeous visually but it was optimized for high-end machines. So the question that concerns lots of fans is - should we expect Anno 1404 to run smooth on older PCs as well?
CS: Anno is a game with a very broad, traditional fan base – of course we always regard their feedback. One of the main aims of our R&D team that developed and implemented the new technologies was to keep the graphics engine scalable in order to keep the game playable on older computers. New generation PCs and graphic cards will be able to enjoy the full splendor of Anno 1404 – the player can be sure to experience a graphic spectacle of the finest quality!

3dz: The previous games always had fantastic music score filled with classical motives and some original songs from 16th and 17th century like Greensleeves for example. What can we expect from Anno 1404 in that direction?
CS: Music has always played an important role in role. This premise is also aimed for in Anno 1404. A single Anno game can be extremely long and the player will be confronted with all sorts of different situations. The music- and sound system was improved to that effect. If in war or peace, in the orient or occident, if a sandstorm is ranting or a storm is coming up – the music will always adapt to the situation.

Like in 1701 the compositions of Anno 1404 will later be instrumentalized by an orchestra. The sound currently to be heard on the website is a compositional draft and not yet the final master.

The middle-ages stand for an era of great spirituality. To underline this effect, we will implement – next to the instrumentals - vocal elements into some of the compositions. The magical flair of the Orient is accompanied by percussive elements in order to give the cultural interaction a strong musical echo.



3dz: Can you please reveal the mystery behind the names of the Anno games? The first one was Anno 1602, the second Anno 1503, the third 1701, and now the fourth title from the franchise is Anno 1404?
CS: There is no real mystery to the names – all dates have the cross sum 9

1+4+0+4= 9
1+7+0+1= 9
1+5+0+3= 9
1+6+0+3= 9


3dz: Do you intend to release a downloadable content after the game is shipped or you are going to stick to the expansion business model?
CS: We cannot say anything about DLC right now.

3dz: All three previous games have been released in German first and after six months or more have been translated to English. Is 27th March the release date of the English version of the game?
CS: The game will be released this year simultaneously in all countries.

3dz: Can we expect a new game of the series set in present days like Anno 2012, or maybe even a game with a futuristic setting called Anno 2505?
CS: No comment... :)