By Quintin Smith on April 14th, 2011 at 10:37 am.
The first trailer’s arrived for Anno 2070, the futuristic reimagining of the city-building strategy series which previously covered the years of 1701, 1602, 1503 and 1404, making 2070 an excellently mad choice. The below footage is pretty exciting- it seems we’ll have the choice of making either a sustainable city that operates in harmony with its environment (with what looks like Apple doing the architecture), or a dark, Blade Runner-looking city that extinguishes all natural resources. Take a look.
Have you played an Anno game? They’re pretty great. Anno 1404 is the latest one, and if you’re in the mood to build a miniature city and make some tricky choices about its economy, army and developments you should totally take a look.
I love the Anno games. This looks perfect.
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I could not agree more, but a question just occurred to me: What will the Americans call this one?
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FutureNo
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Dawn of Climate Change
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I love the Future Shock games….. what the hell is this???
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I agree with DSDan, I’m leaning towards Dawn of Climate Change too.
The whole global warming thing is kind of putting me off but otherwise I’m very interested in this.
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did I read correctly, or is the Anno series a combination of City building and military strategy?
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We’ll call it Dawn of Duty: Call of Anno
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I know how you feel, man. I always get a twinge when games reference that ridiculous germ theory of disease, myself.
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that is the weirdest voiceover.
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I can’t help thinking David Attenborough would be a perfect voice-over for this text.
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“Rob Snyder has been transported to the year 2070. Will he build a utopian city or a dystopian one? Herp de derp de doo!”
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I was so distracted listening to the voice over I forgot to watch the vid :P
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As a fan of city builder games this is a must for me. And I liked Anno 1404 very much. Impressions games like Pharaoh and Zeus are my long time favourites. They dont make good games like those much these days.
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Zeus is awesome :)
also: FEEL THE PAIN AS MY REIGN BLOWS ON YOUR BRAIN!
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The 1400′s called and wanted their music back.
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I want to make a neon city now!
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Hmm, looks good! It looks more fun that Sim City, mind you last time I looked at Sim City was like, a decade ago?
Anno vs Sim City, GO! (Can they even be compared?)
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Playing SimCity was like making Creme Brulee. So many complicated steps, and if you screw up one, you won’t get good final results.
Playing Anno, is like making a jam sandwich.
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Amazing really.
But is this recorded through a glass?
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Yes. But if you choose commerce, it’s through a glass, darkly.
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I dunno about this. Anno games could use an extra year of development each. Putting all this new stuff in,,, well I don’t have high hopes that this will be a super polished and amazing game either.
It will still be brilliant though.
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Does 1404 et al still come with the retardo-DRM though? I’ve almost bought it so many times, and then remember hearing about the DRM killing babies and raping dogs, so I’ve held off.
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They patched it out yonks ago, when the first expansion was out.
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1404 never came with the evil Ubi-DRM, nor did the Addon (at least not the German versions).
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Could RPS please investigate why you can no longer buy the Anno games on Steam?
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Apparently Steam pulled the plug because Ubisoft refused to patch the Steam version of their game (as opposed to Impulse, which has the fully up to date version).
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1789936
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Gamers Gate also have the latest versions.
And looking at the Steam news history they did release a patch for it, so not sure what the problem was. The only one missing is 1.3 which was released at the same time as 2.1 for Venice.
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I’m impressed by Steam standing up for its customers like that. This isn’t the first game Ubisoft has had lousy (or worse) support for.
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Looks excellent, although I didn’t see any train tracks. I’ve got to build train tracks, usually far more than would be really practical. Oh and preferably the option to make nice parks.
Oh and is that Panda thing a repurposed aircraft carrier?
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It looks like a mixture of The Boat That Rocked and Rivet City. With a neon panda. Who isn’t going to absolutely love this?
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The floating barge city with the big PANDA SOCIETY neon made me paralysed with joy.
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Wow! I’ve never really thought about playing any of the Anno games, since nowadays my inner historian tends to cry out in pain when playing any game set before 1939. If im honest, thats a big shame and totally unjustified, but at least now we’ve got a similar game set 60 years in the future. And it looks awesome!
If it turns out to be any good, I’ll no doubt be spending many hours attempting to forge my own recreation of Giedi Prime.
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The Anno series has never been particularly historical. More like a fantasy setting which just happens to take it’s cue from a slightly later period than Tolkien.
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I have never played an Anno game, but this looks excellent so maybe I should look into playing the old ones.
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Anno 1404 (or Dawn of Discovery in the U.S.) is a fantastic game and really not far off from these graphics and detail. Great game, lots of fun. I highly recommend it.
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The Anno serie is really great even though it’s a bit repetitive but I think I could say that about all the Sim City like games… or perhaps about all games with which you play for more than a few dozens hours ?
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YES. PLEASE.
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That does look really rather good indeed!
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I hope you really can RAM the place with skyscrapers and make it look breathtaking, usually the cities look so underwhelming
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this looks amazing, I hope the soundtrack reflects modern times though – classical music with this would be like disco pop in Stronghold or something…
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I miss Terminator:Future Shock… I think I might replay it..
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I have never played any of the older titles despite having a mate really pushing me to play 1404. This one piqued my interest. So tell me those who know such things… will my hippy city be able to go to war with an industrialist city or is it purely about city management? Or am I just wanting to play Alpha Centauri on earth? Ahhh Sid… when are you going to spare a moment from your Facebook monstrosity and bring Civ V up to your usual drool-inspiring standard?
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There always is some element of combat involved in the Anno games. So yes, you most likely will be able to go to war with some NPC faction (or another player in MP).
Usually the strategic element is really down-played though. You only ever had like five different land-units and maybe two or three different war-ships in the older games. And a couple of defensive structures (city-walls and towers with different kins of weaponry).
I tend to just start a sandbox game, turn off all the enemies and build for myself, withouth any rush because “this NPC dude is building up his stuff faster than I am”…
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I am SO exited for this, you have no idea. That ‘dream game’ topic, a few days back? Well, if it is as awesome as it looks, this’ll be mine.
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I played 1701 quite a bit – very nice game. Didn’t get 1404 cause of the DRM.. please let this one be DRM free!
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The German 1404 never had the always-online Ubi-DRM. Don’t know about the international version. However, I think it had a three- or five-time activation limit.
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Wasn’t it just the Venice addon (or somesuch?) that had the notorious DRM?
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This looks really smart.
Totally reminds me of Utopia.
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Mannnn. Awesome tagline there: “Time to create the future”.
I want in.
The more I think about it, the more I really, really crave a city builder game.
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I love this except the Ubisoft part.
Maybe Ubisoft sould open another company, and publish his games trought that one company. One that don’t have his name asociated with anti-customers campaigns.
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Yeah, maybe they could buy the Atari name from Infogrames
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What would have made that trailer perfect, or “poifec’t” as the case may be, would have been for the voiceover guy to let his brooklyn accent come out fully and at the end, “Now, aint that the trooth buddy”.
Liked the other anno games…cant see no reason not to like this one. It’s in there on my “interest” list.
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It’s a shame that this in all likelihood won’t run on my machine. :( I want to recreate Los Angeles, 2019. It looks way cooler than the would-be native islanders eco architecture.
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How does this series compare with say SimCity? I’ve been jonesing for something SimCity esque but I hear Cities XL doesn’t really deliver.
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It has a lot of city building, but the focus is more on economics and production of goods. I’ll describe a typical situation for you:
Your inhabitants want goods (say bread), so you have to deliver. Now on the island where your main city is you may not be able to gow wheat. So you grow it on a neigboring island by building wheat farms. Then you ship it to your main island, where your windmills are. The windmills will then produce flour from the wheat which can then, in bakeries, be made into bread. Voila!
Now think of having a couple dozen of these production chains.
Your population will also want entertainment and other non-materialistic things. So you’ll also have to build alehouses, churches, and firehouses or doctors incase of fires or epidemics.
By fulfilling the wishes of your people, they will then develop into higher “Ranks”, at the beginning they might only want fish and a small chapel, while in the end they may want the whole spectrum of producable wares.
Then theres a little bit of combat, but only if you want there to be.
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So, settlers?
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Anno 1404, reinstalling…
(With DF and this, I think I can do an article on economic science)
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Sod Apple, I want my dystopian future.
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I thought Apple was the dystopian future.
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I could swear we already had this article. But whatever, it looks interesting enough. Being unacquainted with the ways of Anno, I hope there are a few shades of gray between Happy Hippy Land and Blade Runner.
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According to a German preview, while you choose one of the factions in the beginning, it will be possible to change during the course of the game. So you will be able to transform your industrial, but effective dystopia into a happy, sustainable and ineffective hippie-island later in the game.
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Hmm, thanks. I don’t like the black/white options because it’s both unrealistic and, more importantly, uninteresting. It’s simple enough to work your way through a system when you only have one objective – e.g. to maximise economic growth – it’s rather more interesting when you have to balance competing objectives. I guess I’ll keep an eye out for more detailed info as it becomes available.
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I doubt there will be conventional ships by then. Especially not considering they clearly have anti-gravitational ships too. Freight is too big a business to wind up behind the times like that.
But yeah, other than that, this is looking very nice. I can see myself enjoying this and that’s the main thing after all.
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I don’t see why anti-gravity tech would necessarily replace conventional shipping. Economic characteristics trump all for commercial applications.
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Especially if you consider how much energy such anti-grav tech would need.
I mean even today you could theoretically bring goods from, lets say Germany to Spain by plane or Truck, but the vast majority is still handled by ships.
90% of all global (cross-border) goods traffic is in fact handled by ships. Sure, theres faster transportation, but nothing is cheaper.
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I hope that the citybuilding won’t be as binary as that. I’d rather not have the choice of playing as either the asshole industrialists from captain planet or Bert Racoon.
Also I want a patch that lets me recreate Midgar, including the ability to drop city plates on rebellions.
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I so want the game now.
I love the anno games but they’ve been very similar. Some new blood is exactly what the series needs and I hope the new iteration will do just that.
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Been a fan of the Anno games since the DS one and this looks absolutely brilliant. Liking the Star Wars / Blade Runner -like houses.
Looking forward to hearing about what kind of religion they’ll practice.
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