In Anno 117: Pax Romana you play as a newly-appointed Roman governor in charge of building the empire's next great city. Throughout your journey you'll establish intricate production chains, research new technologies, patronize a variety of deities, build monuments to rival Rome itself, and choose to rule through diplomacy or military might. You'll even expand to the Celtic marshes of Albion, where you'll have to decide between maintaining the local population's cultural traditions or enforcing a Roman way of life on them.
Anno 117: Pax Romana is the eighth entry in the award-winning city-building franchise, but it will be the first to launch day one on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S when it releases on November 13. To learn more about how Anno 117 is taking advantage of consoles and what challenges and opportunities there are when bringing traditionally PC franchise to console, we spoke with Senior 3D Programmer, Aaron Scherzinger.
What features needed to be added or changed to make the game playable, not only on a controller, but on a TV?
Aaron Scherzinger: Yeah, that's a big topic for us because, first of all, we didn't want to make any compromises to the core Anno gameplay experience. We had to practice with the console edition of Anno 1800. That was the first Anno that was released on consoles, and it was a huge challenge for us. Anno is just a very UI heavy game. There's lots of menus, windows, tool tips, just lots of stuff going on and lots of complexity in the UI. And so we need to design a UI which is suitable for playing with the controller without sacrificing any of the gameplay complexity and try to get everything on the controller and make it really feel good for console players while still giving them all of the possibilities they have on the PC.
In many cases we implemented two different UI flows and menus, one for controller and one for mouse and keyboard because a lot of the times we couldn't really share the same UI because it would have meant having to make compromises that wouldn't have benefitted either control scheme. One example is our construction menu, where if you play with mouse and keyboard, you have this construction bar at the bottom of the screen where you can click on things and it will open up more options, and on PS5 it will use a radial construction menu where you can use the analog stick to select the buildings.
The other thing you already mentioned was TV screens, and that usually comes with sitting farther from the screen. That changes how you can read things, so UI scaling was also a big topic. On PC, you're usually sitting very close, so we had to make sure the UI scaled for readability on the TV and was adjustable to give the player more options.
Were there any console first features that you realized needed to make their way into the PC version?
AS: Yeah, with the Anno 1800 Console Edition we added a feature where if you have a block of buildings, you can just click anywhere on it, and we'll just put a road wrapping around the entire block. That was a feature that was super useful on console, and Anno 117 brings it to PC players for the first time.
Anno has never launched on consoles on day one. Why was it important that Anno 117 launch on console on day one?
AS: We proved that Anno on console worked with Anno 1800 Console Edition, which saw a lot of love from players. This is also the first Anno that's launching with cross-play, and we wanted all players to be able to experience that and play together on day one.
We saw that there is a demand for not just Anno specifically, but in general for builder games on consoles, because I think there's just not that many of them in contrast to PC because it's a PC heavy genre.
Was there any feedback you got from the console edition of 1800 that you've been able to implement into 117 to improve based on player community feedback?
AS: I think there are two prominent points. The first was that people really wanted the DLC from 1800 to come to console. That didn't happen then, but with 117, all of the Season Pass content will come to all platforms.
The other point is mouse and keyboard support. A lot of players asked for that, and now we have full mouse and keyboard support on PS5 and there's almost no difference between the PC and console version when you play with mouse and keyboard. You'll obviously be able to scale the UI when playing on a TV.
Are there any sort of features that the PlayStation 5 Pro is able to take advantage of?
AS: Yeah, definitely. Since PlayStation 5 Pro has a more powerful graphics unit, especially when it comes to ray-tracing, we can really take advantage of that and are able to offer higher graphics quality on PS5 Pro. The ray-traced global illumination is of a better quality on PS5 Pro, and the overall lighting quality is better. We have shadows for local light sources that we can do on PS5 Pro that we just can't on the base PS5. We have better reflections on the PS5 Pro as well; there are some spots where we have reflections on PS5 Pro that you won't see on the base PS5.
The time to lead is nearly here, Anno 117: Pax Romana launches on November 13.
