Ubisoft went "all in" to get community involved with Anno 1800

Just today we reported on Anno 1800 getting a new trailer ahead of the open beta arriving next week, and we just spoke to the game's community developer Bastian Thun yesterday in London about how things are going, including what they've done to get fans involved.

"So the series is now 21 years old, and a lot of the fans follow us for two decades now, and we realised - especially with 2205 when we did the Frontiers DLC - we invited players to give feedback, and we realised they're so good at giving us quality feedback, knowing the series inside out, that we said 'with Anno 1800 we want to get them in as early as possible'," he explained.

"And when we announced the game in 2017, two years ago in pre-alpha, we also launched the Anno's Union initiative, which is basically a platform where we are super transparent about the game development, where players can share their feedback, and we actually incorporate that player feedback into the development roadmap of the game, and we changed a lot of things - the way South America looks like. The new world right now is based on community feedback, there are a lot of like balancing changes, even we have an island, we have ship designs, we have an AI character based on community content."

"So we really went all in to invite and incorporate the community as much as possible in the actual development process."

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