Anno 117: Pax Romana will launch without a multi-stage monument building for its Albion region due to the “colossal effort” it would have taken to add it in while developing the whole game, developer Ubisoft Mainz has explained.
Monument buildings are seen by some as an end goal of sorts in their respective regions. These expensive, multi-stage projects require plenty of time and resources to construct, rewarding you with the satisfaction of having set up your resource chains efficiently enough to build them while adding a gorgeous new element to your city’s vista.
Anno 117: Pax Romana’s Albion Region May Get A Monument Building At A Later Date
Although adding a monument to Anno 117: Pax Romana’s Albion region was taken into consideration early during development, the team deemed it wiser to spend the resources it would have required on other areas of the game.
“Indeed, making a monument is first and foremost a lot of work for our artists,” Project Coordinator Ubi-Nehor wrote in a recent Reddit AMA. “The sheer scale of the monument and the fact that it technically is multiple assets at once (the different building stages, all the feedback units in it, the special effects of celebration, etc.) make the creation process very long. To give you an idea of scale, making something like the amphitheater is about 7-10x more time consuming than your average lage scale public service building.
“Additionally, a monument is not just a building. It comes with gameplay mechanics, and those should be different for each monument! Example: the Amphitheatre has its games and various events which we showed on stream yesterday. That means that game designers have to design how those events work, what they do, make them balanced and so on. Then Narrative Designers have to implement those events using our quest system.”
They go on to explain that such sizeable assets come with “a lot of visual bugs” that require squashing while also running the risk of causing performance problems which the team would need to address. Giving Anno 117: Pax Romana’s Albion region its own monument would, thus, inevitably come at a cost.
“We have limited time and budget and making a second monument would have forced us to not do a load of other art assets, some other game mechanics, less other types of narrative content, less fixes for other glitches and bugs, and so on.”
At the same time, developer Ubisoft Mainz isn’t ruling out potentially adding monuments to Albion or “elsewhere” at some point in the future.
It would be interesting to see what shape such a project would take, given how Albion’s larger islands tend to be rather limiting in terms of space, due to their sizable chunks of marshland.
For the latest gaming news, follow GameWatcher on BlueSky, check out our videos on YouTube, or give us a like on Facebook. We sometimes include affiliate links in our posts, which grants us a small commission, thank you.
