Anno 117: Pax Romana Brings Anno To Consoles on Day 1
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
