Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Anno 1800: Shadows of Beauty

simonschreibt.de

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 46 posts

Re: Anno 1800: Shadows of Beauty

#21

Post by PedroBatista »

kthartic wrote: post #18
PedroBatista wrote: post #14

Played Anno 1800 a couple years ago, good game and pretty. But the original Anno 1602 still wins in the looks and style department. As most 2.5D isometric games do..

Hmm I feel this might just be nostalgia at play. I've not played any Anno games, but comparing the two side-by-side and 1800 looks leaps & bounds better to me. 1602 looks like it was drawn in MS Paint.

Of course it does :) The two games are decades apart and 1800 was known to require quite a beefy PC to run good when it came out.

My point was 1602 holds up visually in a sense of doing it’s job assisting the game mechanics, something most modern games often fail and over complicate. Also.. nostalgia.

Re: Anno 1800: Shadows of Beauty

#22

Post by lqet »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #16
lqet wrote: post #11

Beauty is really something that distinguished even the early Anno titles (Anno 1602 and Anno 1503) from other similar games like "The Settlers" or even "Age of Empires". I remember that playing these games was just so nice ... lush green landscapes, beautiful cities full of half-timbered and renaissance houses, palaces, ships in full sail on a blue ocean. It was also the first time I really came into contact with cla…

The 'feel' of a game can't be understated. I get the same vibes from KCD 2, where just walking through the environment is in itself a joy. The thing I didn't like about Age of Empires compared to Settlers was that warfare is the main point of the game; I wish AoE had a plain city / society building mode. Actually it probably does via mods or custom maps, or there's other games that tick the AoE and city builder boxes…

> Settlers has war as well but I always felt it was secondary, definitely not something large scale.

Yes. This is the main reason why I always preferred Settlers and the Anno titles to AoE, EE or similar games. You could build things. AoE was mainly about destroying things. "Warfare" in the original Settlers I was just 2 cute knights hitting each other on the head with a sword until one of them was flat as a pancake.

> I get the same vibes from KCD 2

Add Gothic II, which was also very pretty (it still is, although it came out nearly 25 years ago).

Re: Anno 1800: Shadows of Beauty

#23

Post by massysett »

zargon wrote: post #9
rs_rs_rs_rs_rs wrote: post #2

This makes me want to buy the game...

I would play the whole Anno series, but they’re Ubisoft games and incorporate a rootkit. There are too many good games that have a modicum of respect for their customers for me to pay money to be rootkited.

Anno’s DRM was particularly annoying and had to phone home each time I played. This would have been fine if Ubisoft ran a reliable server, which it didn’t. Once I sat down to play and the game refused to open because it couldn’t phone home.

I then learned my lesson, have not played the game since, and will never buy any Ubisoft product. Too bad, it was a nice game, maybe I would have bought some DLC. But I’m sure the pirates are still getting plenty of DLC. Instead I play Factorio and Paradox games and spend money on their DLC.

Re: Anno 1800: Shadows of Beauty

#25

Post by blueflow »

Something is off with the specified directions:

> The sun keeps a position relative to the camera and thus the shadows always fall from left to right:

The video shows shadows fall from right to left.

> One can get into the unfortunate situation where the camera is positioned so that the sun casts shadows behind the camera.

The video shows no shadows because they are behind the things that are casting the shadow. There would be no shadows behind the camera.

Is this seemingly reversed notion of "casting" common?

Re: Anno 1800: Shadows of Beauty

#26

Post by lis »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #16
lqet wrote: post #11

Beauty is really something that distinguished even the early Anno titles (Anno 1602 and Anno 1503) from other similar games like "The Settlers" or even "Age of Empires". I remember that playing these games was just so nice ... lush green landscapes, beautiful cities full of half-timbered and renaissance houses, palaces, ships in full sail on a blue ocean. It was also the first time I really came into contact with cla…

The 'feel' of a game can't be understated. I get the same vibes from KCD 2, where just walking through the environment is in itself a joy. The thing I didn't like about Age of Empires compared to Settlers was that warfare is the main point of the game; I wish AoE had a plain city / society building mode. Actually it probably does via mods or custom maps, or there's other games that tick the AoE and city builder boxes…

Same here. Also one of the reason I loved building castles in Stronghold so much. It's so much more fun to build than to destroy.

That's also why I love Anno 1800 (as well as its predecessors). You can (mostly) avoid combat.

Re: Anno 1800: Shadows of Beauty

#27

Post by nkrisc »

In my own personal 3D game project I did the same thing, and then thought it seemed strange so I changed it back. Now I wonder if I have experienced this many times before in games and just never noticed it, and it only seemed strange in my own project because I was hyper-aware of it.

Re: Anno 1800: Shadows of Beauty

#28

Post by quchen »

kthartic wrote: post #18
PedroBatista wrote: post #14

Played Anno 1800 a couple years ago, good game and pretty. But the original Anno 1602 still wins in the looks and style department. As most 2.5D isometric games do..

Hmm I feel this might just be nostalgia at play. I've not played any Anno games, but comparing the two side-by-side and 1800 looks leaps & bounds better to me. 1602 looks like it was drawn in MS Paint.

Ha, my first Anno was 1503. Guess what in my mind is the prettiest Anno! 1404 and 1800 are nice too I guess. o:-)

(A friend’s mum was famous among us kids because she could play 1602 well, I always got bankrupted by tools. How did she do it!!)

Re: Anno 1800: Shadows of Beauty

#29

Post by quchen »

walthamstow wrote: post #17
volfonibros wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first four are available on GOG, DRM-free.

IMO Anno 1404 (+ Venice) is the best version. Complex but still fun.

1404 gets samey after a while (when going for the monuments). I’d say 1800+DLCs is the same game, but with so many regions and tiers and options.
Post reply on HN