The Settlers: New Allies (February 2023)

Did you register?

I wish I had. Lol.

There’s probably still time.

Yep…

How were you notified you were in? Does the game show up in Uplay?

I got an email, and yeah, it showed up in my game library in Uplay (which is Ubisoft Connect now, I guess).

Aw, I was hoping to get an hour or so in before work , but it turns out it doesn’t unlock until this evening UK time.

Seems to have unlocked.

Impressions! Need details!

First impressions are terrible, I’m afraid. Economy seems to be grossly simplified, the whole territory/resource model seems weird (I’m willing to give this more time to see if it makes sense in the overall context), and yes the game is very geared toward combat, and early. I built an academy (“unlocks research”) hoping this would open up some more buildings, but nope. Pretty much every item is a boost to military units.

At this point I would definitely say play Settlers 7 instead. Or The Colonists, for that matter.

It’s also weirdly unpolished. I know it’s a beta, but come on, it’s only two months from release. There are glaring spelling errors in the tutorial. When you discover a resource it doesn’t tell you what the resource is. The only way I’ve found to figure it out is to select the correct mine by accident, at which point it shows you where the seams are.

I’m baffled as to what the design brief for this was. It’s clearly not going to appeal to Settlers fans, but I can’t imagine there’s a huge audience out there for a clunky Settlers-themed RTS.

Well bummer. Wrong answer, but good to know.

Positive impressions? :P

It looks fairly pretty I suppose. Though honestly not that great.

I did the very simple tutorial. Started a skirmish. Built my first building and sent some engineers to finish it…and it crashed. I didn’t see anything that makes me want to try again.

Going by what I read earlier today on Reddit from people playing the beta, I wonder if any of the developers played any of the previous settlers games?

How do they spend all this time and at least one false start and, presumably, have the money and infrastructure to continue a beloved series and bungle it so badly when tiny teams are making new, creative games like Against the Storm and the many other city builder/economy management games?

It boggles my mind.

Dollars to donuts the pillars of the design (more combat, more RTS-y, etc) came down from some executive who saw a “market opportunity” and thought, “Hey, we have a fallow franchise whose branding documents share some of these keywords! Honh honh honh!”

From what I understand, it was originally much more like old school Settlers. If I had to guess, at some point during production some exec decided that it and Anno occupied too similar a space so they were forced to differentiate it by going all in on the RTS and ditching production chains.

Mmmm, that tracks pretty well too. I will only bet you donuts to donuts on that one.

So hungry for a donut now.