Instead of making an already long game dependent on elimination, Blue Byte is borrowing a page from many popular European boardgames. Victory is now a matter of accumulating victory points. These can be earned in a number of ways, including reaching certain milestones like building the first cathedral or having the largest population. Some of these victory points will change owners depending on how the game progresses, even if there is no combat. (For you board gamers, think of it like earning a victory point for The Longest Road in Settlers of Catan.) Paths to victory can be related to trade, science or military progress. It’s not yet clear how balanced each path is or at which point players should commit to one path over another. This victory point idea, though, is just one way that Blue Byte is committed to expanding the audience.

Blue Byte producer Benedikt Grindel is especially proud of how the game looks, especially in the campaign map. Even if a mission just keeps you busy on one small part of the map, you can see the entire kingdom over the horizon. He raves about the beauty of the game from seeing the blades of grass shift in the wind to the rushing streams soon to be filled with fish.

The user customization stuff really gets him going. “Your castle is sort of like your avatar,” Grindel explains. “As you make your way through the campaign you get new options to customize it and change how it looks. You can make a realistic medieval castle or a Disney princess castle if you want.”

The gameplay implications of the map designer are more interesting. Though you can’t really make a new map that looks as good as the ones Blue Byte has made, you will be able to take any one of their maps and change a wide range of variables to make an entirely new game. You can change resource locations and amounts, you can tie victory points to holding specific locations, and you can change the quest rewards in a skirmish map to make a match play out in specific ways (a king of the hill match, for example) or at a certain pace. It’s not clear how all this map customization will work with the promised leaderboards and ladders – can you game the map maker to inflate your scores? But it does open up the skirmish system to all kinds of interesting amateur game design.

The story based campaign will be your standard tutorial based system that teaches you the game in chunks as you follow a royal princess in her rise to power in a land torn by faction and war. There was no word on the variety or structure of the missions beyond the usual learning stuff. Beyond having a female royal protagonist, it’s not clear if there is anything really new here. The stated challenge for both Ubisoft and Blue Byte is to make this aging series appealing to an America audience that has not just moved on from city builders and RTS games in large numbers, but has also in many ways moved on from PC gaming and patience.

“There is a difference between German and American gamers, for sure,” says Shelley. “I think that the increased popularity of board games in the US means that some of the things we have done in Settlers 7 will have an appeal for an audience that isn’t the typical RTS community.” Settlers as a franchise sits neatly in that group of Euro strategy games like Europa: The Guild, the Anno games and Patrician – deep economic systems that require constant attention. The interface and new victory system in Settlers 7 is a novel attempt to square the circle of being true to the series’ roots and yet move the game in a more accessible direction.

Will it work? We’ll find out in late March 2010 when it finally hits shelves.

Questions or comments? We'd love to hear from you .