I've been sitting on this one for over a month now because I wasn't sure anyone other than myself cared about this but as I'm staring at the disc right now I thought what the hell. Anno 1404 (or Dawn of Discovery in the U.S.) is getting an expansion pack in February. The Venice expansion adds some new ships and other intriguing additions. More importantly however, the expansion finally adds online multiplayer to the game. This was the biggest rub I had with this otherwise stellar RTS - no multiplayer.




In years past (pre-kids) the wife and I would spend hours playing Anno 1602 together over LAN and then they went and screwed up just about every other version of the game by not putting in multiplayer. I don't know what the hell those wacky Germans were thinking but I'm glad Ubisoft bought original developer Sunflowers. Of course Ubi did put out 1404 without MP and previous promises of MP being patched in were blatantly forgotten about (Anno 1503 even had MP listed on the box!) But I digress, I'm happy they are adding MP because I've got two copies of this game gathering dust until this "expansion" that is really a patch, comes out next year. Just in time for kid 2.0 because I'm sure we'll have plenty of time to play then...

Here's what you'll get:

Key Features of Anno 1404 Venice:

The rich Anno 14044 environment gets complemented with a new Venetian setting offering new possibilities of interaction:

• Build two new Venetian ship types: the small and big tradesman cog
• Develop secret cabinets, infiltrate your enemies and sabotage their expansion
• Take control over enemy cities thanks to your influence in the cities’ council board

Play Anno 1404 online in a multiplayer mode:

• Choose to play versus or coop to defeat the AI by combining your techniques
• Up to 8 players

New challenges and quests:

• Up to 60 new items and 300 new quests with two new types: trading race and ship boarding
• Discover and exploit a new type of island, the Volcano island
• New scenarios to face new challenges with new achievements, medals and crests

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