Mods improve games and expand cities.
The enduring appeal of a game like Cities: Skylines is found in the thousands of mods created by its community. All-new maps, buildings, landmarks, vehicles, roads, themes, and sometimes game systems are all created by mods, which means that every time you sit down to design a city, you’ll find something entirely new to add to it.
Therefore, it’s always a good idea for a publisher to embrace the modding community rather than tolerate it, even if it takes some getting used to. In this case, it’s been about 25 years: the Anno series of city-building strategy games has been around since 1998, first developed by Max Design and later by Ubisoft Blue Byte. This month marks the first time in the history of the Anno series that it will receive official support from the Ministry of Defense.
Mods have been integrated into Anno’s latest game, Anno 1800, with mod.io, and official support is being rolled out in stages. The first stage involved inviting two modifiers to submit amendments, and it was not surprising that this call was resoundingly accepted. More than 100 mods appeared in the first 48 hours, and you can already find a variety of building shapes, modified production chains and resource buildings, a larger port, new map models, and a lot of small town building improvements and mods.
You won’t have to wait long to start playing with these mods: on August 22nd, the mod.io integration will be available for all Anno 1800 players. You’ll be able to launch the game, go through the game’s mod list, download it and activate all the mods you want. Very pleasant !
That’s not the only exciting mod news this week: today we learned that Rockstar has bought the creators of the GTA Online FiveM mod that it banned 8 years ago. It’s a big turn.
It is not possible to mention one of them in this post.
