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Comment by lqet | Hacker News Reader

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 classical music as a kid.

https://store.ubisoft.com/on/demandware.static/-/Sites-maste...

https://www.gamesaktuell.de/screenshots/1280x/2002/10/adel.j...

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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.

> 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).

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.

I liked Settlers, but I was much more invested in the Caesar/Zeus/Pharaoh series of games. Maybe it was due to the historical context.

Not sure if this is nostalgia: What I don't get with modern games, at least on the most likely device I could be using for gaming - the iPad - is how ugly they are.

Even AoE and Settlers (both preferably in the second edition) look soooo much better to me than most of the games I can find, they look just strange, both the remakes from "brand name" studios and a lot of the smaller games like you'd find on Apple Arcade.

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