"The title would suggest a reboot. Yet fans know this series has typically established new stories and settings rather than follow a continuity.

The timing, 12 years after The Settlers 7, implies a reintroduction is in order. But is that really necessary when games as old as The Settlers 2 (1996) and The Settlers 3 (1998) still have a dedicated following?

The tactics should be obvious: This is a classic real-time strategy game whose colleagues, such as StarCraft, also haven’t published new titles in a long time. Still, The Settlers’ appeal has never been in the think-fast/twitch-faster demands of an esports RTS born in the same era of late-’90s PC gaming.

“Watch those games, right?” mused Christian Hagedorn, Ubisoft Dusseldorf’s creative director for The Settlers. “Sometimes people turn the graphics down in other games just to be able to perceive the actions fast. This is the opposite in our game; we want people to be able to enjoy, immerse themselves in the world, follow the one guy who just chopped that one tree back into the base, and then see what that is turning into.”

And that kind of one-to-one resource economy — objects on the map being turned into siege weapons, or buildings, or tools — is what has distinguished The Settlers over its 28-year history. “Nothing is an abstract stat hidden in the menus,” Hagedorn elaborated. “You’re creating weapons, that’s literally a weapon being crafted in the game; you see the iron and the coal it required. And then there’s a literal person grabbing that sword and going to train.”