Pioneers of Pagonia demo trial run

There is a not so narrow group of room strategists who do not necessarily consider warfare to be the most important gaming experience. They are the ones who value it much more if they can improve the life of a country, region, city or village overnight. What fills them with joy is when the production chains start up, the residents are satisfied, the treasury grows, and with this, little by little, new opportunities and new horizons open up. They are the ones who also loved The Settlers series at the time. No wonder, since the essence of the franchise dreamed up by Volker Wertich was exactly what I described above. Okay, it was possible and ultimately necessary to recruit an army in it in order to defend ourselves from the rival villages, and finally defeat them. But that wasn’t what gave the real experience of the games, but the everyday life of our little settlers.

Unfortunately, somewhere around the third or fourth part, that is, around the turn of the millennium, something broke. Perhaps it is precisely the fact that Volker Wertich no longer worked on the games (although he did not work on the second part, but his partner, Thomas Hertzler did), perhaps it is the fact that even Thomas Hertzler quit after the fourth part. But it is also suspicious that Ubisoft also joined the party with the fourth part, and the French publisher has been responsible for the series ever since.

The bottom line is that since the 2004-2005 Heritage of Kings episode, our unfortunate settlers are not simply going downhill, but in real freefall. So much so that Ubisoft froze the franchise for a long time after the seventh part in 2007. And how much they don’t know what to do with it was clearly shown by the fact that around 2014, a game with an unfortunate fate was made, first called The Settlers: Kingdoms of Anteria, and later Champions of Anteria, which was finally published in 2016, not coincidentally leaving the series address. After that, The Settlers: New Allies was finally born, which also took quite a bumpy road until it was finally published in February this year. And needless to say, while it was a nice little strategy, it didn’t even come close to what a die-hard fan could reasonably expect from a Settlers game.

But that’s enough from the history lesson, since the subject of my present article is not The Settlers. Or at least not outspoken. It happened that right around the premiere of New Allies, the news suddenly came that Envision Entertainment, led by the already mentioned Volker Wertich, was working on a game called Pioneers of Pagonia. This is nothing extra so far, except that as soon as someone looked at the first pictures or trailer, they were immediately hit on the forehead by the unadulterated feeling of Settlers life. A good three-quarters of a year has passed since then, and according to the plans, the early version of the game can be launched soon. But a few days ago, a demo was uploaded to Steam, which as a veteran fan I immediately jumped on.

In the Pioneers of Pagonia demo, you can settle on three islands. It is worth mentioning here that in the full game we will get procedurally generated tracks, but here we can explore the predetermined tracks. A small caveat is that at the beginning of the courses, they don’t just drop us in a clearing accompanied by a bunch of basic supplies, tools and building materials. We, please, are settlers, and as such, we arrive on a flashy little shipwreck to the promised land, that is, to the unknown island waiting to be conquered and populated. And the ship’s deck is crumbling with the raw materials needed to take the initial steps. This really tiny detail adds a surprising amount to the gaming experience.

As for the gameplay itself, the point is still the construction and setting up of production chains. First we need to take care of the building materials, so we need to build a woodcutter and a quarry. Then the forester can come, who replaces the cut trees, the stonemason can come, and then we can move on to food. It is not easy enough to build a farm (there are several of these), we also need to designate farmland where they can work. We need a mill to process the fodder, but we also need a baker to bake bread from it. Okay, so far this has also been the case in New Allies, but what I sorely missed there is essential here: there is a well and there is water, which is the key element of so many production chains.

The buildings have to be connected by roads, which for the time being in the demo works quite cheaply and with difficulty, and the automatic route planner is not necessarily always on top of the situation. Don’t worry, there’s still plenty of time to carve this. It is an interesting change that the expansion of our area now works a little differently. While previously it was enough to raise watchtowers, now we need a separate building, which our settlers will increase our territory by placing boundary stones. But we also have to produce these milestones first, which is really new. By the way, a surprising number of buildings are available in the demo, only a few are disabled per category.

Pioneers of Pagonia is very nice and well optimized for it. Okay, New Allies didn’t do badly in this area either. The gameplay is broadly similar between the two games, but Pagonia already has one or two details in the demo that New Allies lacks. And this is just a game in the making. And what is most important is that this game already has a soul in its demo, which was missing from Ubisoft’s painstakingly put together work despite all its efforts.

I don’t know what the future holds for Pioneers of Pagonia, but the early version will start in December. What we can already hear about is that the cooperative mode may arrive sometime at the beginning of 2024, which could also be an exciting novelty.