The Settlers 7 - Paths to a Kingdom
Synopsis
The seventh game in The Settlers series. The player controls Princess Zoé of the Kingdom of Kuron. When her father, King Konradin, learns of a coup in the neighbouring Kingdom of Tandria — with the Tandrian king Balderus forced into exile — he tasks Zoé with putting down the rebellion. Making her way through Tandria she encounters the rebellion's leaders, Lord Wolvering and his most loyal knight Dracorian, who claims he is a liberator fighting tyranny rather than a rebel, and warns Zoé not to trust her father. The "Rise of the Rebellion" DLC adds a prequel campaign, "The Chronicles of Tandria", showing how Dracorian and his sister Rovyn first took up arms against Balderus. The headline mechanic is a dynamic Victory Points system, and the player can develop a settlement along three different paths — military, technology, or trade — each requiring different strategies.
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Pixable Studios' contribution centred on the in-game animation system — including squash-and-stretch animation, until then unknown in games — and on building the pipeline that produced roughly 1,200 animations across 30 rigs, plus 40 minutes of rendered in-game dialogue and over 100 engine-ready dialogue / scene animations. Blue Byte explicitly designed Paths to a Kingdom to correct what they saw as the problems of the two previous Settlers titles (Heritage of Kings was criticised for too much combat, Rise of an Empire / Settlers 6 for an oversimplified economy), taking The Settlers II as a reference point and reintroducing complex daisy-chain economic processes and road networks. Shortly after release, the game was caught up in controversy when a fault in Ubisoft's newly launched always-on DRM blocked thousands of players from playing over the Easter weekend. Despite that, Paths to a Kingdom received generally positive reviews and was widely cited as the best Settlers game since The Settlers II.
