Some describe Volker Wertich as the German Sid Meier, or, if they’re feeling particularly bold, the German Hideo Kojima. He is the creator of The Settlers, a 30-year-old city builder video game many fondly remember playing on the Amiga back in 1993. And so when Ubisoft announced a reboot of The Settlers with Wertich signed on to lead development using the same graphics engine that powered the likes of The Division, fans could barely contain their excitement. Finally, The Settlers would return with a game worthy of its forebears.
In 2020, just two years after The Settlers was announced at gamescom 2018 to so much enthusiasm, Wertich quietly left the project. And after a string of delays and development issues, The Settlers reboot launched in February 2023, although you’d be forgiven for missing the memo. The Settlers: New Allies, as Ubisoft called it, was panned by those who had hoped for a return to the series’ roots. What they got instead was something no veteran The Settlers fan, or seemingly Volker Wertich himself, wanted.
The Settlers: New Allies is one of the most expensive games ever made in Germany, with an estimated development budget of up to €40 million ($42.5 million). But sales, inevitably, were poor and now, half a year after launch, it looks like Ubisoft would rather forget the game ever happened. The Settlers: New Allies is, by all accounts, a disaster.
What happened? IGN can reveal the true story behind The Settlers: New Allies’ development, including an exclusive interview with Volker Wertich who discusses his career, his dispute with Ubisoft publicly for the first time, as well as details of his next project that, perhaps unsurprisingly, looks like The Settlers.
The original The Settlers began life as a prototype Wertich had built for a game in which the player could walk within a three dimensional world. In the early 90s, most video games were 2D, so when Wertich brought the prototype to Blue Byte, a German studio then based in the city of Mülheim, the CEO was impressed. But it was Wertich’s game idea that sealed the deal: an RTS where units would walk around but the player wouldn’t command them directly. Instead, the player would give them orders indirectly by placing buildings. 10 minutes after pitching the idea, Wertich had a deal. He signed a revenue share-based contract with Blue Byte, which would own The Settlers licence, and got on with designing, coding, and even writing the manual. 20 months later, The Settlers came out in June 1993. It was a success not just in Germany, where The Settlers was known as Die Siedler, but internationally. Wertich had built Blue Byte’s biggest hit, and there was no going back.
Sequels followed. In 1996 The Settlers 2, a game Wertich wasn’t involved with, came out and did wonderfully well. In 1998 The Settlers 3, a game Wertich designed and programmed, came out and did even better. Wertich, repeating the pattern, was not involved with 2001’s The Settlers 4, which Ubisoft published after buying Blue Byte. Instead, Wertich founded his own studio, Phenomic, in Ingelheim, a town situated along the Rhine’s left bank. Phenomic’s first game was 2003’s Spellforce, published by Austrian company JoWooD. This brand new role-playing strategy hybrid did well enough to spawn a sequel in 2006. But despite positive review scores, SpellForce 2 failed to hit sales targets.
With JoWooD struggling and in turn Phenomic suffering financial difficulties, Wertich went in search of a new publisher for a new strategy and card collecting game called BattleForge. One company he pitched was EA. But rather than snap up BattleForge, EA issued Wertich an ultimatum: either Phenomic becomes a part of EA or there’s no deal at all. Wertich, without much choice, sold his studio to EA for a song. Phenomic, after all, had no intellectual property brand value of its own.
The rebranded EA Phenomic released three games for its new overlord. The first was the aforementioned BattleForge in 2009, then two massively multiplayer browser game versions of existing, established EA IP: Lord of Ultima in 2010, and Command & Conquer: Tiberium Alliances in 2012. BattleForge struggled for sales, but went down well with players (a small but loyal group of fans keeps the game alive with a server operated outside of EA). EA shut Lord of Ultima down in 2014. Command & Conquer: Tiberium Alliances is still playable now, over 10 years later.
In 2013, EA shifted to focus on its big franchises, and EA Phenomic, a 70-person studio making niche strategy games, did not fit the bill. EA shut EA Phenomic seven years after buying it.
Speaking to IGN now, a decade after EA killed his studio, Wertich is philosophical about the series of events. “I’m kind of a businessman, so it’s normal,” he says. “The business changes and our business moves very fast.” In the end, Wertich and EA parted ways “in peace”, with the staff free to work in the same office in Ingelheim on the same computers they had used for the past seven years, but no longer as an EA studio. Without financing from EA, the studio had to shrink, and layoffs followed. At its peak, EA Phenomic was home to 70 people. It had already shrunk to 40 by the time EA closed its doors. It then got smaller, to 20 staff.
Wertich and other former EA Phenomic staff then founded Envision Entertainment and set to work on mobile game Path of War, which came out in 2015. This was another critical success but financial failure. In the meantime, Envision did contract work alongside Ubisoft Blue Byte, and following Path of War’s release, agreed a deal to work on a brand new The Settlers game.
This setup was problematic from the off. Wertich and Envision were not employees of Ubisoft. Rather, they were contractors, with Wertich in place as creative director in Ingelheim and the vast majority of the development team 220 km north at Ubisoft Düsseldorf. Ubisoft had, effectively, outsourced The Settler’s creative director and executive producer (Envision CEO Dirk Ringe).
Amid The Settlers’ positive announcement at gamescom 2018, development was slow and it became clear the project would need more time and money. It was decided The Settlers would come to consoles as well as PC, including to the Nintendo Switch. As you might have guessed, this posed a huge development challenge, with more teams drafted in to help.
At the height of its development, The Settlers involved at least seven Ubisoft studios. Wertich confirmed to IGN that more than 100 people worked on the game. According to The Settlers’ credits, Envision, Ubisoft Düsseldorf, Ubisoft Mainz, Ubisoft Berlin, and even Ubisoft Reflections in the UK and Mi’pu’mi Games in Vienna all contributed. This is small fry compared to the average Assassin’s Creed game, but for a Ubisoft game made in Germany, The Settlers was an enormous undertaking.
In early 2020, The Settlers was slated to launch that spring, but a negative internal review sparked a delay. IGN understands the game at the time was something of a beautiful but disjointed mess, with a user interface that needed a huge amount of work, and slow gameplay and a campaign considered a bit of a slog. Internally, most thought The Settlers needed another 18-24 months of development for it to be considered a top-tier city-builder. Soon after, Ubisoft internally delayed the game to the third quarter of 2020, but that summer, Ubisoft hit The Settlers with a very public and very indefinite delay, and refunded pre-orders.
Ubisoft decided to go a new direction with that game, and the direction was something that I as a creative director couldn’t really sustain and support.
It was around this time that Ubisoft and Envision parted ways. It would be an understatement to call it a difference in vision. Wertich intended to make a The Settlers reboot that harkened back to the older games’ considered, relaxed style. But Ubisoft wanted modernisation, with a focus on fast-paced competitive multiplayer. Speaking about the split for the first time publicly, Wertich diplomatically says: “Ubisoft decided to go a new direction with that game, and the direction was something that I as a creative director couldn’t really sustain and support. It was going in a direction which was not really fitting to my vision of the game at all. And then I talked to them and said, ‘Okay, I guess I have to leave the project if you want to go that direction.’ “
Wertich calls this split “fine”. “Ubisoft is financing the project so they have to decide about the direction,” he says. “If they want to think something else is more successful, they can follow this path. And I have to understand that.” Wertich immediately left the project.
Perhaps this is the point at which Ubisoft should have canceled The Settlers, but Ubisoft, still basking in the glory of Rainbow Six Siege’s redemption and mindful of how much time and money it had already pumped into the project, soldiered on. Development trouble continued and Ubisoft retooled the game. Just days before Ubisoft’s planned March 17, 2022 release date, it delayed The Settlers to an indefinite date, citing negative feedback from a closed beta. The Settlers resurfaced eight months later with a new name (The Settlers: New Allies) and a new February 17, 2023 release date on PC. Ubisoft finally hit that release date, with New Allies becoming the first new The Settlers game to come out in 13 years. But there was little fanfare and no big marketing push. Worse, The Settlers: New Allies launched on the Ubisoft Store and the Epic Games Store only. It is not on Steam.
Critics savaged the game. PC Gamer called it “a slow-paced and overly simplistic take on city building and war waging”. RPS called New Allies “a tedious blend of management sim and RTS that simply doesn’t work”. Fans didn’t hold back, either. The promised console launch came five months later, in July, and barely anyone noticed.
What does Wertich himself think of how The Settlers reboot turned out? Not much. “The game that was finally released is really quite different from the version that I presented in 2019,” he says. “I think that’s obvious. You can still see the version that I presented three years ago. But I will not really comment on the new version because I left the project and I didn’t have much to do with how it finally went.”
It seems The Settlers is now a dead franchise, with no new game in the works at Ubisoft. In a statement issued exclusively to IGN, Ubisoft Blue Byte boss Benedikt Grindel, who manages Ubisoft’s development effort in Germany, admitted the project suffered significant challenges and took responsibility for the end product.
“Game development is complex, and setbacks can and will occur in any production,” Grindel said. “The development of the latest The Settlers game encountered a variety of challenges, and the result is that the final game did not live up to our expectations, nor those of our fans.
“I was saddened that the Settlers community felt let down and that we didn’t deliver the experience that they deserve. Just as important, I was disappointed that the immense talent of the development team didn’t shine through in the final game. As Managing Director of Ubisoft Blue Byte, I take full responsibility for this outcome.
The result is that the final game did not live up to our expectations, nor those of our fans.
“What’s important now is that we leverage what we have learned from this experience to do better in the future. My focus is taking the insights we have gained from a thorough analysis of this production and using them to pave the way for our future success on others.
“Ubisoft Blue Byte in Düsseldorf, Mainz, and Berlin continue to work on exciting projects and our talented team are trusted partners in Ubisoft’s network of studios. In Düsseldorf specifically, we are working on a mix of lead and co-dev games, and we also have teams that provide valuable support to Ubisoft’s in-house technologies and platforms. Maintaining a diversity of projects and skillsets has been core to the studio’s strategy for years, and we look forward to sharing more about the work our teams are doing in the future.”
As far as fans are concerned, Ubisoft ruined The Settlers and drove its beloved creator away. But of course the truth of its troubled development is more nuanced than that. What is clear is The Settlers reboot will go down as of of the most expensive flops in German video game history, and yet another classic tale of mismanagement in the industry.
As for Wertich, he’s moving on from The Settlers onto a new, self-published mediaeval city builder. It’s called Pioneers of Pagonia, and at gamescom 2023, IGN got a look at how it’s shaping up. Wertich loads a save game with over 2,200 “Pagonians” moving about the city. It’s like an anthill of units on-screen, with some Pagonians carrying resources around, others using resources to create items. There are buildings everywhere. It is very much a bustling virtual city. One bakery shows the flour, water, and firewood used inside so players can see if there are shortages without having to dig into a menu. Chefs collect materials, head back to their taverns, then cook a meal to serve to the city’s population. Like The Settlers, Pioneers of Pagonia is a game about fixing traffic jams made out of little people. Wertich says it’s got a high “wuselfaktor”, a wonderful German word that describes just how bustling and detailed a city builder can get.
Pioneers of Pagonia represents a fresh start for Volker Wertich, a chance to self-publish a video game for the first time and to put the disastrous The Settlers reboot behind him. But Wertich also knows that free from a publisher like Ubisoft, which is, ultimately, responsible for the quality of its games, there is nowhere for him to hide if Pioneers of Pagonia ends up disappointing The Settlers fans. “The big difference of course is here we can take every decision,” he says. “So we are responsible for everything that goes well, but also responsible ourselves for everything that goes bad.”
Pioneers of Pagonia is set to launch on Steam in early access form on December 13, 2023.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
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