Anno 117 Pax Romana's Best-Kept Secret Turns Out to Be a Stunning First-Person View.
Wait — did you know you can play the game Anno 117 in first-person? Should that be your response, your surprise matches as I was when I discovered this hidden feature. Excuse me while temporarily abandon managing my empire, entrust it to a reliable subordinate, commandere a carriage, and enjoy a ride through Ancient Rome.
Activating the First-Person View
Being a city-building title, Anno 117: Pax Romana usually operates using a top-down camera. But, should you input a hidden code — including “Ctrl,” “Shift,” and “R” using PC controls or “Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B/Circle, A/X” on a controller — you can explore your domain as a common citizen. Since a similar easter egg was included in the earlier game Anno 1800, I looked forward to experience it in the new release, but I wasn’t sure it would function before I discovered myself chin-deep in a Celtic floorboard (possibly an unexpected bug — this feature is prone to glitches now and then).
Discovering the Roman Cityscape
Once I crawled out, I strolled the lively avenues across my settlement and visited shops, taverns, flower fields, and seafood collectors — it felt magnificent to witness the fruits of my labor through a fresh lens. I noticed all kinds of details I wouldn’t have spotted when viewing from overhead: Doorway embellishments, a donkey carrying a flower bucket, chickens running loose, folks chilling on their balconies… Even just observing the shape of a window sill and the coloration on a post becomes engaging to someone who doesn’t live in Ancient Rome.
More Than Just Walking
Yet, the experience extends to the first-person feature in Anno 117 aside from meandering through streets. I was especially delighted the moment I learned that I could not just look upon crop lands, but also access them. And despite my expectation structures would be inaccessible, I was able to enter clay pits, investigate a respected schoolhouse as teaching was underway, and even trespass into people’s gardens. Don't bother with door access (not even the creators allocated resources for that), however, you can definitely stroll around a barley farm, observe people digging and transporting bags, and glance into any tiny hut provided the entrance is missing.
Appearance and Mood
While I was completely ready to observe my settlement depicted with outdated visual quality, excluding a few unpolished motions and sometimes citizens positioned in a bench as opposed to atop a bench, the first-person view appears much better than expected. The highly detailed textures (notably masonry elements) are unexpectedly excellent in what is still, essentially, a top-down game. You won't necessarily notice specific hair details, yet you will notice engravings on walls, flames emitting from lights, fading on bricks, pupils, and conifer needles. Nighttime, with its flickering fires and celestial bodies twinkling afar, is especially atmospheric, and proves significantly less intimidating compared to Anno 1800, now that the citizens don’t look like sleep paralysis demons anymore.
Discovery and Modification
Given the covert first-person feature has no guided tutorial, I decided to experiment a bit, and immediately located the functions for jumping, dashing, and zoom in or out — the last option enabling me to alternate between immersive and external perspectives and return. I then decided to hit certain numeric keys and discovered that I could change my representative's visual design. Yellow toga? Ruby clothing? Blue and purple toga? Or — maybe superior — complete battle gear? You can wield a blade and protection, or, personally chosen, equip a shooter's costume; if you activate the engage command, you’ll fire burning arrows into the sky. If you're interested, eliminating citizens cannot be done (not that I’ve tried, of course).
Comedy and Population Encounters
However, I had no desire to injure my people, since they're incredibly amusing. Shortly after I activated the immersive perspective, I heard a parent advising their offspring that “You cannot keep a fox as a pet and if you feed it one more chicken, your grandmother will be furious.” Understandable stance, father character. A friendly native Celtic person then started applauding my excellent cross-cultural strategies by labeling it “Perfect fusion,” while some cranky old lady chose to intimidate me: “Say that one more time, and they’ll never find your body.”
The Joy of Joyriding
Just as I assumed I’d discovered all there is to discover in the title's first-person feature, I found the joys of joyriding across historical settings. Completely unexpectedly, I selected a carriage and quickly occupied the transport. Bovines, equines, even human-pulled carts; you can drive them all at your leisure. The donkey-powered transport, notably, moves quite quickly, although you shouldn't expect open-world vehicular chaos — impacting citizens or additional vehicles cannot occur (again, not saying I’ve tried).
Fighting Restrictions
The sole aspect that let me down regarding the first-person view was discovering my inability to participate in battle encounters. Wearing my military outfit, I charged toward adversaries amidst fighting and attempted to attack them, but was entirely disregarded. The proximate observation was still rather spectacular, and seeing opponents retreat, their arms flailing about, felt highly gratifying, but it would’ve been cool to actually hit something via my incendiary bolts.
