Anno 1800 Open Beta kicks off tomorrow

Back in 2017, when Ubisoft announced Anno 1800, this business management/city building hybrid game was supposed to launch this year, on February 26. Even when the Closed Beta — which I unfortunately missed, although I had an invitation — went live, the launch date was not changed. Unfortunately, Blue Byte revealed in the meantime that the release date has been pushed back to April 16 for "additional polish and tuning" and now that day is almost here, so the time is right for a brief Open Beta stage.

As it was the case with the Closed Beta, those interested in taking this game for a spin can preload it a few days before being able to actually play it. The Open Beta will go live tomorrow and will last until the 14th. Since downloading more than 18 GB of data might take a while for many gamers out there, preloading the title sounds like a good idea.

Sadly, the Anno 1800 Open Beta comes with a catch: only those who use Uplay or Epic's launcher will be able to play it. Steam users who pre-ordered the game will get it at launch, but Anno 1800 will not be available for purchase on Valve's platform after that since it will be an Epic Games Store exclusive title.

Fortunately, the system requirements are not out of this world: to run the game at 1080p and 60 fps on High settings, one needs an AMD Ryzen 5 1500X or Intel Core i5-4690K processor, 8 GB of memory, and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 or AMD Radeon R9 290X graphics. Obviously, having something superior can't hurt, and running the game at a lower resolution could be done with a far less potent hardware setup (I might get back to this once — and IF — I get to run the game properly on my desktop PC).

Anno 1800 will only be available for Windows PCs and includes a story-based campaign, a sandbox mode, as well as multiplayer. If we have any readers who got to love/hate the Anno 1800 Closed Beta — or are looking forward to the Open Beta — it would be great to see their thoughts in the comments section.