screenshots and revealed that the game would be a combination of city-building and action role-playing. At Gamescom that month, lead designer Guido Schmidt touted the game's economic system, which he explained was the most complex in the franchise's history, with some of the more advanced economic processes involving up to 19 buildings. Discussing the differentiation between combat missions and city-building, he said the designers were acting on feedback from fans, who disliked being under pressure whilst they tried to build up their city, as that city could be attacked at any time. With this in mind, Blue Byte decided to completely divorce combat from city-building, structuring the combat more in the vein of a dungeon crawler than the kind of real-time strategy combat seen in previous titles. A German closed beta began in August and an international beta in September. However, by late October, it had become apparent that the beta was generating predominantly negative feedback from both fans and journalists. Many found the combat gameplay too similar to Diablo, and criticised the repetitiveness of the missions, chaotic fights, a non-rotatable camera, and poor AI. There was also an especially strong feeling that the game didn't feel like a Settlers title. In January 2015, Ubisoft abruptly ended the beta several months early. In a statement on the game's official forums, they said that "this step is unusual but necessary so that we can fully concentrate on modifications, new content, and solutions to known problems. Many upcoming changes are based on the huge amount of valuable feedback that has been collected to date". Little more was heard about the game until April 2016, when Blue Byte published an open letter on their forums, explaining that Kingdoms of Anteria would be released in August, albeit no longer as a Settlers title, with the new name of Champions of Anteria, and with redesigned gameplay. At Gamescom in 2018, Ubisoft announced the eighth title in the main series. Initially, named simply The Settlers, it was intended as a reboot of sorts, and was originally slated for release in 2019, then rescheduled for the third quarter of 2020, but in July, the game's release was postponed indefinitely and preorders were refunded. In January 2022, Ubisoft revealed that the game was nearing completion and was scheduled for release in March of that year. However, the game's closed beta received highly negative feedback. Acting on this feedback,