color; and integrating the 2D isometric graphics of the first two games with certain 3D graphical elements. An early problem faced by the game's artists, Torsten Hess and Thorsten Wallner, was that the settlers themselves couldn't be too complex, as small details would be lost given their 32-pixel height, yet they had to be detailed enough so as to seem at least somewhat realistic. To tackle this problem, Hess and Wallner elected to exaggerate the settlers' proportions, giving them disproportionately large weapons and tools, as correctly sized implements would be too small to be seen. The settlers were also made more rotund and given enlarged heads. As all the animations in the game had to be interchangeable for every settler (walking, bending etc.), Hess and Wallner first needed to work on the skeletal animation, building an "extremely primitive skeletal settler which we could put under the visible structure of our figures". The drawback to this approach was that every individual action had to animated separately, frame-by-frame. Released in 1998, The Settlers III continued the series' run of commercial successes (although reviews were more mixed), and Blue Byte announced The Settlers IV at the ECTS in August 1999. However, Wertich was not working on the title, because, as he later explained, "Blue Byte wanted to have it ready for release by Christmas 2000, which, in my opinion, was not sufficient time to create a worthy title". At the E3 event in May 2000, Blue Byte cited negative feedback from fans who felt The Settlers III was too combat-orientated, and so The Settlers IV was intended as a return to the core gameplay of The Settlers and The Settlers II. Blue Byte also revealed that for the first time in the series, the game would feature a non-playable race (the Dark Tribe), the importance of whom to the overall design was addressed by project manager and co-designer Hans-Jürgen Brändle: Speaking to IGN later in the year, Brändle reiterated the designers' hopes that the game would more fully integrate economic-based settling with combat than had the previous title: "We are mainly concentrating on getting the balance between settling and fighting just right. We're introducing new features, which will make the settling part more important but will also influence the strategic fighting part. This will mean you can't concentrate on just settling, or only fighting". In November 2000, Blue Byte announced the slated December