remake of The Settlers II, with their business development director, Ralf Wirsing stating, "there are not many video games that are suitable for such a project, but the second part of The Settlers series is undoubtedly one of them". The game's developers, Blue Byte, who had developed all five titles in the series thus far, had chosen to remake The Settlers II because doing so was the most frequent request they received from fans. Additionally, surveys in German magazines and on gaming websites consistently showed The Settlers II to be the most popular game in the series. One of the most important early decisions Blue Byte made was to leave the original's gameplay relatively unaltered. Of this decision, Wirsing explained: "The self-contained style of gameplay and the indirect control, in which the settlement and not the individual settlers are controlled, have not lost their charm even ten years after the game was first published". The only significant changes the designers made were giving the different races aesthetically differentiated buildings (in the original, the only difference between races was the design of soldiers), although, as in the original, all three races play identically; redesigning the HUD to take advantage of larger monitors with higher resolutions than were available in 1996; adding an online multiplayer mode; when the player demolishes a building, they now get back half the construction costs; rebuilding and expanding the notification system, plus giving players more control over which notifications they receive; and adding a day/night cycle. According to project manager and co-designer Thomas Häuser, the most important overarching decision regarding the remake was to renovate the original rather than reinvent it: To ensure continuity with the original, the development team included several people who had worked on the 1996 title; Häuser was lead designer and lead programmer, producer and co-designer Thomas Friedmann was a design consultant, and co-designer and art director Thorsten Kneisel was an assistant producer. Speaking of how similar the remake would be to the original, Wirsing explained: According to Thomas Friedmann, "we have retained the strengths of the original game." He specifically referred to the reimplementation of the road network, which was dropped from The Settlers III and all subsequent games in the series, and the importance of transport hubs. Of the graphics, Wirsing explained that "the new Settlers II looks as it would have in 1996 if the technical possibilities of today had