14 DAY TRIAL // Ubisoft has quietly revealed in a promotional video that Bruce Shelley, one of the main figures behind the success of Ensemble Studios, is working on the upcoming Settlers 7, which is being developed by Blue Byte, the studio in charge of the series ever since it was initially launched in 1993.
The Ensemble man appeared to talk about the economic system used in Settlers 7 but it's not clear whether Ubisoft has offered him a long term position or whether he is only serving as an adviser for this particular project and will then part ways with the company.
Bruce Shelley is one of the best developers of strategy games. He had his start in the industry by designing board games and he is said to have been so impressed by Sid Meier's Pirates! that he went on to work for MicroProse. There, he contributed to the creation of the first Railroad Tycoon and the initial Civilization, which arrived in 1990 and 1991.
He then left the company and became a freelance writer and then joined a just started new studio called Ensemble Studios. There, he was the main creator behind the making of the first Age of Empires, which spawned the concept of loosely history-based real time strategy and a very successful franchise. Shelley was then more hands off for the creation of the second and third games and also served on the board of direction for the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences.
Until it was revealed that Shelley was working on it, Settlers 7’s claim to fame was the fact that Ubisoft chose the game, currently in beta stage, to test its new anti-piracy measures, which include having the game tied to an official account on the publisher's site while also having saves stores in a Ubisoft managed cloud and not locally.