That picture up there is both a screenshot from Dawn of Discovery, a quite lovely city builder released last week, and a metaphor for how the publishers at Ubisoft are treating its North American release. The church is the game: grand, serene, majestic. The burning shantytown is Ubisoft's support: unsightly and well on its way to being a forgotten smoldering ruin that will lower the property value of the lovely church.

For starters, the documentation is pathetic. This is a richly detailed game with a thin manual and no in-game reference for all the various buildings, populations, resources, and interface elements (the previous games in the series, called "Anno ", shipped with a cute in-game reference called the annopedia).

Since Ubisoft maintains a message board with sections for each of their games arranged alphabetically, you'd think you could just check between Chessmaster and Driver. No such luck. Dawn of Discovery doesn't appear on the list. Instead, if you look hard enough, you might stumble across a post directing you to the English language section of a German forum for the series as a whole. If you don't leave, and instead ask a question about Dawn of Discovery anyway, the community manager will politely tell you to go away.

So if you have questions about Dawn of Discovery, here are a couple of tips: The big long word with "name" in it means "username". "Ubermitteln" means "enter". "Abbrechen" means "cancel". "Passwort" means "password".

But the more dire problem is that there is apparently zero support for Dawn of Discovery's online features. The game has a truly wonderful system of achievements and medals. These give you points to spend on unlockables tracked across all your games, such as unique buildings for your cities, as well as coats of arms, portraits, and titles for your profile. This all hooks into an online server, where you can upload screenshots and even saved cities.

So once I realized that the button on the main menu labeled "Gateway to the World" was a button and not just a bit of decoration, I gladly started over my profile. I gave up the gems, awards, and unlockables I'd earned and even reset my progress in the campaign. I really enjoy Dawn of Discovery, so I'm happy to start over so I can plug into the online community, called the "Anno Portal" by the button in the game that will take you there.

Once I had reset my profile, I pressed the button to visit the community site. Here is a screeshot of it:

After a bit of hunting around online, it turns out the site is actually working. You have to track it down yourself. Apparently, the "Gateway to the World" button in the game is like one of those fake doors Wile E. Coyote paints onto the side of a cliff.

Come on, Ubisoft. This is a really swell city builder. How about giving it some of the love it deserves?