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Age of Empires: Definitive Edition (AoE1 HD rerelease)

Endemic

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Units still move and fight in a disorganized rabble. Animations look janky. Surprised they didn't add gates or diagonals for the walls either...
 

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Watching the gameplay now. I'll definitely use the toggle for original music.
 

Vaarna_Aarne

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Units still move and fight in a disorganized rabble. Animations look janky. Surprised they didn't add gates or diagonals for the walls either...
Agreed, there's not really an excuse not to add some of the very important improvements Age of Empires 2 made over the first one, especially if you're including a functional version of AoE1 along with your HD remake!

Gates would be the bare minimum, and ability to set units to move in formations would also be a huge improvement (even if said formations instantly turned back into chaos the moment contact was made). I could make-do without diagonal walls, since those I felt alwas looked kind of wonky in AoE2 (but this I figure is because the sprites weren't working out).

(ten bucks says they're totes gonna release an expansion where gates are a major feature)

These cheapskates are using Age of Mythology icons. :lol:

At least the pathfinding seems mildly improved.
"It would cost us less than one thousand dollars to hire some dude to make some icons." "ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS?!?! REUSE OLD ASSETS IMMEDIATELY!" "Sir, we could just have one of the guys over a graphics use a week to..." "ONE WEEK?!?!?! UNACCEPTABLE TIME COST! USE OLD ASSETS!"
 

pomenitul

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Postponed at the last minute. Bah.

https://www.ageofempires.com/news/age-empires-de-release-update/

Age DE Team
OCTOBER 13, 2017

Hi all,

When we set out to re-release the original Age of Empires (as ‘Age of Empires: Definitive Edition’), we had many debates over the extent of restoration that we should undertake. The challenge of re-releasing a classic is just that: it’s a classic and it deserves to be treated with careful reverence. At the same time, in a living, thriving genre, norms continually evolve, technology advances, and player expectations change. This is as true for RTS as for any other genre. So, the challenge is to recreate the experience not as it *actually* was but as we all remember it. How can we modernize the game while preserving the fun, discovery and magic of that first experience?

To that end, rather than a final release of Age of Empires: Definitive Edition on October 19, we will instead be inviting thousands more players from the community into our closed beta between now and launch to allow for more in-depth testing across single player campaign, multiplayer balance, fine-tuning the lobby, etc.

We don’t have a final release date to share quite yet, but are targeting early 2018. In the meantime, we will be actively engaging with everyone participating in the closed beta to gather additional feedback, set up multiplayer sessions, and ensure that the Age of Empires: Definitive Edition that we are delivering is the Definitive Edition that you want.

Thank you,

The Age of Empires: Definitive Edition Team
 
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https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/01/the-age-of-age-of-empires-as-told-by-the-devs-who-built-it/

“The least-worst idea we had”—The creation of the Age of Empires empire
A brief oral history from the original game’s designers at Ensemble Studios.
RICHARD C. MOSS - 1/8/2018, 2:30 PM

Age-of-Empires_Oral_History-800x483.jpg

Enlarge / We've enjoyed Age of Empires so much, we'd probably play this version, too.


Not much about Age of Empires isn't epic.

Over the last 20 years, these epoch-spanning games have starred more than 50 historical civilizations, sales have surpassed more than 20 million units, and a core fanbase of hundreds of thousands has put hours upon hours into playing one series entry or another on a weekly basis. Age of Empires is one of the most influential strategy games of all time. And far from fading into obscurity, as history is wont to do, Empires is now squarely back in the (games-playing) public consciousness.

With a new Age game in development and a "definitive edition" reboot of the original just around the corner—and given our recent foray into the evolution of the entire real-time strategy genre—we thought it'd be interesting to dig into the history of this RTS series. After all, RTS games like Age have introduced millions of impressionable youths to the delights of... well, history.

I spoke to several of the two dozen or so people who worked on the original Age of Empires about how it was made. I asked them to reflect on the series' triumphs, successes, failures, and legacy. This is a compressed retelling of their many stories, focusing on the early days—the building of the foundations that are so central to both the Age story and each of the Age games—but spanning the full breadth of the series' life.

Dawn of Man
The seed of the idea for what would become Age of Empires lay with Tony Goodman, the co-founder of an IT consulting company called Ensemble Corporation.

Goodman loved games. He and his brother Rick had been avid board gamers since they were kids. One day, in 1994, thinking that Microsoft's release of WinG, a DirectX predecessor, had presented a great new opportunity, Tony struck on the idea to do a game as a side project. He didn't know what it would be yet—only that it would be fun to make something and see if it goes anywhere.

"He just came in one day, out of the blue, to my recollection," Rick Goodman told Ars. Tony addressed the engineering team: "Hey, would any of you rather be programming games than databases?"

"I think there was a strange reaction in the room because people didn't know quite how to perceive that," Rick continued. "But it turned out he was serious."

Tony then set about organizing a small gaming cabal at the company. The cabal started to experiment with building an engine, its isometric perspective inspired by SimCity. Tony and programmer Angelo Laudon put together a simple tech demo with a tank. You could drive it around and shoot palm trees—that was about it. Still, the demo solidified the idea that they could make a game.

Now, the team just needed a good idea.

To help come up with a solid concept, Tony brought in Rick and their friend Bruce Shelley, who lived up in Chicago but periodically travelled down to Dallas for short stays. Shelley was the co-creator of both the hit game Sid Meier's Civilization and the business simulation Railroad Tycoon. Tony and his cohorts had met Shelley in a board gaming club when they were teenagers still at school and Shelley was in college.

They spent the next few months discussing countless ideas. Tony suggested something set on a desert island that would have been similar to the television show Lost. But the idea that really got them thinking was a suggestion by another programmer, Tim Deen, to riff off Blizzard's real-time strategy game Warcraft.

They looked at Warcraft and Westwood's Command & Conquer. When Rick suggested they borrow from these, Shelley brought up his past experience with the games and suggested they do a kind of real-time take on Civilization.

"They nodded their head and agreed that maybe, of all the bad ideas, it was the least-worst idea we had," recalled Rick.

"I had an idea that the game would start with the map almost covered with ice, like an Ice Age, and you have little settlers," Shelley said. "And as the ice recedes, resources are uncovered, and you can start building, and then you proceed from there to build the first civilizations on Earth."

Another nine months would go by before the entrepreneurs would complete the first working prototype of the game. They gave it the working title of Dawn of Man. The game had a tree, some grass, and a town center composed of tent huts on a 2D isometric grid. A lone animated caveman would chop wood and carry it to the town center, incrementing a resource counter. There might have also been some deer running around that you could hunt for food.

"It seems like an incredibly long time for such a small prototype," Rick said. "But we started with nothing, and we didn't have any people that really knew how to make a game. So I guess in that sense we were on schedule."

Once this basic proof of concept was sorted out, attention turned to the game's design. Rick Goodman took the lead here, with help from Shelley and another childhood friend of theirs by the name of Brian Sullivan.


Enlarge
/ Cover art for the original Age of Empires.
YouTube / Microsoft


Rick grappled with the challenge of incorporating a sweeping history of humankind. He wanted to have seven epochs, beginning in the Stone Age and moving through six major technological leaps, each time unlocking different troops. But he was eager to give players a choice: they could speed through history, advancing quickly from age to age, or they could stop in any age and focus on breadth—to research minor technologies that grant bonuses and additional units. It was no easy task.

"I remember drawing the schematics in Vizio, and I got up to [version] 78 or 79 before we happened on the structure that you're familiar with," he recalled.

Sullivan remembers that he had a hand here in paring back the layers to get to the core elements they needed for a compelling design. When he came on board to help out, Rick's tech tree was enormous. It was so big that multiplayer matches would have been infeasible over the Internet, which was just emerging as an alternative way to play games competitively.

"I said, 'If people are going to be playing online, the longest a game should last is about an hour,'" Sullivan recalled. "You can't just find a stranger across the country and start playing a game that may take three, four, five hours, because one of you is going to have to leave before the game finishes."

Flattening the tech tree and stepping down from seven to four ages worked well with the designers' intended approach for the game, anyway. Borrowing from the lesson of Civilization, which had been designed with help from books in the children's section at a public library, Age of Empires would be about what ex-Ensemble people call "Hollywood history."

Only a game about history, that doesn't take history too seriously, could generate such a rallying cry.


Hollywood history
"In Hollywood movies, the Vikings always have these horned helmets, while in reality I don't think they had horned helmets," Sullivan explained. "But if it worked for Hollywood, it would work for us." The team was beholden to the game's mechanics and to making it more fun to play—not to strict historical accuracy. "If we had to stretch history a little bit to make that work, we did that," he said.

Hence the fan-favorite priests that chanted "aaiiyoooo wololo" as they made enemy units change sides mid-battle. You won't find that in any history books.

History's real value, from a gameplay perspective, was as a shorthand to help players learn the rules. For that, accuracy was irrelevant. As long as Age of Empires seemed historically authentic, it would be accessible to a much larger and more diverse audience than the dozens of fantasy and science fiction RTS games in development at the same time.

"If you look at a sci-fi RTS, you might not be able to tell, 'Why is this better than that unit?'" said programmer Matt Pritchard. "But when you see, in our game, a guy carrying a big club meet[ing] up with a guy in armor riding on top of an elephant, you have a pretty good idea who's going to come out on the bottom of that encounter."

The guys on horses move faster. The ones with arrows can shoot long distances. It's intuitive.

To accentuate their Hollywood history, Tony asked brothers Stephen and David Rippy to compose elaborate music that would tell a story. They started with a piece on early cave people going out on a hunt.

"We went out into the woods with a bunch of microphones and made a bunch of ridiculous caveman sounds and ran around and threw rocks and broke branches and brought all of this stuff back to my apartment, and we kind of made this rhythmic piece of music where we incorporated all of those sounds," Stephen Rippy said.

"At the end of the day we got it pretty close. You could tell what was going on, and you could tell we're making tools, we're stalking the lion, killing a lion, bringing it back home. And we put it in the game, and it was a complete disaster. It was just a joke."

Instead, they decided to do a lo-fi, percussion- and synth-heavy soundtrack in more of a Hollywood-style, mood-setting role that vaguely approximated what ancient music could have been like. (The low-fidelity synthesizer sound specifically was a response to technical limitations—they wanted something that would sound fine on the terrible MIDI sound cards in many PCs at the time.)

Age's art style would take similar liberties with the source material. Despite having no background in the visual arts, Tony Goodman appointed himself art director and oversaw a small team of artists. He felt that most games at the time were full of drab colors. They were dark and gritty. But—in contrast to its conflict-filled gameplay and in a decision that would be crucial to the game's ultimate success—Age of Empires would favor a bright and saturated color palette. "I wanted Ageto be a place that you wanted to be," Tony said.

This happy, sun-drenched world helped the game attract casual players as well as stand out from the competition. Crucially, the look of the game was also the deciding factor for Microsoft signing on as publisher.


Enlarge
/ If you were a game studio with zero history in the mid-'90s, you likely couldn't dream up a better distribution partner. "At the time, the saying was, 'They could put a rock inside a box with a game package and that would sell 400,000 copies.'"
Jeff Christensen/WireImage


Microsoft Games
Ensemble was hardly hurting for resources, given that Age of Empires was a side project for a few people in a company that Tony recalls had around 50 staff. But the realities of software distribution at the time meant the road to self-publishing was fraught with danger, and Ensemble's secure finances meant it couldn't be bullied into a bad deal. So Tony approached a few publishing contacts—including Microsoft product manager Stuart Moulder.

They'd met briefly at the Computer Game Developers Conference. Moulder had just given a talk about Microsoft's new graphics API for Windows games (called WinG) and the company's decision to expand its games-publishing efforts.

Bruce Shelley's involvement lent the project instant credibility, and Moulder was intrigued by the idea of a real-time Civilization. Moulder agreed to come in and have a look at the prototype during a trip to Dallas to check on the progress of a different studio's game.

Moulder remembers that the prototype was surprisingly compelling. "It was captivating, and part of what was captivating was that, visually, it was very rich," he said. "It didn't look like other games out there. Other games tended to be stylized and cartoonish. Warcraft is a good example. It's an attractive game, but it's not an attractive world, if you will. It's a war-torn fantasy world."

The Age of Empires prototype, by contrast, was lush and green—attractive "at some gut level," as Moulder describes it.

Microsoft offered to publish the game. Ensemble eventually agreed to a deal that stipulated Microsoft would own the intellectual property rights but also pay a higher-than-standard royalty rate. This was about the best Ensemble could get as a studio with no published games.

Rick remembers that Ensemble went with Microsoft because of the software giant's reputation. "At the time, the saying was, 'They could put a rock inside a box with a game package and that would sell 400,000 copies,'" he said. In time, it became clear just how naive such thoughts were. "Your assumption is that these people are godlike," Rick recalled, "and it turned out they were mortals like us."

The truth is that Microsoft was as clueless as Ensemble. Neither company knew how to operate in the games market, and both were hurriedly finding their feet. "Lucky for us," noted Rick. "They would never have partnered with us if they had known what they were doing."

Microsoft's lack of games-publishing experience also meant it was happy to sit back and let Ensemble make all creative decisions. And Moulder found that he could give the team even more slack because Microsoft's consumer division "didn't care about games." The division felt obligated to participate in games, but it paid little attention to what the tiny games publishing group did. It barely kicked up a fuss when Age of Empires was delayed six months—twice—in the interest of adding polish and improving the multiplayer balancing.

Mandatory playtesting
Tony Goodman actively encouraged a collaborative environment throughout the Age series. Everyone took ownership of every aspect of the game—regardless of which part they directly worked on—and everyone was required to play the game. Daily. Tony had decided this was necessary while he was researching the games industry before Ensemble started on Age 1.

"I had gone around and looked at other game companies, and I had seen these projects where somebody is working on a driver and somebody else is doing the graphics," he said. "I remember I walked up to some artist and talked to this guy, and he's like, 'Yeah, I'm working on—this is a wheel. It goes on, like, a cart.' I said, 'OK, yeah, that's cool. What's it going to do?' 'Oh, I don't know. I'm just the artist.'"


Enlarge
/ After the initial hit, Age II was inevitable. But how do you update a classic?


Tony couldn't stand this idea of a developer as a cog in a machine, so he mandated that everyone be involved in daily playtests.

After each playtest, which was observed by at least one member of the design team, everyone would have a meeting to discuss how the game was progressing and to bring up ideas for changes or additions. Sometimes, one of the artists would say they could actually show some concept, visually. Often a programmer would suggest an addition nobody realized was possible, such as when Matt Pritchard, who was handling a rewrite of the graphics system to improve the game's shoddy performance, noted that he could make players have a shared line of sight with all of their allies.

One key design concept, the Wonder buildings (which if completed will grant victory to the builder, provided the building remain standing when a countdown timer runs out), also came up during one of these meetings.

That Wonder victory became a beacon to less-skilled players, which turned out to be critical in exposing some fundamental flaws in the AI code during the final month of development.

Moulder was terrible at multiplayer, but he liked to play single-player matches against the AI and found he could beat it every time. It turned out that his play style—to find an area with enough resources to build a wonder, wall it off, defend that wall, quickly advance through the ages, and then build the wonder—was the perfect strategy to defeat the AI. It hadn't been picked up before because multiplayer taught people not to bother with walls (good human players could bypass or defeat them effortlessly).

Becoming a bestseller
Age of Empires finally came out in October 1997. Microsoft's sales projection was 430,000 lifetime copies, miles beyond the team's own expectations through most of the game's development.

"I remember saying to one of our employees, not too far before Age shipped, I think, 'Well, if we ever sell a million of these things I'll buy you a Ferrari,'" Tony laughed. "Because we were thinking if we could sell a hundred thousand we got ourselves a real business there."

The first million came faster than anyone predicted. Moulder remembers thinking everything was stacked against them—that Age of Empires, the odd-duck historical-RTS from boring old Microsoft, looked set to be crushed by the hotly anticipated sci-fi RTSes Dark Reign and Total Annihilation or perhaps just by the sheer weight of the four dozen RTS games in development at the time. Then Dark Reign just about sank without a trace, and Age managed to stand toe to toe—and ultimately outdo—Total Annihilation on the merits of its more accessible theme and presentation.

Familiarity, when tied to a good design in a hot genre, translated into huge sales. Age of Empireswould surpass three million copies sold before the beginning of 2000. Now that they had a hit, it was time to push on with a second game.

The whole team gathered into a room to discuss plans for the sequel. "We talked about periods of time, and we all came back to medieval," Shelley recalled.

"Knights and castles seemed like the next obvious leap. The Middle Ages—after ancient days you have the Middle Ages. And it turned out that that period of time is one of the all time greats for a strategy game. There's so much cool stuff going on with castles and knights. And it was a perfect place to build a game."

But Rick Goodman felt compelled to go in a different direction. He wanted to try something more epic—to go back to that real-time Civilization idea and tackle the entirety of human history rather than a mere subset of it. And, in any case, Ensemble hoped to get the sequel done in a year—which wasn't a good fit for how he worked. Rick decided it would be best if he struck out on his own, so he left to form Stainless Steel Studios and develop Empire Earth.

Castles and knights and development missteps
Rick was gone, Brian Sullivan was busy negotiating a new contract with Microsoft for Age 2's publication, and Bruce Shelley continued to take more of a high-level supervisory, almost-consultancy design role from afar. That meant lead design duties for the sequel fell to Ian Fischer and Mark Terrano, who had both joined Ensemble late in Age 1 development.

"These guys were kind of new to it, and they did what I think a lot of new designers do, which is they kind of put in everything and the kitchen sink into the design," Sullivan said. "Every cool kind of thing they would put in."

This made for an incoherent game once it was ready for playtesting. "It had tons of these cool new features, but none of them were proven and none of them really worked together very well," Sullivan recalled.

Stuart Moulder likens the early stages of Age 2 to a fan letter they'd received for Age 1: eight barely legible, handwritten pages, front and back, crammed edge to edge with all the things this fan thought should go into the next game. "We laughed at that letter, but it was kind of the approach we took with the design, unfortunately."

Ensemble came up with elaborate new diplomacy and market features, a host of automations, complex unit formations, and much more. Retuning all these features didn't seem to be helping, so the design team ripped them all out. The team then replicated the Age 1 features in the new version of the engine and added the new features one at a time. Each feature would be playtested and refined, and, if it still didn't work, it would be cut from the game.

The end result was a lean game with little to no cruft that meaningfully improved on the original, and Age 2's immense sales reflected this—with two million copies sold in its first few months and a long tail few games can match. In 2005, six years after its initial release, Age 2 sold 675,000 copies—more than most new PC games managed.

Many fans and reviewers criticized Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings for being too safe, however. They felt it didn't change enough. In reality, Age 2 added unit formations, automation of some tedious tasks from Age 1 (building queues, finding idle villagers, hotkey unit groupings, patrols, etc.), defensive building garrisoning, different civs and units, new buildings like castles, market trading, unique units for each civilization, improved graphics and AI, scripted events in single-player scenarios, and more.

But players' expectations were a moving target. The genre was evolving, and computers were rapidly increasing in graphical and computational power. "You actually had to improve the game for people to feel like you just stayed still," said Pritchard.

Age of Mythology managed to keep that old dance going a little longer. Its flirtations with 3D graphics were enough to keep it looking modern, and both its gameplay additions—notably, hero and mythological creature units plus god/culture-specific abilities—and its fully orchestrated dynamic soundtrack—finally Stephen Rippy could get away from MIDI—were critically acclaimed. One million units were sold worldwide in just four months.

But Age of Empires III needed to stretch further from the series' gameplay roots. Its eight-figure budget ensured that it would look amazing, at least—especially with the way cannonballs would bounce and roll across the world. For Tony Goodman, Age 3never had much hope of matching the mainstream success of its predecessors, because its timeframe, which charts a course through much of the first wave of European colonization, isn't one of the "big ones"—ancient, medieval, and modern.

"There [are] a million movies done about gladiators and a million movies about knights," he explained, "but there's not that many movies, if you think about it, done about Napoleonics or Revolutionary War/Civil War."

There were missteps on the design side, in any case, with new ideas that didn't feel right for an Agegame and that didn't gel together. Unlike in Age 2—in which nearly all early design problems were resolved during development—Age 3 would end up shipping with some of these.

Bruce Shelley recalls a dozen different versions of the big new feature, home cities, which were intended as a kind of meta game. But Tony Goodman doesn't think the feature ever fully worked. "The home city worked more like a big menu," he said. "And the gameplay on it I thought was—it was a good attempt on our designers' part, but it's never anything that I personally was able to connect with."

Problems aside, Age 3 was still rated one of the best games of 2005 and sold more than two million copies—so hardly a failure, just not the mega-hit that its predecessors had been.

Legacy
Age of Empires III was the last Age game that Ensemble Studios worked on. The company had many projects across several genres that were cancelled, at one point or another in development, along with a Halo-themed Xbox 360 RTS called Halo Wars. Then, in January 2009, after a change in management at Microsoft had killed an in-development Halo MMO the previous year, Microsoft decided to close the studio (which they had acquired back in 2001).

Ensemble's closure triggered the formation of five independent studios, including Tony Goodman's Robot Entertainment—which made a deal with Microsoft to work on a fourth Age of Empires game. That became the short-lived free-to-play Age of Empires Online MMORTS, released in August 2011 and put on life support in January 2013, which doubled down on the saturated colors of old with a cartoony look. Looking back, Goodman thinks Online was destined for failure because by then "there just wasn't much left in the RTS genre."

But now, as we enter 2018, Microsoft seems to be throwing its weight behind the Age franchise again. A new mainline Age of Empires game is in development at Relic, the studio behind the critically acclaimed Company of Heroes and Dawn of War series. And the team of Age 2 modders-turned-developers at Forgotten Empires, who were responsible for Age of Empires II HD's three expansions, will soon release Age of Empires: Definitive Edition, a complete overhaul of the original game, under the technical guidance of Matt Pritchard and with a few other Ensemble veterans in the ranks.

Pritchard said Definitive Edition is like the original game in a "mech power suit or something, from a technical standpoint"—such is the extent of enhancements he and the team have made to modernize the codebase, fix longstanding issues, streamline annoying features, and enhance the good stuff, all with care taken to preserve the feel of Age 1 as opposed to the games that came after.

There are still no formations, for instance—that's an Age 2 feature. But now villagers can walk across farms, so no more accidentally trapping them and worrying so much about farm placement. And the designers are leaning on both their own memories of the original and those of the tens of thousands of beta participants to ensure they stay as faithful to the spirit of the original as possible.

If they get it right, there's sure to be an eager audience waiting to snap up Definitive Edition. And not a small audience, either—at the time of writing, SteamSpy estimates Age of Empires II HD's number of active players at around 400,000.

For the original team, this is a wonderful thing. "I have a couple of teenage kids," Sullivan said, "and it's really cool because now I have the whole family playing Age 2 all the time. My wife's not really a computer gamer at all, but she likes Age 2; it's a nice, accessible, fun kind of game, and the kids like it. So here it is—I don't know—15 years later, and we're still playing this game almost weekly."

Bruce Shelley turns to a sports analogy to reflect on Age 1 and 2's enduring popularity. "To me, it's like digital soccer or football or digital baseball," he said. "I mean, baseball has been played in America for 150 years practically. And people still enjoy just watching it. Well, we've built a game that seems to have the same kind of draw that's going to keep people happy for the rest of their lives. And they don't need another game."

"It's a nice testament to all of us who worked on it that we built a game that has that kind of life."
 

LESS T_T

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Coming next month: https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2018/01/18/age-empires-definitive-edition-launches-february-20/

Age of Empires: Definitive Edition Launches on February 20

When we set out to create the Definitive Edition of the original Age of Empires, our goal was to deliver the best possible version of this classic, from a top notch audio-visual presentation to multiplayer to core game systems. Everything needed to be as good as you remembered it (or better!) to deliver a compelling RTS experience 20 years after its original release.

…and that took us a bit longer than we’d originally planned. But, it was important for the team to treat the Age of Empires franchise with the respect it deserves, so we took the time we needed to get features like attack-move and the improved minimap exactly right, and even added things like an in-game tech tree (how did we survive 1997 without that?) that we hope fans will love.

And now I’m happy to announce that Age of Empires: Definitive Edition is launching on February 20 worldwide for Windows 10 PCs at $19.99 USD.

For this Definitive Edition, we’ve made improvements like:
  • Completely rebuilding assets for a modern 4K presentation
  • Letting you play online with Xbox LIVE (in addition to LAN play)
  • Re-recorded the original soundtrack with a new orchestral score
  • Adding campaign narration for every mission
  • Enhancing the campaign and scenario editor, which allows anyone to make original custom campaigns for the game, by letting players easily share them with other players around the world via AgeOfEmpires.com
The above and more outline the many quality of life gameplay improvements we’ve added – all while retaining the original feel and unique gameplay that made Age of Empires so special for so many.

To celebrate this announce, we’re also opening up the multiplayer beta to more players worldwide starting January 29 so everyone can get a taste of the game for free before it launches on February 20. You can find more information on the beta and sign up for it at AgeOfEmpires.com.

We’re excited to get Age of Empires: Definitive Edition into the hands of players this February and we thank you for your patience while we put the finishing touches on it!

Welcome back to history!
 

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Zboj Lamignat

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They might try and salvage it with a normal release in the future. Then again, it's not like they lack the money to play dumb and stubborn.
 

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https://www.pcworld.com/article/325...ires-definitive-edition-beta-impressions.html

Age of Empires: Definitive Edition could be one of the most impressive remasters ever
In the beginning...

By Hayden Dingman

Games Reporter, PCWorld | Jan 31, 2018 7:22 AM PT

windowsapps-screenshot-2018.01.30-19.16.14.78-100748170-large.jpg

IDG / Hayden Dingman

I like to think the sign of a good remaster is whether it looks the way you remember a game looking in your memories, whether it maintains the spirit of the original. By that definition, Age of Empires: Definitive Edition is one of the best remasters I’ve ever played. Here’s a game that’s over 20 years old, and when I loaded up this week’s closed beta I thought to myself “Yeah, this looks pretty much like I remember.”

Turns out the original Age of Empires actually looked way worse in 1997 than I remembered—a fact Google Images was all-too-happy to remind me of afterward.

Facelift
So yeah, as far as the “Remaster” side of the equation goes, Age of Empires: Definitive Edition ($20 preorder on Amazon) is on track to be a resounding success. A miracle, really. I’d wager the Definitive Edition looks just as good as Age of Empires II: HD Edition, which is phenomenal when you compare what the developers of each had to work with.

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Age of Empires
Here’s a side-by-side comparison of Definitive Edition (left) vs. the original Age of Empires (right) taken from the official website.

That’s not to detract from Age of Empires II HD. A lot of work went into that overhaul too, and it also deserves a spot on the all-time best remaster list. But go ahead and pull up a shot of Age of Empires from 1997. It might as well be a raw block of marble next to Age of Empires II, a fully-sculpted Raphael.

Definitive Edition developer Forgotten Empires had a lot of work to do here, and somehow did it. The menus are a bit underwhelming, but otherwise the art is across-the-board fantastic. Ground textures and water look vivid, buildings are crisp and crumble in a satisfying way, and the units are impressive looking even when restricted to eight-way movement, cavalry especially. Pathfinding? Not as great. But hey, at least it’s easy on the eyes.

The problem is you can only appreciate the remastered visuals when the game works.

Multiplayer, when you can
And that’s a huge caveat, right? It’s also one that only applies to the beta though, and therein lies the problem. Hosting a multiplayer-only beta for Age of Empires: Definitive Edition was (maybe) a mistake.

Oh, I’m sure there are good reasons for it. Multiplayer’s important, and it’s hard to test without live players. The info Microsoft and developer Forgotten Empires are getting from this beta is undoubtedly important—the team wants to smooth over any lingering netcode issues before release. Good justification for a beta!

IDG / Hayden Dingman
There are plenty of issues though. I’ve come to loathe the error message “You are having issues communicating with other players” over the last 24 hours. It's just enough information to make you wonder what’s wrong, but not enough to be actionable in any way. Is the problem on my end? Their end? Who knows, but I’ve been plagued by this notification every time I’ve joined a match—both through the automated matchmaking system and the match browser. Sometimes the lobby doesn’t even load. I just get that message and then I’m kicked back to the menu. No other explanation.

And it’s not just me. In another lobby, two people who’d “joined” were kicked by the system right as the match began, leading to a team imbalance from the get-go.

Problems don’t stop once you’re playing, either. I’ve had workers and other units refuse to follow orders, chat messages seemingly lost to the ether or delayed long past the point they would’ve been useful. Worst of all, the game often freezes every 30 seconds or so, presumably to sync the action back up on everyone’s PC.

Some of these problems are due to latency, and perhaps will get better on their own post-release—once more people own the game and are actively looking for matches. I did have some extremely high pings in the beta.

IDG / Hayden Dingman
But even if some problems are due to latency alone, Age of Empires: Definitive Edition isn’t doing much to help. Since connections are peer-to-peer, there’s no all-encompassing ping for you to measure against in the match browser. Games also don’t seem (as far as the beta’s concerned) to be region-locked, or even let you specify a preferred region.

Thus you have no way of knowing what your connection will be like until you’re in a lobby, and even then the situation might change as more players connect. One match I actually had decently fast connection with two other players, and then a third person connected with 200+ ping. That’s enough to make the entire match borderline unplayable, in a game that requires somewhat fast reactions.

Patches are going up quickly—Microsoft released one as I wrote this, actually. But whereas the Sea of Thieves beta we played last week seemed like a fairly polished bit of marketing, Age of Empires: Definitive Edition is a beta, full stop. There's nothing wrong with that, but it’s not exactly a great showcase for the game, and it remains to be seen whether Forgotten Empires can fix these problems prior to release next month.

IDG / Hayden Dingman
I’m even more skeptical, given some of these problems (like latency) rely on Microsoft securing a large enough player base for multiplayer—with the game exclusive to the Windows Store, no less. Starting at a bit of a disadvantage there.

Bottom line
But damn it looks so amazing when you actually get to play. I have a few game-related qualms—I hate, for instance, that Age of Empires doesn’t let you queue up research for buildings. (Though mercifully, the Rise of Rome expansion’s unit queuing is included here.) There are also some quality-of-life improvements in Age of Empires II that I miss, like uh...gates. That’s right, I forgot the original Age of Empires let you build fortified walls but not gates to get out of them.

Purists will love it though, and even the Age of Empires II diehards like myself might find it interesting to revisit the first game, if only for the campaigns. I’m looking forward to playing through Rise of Rome again—it’s been a long time since I went back to the original. And hey, no need to worry about network issues there.

Look for the full release (and our final review) on February 20.
 

Infinitron

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https://www.pcgamer.com/age-of-empires-stands-the-test-of-time/

Age of Empires stands the test of time
Hands-on with Age of Empires: Definitive Edition.

The last time I played the original Age of Empires was at the expense of math homework involving long division. Bill Clinton was president of the United States, Keanu Reeves was ducking bullets in slow-mo, and Ricky Martin was Livin’ la Vida Loca. It holds an odd place in my gaming past as the first historical RTS I ever picked up, but also by being immediately and permanently eclipsed by its superior sequel only a couple years later. Thus, my first thought after the announcement of Age of Empires: Definitive Edition was, “Why would I play that again in a world where Age of Empires II exists?”

As it turns out, the original Age is still an entertaining, multilayered, tactical multiplayer experience (the campaign wasn’t available yet in this particular beta) that isn’t half bad to look at with the graphical renovations Definitive Edition has received.

Still, there were plenty of things I miss from AoE2. Remembering little details like, “Wow, the first game didn’t have unique units for each faction?” tripped me up a little. But even in newer strategy games, there is something to be said for simplicity. And it’s perhaps because of this relative simplicity that the formula remains enjoyable.

Age of Empires is largely a game about expansion and division of labor. Balancing your population between building new structures, gathering the right proportions of each of the four main resources, and having an army large enough to protect it all and expand your borders is the decision-making engine that drives everything. The diversity of resources also tends to steer expansion differently than most modern RTSes. In StarCraft 2, for instance, expansion bases are almost interchangeable in terms of their economic output. You take a new base when you need to increase your intake of any given resource and the primary discriminating factor is location.

Age of Empires runs a little differently in that running out of stone or gold while you still have plenty of wood to harvest might lead you to expand differently than if the reverse were true. Expansion tends to happen in smaller, overlapping waves based on what resource you’re about to run out of in the immediate future. I find myself thinking about “wood expansions” and “stone expansions” rather than simply grabbing another base.

This specificity also means scouting the map is important not just for knowing what your enemy is up to, but for locating expansion locations—something that generally isn’t a concern in modern RTSes. All the while, the clearing of forests and establishment of new structures and fortifications as the ages progress gives a very real feeling that you’re moving out of the mists of the untold past and into an era of warring empires, which is a big part of why I originally found Age of Empires fascinating as a kid.

Also notable is the more naturalistic unit balancing, as opposed to the rock-paper-scissors schemes we’re used to today that are specifically designed for hard counters and reactive play. In Age of Empires, a swordsman works intuitively how you’d expect a swordsman to work. The same can be said of a chariot archer, a hoplite, or a war elephant. There’s less need to memorize what kinds of units are intended by the developers to be particularly good against others, because it mostly follows along the lines of real-world logic. You don’t run into a lot of hidden modifiers that cause you to lose a battle because you didn’t realize a certain archer had a special damage bonus against the armor type of your cataphract.

As a result, I found that I was focusing a lot more on unit positioning and the terrain of each engagement than specific army compositions, which was somewhat refreshing. There are still some issues with unit control I had to re-adapt to, however. Similar to marines in StarCraft Remastered, the front rank of a large group of archers will begin firing as soon as they get into range, often blocking the back rank from doing the same. This led to some unnecessary-feeling micro, as I’ve gotten used to smarter unit AI in recent years.

Microsoft Studios has done an excellent job on the graphics and the user interface. It still looks and feels how I remember it looking and feeling in the '90s, but with a level of detail that treats you for zooming in on a stately town center or a throng of busy villagers chopping wood. Each sprite is colorful, readable, and popping with personality at 1080p. There are RTSes that have come out in the last five years that are less pleasing to look at. Navigating building menus, creating unit groups, and scrolling around the map also never felt clunky or dated—which is, again, a feat that not all modern games are able to accomplish. My one visual gripe was the minimap, which in general isn’t as communicative as I’m used to in newer games.

The most striking thing about Age of Empires: Definitive Edition from the time I’ve spent with it so far is that it truly doesn’t feel like I’m playing a remaster of a 20-year-old game. If this exact build were released for the first time as a brand new franchise today, I think I’d still have a relatively positive impression of it. And perhaps that goes to show that not all classics are classics just because they broke new ground. At least in this case, it’s also because it’s still a really fun strategy game—a Wonder in and of itself—that continues to outshine much of what came in the two decades of RTSes it inspired.
 

Vaarna_Aarne

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They seem to be avoiding the topic of interface improvements (since a said previously, any remaster of AoE1 should take the effort to upgrade the interface to at least be the one from AoE2). Not a promising sign.
 

thesheeep

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The whole thing was very questionable from the beginning.
I really don't understand why anyone would want to play this over AoE2 HD. Other than nostalgia for the campaign, maybe?

Plus, this will be exclusive to the Windows Store (and therefore, exclusive to Win10, too). No Steam, no GOG, nothing.
And with completely absurd reasoning, too. As if a game being on Steam would in any way influence how its multiplayer/matchmaking works :lol:
Which means it will be dead on arrival.
 
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Vaarna_Aarne

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I really don't understand why anyone would want to play this over AoE2 HD. Other than nostalgia for the campaign, maybe?
Well besides obvious nostalgia, I also think it's set in a very neat time period and I like starting off in the Stone Age.

Main thing to me is really that those two things aren't enough to endure the original interface, which is simply so clunky and primitive it is painful to use. AoE2 sported one of the first modern RTS interfaces, and that is key for why it's still enjoyable to play (although the face the villagers and other units sprites are the same for everyone triggers my autism; albeit nowadays there's mods for doing something about that for military units at least).
 

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