I'm one of the biggest AoE2 fans out there-- it's my favorite game of all time and I've played thousands of games of it. I also loved the original AoE and the related Age of Mythology.
In spite of that, I feel this is nothing to be excited about.
Age of Empires 1 & 2 were special because they were designed by a special team at a company called Ensemble Studios, which was bought by Microsoft and sadly shut down in 2009. None of that team remain with Microsoft.
AoE4 is being developed by Relic, a company with no track record to speak of.* It has nothing in common with the game many of us know and love other than the title. It is extremely unlikely to have the depth, nuance, replayability, and well-thought out design that made the original franchise a hit.
In place of those things, it's likely to have shockingly poor multiplayer integration through the Windows store as Microsoft inevitably rejects Steam integration, and god knows what other modern problems like microtransactions.
Frankly I feel there's very little to be hyped about here.
And god do I ever hope I'm wrong.
*They made some decent games 15 years ago. How many of those designers and developers are still with the company now? How many will be working on AoE4? And were their best games good enough that they're still so beloved that they merit re-releases, new expansions, and definitive editions 20 years later? I don't think so...
Relic has a great track record, but unfortunately the last great RTS they made was Company of Heroes 11 years ago, and the last good RTS was Dawn of War II 7 years ago.
Their last 2 games (Company of Heroes 2, Dawn of War III) were not nearly as good and were not well recieved, basically rehashes of past series aimed at an audience that doesn't play RTS games anymore.
Pretty sad considering they're pretty much the last old RTS developer still alive, and almost no one new is making RTS games.
Relic is know for Real Time Tactic, not Real Time Strategy (RTS) games. Guess what AoE series was - RTS. Base building and mass of units are part of AoE RTS gameplay. Relic with it's Halo 2 casual game, no free base building and it card trading elements is NOT a good record.
As I said in another comment, does that matter? Homeworld is from 1999. How many people who worked at Relic in 1999 are going to be working on AoE4? My guess is zero.
Right, i wasn't entirely clear on what the implications of this are.
You said they have a good track record.
The current context of the thread is the revival of a game series 12 years after its last entry. This means they'll need to do a vast amount of work in updating both the graphics and the gameplay in order to produce a worthwhile successor. (Note worthwhile and good are not the same. It's entirely possible to make a good game that won't be worthwhile for a large portion of the possible audience.)
One of the examples you cite towards their track records is a game that had success, but was built in a completely different way from what they do now. (Immediately after the inspiration thus not requiring a leap in graphics; and gameplay-wise with a smaller feature set.)
Thus it doesn't seem to me that Company of Heroes is a particularly useful indicator for what they'll do with AoE 4.
(Edit: Also, tbh, due to what S:HOWW2 is (in simple terms, multiple games combined), the decisions of which parts to keep were trivial. I don't want to go into detail here as the post is already big enough, but i recommend investigation of the details.)
Good points. But to be fair I feel this way about 99% of the games being developed over the past few years. Huge marketing budgets, big flashy announcement trailers, followed by repetitive delays, pay-walled content, and broken games at launch.
As much as I love the AoE franchise, I doubt this is the comeback everyone thinks it is.
Game studios don't make good games anymore, they create and sell hype, and we keep buying into it.
Except for a few ones. Naughty Dog comes to my mind. Everything they have produced have been consistently good. I'm following the ex team of infinity wards as well (haven't played titan fall but heard good things). Nintendo always produce good flagship games. What else can be praised out there?
Paradox Development and (the associated) Colossal Order have repeatedly produced some fantastic games.
Paradox's grand strategy games (Crusader Kings II, EU 4 and Victoria, among others) are absurdly deep and have a really broad play style continuum.
Cities:Skylines definitely has its flaws, but it handily took the torch from the fumbling wasteland of SimCity 2013.
Edit: To add, both series/companies do a great job of using their DLC to add actual, refreshing content to the game. That's a big win in my book over "Buy this new hat!"
Blizzard. Their last two games (Overwatch, Hearthstone) were incredible. I think their only mediocre game was Diablo III, but they actively worked to fix it.
Yeah I mean there has been a fem gems, but it's a small fraction of the crap that's released. The bigger point is that there's no incentive to release polished, finalized games. People will pay for it either way, based on hype alone.
If that is the same Relic that made the Company of Heroes series, then they do got quite a bit of track record: the series is extremely well made, and stands amongs the greatest of strategy games. They weren't too popular for several reasons, biggest one the decline of strategy games in general. But it seems like AoE is in good hands
One of the first things I did went I added a PC to my household (for programming a VR project and... to play games. Also my girlfriend didn't have a computer of her own at the time) was dug out an old copy of AoE2 get it going. I think I was up until 5 am that night, and I'm not normally an overnight gamer. In fact I treat it like ice cream and try to not get sucked in very much.
I do hope you're wrong, too. The seeming story of the person asking Mr. Gates for a new release is pretty charming, and will continue to be if they nail it.
> Age of Empires 1 & 2 were special because they were designed by a special team at a company called Ensemble Studios, which was bought by Microsoft and sadly shut down in 2009. None of that team remain with Microsoft.
Ensemble also made AoE3 which I loathed and Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds which was a bit of a turd. Also note that Microsoft acquired Ensemble in 2001, during the development cycle of Age of Mythology (which was phenomenal), so an independent Relic could be as good as or better than an internal Ensemble.
> Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds was developed by LucasArts by licensing the Genie game engine from Ensemble Studios. The game, as well as the Clone Campaigns expansion pack, was designed and directed by Garry M. Gaber.
Taken from Wikipedia. Garry M. Gaber worked at LucasArts. Ensemble had nothing to do with SW:GB.
"AoE4 is being developed by Relic Entertainment, which previously worked on the Company of Heroes and Dawn of War serie"
Exactly. Relic has no track record of RTS games. Real a Time Strategy (RTS) is completely different to Real Time Tactic games, the later Relic has experience with. The Halo 2 game was a casual one with even card game elements and dumbed down gameplay (no free base building, etc). Not on Steam - not gonna playing it. Sorry but no thanks to UWP Store. The last AoE is III, from the awesome Ensemble Studio.
Relic just recently screwed up DoW3, CoH2 has become micro-transaction hell even in multi-player against bots, so I wouldn't expect much.
I've always played these RTSes with friends against bots, and Relic have basically been at war with our play-style for a decade. First they said the RTS was dead, then dispatched with base-building and then added in terrain heights that are impossible to discern from a top-down view. Now they have made the DoW series into some sort of bad DotA/RTS hybrid, removing cover and morale, that's got terrible reviews.
Prepare for your fond memories of AoE to be trampled over.
FYI - I'm having a lot of trouble getting any information at all from this comment, because so much of it is tied up in abbreviations that I don't understand.
CoH = Company of Heroes, WWII-themed real-time strategy game
RTS = Real Time Strategy
DotA = Defense of the Ancients, a (the original?) MOBA
MOBA = Multiplayer Online Arena Battle, initially a more action-oriented subgenre of real-time strategy, though IMO closer to real-time tactics games as it's smaller scale with more important units and itemisation, no base construction/management and more limited resource management. I think the RTS link only exists because the "original", DotA, was a mod on an RTS (Warcraft III) (it was not the original one but as with e.g. Minecraft it basically opened up and popularised the genre), probably the most popular eSport category today
AoE = Age of Empires, real-time strategy game set in a semi-realistic past, the first two installments were roughly set between the stone age and the middle ages or renaissance, the third one does not exist and is set during the Age of Discovery
I've never known whether I'm in an incredible minority, or there's a silent majority who just play the game against the computer, enjoying these RTSes as tower defence style base-building.
Dune 2, Star Craft, Warcraft, Red Alert, CoH, DoW, etc., my friends got tired of the cheap strategies like orc tower rushes and the toxic taunting by human payers that you couldn't turn off and so instead we started to team up against the computer, increasing the difficulty or the number of computer players and turtling up in base. A relaxing macro game, instead of the frantic micro these games all seem to have evolved into.
Unfortunately as time has gone on the AIs seem to have got worse and the base building strategies side-lined, removed or punished.
> Unfortunately as time has gone on the AIs seem to have got worse and the base building strategies side-lined, removed or punished.
I played a lot of StarCraft with my brother against AIs when I was younger.
I have since played a lot of multiplayer games, but as you said, it's not as relaxing, which is what I want from games nowadays when I take the time to play them.
I don't expect the OpenAI initiative with Dota 2 to automatically lead to better games AI in the foreseeable future, but I hope it might lead to a renewed interest in them in games, and in time something simulating real players in more games (minus the toxicity, and being pausable without anyone wasting anyone elses time).
I also love playing RTS's like that, and the one I have found which delivers big time is Planetary Annihilation. The AI is fantastic ( without cheating ), you can load up to 12 AI's, and you can make massive maps that allow multiple play styles. It has a bit of a learning curve, but I have had lots of fun playing large scale battles against massive numbers of AI.
I personally couldn't stand Planetary Annihilation due to the camera, but there are other great Total Annihilation clones out there, like Supreme Commander (w/Forged Alliance expansion) and Spring Engine games (open source)
I love playing true RTS like AoE 1-3/Mythology, Empire Earth and C&C Generals - games that can be played in single player against really good AI bots on random generated maps. Unfortunately the RTS genre is dead for 13 years (except SC2, but I play only realistic scenarios not SciFi).
I am with you 100%!
Me and my mates also team up against increasing AI's of increasing difficulty. Lots of fun.
It's great to beat each other, but it's also great to beat the computer together :-)
Me and my friends, none of us actually really into gaming, played hours of AOE III at university, we'd load up against expert bots, who have an insane buff at the start, and grind away until we won.
Why would there be? There’s not a sufficient market for it. Hoping for the day when everyone magically supports Linux hasn’t worked for 20 years. Maybe it’s time for a different plan?
Often porting cost is much less than profit from this market. This is quite geeky game intended primarily for fans of old AoE, lots of such fans are using Linux and Mac Os now.
As a long time fan of the AoE who thought that the series was dead, this news is rejuvenating. I've found the chess-like gameplay of turn based strategy games to be frustrating, and there are hardly any new games being made in the RTS genre anymore.
What do you mean by turning it into a MOBA? I would really appreciate a launcher/matchmaking interface similar to League of Legends - granted the game itself remains a RTS just like AoE2.
MOBA is a bad genre label used to distinguish games like Dota and League of Legends from RTSs like Starcraft. It's a concept that is completely orthogonal from providing a matchmaking service with your game.
I know (I used to play LoL after all, so I'm familiar with the genre), but I've seen people misusing the term very often. I wasn't sure because I'm not entirely sure how would they turn a game like AoE into a MOBA - it wouldn't be an update of the original game, it would be a whole new concept published under the same name.
In spite of that, I feel this is nothing to be excited about.
Age of Empires 1 & 2 were special because they were designed by a special team at a company called Ensemble Studios, which was bought by Microsoft and sadly shut down in 2009. None of that team remain with Microsoft.
AoE4 is being developed by Relic, a company with no track record to speak of.* It has nothing in common with the game many of us know and love other than the title. It is extremely unlikely to have the depth, nuance, replayability, and well-thought out design that made the original franchise a hit.
In place of those things, it's likely to have shockingly poor multiplayer integration through the Windows store as Microsoft inevitably rejects Steam integration, and god knows what other modern problems like microtransactions.
Frankly I feel there's very little to be hyped about here.
And god do I ever hope I'm wrong.
*They made some decent games 15 years ago. How many of those designers and developers are still with the company now? How many will be working on AoE4? And were their best games good enough that they're still so beloved that they merit re-releases, new expansions, and definitive editions 20 years later? I don't think so...