Last week, the long-awaited event took place at the X019 conference in London on the night from Thursday to Friday - Microsoft showed the gameplay to continue the famous strategic series Age of Empires IV. At first glance, the project, surrounded by the "fog of war" for several years now, resembles a 3D remake of Age of Empires II, the most popular part of the series, which is still played by millions of RTS and history lovers. We warn you: it is too early to “throw money into the monitor” - gaming publications are called the approximate release date
Under the cut you will find a story about why the release of the new Age of Empires had to wait 15 whole years, the maximum of known details about the fourth part of the legendary strategic series, as well as a review of the closed show of the game, based on the testimony of witnesses and the gaming press.
The Fall of Empires and Sunset Ensemble Studios
So, why did we see the new part of the series only 15 years after the release of the third part of the game?
The fact is that the creator of the “same” games of the Age of Empires series that you are familiar with was Ensemble Studios - founded in 1995 and closed in 2009. The author of these lines asked several interesting questions to one of Ensemble Studios developers Richard Geldreich, who participated in the creation of Age of Empires, and his answers shed some light on the reasons for the closure of the studio. You can get acquainted with the history of the rise and fall of Ensemble Studios in details by reading the translation of last year's article , which I published on Habré.
The founders of Ensemble Studios set themselves an ambitious goal - to create a strategy that, in principle, would resemble the dizzyingly popular Civilization, but at the same time it was a real-time strategy. They quite succeeded (not without the help of one of the creators of the original “Civilization”) - the first part of “Age of Empires” quickly gained popularity in the gaming market, and its sequel “shot” for real, becoming a resounding commercial success (annual sales of Age of Empires not only didn’t fall, but continued to grow from year to year) and thereby determining the landscape of historical strategies in real time ten years in advance.
Today, Rick Geldreich sincerely regrets the closure of the studio and calls Ensemble the best place he has ever worked - and he has something to compare, because his track record includes Valve, Unity and SpaceX. The company's management has always taken a strong position, trying to protect developers from inappropriate claims and wishes from Microsoft - the company of Bill Gates acted as a publisher who constantly tried to intervene in the game development process, while not really delving into it. After the release of Age of Empires 2, Microsoft acquired Ensemble Studios and made it one of its internal studios, but the old order in it did not change until the last.
Unfortunately for all fans of the series, as part of Microsoft, the company developed only one of the planned games in the Empires line - Age of Empires III (but managed to do the Age of Mythology spin-off, dedicated to myths and gods, which also found its loyal fans).
According to the studio staff, the main mistake that Age of Empires III failed and led to the end of the series was crept into the choice of the era to which the game was dedicated: they say that the theme of conquering America did not cause much interest or pride among modern Americans. “The question is, what crazy idea could this idea have come to mind? That's the question,” says Richard.
But this, of course, was not the only cause of failure. According to insiders, the creation of the third part of the franchise cost Microsoft $ 50 million (of which about half went to development, and half to marketing); The studio staff themselves for a long time believed that this figure was "only" $ 30 million. At that time it was a huge budget for the game, especially for a real-time strategy. Microsoft hoped that Age of Empires III would be able to repeat the fantastic commercial success of its predecessor, and that lightning would strike the same place twice - but these predictions were not destined to come true.
At the time of the closure, the company was working on several projects - one of which was the Halo Wars game, designed for the Xbox 360 console. In 2008, the studio was moved to a new office for 120 people, and only a few months later they reduced all but the key employees by announcing however, after the release of Halo Wars, the studio will be closed. Microsoft kept its word - in those years, the company, led by Steve Ballmer, "killed" the internal gaming studios one after another.
Years later, in an interview with Gamers at Work authors Tony Goodman, founder of Ensemble Studios, said that in his final life phase, most of the studio’s efforts were devoted to a project codenamed Titan - do not confuse it with another “fallen” Titan, which Blizzard created the same time (and from the fragments of which Overwatch was born). All that is known about him is that the project was to become Halo MMORPG, and that Microsoft decided to close the game in 2009.
Before finally closing the studio, Microsoft arranged an urgent meeting with Goodman and invited him to buy his studio back. He declined this offer; instead, he agreed to close Ensemble and founded a new studio, which was to continue developing Age of Empires. This was the real end of Ensemble Studios.
Among the closed projects of the studio was the original version of Age of Empires IV, which at that time was still at an early stage of development. Many players expected that in the fourth part of the game, the action would be transferred to the 20th century, based on an advertising illustration that was distributed on the Web, but after the release of Age of Empires III, plans had to change dramatically. Now the developers have decided that the new "Age of Empires" will mark a return to the roots of the series. Several developers worked on it, who planned to adapt the game engine to low system requirements (so that it could be played on netbooks), as well as to digital distribution through the Steam platform, which was then gaining momentum.
Microsoft invited them to turn the game into social F2P, which was on the rise in those years, and after the closure of Ensemble Studios, development went on for a while at Robot Entertainment, the very new studio recently founded by Tony Goodman, who now worked with several key Ensemble veterans who once created Age of Empires.
Goodman agreed with Microsoft that he would find another studio that would complete the development of the game, and that was Gas Powered Games, which a few years later released a game called Age of Empires Online. Today it is customary not to recall it in a decent society.
New Empire Developer
Age of Empires IV was announced in August 2017. In the short trailer, there were no hints of a historical era, nor of gameplay, nor - much less - of the release date.
After that, the game did not appear on either E3 2018 or E3 2019 - let alone Gamescom, where a variety of developers traditionally demonstrate their new strategies. The head of the Xbox Game Studios, Phil Spencer, who is responsible for the Microsoft gaming division, cleverly avoided answering journalists' questions, evasively noting that “the development of the game is in full swing”, and the company, which was entrusted to it, “are great fellows who constantly surprise us with their creative potential ". All this is clearly not without reason.
When Microsoft decided to start the creation of Age of Empires IV, no one was found within its walls who would have a sufficient level of competence to create the heiress of the famous strategic series. Microsoft had to choose a studio that could make a game that would take its rightful place among its predecessors.
But who could make a quality RTS in 2015? Only Blizzard (which, of course, would hardly have started working with someone else’s franchise) and Creative Assembly, which has been noted by Warhammer for their excellent performance in recent years: Total War, come to mind - however, the British have always been known for their preference for the genre of tactical strategies, as well as made for Microsoft a sequel to another Ensemble Studios game - Halo Wars 2. Remain Entertainment remained, a company that knew a lot about RTS - the authors of the wonderful Warhammer: Dawn of War and Company of Heroes. It is not surprising that the choice was made in favor of the latter - the studio was deservedly loved by all RTS fans.
However, the latest Relic Entertainment game - released in April 2017 by Warhammer: Dawn of War III - although it earned the praise of the press, was literally torn apart by fans of the series after release. Yes, the unjustified expectations of the players played here - they dreamed that the third part of the game would combine the best features of the gameplay of the two previous games, which were absolutely different from each other - but this does not cancel out the many shortcomings of the game and controversial decisions, like practically the complete lack of cards in multiplayer at the time of its release.
The worst thing was that it was obvious that most of these decisions were made at the highest level - by the producers and managers of Relic Entertainment, who were not going to leave after a major failure. As a result, the huge credit of trust issued by the studio by that time by the players was lost, and the trailer of its announcement, which, according to the players, “made people who understand the Warhammer 40K universe much better than those, was the best part of Dawn of War III who developed this game. "
Some time after the announcement of Age of Empires IV, one of the insiders spread a rumor that the situation in Relic has not changed, the management still can not decide what it needs, and the new Age of Empires from the very beginning goes wrong direction. This information quickly spread through Reddit and news outlets, but no one was in a hurry to make rebuttals; time passed, and fans' hopes that something would change continued to melt along with once-high expectations.
Who could then know that this rumor would be essentially the only news about the game in two years.
World's edge
Meanwhile, Microsoft began to release remasters of the first parts of the series. They were warmly received by the fans, despite some shortcomings (such as problems with the netcode in Age of Empires: Definitive Edition). Many saw a good sign in this move - it helped to unite the community and attract new players, thereby heating the audience’s interest in the release of Age of Empires IV.
The release of the gameplay of the new part of “The Age of Empires” was timed to coincide with the release of a remaster of its most popular part - Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition. He was engaged in a new studio, which in a press release on E3 2019, Microsoft itself called simply Age of Empires Studios; only a few days later we became aware of its real name, World's Edge. On the shoulders of the studio, which currently employs 30 people, lay not only remasters, but also work on the franchise as a whole.
It is worth noting that World's Edge employs those who know a lot about creating real-time strategies. For example, among its leaders is Chris Rabior, who has been working in the gaming industry since 1994. Chris took part in the creation of the classic parts of the Command & Conquer, Star Wars: Empire at War and The Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle-earth series as a game designer, and began with QA work on the “Lion King” - A complete list of his achievements can be found here .
According to Phil Spencer, while working on reissues of Age of Empires, World's Edge has gathered a huge amount of feedback about Age of Empires IV in order to have an idea of what the game's community of fans expects to continue. It seems that his words can be safely interpreted a little differently - apparently, in addition to directly working on the reissue, World's Edge got the function of supervising Relic.
As it turned out, the criticism that fell on Relic for Dawn of War III greatly influenced the attitude to development within the company. Everyone who works closely with the studio is unanimous - this time Relic is working to the limit in order to make sure that the new game will be worthy of the name Age of Empires. According to the creative director of the series, Adam Aisgrin, now he rather offers Relic to experiment with new ideas than the studio is ready to step back from the canon.
The situation in which Relic and World's Edge today are located is reminiscent of the task that Nival and Ubisoft faced when developing Heroes of Might & Magic V: when you need to take as a basis the popular previous part of the game series (performed, for example, in 2D) and make a new part of it (at the same time, let’s say, correctly transferring it to 3D, which is not the most trivial task in itself), while trying to add new gameplay elements to it and not accidentally divide the fan camp into two parts (what happened in time with the fourth part of "Heroes").
The latter, of course, is an almost impossible task - they will be dissatisfied in any case. Therefore, what’s new in Age of Empires IV, its creators still prefer not to spread, being extremely careful, and not forgetting to shake the air with loud marketing promises from time to time that “we never played what like that. " The walls of the studio itself say that the purpose of the game is to "humanize the story" (no matter what it really means).
Behind the Scenes X019
In fact, the recent show at the X019 conference was not limited to just a trailer - behind closed doors, World's Edge employees demonstrated the game to selected journalists on laptops. Their opinion is unanimous - the game looks "like Age of Empires II, but in 3D and more beautiful."
The creators set themselves the goal of attracting millions of players to the game, so they decided to bet on the most popular setting among fans of the Empires - the Middle Ages. However, Age of Empires IV will cover a longer period of time than the second part. The game will focus on medieval Europe, but World's Edge art director clearly hinted that if the game is successful, inevitable add-ons with other nations and their story campaigns await us. Apparently, we are again waiting for campaigns containing free retelling of stories from the life of historical figures; at least, the developers claim that they tried to authentically reflect the culture of the nations that will be present in the game. Details? Alas, due to the ubiquitous look of the PR colleagues present at the show, Icegreen could not afford to reveal them.
Relic carefully transferred the buildings, familiar from the second part, to the world of three-dimensional models, while completely preserving their recognizability - for example, in the British settlement shown to reporters, behind the winding walls in the middle of houses, barracks, a university, a church and a market, a good old castle still stands.
However, the developers decided not to stop there. In the second part of the “Age of Empires” civilizations differed among themselves in special units. Here Relic decided to go even further - now different nations will differ not only in appearance but also in gameplay. The reporters were shown the game for the British against the Mongols; if the former fully fit into the gameplay of the classic AoE - collecting resources, building additional houses, and so on - then when playing for the Mongols, the style of the game changed significantly, since those from the very beginning had the opportunity to conduct quick raids due to the presence of cavalry. It is already obvious that the in-game economy and hiring units for different nations will look different, but for now the developers are not going to reveal their cards - they say, let the players wonder if the construction of the base will be used in principle when playing for the Mongols.
The gameplay trailer provoked a discussion in the game community of one acute question: how big will the unit limit be this time? The creative director of the series, Adam Icegreen, says that there is no concrete answer to this question yet, but everything shown in the trailer is a record of the real gameplay, which for us means the possibility of having hundreds of units on the screen at the same time. However, it’s time already - Age of Empires IV will probably come out no earlier than the moment when we are faced with the next generation of consoles. But again, you should not hope that the large-scale battles seen in the trailer can be played in multiplayer - but, according to the developers, they can easily be arranged in a single player game.
The fog of war is returning, and with it will return the classic resources - food, wood, gold and stone. Special units exclusive to individual nations, as well as hero units, will return to the game. In the case of the Mongols, such a leader would be the Khan (Mongols the Khane). By the way, one of his special abilities made his way into the trailer, but you hardly noticed her: the falcon, which the British settlement opens for us at the beginning of the trailer from the fog of war, is an in-game mechanics consisting in summoning the special ability of a unit hero.
The key feature of the past parts - the era that opens up access to new buildings, technologies and units, will return to us. Here the players will be surprised: the classic four eras through which we will need to conduct our civilization will not be available to all nations - for example, the same Mongols will have three of them.
One of the key principles of developers regarding game design is that all visual elements of the game process should be somehow connected with the gameplay. It is not just about every upgrade of units and buildings; You may already have noticed that for the first time units are allowed to stand on walls, and they have an advantage in attacking the enemy.
The construction of the walls was substantially redesigned and made an important element of the gameplay (which fans of the Stronghold series will certainly enjoy) - now they can be built on rivers and rocks. By the way, you start again with a wooden fence - according to tradition, the right to erect full-fledged stone walls will still have to be earned.
Knights who are struggling to cut walls and buildings with their swords, we will not see again either - presumably, they will damage buildings by throwing lighted torches at them. According to Adam Aisgrin, only this one detail managed to infuriate several participants of the “Players Council” at once, but at least this innovation can be called logical - and it has the right to life.
For most of the features of the new “Age”, developers collect feedback from the so-called “Council of Players” - selected representatives of the community who have been expressing their views on various aspects of the game and gameplay for two years now (and this once again confirms the theory that Microsoft in time drew attention to the situation with the failure of DoW and wanted to avoid this situation with her new game). According to Chris Rubior, director of design, the degree of involvement of these players in the process of creating an AAA-level game is simply unique.
In terms of workflows, World's Edge superiors focus on Amplitude Studios, the creators of the successful and popular Endless strategy series these days. With the release of alpha and beta versions, Age of Empires IV will be available to an increasing number of players - the developers have already planned to conduct closed beta testing. A similar approach was used by them in the process of creating the re-release of Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition - there the players continued to play the test build provided to them until the release.
With this approach to collecting feedback, players are not shy in their expressions - any game developer is aware that each player knows best what the game should be, but blindly follow the wishes of individual players.
The developers refused to use the card system, which was used in Age of Empires III, despite the fact that some players insisted on her return - the fact is that its use for the gameplay seemed to the developers questionable.
Of course, sitting on two chairs will be difficult - the developers plan not only to play nostalgia, but also try to modernize the RTS genre. It seems that we already heard this somewhere (and this was Warhammer: Dawn of War III somewhere), so the journalists were immediately assured that no flirting with the MOBA genre was expected here. The goal is to preserve the gameplay and unique features of the second part of “Empires”, introducing some reasonable amount of new features and game mechanics into it.
Age of Empires II surrounds a huge community, and now Microsoft is least of all needed a crowd of angry fans. And this concerns not only changes and game content, but also the technological basis of the game.
Technology priorities
Here we are waiting for a surprise, which is as follows: at the time of the announcement of the game at Gamescom 2017, the studio already had a fully playable build, even though it lacked most of the necessary functions. The playable version appeared among developers almost from the very first day of development, which cannot but rejoice - after all, the sooner playtesting begins (at least internal), the more chances there are to get a good game; This approach allows you to quickly check whether new game mechanics work when adding them to the game.
Attentive players have already noticed that judging by the way the foliage looks in the trailer (and the rest of the so-called foliage), we can confidently say that the game works on the basis of the improved Essence Engine that Relic once used for Company of Heroes 2 In fact, everything, of course, is somewhat more complicated. Although Relic Entertainment had its own engine, sharpened under RTS, Microsoft set a new ambitious goal for them - Age of Empires IV should be playable on as many PC configurations as possible.
As a result, the engine had to be rewritten, and very thoroughly. In terms of optimization, the developers of Age of Empires IV take an example from games like DOOM (2016), which are able to show good results even on weak systems, adapting to them. Microsoft believes that the target audience for the new Epoch will be no less than for Nintendo hits, so the game should be able to adapt to them both in terms of graphics and management. Huge maps, numerous units, the dynamic destruction of buildings and walls - all this should look great for fans to play in 4K resolution and fine-tune for everyone else. World's Edge has accumulated rich experience in communicating with players, so this issue was initially given special attention.
For the development team, the priorities were the engine’s full readiness - by the time the game mechanics were fully approved and feature freeze happened, it had to be 100% functional - as well as the desire to avoid technical debt as much as possible so that developers did not have to waste precious time in the future to deal with bottlenecks in engine performance.
Relic Link is used as the server backend and to store player profiles for all new games and reissues in the Age of Empires series - World's Edge is going to continue to use it further with the release of possible sequels, new additions, and the DLC.
The main (and at the moment - the only) platform for the release of the game is PC, and since we are dealing with RTS, this will certainly please many players - after all, developers will not have to adapt to the limitations of the gamepad; with all due respect to the achievements of the Halo Wars series, which was highly praised for the successful transfer of classic RTS gameplay to the console, many players continue to be skeptical about the idea that using a gamepad it will be more convenient for them to manage hundreds of units. The game version for consoles is currently not in operation and is not in the developers roadmap, but it may well appear in the future.
Alas, the technical details disclosed by developers today are exhausted.
***
In the end, now the main mystery of Age of Empires IV is the release date. Age of Empires IV still does not have it, since the developers themselves do not yet know when the game will be ready - however, it is quite possible that they are just cunning, since the producers firmly forbade them to inform it.
I would like to believe that such a long development cycle for our time will benefit the game, and its authors will be able to find a healthy balance between innovations and indulging nostalgic fans. But here it remains only to quote an encouraging (and at the same time somewhat caustic) commentary on the game trailer on YouTube:
"I know why this is taking so long. They are building a Wonder »