[Zaxx]

There is some teasing going on here:
https://www.ageofempires.com/hyse/

At the bottom of the website there is a part that's protected by a password so chances are the numbers and letters in the video are providing clues to figure that out along with the images. "Elric" seems to be an anagram for Relic Entertainment and the number 4 is a recurring thing so it looks like we'll know something about Age of Empires 4 soon.

[Zaxx]

Another video got released with different numbers and a differently colored square in the top left corner:
https://www.facebook...09046089198423/
The plot thickens.

[Zaxx]

This whole "hyse" thing is fun stuff but it looks like fans will just have to wait for MS to release more clues. So far 4 videos were released with different number and letters on them with the last one being this one:


These seem to be coordinates on a 1920x1080 image, especially since they released a screenshot from AoE 2 DE:
https://twitter.com/...775182159941632
There is one male villager on the shot and when combined with the video that has the colour green in its corner you get this:

So yep, they'll release more shots and chances are that will lead to the password.

[MrFlibble]

How exciting

[Zaxx]

Honestly it will be exciting only if it will actually be something at the end. So far people managed to crack the first password (yes, there's more ) and the only thing it revealed was the tech tree for the Tatars (a new faction in AoE 2 DE) along with a Steam key for AoE 2 DE hidden in the address of a link.

[Zaxx]

"Round 2" of this thing just started: if you take a photo with a sheep on it and send it to them on Twitter you can win a key for AoE 2 DE:
https://www.ageofemp...tratsaa4i-2019/

[Zaxx]

In the last month or so I've replayed all the AoE DE campaigns and honestly it was an interesting experience. The last time I've seen the game was back when it came out and I liked it, played it but overall there were just too many small issues. Thankfully those were fixed and a bunch of quality of life stuff was added in the last one and a half years so overall now I can safely say that I am fully satisfied with the remaster. There are a few very minor bugs but it's negligable stuff at this point.

On the other hand recommending AoE DE is hard because even though a very large portion of the campaign was changed or downright replaced with new, better designed maps at its heart this game is still very much AoE 1. Now the thing about AoE 1 is that when it comes to things like scripting missions and stuff it's very-very primitive so Ensemble couldn't really make a campaign like what you'd see in StarCraft or AoE 2 later down the line. Instead what they did was they came up with unique scenarios where the campaing-like gameplay is coming from the map design itself while the enemy AI is mostly just playing like how it would on a random map. There is some scripting going on here and there of course mostly in the "commando" missions but sometimes even those are about somehow doing the objective while the AI is just building up its bases.

Because of this the campaigns are not designed in a razor sharp way where there is always a linear progression in difficulty or it's always clear just what you have to do. The missions can vary greatly in difficulty for this reason and there is a general lack of handholding apart from the game giving hints for every map (and those are sometimes relevant but sometimes very misleading depending on the difficulty). I like this, I always thought that this is why AoE 1 is worth playing even though it clearly aged pretty badly.

I'd say that playing the campaigns on hard is kind of a boot camp in playing RTS. The stuff you have to figure out can be fairly crazy since a lot of the missions start with the AI attacking with an army the size of "AND NOW YOU'RE GONNA DIE" so the challenge really is that you have to come up with a build order that will be effective in dealing with the bullshit coming your way. This can be anything from rushing to the next age to get the necessary upgrades asap or to just immediately walling yourself off even before you've built your town center. Lots of times even deciding where to build up your base can mean the difference between life and death and figuring that stuff out is fun but depending on the player it can also be very frustrating.

In fact there was one time when I got really frustrated with the game because the Spartacus mission is just bonkers. Here you have to defend the yellow AI from the red one but the mission is designed in a way that you just have no chance against red in open combat. Red is at maxed out Iron Age while you start in Bronze and you just don't have the time to build an army that can deal with it. So basically if you try defending yellow with your army you'll get crushed but if you start turtling and wall yourself off then read will just destroy yellow and you lose the mission. I tried again and again and stuff just didn't work out.

Eventually red will attack your base with everything it got though so I figured that I'd have to somehow save some of yellow and in the meantime buy myself some time to tech up and get myself a nice Roman army. The solution: there is a fairly clear forestline at the left side of the map and if you build a wall along that you can essentially wall off half the map with some of yellow's buildings being there. This delays the attack on your base because in AoE 1 the AI is looking for a space to fit in if it runs into an obstacle so it will wander along the wall and it only starts attacking when it doesn't see a way to get through. And that's how you do the fucking mission, it's the only way on hard difficulty and up and even then it's a tough battle:

So it was tough sometimes but overall I enjoyed it greatly because winning a map after coming up with something crazy feels good.

[Tea Monster]

AoE DE intrigues me. I've always been more an Age of Kings guy, but I wouldn't mind playing a bit of number one again after all these years.

Are there any reported issues with AoKDE? The HD edition suffered from multi player issues for years after its release.

[Zaxx]

I never tried multiplayer and generally AoE 1 is not really being played online. What I've heard is that overall the netcode is fine but the engine has a problem with high unit counts.

[MusicallyInspired]

I've never had any problems with multiplayer for any version of AOE1 or AOE2. My siblings and I used to play AOE2HD muliplayer semi-regularly actually. And my brother lived in Texas (I'm in Manitoba).

[Zaxx]

I've tried Project Celeste and it's great. What the fuck is Project Celeste you might ask? It's a long story.

Back around 2011 Microsoft released Age of Empires Online, a free-to-play "MMORTS" that sadly fell victim to MS's greed and ultimately the servers were shut down in 2014. It was developed by Robot Entertainment (basically a new company by Ensemble Studios after MS shut them down) and Gas Powered Games (Chris Taylor's company that gave us Supreme Commander) so everything was there for a great game to happen but it didn't. Age Online used the terrible GFWL service, it had a business model that locked everything behind various paywalls and to top it all off the game shipped with only two playable races with more added later.

Project Celeste is the fanmade / fan maintained version of Age Online. It's completely free with all the paid content from the original game unlocked by default and it's not only fully functional but also completely rebalanced so the only grind that remains is the fun one. It has all six races and a lot of added content (new campaigns, new gear and cosmetic items, new events and this year we'll even get a new race, the Romans) and it's fucking excellent. I recorded a bit of gameplay because it's a bit tough to explain how exactly the whole thing works + people who don't know the game seem to require some "proof" that yes, this is still an RTS at it's core:


Basically at the start of the game you have to choose a race and then found a capital city. You will build this city into its full glory as the game goes on, you gain experience by doing quests (that's the RTS part, around 90% of the game) and in your city you're crafting stuff like materials, gear that passively modifies the stats of your units and consumables that you can use during gameplay as active abilities. To get quests you visit cities and talk to NPCs, you visit shops to buy what you need and you get chests with random loot: without the paywalls it's actually a very satisfying RPG experience that brings a lot of depth to the RTS gameplay.

Now as for that core RTS stuff it is a smartly streamlined (meaning that the game didn't get dumber, just faster and slicker) mix of Age of Empires and Age of Mythology. Storage pits, granaries, mills, mining camps etc. are gone and got replaced by unified storehouses that serve as drop off points for any kind of resource: it's one less thing to worry about and it works really well. The economy got rebalanced pretty significantly, basically farms are more expensive now and they also take longer to build so instead of switching to farming early on you're encouraged to explore the map and look for different sources of food. So you're going for berry bushes and you hunt animals instead of turtling which is great because it makes the whole macro / economy stuff more fun and engaging. They also kept the twist AoE 2 came up with: villagers will gather food from animals around 40% faster than from berry bushes or farms so scouting is even more essential and there is just a lot of active gameplay going on even when there's no combat.

Things get a bit weird when it comes to the Age of Mythology influence though: the devs brought back the hard counter system of AoM but it's even more significant here. As a result the game can feel even more rock-paper-scissors than something like StarCraft, if you have a bad unit composition even the standard AI can just delete you with its smaller army because the damage multipliers are huge. The other thing that's back from AoM is the difference in population requirements between units but it's not as crazy as it was in AoM so the max pop requirement for a unit is 3. This can still be annoying though because one house still gives you 5 population so getting population blocked and spamming houses like a madman are very much part of the gameplay.

Overall the mission variety is excellent though, it's like if the devs learned a thing or two from StarCraft 2 when it comes to objectives yet the PvE campaign still doesn't feel as scripted as SC2 was. They found the perfect middle line between a skirmish and a scripted campaign so the mission design is wonderful, right now I'm at the Troy missions in the Greek campaign and it's insanely fun.

Long story short Celeste is what Age Online should have been from the start. I tried the original game back in the day but went for the uninstall button fairly quickly because of the business model and the grind so it was shocking to find out that there was a great RTS under all the bullshit.

Here's a link, try it:
https://www.projectceleste.com

[gemeaux333]

I know I played it back then, and when it was stopped it also doomed Gas Powered Games...

[Tea Monster]

Holy Shit! That's amazing.
I like the art style and was looking forward to AoEO. Most of the family love playing AoK and AoE III. Nobody went near AoEO when it came out. They weren't fans of the cartoony art style and when they found out about all the Pay 2 Win shannigans, they all stayed away. I was always tempted to try it, but there was just too much obvious bull shit involved.

Thank you Zaxx, I'll give this a whirl.

[Zaxx]

Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of the art style either but I think it works for Age. I remember watching an interview with Bruce Shelley, the lead designer of the original AoE games and he said when it comes to atmosphere their philosophy was that "the sun is always shining in Age of Empires". So the games were bright, the music was melodic and calm compared to other RTSes and even the gameplay has the ability to just be relaxing if you want to. In C&C there's always fast combat and high octane music, in StarCraft you always get the sense that the world is dark and that there are things at stake but in Age you can just sit back and do shit.

You can just make a scenario where there's a huge forest between you and the enemy, just build a wonder and win that way and sometimes it's just worth to do that because managing your economy is fun in Age. You have different sources for food, you can make markets to sell and buy stuff, trade with ships or caravans etc. so it's not just "okay, I'll send my SCV to that mineral patch" but a lot more fun. When I was around 8 years old and AoE 1 was the first RTS I ever played I didn't understand shit about the gameplay but collecting resources and building a city was fun so that's what I did.

Even as I got older, played other RTS games and just understood how everything works I still gravitated back to Age 1 time and time again because it was just more fun even with all its issues (and of course Age 2 didn't have those issues so when I got my hands on that oh boy was I happy kid). Age Online has this warm, welcoming feel to its art style so it's absolutely a legitimite interpretation of the franchise I feel. It also helps that the animations are very nice so stuff like a big army moving on the map looks really cool + with this art style you really don't feel that it looks like an 8 year old game.

[Zaxx]

gemeaux333, on 06 October 2019 - 07:28 PM, said:

I know I played it back then, and when it was stopped it also doomed Gas Powered Games...

Yep, that's when they turned to Kickstarter and failed at it sadly. After that Wargaming bought the company so they still operated until 2018 though.

Anyway here's a great GDC presentation where an MS employee explains how they fucked up the business model:

I find it shocking that even though the guy clearly explains how wrong they were in a lot of things some companies still manage to mess up their games in the same way. For example "you don't get a soft launch with a branded title" is absolutely fucking true, if you call your game Age of Empires than your audience will expect Age of Empires instead of some half finished, undercooked stuff. And then here we are in 2019 and Bethesda made the same mistake with Quake Champions and Fallout 76, it's insane.

[gemeaux333]

Wildman failed especially because they have stopped the campaigns before the end... Gas Powered Games was rename Wargaming Seattle and closed in mid 2018 and Chris Taylor have quit a year prior to get retired...

They lost the Dungeon Siege and Supreme Commander just before, Squarre Enix butchered them...

[Zaxx]

gemeaux333, on 07 October 2019 - 08:34 PM, said:

Wildman failed especially because they have stopped the campaigns before the end...

Because they didn't ask for the amount of money that would actually be enough to save the company and fund the game, they thought that they would make a lot more than the initial goal. It wasn't an outright failure but considering the lack of excitement it was pretty close to that. Nobody really wanted a hack and slash game from GPG. Chris Taylor didn't retire though, he's working on a new game now.

But yeah, really when GPG went south was way before the development of Age Online and honestly even the fact that they ended up working on that project was a sign of their financial troubles. It was a "work for hire" thing through and through and it's really not a game Chris Taylor would make on his own I think. He was never a fan of an RTS having a very specific ruleset and Age Online's hard counter system is very much the opposite of that philosophy. Taylor was always a fan of Age but I don't think that includes Age of Mythology (where this whole hard counter thing is coming from) but rather the first two games with their massive amounts of freedom.

That seems to be a problem with Age Online in general: it's a game that really nobody wanted to make. Even Robot Entertainment, the guys who came from Ensemble only took the job because it was good money so MS gave them an opportunity to get their new company going fairly quickly. It's surprising that the game ended up as good as it is honestly.

[gemeaux333]

It's the 2008 crisis that started the financial troubles of GPG, and the many Editors they crossed the way were really lame... SEGA...TECMO...SQUARE ENIX...

they even made the same mistake as Cave-Dogs : Kings and Castles, that was likely to be remake/reboot of Total Anihilation Kingdom, and didn't even find an editor for it...

Chris Taylor working on a game ? Which one ? And more important : with who ?

[Zaxx]

It's called Intergalactic Space Empire, it's going to be a browser / cloud based RTS and it's a small indie project. That's all we know so far, there are no screenshots or gameplay videos yet.

[Zaxx]

X019 (Xbox cringe fest) is coming tomorrow with a rumored Age 4 reveal:


A bit of a teaser:
https://twitter.com/...547758734233600

[Zaxx]

Aaand here we go:

[MusicallyInspired]

Like the look so far.

[Zaxx]

Some very minimal real gameplay here:

Gotta love that placeholder UI.

[MusicallyInspired]

n/m

[Morpheus Kitami]

And here I was hoping for the Age of Empires IV set after the 18th century I was promised so long ago. Oh, well, I'm sure there some obscure RTS gem that covers that time...probably. And the way they talk about making them "your stories", ugh. Why do so many resurrections of classic game franchises end badly? Is it that hard to do something that was promised so long ago?

[Zaxx]

You mean this?

This was a lie basically, a few years ago Bruce Shelley confirmed that there were no plans for an AoE 4 at Ensemble at all so the artwork is just that: artwork, basically fanmade stuff for the manual.

As for rebooting the franchise: I would have preferred a game that continues history from somewhere around the French Revolution myself but look, it's been almost 15 years since Age 3 came out. Here's a German preview / interview for the game translated to English:
https://docs.google....d52BW_H6mA/edit

So:

Quote

In bridging, you try to hide an innovation in a kind of sandwich: You give the players something well known and popular (like the medieval scenario), then confront them with a more or less radical innovation (the strong differences between civilizations) and immediately calm them down again with another nostalgic function (basic building works as always). From this it can be concluded that Age of Empires 4 will eventually contain more familiar elements than completely new features.
"We're trying to build bridges. The Age of Empires 2 community is undoubtedly the largest when you look at the entire Age series," says studio boss Loftis. And Adam Isgreen, looking to the future of the series, adds: "[The Scenario] felt like the best place to start." Because Age of Empires 4 is just the start of a whole new chapter in Age history - and that requires a strong technical foundation.

Understandable decision I say. This is not really the time to experiment with Age of Empires so they are basing Age 4 on the most popular entry as a safe bet.

[Morpheus Kitami]

That's a wonderful thing to find out. Apparently teasing fans with things that will never happen is something that will never ever stop happening. Even if it was 14 years ago.

[Zaxx]

I think it's still better that it was just some artist's wet dream than if there were some actual, real concepts developed for it only to be flushed down the toilet. At least now you know that nothing was lost and really for a new team getting back to the roots of Age is better than reinventing the wheel with something like a World War 1-2 themed Age game. So overall I'm still excited for how Age 4 will play and curious about how their "more broader" representation of the medieval era will look like. Now that Age 2 DE is out I started playing the Attila campaign and I have to say it was great to see the ruined versions of the Roman buildings from Age 1 DE in there, it really helps in establishing continuity with the first game instead of the base game's "hey, here's William Wallace" start.

[Zaxx]

On a sidenote: I'm honestly amazed how well Age 2 DE turned out after participating in the closed beta. The beta was absolute garbage for most of the time and they replaced the renderer in the last few weeks and managed to fully tank the performance (imagine that you barely have 60 fps in a CPU bound game on an i5-9600k in a regular campaign mission). Graphical bugs were also numerous so one of the most popular threads on the closed beta forums was one where fans were begging Microsoft to delay the game. I don't know what they did but the launch version is mostly fine in terms of bugs and apart from some very agressive stuttering (because of course the new renderer totally destroyed the framepacing too) the raw performance is truly, unexpectedly great now from a game that's still doing most things on just the one CPU core. It's running better than the HD Edition did by a long mile.

If they fix the stuttering and the remaining bugs (most of them are connected to the netcode) then this will be a truly great version of Age 2.

[MrFlibble]

I just stumbled upon this little indie game called The Fertile Crescent that seems quite heavily inspired by the Age of Empires.