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When it comes to strategy games do you get much more classic than Age of Empires? This is the game that started it all and it is crazy to think that this game came out the better part of a quarter of a century ago!
It is a series that has gone from strength to strength and today I am taking a step back in time to see how it holds up. When you go back and look at a classic like this it is really hard to do so. On the one hand, I have very fond memories of playing this game and as a result, I can truly appreciate how this was a game-changer when it was released. On the flip side of this though, I am not sure I would ever in a million years expect someone new to the series to jump into this over one of the newer games in the Age of Empires series.
As far as the presentation of the game goes, it is not bad. This is an older PC game so you have to keep that in mind, but the visuals are not all that bad and there is some very nice sprite work here that tugs on those nostalgia strings.
It is worth noting that a Definitive Edition of this game was released a little while back that did improve the visuals. The goal of the game is that you are in charge of an empire.
There are just under 20 for you to choose from and you have to make sure you are taking care of your people. What is cool is that the empire you choose will actually dictate a large portion of the early part of the game such as the resources and so on that you have.
You will want the resources for your own empire, but so will others which can lead to war You cannot just take what you want and try to steamroll over the other nations. Well, you can try, but eventually, it will catch up to you. You have to shake hands and try to play nice at times, but never be scared to go to war when it is required.
In going back and playing the game I did actually like how scaled back it was in comparison to what we have now. It made things a lot simpler and I still did have a fair bit of fun with it. I think if you played Age of Empires back in the day it is worth going back and taking a look at it. It is really lacking in-depth and features in comparison to the modern games, but I still think there is something good here.
For a player new to the series I would recommend checking out one of the newer games. Back In Microsoft may well have been the biggest company in the world, fronted by the richest man alive, but it didn't necessarily follow that by providing virtually every PC across the planet with the means to operate that Microsoft made the finest games.
Neither prolific nor prodigious, Microsoft's entertainment output was up to that point notable only for it's annual update of Flight Simulator, a game about as entertaining in the eyes of most gamers as that other great Microsoft entry into gaming's hall of legends, Solitaire. If Bill Gates and co wanted to be taken as seriously for their entertainment software as i they did for their applications, they needed to release a killer game. Little did they know that in February of that year they'd found one.
Although development on Age Of Empires begun early in , Microsoft had little to go on when they first saw it later that year, as Rick Goodman, AoE's lead designer recalls: When we invited them to visit us, they came and we spent about 10 minutes demoing a man chopping a tree.
Truly, there wasn't much to show at that point. You couldn't construct a building, research a technology, or conduct combat. But, a villager could chop a tree. Microsoft saw this and concluded that we were working on a Life Sim'. Apparently, they needed a Life Sim in their portfolio. So, soon afterwards,. Ensemble Studios was born in July out of Ensemble Corporation, a Dallas-based database accounting company, founded by brothers Tim and Rick Goodman.
Seemingly bored with developing spreadsheets and running out of wacky ties with which to brighten the days, it occurred to the duo to replace their suits with standard issue Atari T-shirts, grow their hair down to their arse cracks and start programming games rather than relational databases. I had loved gaming of all types, video and board games, for 20 years before starting to work on Age Of Empires, but the possibility of actually designing a game, much less a videogame, had never occurred to me.
Stealing' a programmer from the mother corporation, Rick began work, first by burying the programmer under a pile of programming manuals and hoping he might come up with something, which he did months later to the surprise of everyone - a small 2D FPS game demo, providing the gang with the inspiration to carry on and create a game.
We had no idea what game to make, remembers Rick. I bought a copy of the original Warcraft and we then embarked on a quest to figure out what to do.
We considered a cowboys and indians game, a railroad game and a game in which you were trapped on a deserted island and had to solve puzzles to escape. Then at the start of we hired Bruce Shelley and formed a three-person committee, consisting of Bruce, myself and my brother.
We met each week to discuss proposed game ideas before finally deciding on a real-time Civilization'. The concept behind Age Of Empires then grew out of those meetings.
It's hard to imagine that someone who would later be considered a gaming legend, with hits such as Civilization , F Stealth Fighter and Railroad Tycoon already under his belt, would become involved with an unknown games studio without much experience of what was becoming a risky business to be in.
But as the old adage proved, it's as much about who you know as what you know and Tony Goodman, the business brains behind Ensemble, had an old acquaintance keen to help out. Tony was an old friend from many years earlier, recalls Bruce Shelley.
When he and colleagues at his business applications company were thinking about getting into game development, he started calling me up and asking pretty detailed questions about the process of creating games.
Eventually he asked me to get involved. At first Rick Goodman, Tony, and I met regularly on the phone to discuss the design. Then Tony got more involved in building the company, leaving Rick doing most of the work with me helping him.
Those games were definitely the biggest influences," says Rick. There were elements of those games that I liked and some that I felt could even be improved.
I liked the epic scope of Civ and the random maps, but I really wanted our game to be multiplayer. I liked the graphics and action orientation of Warcraft, but I felt that a historical realistic' game would have a broader world-wide appeal.
I think the single greatest influence and resource available to any designer is all the games that already exist," says Bruce. Our games originally derived from several classic games and then began to derive from our own creations. We did a lot of research and conceptualising because it took a while to get an engine together to build a prototype. Angelo Laudon did a fantastic job as our lead programmer making that happen.
From the first prototype the game just continued to evolve through playing, adjusting, recoding, and so on, over and over. Overtime, the vision changed, says Rick, as development progressed from the conceptual stage to the implementation stage. It's safe to say that few of us had any real experience creating a computer game, so we had no idea what we were getting ourselves in to.
As a result, the game charted its own direction, much more so than any one team member charted the direction for it. Our philosophy was: as long as the game was becoming more fun to play each day, then we felt were on the right path. Considering Ensemble's speciality was business software, it remains something of a minor miracle that development on their first ever game continued with few real problems.
With much of the team receiving on the job training, and veteran Bruce Shelley's skills centred on design rather than coding, neither he nor Rick Goodman can remember any significant problems. If I had to choose one major challenge during development it would be the performance of our 2D graphics," says Rick. The engine was relatively slow and we recognised this early on. So Matt Pritchard went to work rewriting it.
His idea was. I had no idea if such a thing was even possible As the game neared completion, with Microsoft now on board, the problems of having 12 races and numerous units and buildings and technological advances in the game became apparent. Balancing the gameplay would be a huge undertaking that Ensemble recognised they would have to get right early on.
To our credit we started the play balance process eight months before we shipped," says Rick. We used every minute of that time to attempt to balance all of the civilisations and all of the units in each civilisation. We had never done such a thing before, so we didn't know how to go about doing it.
Therefore, we just had everyone play multiplayer games every day from February to September of We did a pre-game briefing and a postgame debriefing. Then, I made play balance changes to the game and we played again the next day. I think we played a total of about internal play-test games during this period, not counting the Microsoft test team's parallel effort in Redmond. That Age Of Empires wasn't quite the Life Sim game they'd signed up to publish didn't seem to worry Microsoft as it soon became apparent during months of testing both at Ensemble and Microsoft HQs that it would be a huge success, with forecasts putting worldwide sales at the half a million mark.
In fact, the game was so successful that the first shipment totally sold out, leaving Christmas shelves across the US empty of stock. We had no idea at the time, but, in hindsight, AoE turned out to be a real blessing for Microsoft as well as for Ensemble Studios, says Rick. Microsoft was suffering badly in the minds of gamers and in the press. Even we felt the splash damage before the game was completed. At one point, before the game shipped, we wondered whether the Microsoft name might actually have a negative connotation in the minds of gamers.
We only realised how successful the game was after we ran out of copies during the holiday period in and it went past one million copies sold.
Recalls Bruce. It was continuing to sell really well at that point, there was a huge fan community around the game, and it was clear it was appealing to a broad audience. The response greatly surpassed our expectations, although we knew the game was good. It was at this point that Rick Goodman, the game's leading architect, decided to leave the studio he helped create. In , he formed Stainless Steel Studios and soon began development on Empire Earth , in many respects an even more ambitious game than AoE.
This took the real-time concepts of its predecessor and added in the entire past, present and potential future of Earth history. Ensemble also had a clear vision, so we amicably parted company so we could each pursue our own goals. Today with combined sales of Age Of Empires, its two sequels and two expansion packs in excess of 8. What imperfections remained have largely been ironed out as the series has evolved. Though relatively basic, the real-time clashes inspired by Warcraft are today regimented battles, with players able to organise their armies into intricate formations - just one of Ensemble's innovations that come as standard in realtime strategy games since.
The latest in the series, Age Of Mythology, takes the series in a new direction, both in terms of setting and the new technology powering it, though the core concept -to have fun - has remained central.
I would hate to pick a favourite out of the games I have worked on, says Bruce. I think in general I believe the most recent is the best because each builds on those that came before.
AoE will always be special, however, because it was a beginning for so many great things that have happened since. The fact that we provided so many different gaming experiences within the same box, allowing such a broad spectrum of gamers to find a way to play and enjoy it worldwide, from casual to hardcore, children to seniors, in countries from Germany to Taiwan.
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