It’s been 25 years since a small studio in Dallas recast the ancient world through the prism of a real-time strategy game. Age of Empires has echoed Monk wololos about our homes ever since: Parents believed that their kids were learning history; kids believed that they were gaming surreptitiously. And veteran players know that both were right.
Yet Age of Empires did not always receive the love it does today. The rise of the Xbox saw PC gaming take a back seat for Microsoft: Communities like AoE’s were left to fend for themselves. In a very real way, it was the passion of these obsessives that led to Microsoft's renewed attention and the release of the franchise's latest entry, 2021’s Age of Empires IV.
All the games continue to receive updates or DLCs. Age of Empires games are headed for Xbox and mobile devices, complete with cross-play so console gamers can get their hands on the RTS classic and play with their PC-loving friends. Also, Age of Mythology is finally getting a definitive edition. Age IV is building momentum, too, with an anniversary edition crowning a year of updates designed to woo players who found it a tad stripped back at launch. AoE is now a point of real-time-strategy pride and a shining jewel in Microsoft’s roster.
On October 25, after watching the anniversary event—and enjoying a surprisingly adept group of lute-bearing bards perform the series’ iconic music—I spoke with Phil Spencer, CEO of Microsoft Gaming, and World’s Edge studio head Michael Mann about the past and future of the franchise.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
WIRED: So it's the 25th anniversary of Age of Empires, and I know, Phil, you've been with Microsoft for more than 30 years. You’ve seen this evolution of the franchise. But I think there was definitely a gap, for both real-time strategy and Age of Empires, where it didn’t look good. Was there ever a moment where Microsoft was like, Age and the real-time-strategy genre is done? And then, the second part of that is, when and what turned it around? When you were like, wow, this is worth paying attention to again?
Phil Spencer: So it's a good thread to pull on this one. I mean, the thing that we saw with Age was less about the genre, to be honest, and more just how the community was continuing to play. The games were still available to buy, and we just saw a vibrant community of people out there playing. And we weren't actively engaged with the community as Xbox. When Xbox started, I would say, regretfully, we took our focus off of PC and focused more on console, which meant franchises like Flight Sim and Age—the communities were left to fend for themselves a bit. And as we evolved our gaming strategy, looking at players playing on any screen, we started looking at franchises in our portfolio where the communities were active, fairly large, and really engaged with the game and engaged with each other. And Age was right there as one of those franchises.
So we had the opportunity to find a good partner. And getting back to Age with Relic [Entertainment], a partner that knew the genre, we saw it as a great opportunity for us to really just meet the community where they were, with their love of Age. And I'd say the same thing about the announcements about Age coming to console just trying to show the community that we recognize their love of Age of Empires, what it's meant for so many people, and I'm proud that we can now kind of step up and do our side of it as the IP owners and the stewards of the franchise.
Michael Mann: I also want to congratulate Ensemble Studios—they created the franchise 25 years ago. I know that World's Edge gets to enjoy the celebration too. But I also want to just reach out and say Tony Goodman, Bruce Shelley, all those individuals just did an amazing job 25 years ago to create this franchise that we're the ambassadors of going forward.
The most exciting news, at least from my perspective—and the chat watching the anniversary stream, judging by their reaction—was the announcement of Age of Mythology Retold. Does that name essentially mean a definitive edition? I'm interested in what you can tell me about it.
PS: I think Michael will do a better job giving the details. The nice thing about the Age franchise, from Age to Age III to Age of Myth, is that Ensemble really came up with very different takes on what the franchise was about, and the gameplay mechanics or even in the case of Age of Myth, what the IP was about and what stories were being told. So we have a nice collection of games that—while they're all in the Age franchise—they all have very different gameplay styles, very different settings. And it's nice to be able to go back. And we've had a lot of requests over the years for Age of Myth, and I'm glad that we're able to do what you'll see is more of a [definitive edition], because it's been something that the community has been requesting for an awfully long time.
MM: I think that’s the best way to look at it. It is a definitive edition of Age of Mythology, and as I mentioned, we are ambassadors of these franchises, the cultures, the peoples, the stories. And we want to modernize aspects of them too. But we do want to use the same treatment, but we want to go back and make sure that we work experts to make sure we represent the cultures, the people, the stories correctly in today's light. So it is a definitive edition of the game.
On Age II, you know, I think there was a fear with Age IV coming out that support might fade away; that hasn’t proven to be true. What's the road map for the game: Is it basically as long as the community is still there and the DLCs are successful you’ll keep making them?
PS: There is a road map. Michael has more of the details. But I'd say for us, we do think about the games separately, and I know this is different from a lot of franchises where, when you go from N to N+1, you really deprecate the experience on one and it's like, OK, everybody's moved over to the next version of a game. But with Age, though they were sequels obviously, they took different approaches to the RTS and to Age specifically, and so we do think supporting multiple Age products in the market makes sense for us. And it's maybe different than, as I said, some kind of traditional franchise management. But in this case, the Age II community remains strong and active. And we love being able to continue to support them with content and having a team behind them to make sure we're managing the community as well as just celebrating with them and building.
MM: I won’t go into specifics of Age II and Age III and Age IV road maps, because we have more news to announce early next year. The way you have to look at it is that, since we launched IV, we have supported all the communities across the board with updates and expansions, just as we announced yesterday at the anniversary event. So yes—the foundation of Age of Empires and why it’s been successful for 25 years is our community, and empowering our community.
And if you look at our development, Forgotten Empires, which is one of our key developers, created mods initially, and then we partnered with them and grew them. Capture Age, which is a great caster service for us now in Age II and Age IV, was also a modding company. So we continue to foster those relationships with our community to grow that community and power that community. And I look at Red Bull [who is sponsoring] the first tournament that we're doing, Age II, Age III and Age IV. So I think our track record and our current today is that we're continuing to support those communities across the board for Age of Empires.
So there was an announcement in the anniversary show about bringing AoE definitive edition into the AoE 2 DE engine. One of the best Age content creators, Spirit of the Law, speculated that this integration might be similar to the Rome at War mod. What’s the plan here?
MM: Yeah, we tease something in the 25th anniversary: that we're looking to take Age I and integrate it into the Age II engine, which has a whole bunch of enhancements including pathfinding, formations, and stuff like that. So our goal is to basically get two games in one.
So Age of Empires I would be within Age of Empires II? But would it be a separate game with the same engine, or would the games be integrated with civilizations being able to fight against each other, etc.?
MM: I can't go into those specifics, but just think of it as part of the unique experiences that are now in the updated engine that we're supporting and can continue to support going forward.
And the two new civilizations for Age IV, the Ottomans and the Malians, why were they chosen?
MM: I mean part of it is if you go on the forums, to the Steam forms, to our forums, there's always polls on the next civilization we should introduce. We also looked at diversity within the Age of Empires series, and which stories we want to tell from a creative standpoint. Our creative director, Adam Isgreen, is very passionate about the franchise and the global appeal to the game, so we definitely look at it from both a global standpoint and a player choice standpoint as we look at our civilizations.
I’ve seen people talking about the Byzantines on the forums a lot.
MM: Yeah, the Byzantines. Yes, as I said we are listening to the community. We do have a road map that we're working to. We have some surprises coming in 2023 on civilizations in Age IV based on our community feedback. I can't go into specific details, sorry, but I can tell you that we're actively reviewing all the feedback that we get from our community and making choices based on that.
I’m interested to know how you would assess the first year of Age IV. While the single-player campaigns have been very well received, there were stats that suggested the online player base had declined below Age II. But it feels like, with this anniversary release, there’s this sense of momentum, and now a lot of the features that the player base wanted at the beginning have been added. So it’s a two-part question: Would the game have benefited from being delayed a year to get to this level? And how do you win back players from the competitive and casual community who might have left?
PS: It's always a question with any game: If you could know everything you know, a year later in this case, your game would have been better if you waited a year. The problem is, so much of the feedback that we get is from players actually playing. So how you actually gain a year's worth of knowledge about what people like, what they wish was better, especially with a game like Age that ends up with millions and millions of players, that it's just impossible for us to wait a year without the customer feedback. We wouldn’t be as smart about Age IV as we are now after a year of having players in the community engage with us. So I think we shipped a finished game last year. We like listening to the community on Age or any of the games that we ship and we like taking that feedback.
We're always smarter a year after launch than we were at launch. I think that's just almost by definition because we're so engaged with the communities of players who play our game. So I hesitate to get into the world of how you get a year's worth of gameplay and experience with the community without actually doing it, I just think that’s a necessity. You go through this journey, and you manage the growth of the game and the feedback of the community and I think that's a positive part of the game. In terms of engaging, I love all of the traffic and celebrations that we saw on the 25th-anniversary feed, and you're helping us with that, obviously. And I think these are the moments that we raise awareness of the games: that people end up playing more Age II or they're going to wait for Age of Myth, or they're going to go play Age on mobile, or they're playing Age on console, or they go back to playing Age IV on PC.
For us, it's just the importance that Age of Empires as a gaming IP sits where it should, which I think is one of the historically great gaming franchises ever built, obviously built by Ensemble originally. And that's our goal. And to let users decide which of the games they want to go play. And let's just make sure we're supporting those and growing them.
MM: I think by releasing a game you get so much information. And if you look at prior Age of Empires games, the experience changed based on community feedback. So the game we launched last year and the game two years from now are going to be different experiences based on what the community wants, based on their input. It just evolves over time, and we can't start that until we release the game. So yes, there is feedback from the community that there were missing features, but we reacted and we worked with them and we added additional features and support to make the experience better.
And part of the celebration is providing this free anniversary update to everyone to celebrate all the feedback that the community has given us. And we touched on this about competitive play and so on, but it is a new experience: The civilizations play differently than how they’ve played in prior civilizations. So if you look at the different games, there's different players, and that's awesome. And then you can actually look at the Age franchise as a whole, bringing in new competitive players, new creators, new influence into the ecosystem. And yes, there's going to be some natural friction and comments between the titles. I kind of look at it like it's kind of like a family right in the back seat: You have Age I, Age II, Age II, and Age IV in the back seat fighting over the middle seat.
So things will progress naturally, and the competitive scene will continue to grow as we look at grassroots funding as part of our esports initiatives. And looking at this week and having three titles in a major tournament and with a partnership with Red Bull is incredible. So it is a journey, and Age IV has been on a journey for a year, right? The other franchises have been on the journey for decades. They’ve all been able to mature and change and have features added. You know, taunts and cheats weren’t there day one either right? So maybe we missed that for IV, but there's an evolution that each of these franchises need to go through.
And one of things I want to emphasize is, we want to inspire a love of history in everyone worldwide. That's our passion. And I mentioned that we're ambassadors to the franchise, to the culture, to our community. And we just want to unite them and empower them to be able to have choices.
This might seem a bizarre question, but could you ever imagine Age of Empires without being a real-time strategy? So the Age of Empires world but not that particular genre?
PS: I was going to tease a little bit about Pentiment coming out from Obsidian, which is like this 15th-century gothic German story. But I think the setting for Age, progressing through history, from first person or third person, we don't have anything like that in development right now. But I think the franchise is deep enough and has enough awareness that you could think about doing different games in that historical progression setting, which is really what Age has been about. Moving through the different ages and seeing the change in both technology and the NPC styles and approaches. I definitely think you could do more with that and I'm glad we have a studio behind Age now, since for a long time we didn't.
But now we have an internal team that's very motivated around Age of Empires. And I love we get these moments and we get to talk about stuff like it coming to console or mobile, or like Age of Myth. And it just shows that the team is motivated to continue to do more with the IP and I look forward to that.
So this is definitely a question specifically for you, Phil. We've talked about real-time strategies and the genre. With the Activision Blizzard purchase, there's a lot of discussion about Call of Duty, but are there plans for StarCraft, for example?
PS: The first thing I would say is, I'm not allowed to make any decisions about what happens at Blizzard or Activision or King. So this is all just kind of talking and thinking about what the opportunity is, but you're absolutely right. Not only StarCraft, but WarCraft, when you think about the heritage of RTS games that we're talking about here, specifically from Blizzard. And I don't have any concrete plans today because I can't really get in and work with the teams. But StarCraft was a seminal moment in gaming, right? From an esports perspective, from RTS on console perspective, and from just an RTS storytelling perspective in the genre.
And I'm excited about getting to sit down with the teams at Activision and Blizzard and King to talk about back catalog and opportunities that we might have. So I will dodge the question other than to say it's not something I can actively work on right now. But the thought of being able to think about what could happen with those franchises is pretty exciting to me, as somebody who spent a lot of hours playing those games.
And this is again broader than Age but I was curious to know a bit more about cloud gaming. Xbox cloud gaming users haven't been as active as PC users. But I'm interested that you're still committed to it: are there plans to encourage Xbox gamers to use cloud gaming more or do you feel like the current offerings are solid and just need time to be adapted?
PS: We look at it as a choice for our customers. If they want to play on console, that's great. If they want to play on PC we make games that are available on both platform If you buy our first party games on console, you get the entitlement on PC, and obviously, we have Game Pass. And if you're an ultimate subscriber, you're a Game Pass subscriber on both PC and console. So I don't have any strategic imperative to get people on Cloud. I like having it as an option.
A lot of people use Cloud on console as a way to try a game before they download, just to see if this is something that they want to spend the time to download. A lot of people, frankly, will play on console or PC, but then when they're away from their console or PC, they will use Cloud as a way to play remotely. I think that's a great option. The choice is the choice that our customer has, and they will decide where they're going to go play. And we try not to build into our strategy, ‘OK, we try to drive so many hours of cloud or so many users on cloud or PC or console’ and instead just try to create the best options and the best value for our customers and allow them to decide where they want to play.
