Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition has revealed its next DLC. Victors and Vanquished will apparently be the remastered RTS’ first “campaign-focused” expansion, offering up more playable scenarios than any of its previous packs - many based on popular community creations. Oh, and it’s out next month.
]]>The first week of January is always one of my favourite times of the year. It's a time for making plans, setting goals, thinking about all the cool new games I'll be playing over the next 12 months (while also looking nervously at the pile of games I missed over the last 12 months and placing them very, very gingerly on the teetering and totteringly tall pile of my backlog). And, of course, making some new year's resolutions. Traditionally, I don't often set myself too many resolutions - I always give myself a reading goal (35 books is what I'm aiming for this year), for example, but the rest I usually play pretty fast and loose with - more 'nice to haves' rather than 'musts', I'd say.
This year, though, I do have a few gaming-related resolutions on my list, and in discussing them with the rest of the RPS Treehouse, it turns out we all have some games-themed goals this year. So I thought it would be fun to share them with you all below. And if you've also made some gaming resolutions for 2024, tell us about them in the comments. We can hold ourselves accountable together, like that big curtain of eldritch eyeballs up there in the header from good game Norco.
]]>Real-time strategy game Age Of Empires 2: Definitive Edition is now exploring the series’ own history with the Return Of Rome expansion pack, bringing back The Roman Empire and every other ancient civilisation from the very first Age Of Empires game. It’s coming on May 16th, and it essentially lets you battle and conquer like it’s 1998 again.
]]>Today marks the 25th anniversary of strategy classic Age Of Empires, and to celebrate Xbox Game Studios have announced a ream of updates coming to Age Of Empires II: Definitive Edition next year. Technically, the main bit of news from tonight's anniversary stream is that both Age Of Empires II: DE and Age Of Empires IV will be arriving on Xbox consoles in 2023 (that, and Age Of Mythology is coming back), but the upshot of all that is that the PC versions will be getting the very same benefits, including controller support, crossplay with consoles and cloud gaming support.
]]>Our Nate (RPS in peace) is a big fan of Age Of Empires 2, calling it the best strategy game ever made and, in his Definitive Edition review saying it was still that, "but now, there's a lot more of it."
Well, there's more of it again, now, with the release of the Dynasties Of India DLC. If you want to watch an elephant headbutt a pyramid until it bursts, watch the trailer below.
]]>"In the past," says Age Of Empires 2 project lead Bert Beeckman, "if we wanted, say, the AI playing the Holy Roman Empire to stay in the game even if they lost all their units, there was... a little trick we had to do". On remembering this, he sounds somehow nostalgic and faintly harrowed at the same time. "We had to create an invisible unit, somewhere out of the way. And the way to do that was to take a horse. And then garrison it inside another horse. Which would then become invisible". He pauses for a moment. "No, we had no idea either. But it worked."
]]>Historical RTS Age Of Empires 2: Definitive Edition has a brand new DLC with two new civilisations for you to play as. Dawn Of The Dukes introduces the Poles, farmers and nobles with great cavalry units and blokes with giant hammers, and the Bohemians, a civilisation of gunpowder and monks with explosive medieval tanks. This is the second decent chunk of newness for the game in six months, which isn't bad for a game that's over 20 years old.
]]>Despite being the fifth main game in its series, the only way of looking at Age Of Empires 4 is as a sequel to Age Of Empires 2. The first and third Age titles were both fine games, of course, as was their stoner cousin Age Of Mythology. But it was AoE2 that would be enshrined as one of the all-time RTS greats, and it’s the inevitable benchmark against which AoE4 will be measured, when it launches later this year. Just the twenty-year fug of strategy dad nostalgia surrounding the series would have been a significant enough headwind for AoE4 developers Relic Entertainment to release into. But thanks to a belting remaster of AoE2 in 2019, the old bruiser is somehow once again the RTS of the day, complete with brand new expansions, lashings of fresh esports, and the largest player base it has ever had.
Launching a new Age game now has the air of a prince giving a nervous funeral speech, where he promises to exceed the glories of his father’s reign, even as the king’s body casually bench-presses a horse from the coffin next to him. How do you supplant a game whose star still seems to be rising? Change too much, and you’ll be beasted for fixing what wasn’t broken. Change too little, on the other hand, and you’ll be castigated for not fixing the broken bits. It’s a hell of a balancing act, for sure. And yet, after watching the footage from today’s Fan Preview event, and speaking with the folks at Relic, they look well in reach of pulling it off.
]]>Picture your mind as the control room of a massive death robot, which is in the middle of a fight against a millipede the size of Croydon. It’s a hectic duel: the whole command crew are at their battle stations, doing that Star Trek thing where they try to use computers while standing up and thrashing about. And in all the uproar, the communications console has been left briefly unattended. Enter the janitor, then, with a cheeky wink to camera. They are your subconscious mind, in this metaphor. And while the rest of the crew is distracted, they’re going to have some fun.
]]>The fact that Age Of Empires 2 has a fresh expansion pack, more than two decades after it first came out, is something I’m inevitably well happy with. The release of Lords Of The West is clear confirmation that AoE2’s experimental resurrection has been a success: the monster lives, and it’s going to get continued support from its creator and patron, Doctor Microsoft. This feels good. It feels deserved, even. AoE2’s Definitive Edition has dominated my gaming time over the last year, even more than the original dominated my teens, and I’m thrilled at this sign that it’s sticking around.
But however pleasing it is that the expansion exists at all, my feelings are a little more reserved about Lords Of The West itself. I’ve been rinsing it, both in ranked and single player modes, for nearly two weeks now, so I’ve had plenty of time to see how it’s affected the game as a whole. And while there’s a lot about it that’s just as good as I’d hoped for, there are some surprising disappointments too. So there’s a bit of tough love here.
]]>Probably the most common woe, for all but the most unnaturally gifted players of real-time strategy games, is the feeling of being overwhelmed. Particularly in games from the genre's "golden age" in the late 90s, there's a relentless need to focus on several things at once, and endlessly jump back and forth between combat and economy. Age Of Empires 2, beautiful beast though it is, is certainly no exception, even with the concessions to modernity introduced in its Definitive Edition last year.
However. What if I was to tell you there was a way to play the game, totally unmodded, in a way that eliminates this concern entirely? Well, as the bloke off of Pirates Of The Carribean once memorably said, "you'd best start believing in posts about weird, gestalt-consciousness Age Of Empires sessions; ye're in one."
]]>Age Of Empires 2 is about to receive its sixth expansion pack, Lords Of The West, just a casual 22 years after the base game first wololoed its way onto our screens. From January 26th in the year of our lord 2021, players will be able to take the knight-happy Burgundians and the castle-dropping Sicilians for a spin, as well as play through three new campaigns - one each for the new civs, and a third for the Britons, featuring good old Edward Longshanks. Longshanks, of course, was the baddie off of Braveheart, and thus also the baddie off of AoE2's first ever campaign, where you played as William Wallace in a series of adventures that were totally based on history and not the film.
]]>Ultrawide gaming monitors can seem excessive compared to regular 16:9 gaming screens, especially when their demanding resolutions often require powerful and expensive graphics cards to make the most of them. Once you try one, though, there's no going back. I've been a big fan of ultrawide gaming monitors for years now, as their extra screen space not only makes them great for juggling multiple desktop windows, but supported PC games also look uttery fantastic on them - and to prove it, I've put together this list of the best ultrawide games on PC.
]]>Strategy games is an enormous genre in PC gaming, with real-time, turn-based, 4X and tactics games all flying the same flag to stake their claim as the one true best strategy game. Our list of the best strategy games on PC covers the lot of them. We like to take a broad view here at RPS, and every game listed below is something we firmly believe that you could love and play today. You'll find 30-year-old classics nestled right up against recent favourites here, so whether you're to the genre or want to dig deep for some hidden gems, we've got you covered. Here are our 50 best strategy games for 2023.
]]>I've not posted about Age Of Empires 2 in a while, because there's been a lot of other things on, but I'm still plugging away with it - I start each day with a quick random match against the AI to keep my hand in, and once a week or so, I dare to enter the adrenaline-soaked APM hell of ranked multiplayer. I lose more than I win, but I'm slowly getting better. This match made me feel particularly good, and it had the plot of a classic farce (only with war elephants), so it seemed like a good one to relate to you. Get your Knight Vision Goggles on, then, and let's see how it played out.
]]>From our first years we know what it means to build. As babies we're given clacky wooden blocks and colourful Duplo bricks. We are architects long before we are capable eaters of raw carrot. If you're anything like the staff of RPS, you've not outgrown the habit of child-like town planning. Yes, building games often take a managerial approach (at least many on this list do), but a sense of play is always present. It's there when you draw out a road in Cities Skylines, just to watch it populate with toy-like traffic. When you brick up another hole in your mighty Stronghold to fend off enemy swordsmen. When you painstakingly dig a trench for water to flow in Timberborn, just like you did all those years ago on the beach, in an effort to stop the tide washing away your sandcastles. You'll find all these games and more on our list. So here you go: the best building games on PC.
]]>I've been having a bit of a rough time in my quest to become good at Age Of Empires 2: Definitive Edition. After my first ranked win, I had a streak of confidence-fuelled victories, and started to feel like maybe I was the Big Man. But oh, no. I was not. The wins took me out of the world of newcomers, into the wide band of the leaderboard frequented by people who actually know how to play, and I got beaten into the ground with a bastard sword. As ever, my weakness was timidity about being aggressive early. I'd try to "fast castle", focusing on rapid early economic growth so as to get to the game's third tech tier, only to have a squad of gits march into my base eleven minutes into the game, because my enemy had thrown everything into a feudal age military rush. But now, it seems, my luck has turned.
]]>Twenty one years after its original release, RTS classic Age Of Empires 2 is finally, improbably, coming into its own as an esport. There's been a competitive AoE2 scene ever since 1999, but in the last couple of years, and particularly since the release of the Definitive Edition in November, it seems to have blown up somewhat. In fact, since 2pm GMT today, when the third Hidden Cup tournament kicked off, there have been around 30,000 people glued to this orgy of frenzied knight-spamming - and we're only on the second best-of-five matchup in the first round of 16 [Edit - in the 20 minutes since I started this piece, we're up to 35,000 viewers].
]]>Last week, after a lifetime of timidity, I finally bit the bullet and played my first competitive ranked game of Age Of Empires 2. Needless to say, I got battered. A big medieval boot stomped my fingers from the first rung of the ranked ladder, and I splashed back into the mire where I belonged. But after a week licking my wounds, practising build orders, doing maths with 14 wiki tabs open, and archer-rushing my way through endless 1v1 comp stomps, I came back for another go.
This time, my arrow-spamming, catapult-happy Ethiopians were facing off against the Japanese, on the map known as GOLD RUSH. As its name suggests, this map is all about fighting for control of gold deposits, almost all of which spawn on a massive hill in the middle. A massive hill... covered in tigers. Aggressive map control would be even more crucial here than it had been in the Black Forest, while tigers would become suddenly, and drastically, relevant. But had I learned my lessons from my first defeat - and could I seize my first win on the back of it? Draw your reading swords, armchair knights, and charge on to find out:
]]>I've never particularly been one for competitive multiplayer games. I've played the odd bit of Overwatch in recent years, but mostly as a way to hang out with pals, and I quite enjoy the complete anonymity of ranked hearthstone, even though I'm guff at it. But I've always been massively scared to play strategy games against human opponents, in case it ruins the illusion that I might be good at them. Plus, I panic! I get disproportionately terrified by the idea of being locked in a map with someone who wants, essentially, to end my pretty game of ant-farming, and so the idea has always seemed too stressful to bother with.
But then, after I fell in love with Age Of Empires 2: Definitive Edition in November, I started watching casts of high level players fighting 1v1 duels as a way to relax before going to sleep, and ended up getting fascinated by the absolute precision with which they handled the game.
]]>This is, really and truly, the last ever Steam Charts.
Which, I realise, is something I've said before. More than once. But this time it's really true!
Erk, I'm not really sure how to convince anyone of this. I'm the boy who cried last ever Steam Charts.
]]>Age Of Empires 2 is, as far as I’m concerned, the greatest real-time strategy game of all time. And with the release of Age Of Empires 2 Definitive Edition, it’s… well, it’s still that. But now, there’s a lot more of it. It’s brilliant. Still, virtually every design decision its quality rests on was made twenty years ago, and what few changes have been to its inner workings are fairly conservative. Make no mistake: this is much more of a compilation job than it is any kind of reimagining.
But then, crucially, there’s also nothing added that dilutes the success of the original, either. While its early-2000s successors, Age of Mythology and Age Of Empires 3, were both good games, they suffered from their attempts to innovate on a proven formula. Altering the formula of a classic is always a risk - and in Ensemble Studios’ case, it was one that didn’t pay off. Bravo then to former modders Forgotten Empires, who tinkered with the game they loved long enough to inherit it, and yet never went too far. While the king of RTS games still doesn’t have a successor, he’s looking bloody good in his old age.
]]>On the night of Friday 30th August, at PAX West in Seattle, RPS will raise the dead. Using techniques too dreadful to comprehend, we shall puncture the mortal veil like a sheet of wet tissue paper, and drag something back from the other side. That spirit will be Ghoastus, the Roman Ghost: our first fully spectral staff writer, and the site’s occasional historical strategy correspondent. He’s erudite, he’s wise, and he’s in no way a person draped in a sheet and a replica centurion’s helmet.
Ghoastus will be interviewing a panel of strategy gaming’s leading lights: Ed Beach, lead designer for Civilization VI; Adam Isgreen, creative director for the Age of Empires series; Peter Nicholson, content designer for Imperator: Rome; Jeff Spock, narrative director of Amplitude's just-announced historical 4X Humankind; and Nicholas Tannahill from Stronghold developers Firefly. From within his circle of chalked wards, Ghoastus will ask them how they mix reality with fiction when making historical games, and how they’ve kept well-loved franchises fresh over the years.
]]>Ave, citizens! It is I - Ghoastus, the famous Roman Ghost. This week, I have been haunting the streets of Los Angeles, in eager anticipation of all the thrilling Roman content soon to spill from the mouth of the games industry, like half-digested dormice from the maw of an overfed senator.
And yet, alas: I have found little to stir the patriotic embers that smoulder in my Roman soul at EIII. Those naughty Greeks have had a little time in the American sun, but it seems nobody cares much for us Romans this year. Nobody that is, except for Microsoft, who announced a thrilling new Definitive Edition for Age of Empires II, coming out this Autumn.
]]>Trying to keep up with E3 2019 is a fool's errand, and the foaming river of content streaming down the internet's face doesn't always make it easier. So here's a round-up of every news story from the show we think matters to you, with links to our full stories (and bantful liveblogs) where relevant. We'll be updating this hourly, so keep coming back.
]]>While Microsoft's E3 mediablast had nothing to say about Age Of Empires IV, and more's the pity, they did gab more about their ongoing efforts to fancy up older games in the historical real-time strategy series. Following 2018's Definitive Edition of the first game, we'll be getting Age Of Empires II: Definitive Edition this autumn. Yes, I know Empires 2 received an HD Edition with fixes and fancying only a few years ago, but this is a grander endeavour with new art and a new expansion and such. Have your first peek in the new trailer.
]]>After returning to Age of Empires II for an 'HD' re-release and several years of new expansions, reviving the long-dormant real-time strategy series, Microsoft have finally announced a brand new instalment. Age of Empires IV [official site] is in the works at Relic Entertainment, the folks best known for the Company of Heroes, Homeworld, and Dawn of War games. What a treat! And what a surprise.
Microsoft also revealed a release date for Age of Empires: Definitive Edition, the revamp of the first game. AND they confirmed that Definitive Editions of 2 and 3 will follow. Strat-o-rama!
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