Age of Empires IV: Anniversary Edition News

The English are "OP": Age of Empires veterans weigh in on the AOE4 beta

The Age of Empires IV technical beta is over, and everyone is taking some time to reflect on the upcoming RTS game. We shared our own thoughts on it the other day, but a handful of well-regarded beta testers - two of them self-proclaimed former Starcraft 2 pros - have shared some in-depth feedback of their own.

"These are just our opinions," user HuT_3527 explains, "...we are all competitive RTS players so that skews our perspective on certain things. Our desire is to highlight opportunities to optimise the competitive multiplayer aspect of the game. With that in mind, we can also be wrong."

The group's feedback is bulleted and spread across a number of topics, such as notable bugs, specific thoughts on each of the four Age of Empires 4 civilisations on offer during the beta, units, and more. Overall, they feel the game is solid "but falls short of what can be a great RTS," with specific points of questioned including the lack of dedicated command bar, upgrades that cost too much, and some balance concerns over the English and the Chinese civs.

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Age of Empires 4 is not the RTS revolution you've been waiting for

The recent Age of Empires IV technical beta gave players beyond the Age Insider programme their first chance to take the highly anticipated RTS game for a spin. It was fine, and I'm oddly pleased to discover that I'm just as mediocre at Age of Empires now as I was 20 years ago.

The beta offered PvP or co-op play against AI in up to 4v4 matches, with the English, Holy Roman Empire, Chinese, and Abbasid Dynasty available on a handful of maps. I had just as much fun playing around with the different civs as I did trying to actually win - it turns out building yourself a nice and tidy wooden wall is not the saviour you think it will be. That AI is also no joke either, even on intermediate settings.

I also found that an early rush can be killer. The English seem especially good at this, as they get access to some hard-hitting infantry earlier than the other playable civs, who have to make do with basic spearmen. Despite the community brouhaha over the art style, I found the graphics pretty enough (although I wasn't playing on max settings), and overall I saw nothing to make me especially concerned for the game's future.

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Age of Empires 4 DLC will be "a balancing act" to please different strategy fans

Age of Empires IV is getting a new technical beta this coming weekend, and despite a release date set in late October fans are already talking about what kind of DLC expansions they want to see next. Adam Isgreen, creative director at World's Edge, hasn't been coy with the fact that there are 'plans' for post-launch content, but we recently sat down and asked him to expand on what the studio's thinking is on this topic.

"We break people down into buckets," he tells us. "Like, the competitive players, what are we offering them? At launch? After launch? What's our roadmap? What about the players that love campaigns? What are we doing at launch, after [launch]? What about people who love to mod? How are we getting the tools out? We have all those tracks there we're working along for all the different types of players so that we can satisfy them in different ways."

When it comes to future expansions, we asked them whether they plan to tackle each "bucket" individually, or whether they'd tried to do an all-in-one approach to cater to multiple groups at once. "It's best to almost have a leapfrog thing," Isgreen explains. "I'm talking hypothetically here, but say new civilisations, but new civs could also touch on new campaigns.

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Age of Empires 4's stress test kicks off this week - and everyone's invited

Following August's Age of Empires 4 closed beta, Relic Entertainment has revealed that the highly anticipated strategy game is getting a new, technical stress test that kicks off later this week. While the team's aims are a little different this time around, meaning it won't be an identical experience, the key difference is you won't need an invite to jump in to this one.

First up, the when. The Age of Empires 4 technical stress test goes live on Friday, September 17 at 10am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm BST and runs through that weekend until Monday, September 20 until the same time. The idea this time is to stress test the upcoming RTS game's servers and systems at scale, with the devs trying to get as many people in and playing over the weekend to check that its "matchmaking, lobbies, and additional systems hold strong", as they explain in a blog post.

The test will primarily offer the chance to dive into Age 4's multiplayer experience, though there'll also be AI matches to try in its multiplayer custom lobby along with the game's tutorial, Mission Zero. The four Age of Empires 4 civilizations available to play during the test will be the English, Chinese, Holy Roman Empire, and Abbasid Dynasty, with five maps to give them a whirl in.

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Another Age of Empires 4 beta is something devs are "interested in doing"

Age of Empires IV's closed beta is over, but Relic and World's Edge are interested in running another one, provided "everything comes together." Creative director Adam Isgreen tells us during an interview at Gamescom that there is interest in running another beta, though it's still in discussion.

"I don't have anything concrete to share," he says, "[but] it is something that we're interested in doing. When you make a beta build, it's always a frozen moment in time but it doesn't stop the progress of the game."

Isgreen mentions that the version of the game that was provided for the beta - which started on August 5 and ended just before Gamescom - was nearly a month old by the time the testing period started. "There's been a lot of changes that have happened since," he explains, "balancing, new features, and all kinds of things." When we'll get another one though is a matter of timing, and choosing the right moment, Isgreen explains: "If everything comes together, and we can find another perfect freeze point - we're working on figuring out where we can make that happen."

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