Even before we first saw gameplay from Age of Empires 4, we talked to the developers. AoE 4 becomes AoE 2 - in modern!
Sometimes it surprises me how well known GameStar is all over the world. Chris Rubyor, Design Director at Xbox Game Studios and the new real-time strategy developer World's Edge, remembers Jörg Langer and Martin Deppe well.
For both have visited the game smithies over the past 25 years, where Rubyor has worked on RTS beads such as Command & Conquer, Star Wars: Empire at War or The Lord of the Rings: Battle of Middle-earth.
Now Rubyor Age of Empires 4, along with Relic Entertainment, the creators of Company of Heroes,is giving the finishing touches - and he's not the only developer involved in this mammoth project who made the genre great in the 90s and early 2000s.
However, AoE4 faces a much more difficult task than all the old classics: It aims to pull the real-time strategy out of the crisis, modernize the mix of base building and giant battles, kiss a sleepy genre and inspire millions of potential RTS players.
And for that, Age of Empires 4 returns to arguably the most popular scenario in the series: the Middle Ages
Adam Isgreen can't wait. He wants me to see the first gameplay trailer of AoE4 in front of all the other journalists and viewers of the XO event in London on November 14, 2019. Isgreen, his character Creative Director for the entire franchise, sits me on the eve of the show in opposite a restaurant, between us the starter plate. He pulls out his phone.
"Woe!" shannon Loftis threatens him. The studio manager of World's Edge, Microsoft's new RTS department, can't believe it: "It's not okay to show the game to the very first person outside the studio on a mobile phone!" Adam Isgreen grins remorsefully: "Yes, okay, you probably don't want to see this beautiful 4K trailer on my little smartphone display." Then they show me Age of Empires 4 on a laptop - and it looks like the best of Age of Empires 2 in modern 3D.