(logo warbling)
(keyboard clacking) (bright lively music) (keyboard clacking) (keyboard clacking) (bright lively music) - So you may not be aware of this, but "Age of Empires" has had
quite the remarkable comeback over the past few years. This all started back in 2018 when Microsoft released
a full-scale remaster of the original 1997 "Age of Empires" under the title "Age of
Empires: Definitive Edition." This was followed one year
later with a definitive edition of its insanely popular
sequel a year later with the Definitive Edition of the first 3D game in the
series, "Age of Empires III." And in an effort to keep the streak up, Microsoft just went ahead and made a new "Age of Empires" game and named it "Age of Empires IV." So you're probably thinking
what I was thinking, right? Big company like Microsoft suddenly making a bunch of cheap remakes of this classic series just to get people interested in it again so they can reboot the franchise. But here's the thing, every single one of these
games has been well received, not just by the fans,
not just by the media, but by the market too. The past few years have been a full blown "Age of Empires" renaissance with active online communities, terrific age-focused YouTube channels like Spirit of the Law, and even a vibrant esport scene thanks to the Red Bull Wololo tournament that's been running since 2000. We'll explain the Wololo thing later. The series has been so popular
that earlier this year, Microsoft released a console version of "Age of Empires II," a game that seems inconceivable to play without a mouse and keyboard. So I mean that's gotta be a cash grab. There's no way people actually enjoyed playing it on a controller or... Huh?
(package thuds) So here's the thing, this is a bit of a selfish documentary because myself and my wife
played dozens of hours (package thuds)
of "Age of Empires II Definitive Edition"
over the past few years, specifically during
the COVID-19 lockdowns. See, we were 13 when "Age of Empires II" was originally released on PC. And like most PC gamers back then, I was enthralled by its exciting balance of city building and realtime strategy. "Age of Empires" isn't the
first real-time strategy game, that honor is usually given
to "Westwood's DUNE II," but it was a genre defining game. A beautiful isometric world, with a collection of
civilizations to choose from, each with their own language, buildings, and style of warfare. The battles were exciting, but manageable. There was a single player story, but you could also
create custom skirmishes with different rules on
a variety of landmasses. There were sea battles,
there's early artillery, politics, religion. "Age of Empires" was
basically chess on steroids. So during the pandemic, when we have to closed the
previous Noclip Studios, I had to bring all that
equipment back to my house and I suddenly had like four desktop PCs just lying around my house. So myself and my wife decided
to look for any PC game that we could play cooperatively. We had both played Age
II while growing up, so we turned the spare bedroom
into basically a LAN cafe. And so, when our kid went to sleep, we'd burned the quarantine midnight oil ganging up against some
bots in custom skirmishes. It became so much of our day-to-day that for Valentine's Day that year, she made me this card. Again, sorry, if you're not
getting the Wololo thing, (laughs) don't worry,
we'll cover it later. So today, we're gonna
dive into the resurrection of "Age of Empires" by
talking to two of the folks at the studio that Microsoft
spun up to helm this effort. Earnest Yuen, executive
producer at World's Edge and Adam Isgreen, senior creative
director at World's Edge. But before we dive into the nitty gritty, I wanted to ask them where the decision to remake the first three games came from. You see, it's not like you
couldn't play "Age of Empires" until these Definitive Editions came out. An HD remake of "AoE II"
had been on Steam since 2013 and a version of Age
III had been available on Steam since '07. Why do they think people
wanted these new versions? And why is it they made the
decision to remake all three? (gentle music) - You know, a lot of people
in that time were like, "Oh, RTS games are dead, right?" They got eaten by by MOBAs, they got eaten by Tower Defense games, your farm builds, whatever, you know, let these genres split. And when we put the catalog up, the crazy thing is that we're like, "Wait, people are engaging with this, like, with long sessions
and more people keep coming to the title." And we really were like, "Well, wait, maybe RTS isn't dead, like, what could we do here?" And I think that was that, plus, what we wanted to do with Age IV when they're like, "Hey,
if we made a new Age game, what would we do?" I think that all contributed
to us being like, "Boy, these games are
in kind of rough shape. Can we preserve them better? Can we do a better job with networking? I mean, there's some hoops people have to jump through, right, to play them. Can we make that better?" And, you know, that kind of
started the whole conversation towards what Definitive Editions became. - I would say, like, it started about just over five years ago, is when we started doing it. We kind of did it in parallel when the "Age of Empires IV" project was being discussed and then started. And then we said, "Hey, you know what? What would be awesome is we had a chance to bring all the original 'Age of Empires' back as well." So by the time Age IV comes out, then everyone already has the chance to recently play all the awesome "Age of Empires" games. We wanted to make all the Age fans happy. So that's why when we signed the project, we got approval to do all of them. One was never actually re-released. So when we re-released Definitive Edition, it was the first time
that we brought it back. But in terms of production, we did do one first, and then go to two, and then three started
in parallel as well. So the idea was like, "Hey, let's learn how to
do real-time strategy games the right way again. - [Adam] You could almost say that Age I is like the national game of Vietnam. It's almost like StarCraft is for Korea. It's crazy, but they only play Age I. Like, they're not really into Age II. And then yet Age II has, you
know, surpassed a lot of people because I think of just
how globally accessible it is, right? It's just like there's,
"Hey, one of your nation or a previous nation (laughs) that became your nation is in
that game somewhere," right? Every one of them just has
such a unique player base and I think that's because each game kind of has its own rhythm
to it and its own pacing, and people have fallen in love with the unique shtick of each one. So it's funny when you say like, "Oh, did one replace yet?" No, they never did. (character speaking in foreign language) - [Earnest] Yeah, "Age
of Empire I" was special for that reason. It really taught us a lot of foundation work
on how to redo all the art, how to, like, really build a
game across different regions of the world at the same time, get all the really smart people together that are passionate about "Age of Empires" to work together on the projects. (drum roll)
We set up a whole studio for "Age of Empires", like literally. This is what we did. - We have all these wonderful
sister studio partners that work with us, right? Tantalus, Forgotten Empires,
Relic, just to name a few. And they all end up working
in different aspects on pretty much every "Age of Empires" game because they all have
such unique strengths that they all get pulled
in at some point. (laughs) It's like, it starts, "Well,
it's just gonna be Relic and it is for a while." And it's like, "Hey, Forgotten Empires, can you come in and help
us with some tuning?" And like, "Oh, hey, can you
do this part of the code over here that we..." Yeah, it's a big family. Actually, matter of fact, there's a lot of "Command &
Conquer" people here, myself. Yeah, like, I was on all of the C&C games except for the very first one and there's two others
from Westwood as well that are on my team, that are on our team, that all work on the game
now, which is kind of fun. - [Earnest] But we did talk
to a lot of Ensemble people since we have friends and
we get to talk to them. But it was really cool that
a lot of them still remember "Age of Empires" really fondly. So they want us to do well
and that was really helpful. - [Complete Build Noise] (gentle music) - We actually learned a
lot of things from one. So for one, the project itself, we definitely, like, try to
bring up the quality of life. We added a new user interface so you can actually tell what's going on.
(water sloshing) We actually tried running
the original code as is and the pixels are so big that you can't actually
see it anymore. (laughs) It is amazing. But there are just so many conventions that people are so used to. Then we also need to like, "Hey, but the fans play "Age of Empires I" because it is "Age of Empires I." So we want to make sure that we keep the spirit of "Age of Empires I," the code to be the same. So we ended up using a blend. We actually updated the engine instead of creating new engine. We did do some experiment of complete... Do a new engine for a little bit, but then, we quickly found out that they are timing the feel of it. Keeping the feel is very important to us because that's what the fans wants, right? - Man, a lot of people, they had this fondness in their head for what Age I looked like. I actually, originally, we wanted to... I had posed the idea
of starting every game on the original graphics and then it blur, like all pixel and then it
blurs into the new version. But the asset load was so
crazy from the new version that we're like, "We
can't even hold the memory to have the pixelated
(laughs) versions in there." The original assets were
pretty much unusable for us to go forwards with. So we had to redo everything from scratch. - [Earnest] We're trying
to learn where the bar is, like authenticity bar versus high-res bar, like, where do you draw the line. And we have to learn where that is. But we have learned that from one that if you get too close to the original, all the original fans will love it, but it makes it really hard
for new people to join. (bright upbeat music)
(object thudding) So for two, we set up... One of our goals we actually
write on the whiteboard to say, "We want to build the 'Age of Empires II' you remember, not still reality that you see." - You know, fortunately,
given the size of the game and given the zooms, there was certain... You know, that put some restrictions on how big they had to be,
how detailed they had to be. So it made the modeling a little simpler, but to get to 4K assets,
everything had to be redone. All the animations, all of the states, every single sprite rotation,
right, that we have to do. Creating 3D assets of them because it's just easier to
animate them quickly, right? Instead of having to drew all the... 'Cause you'd have to do key frames and then do all the Twins, and like if you're doing
classical animation. So it's just easier to
do it in 3D that way to capture all of the animations. And then the big challenge was
converting the eight facings so they didn't just pop into a blend, so that we could have kind
of more smooth rotations. If you go back and you look
at a lot of the old RTS games, they've only get directions for anything. So you'd get things to
go, (vocalizing), right? And we blended them, but we had to maintain
the timing of the original because as Earnest said,
feel was so important. There's a lot of logic and
code that went into making sure that, again, we maintained feel even though we could improve the visuals.
(horse whickering) Like, noise is always
an issue in RTS games 'cause you want really clean reads, right? I mean, like, if you
really think about it, RTS games at their core
are three elements. There's units, structures, and
things that block me, right? And then the things that
block me can be a building, it could be water, it could
be, you know, a hill, whatever. But, like, that's really what
you need to be able to... (finger clicks)
A player needs to be able to read that in seconds, right? And so, silhouettes were
insanely important to us. And so, that was a challenge, right? Because if you have all this
super detail on the units, if you crush it down
directly, you just get noise and then it's hard to read the units. So a lot of care was taken in making sure that things like, if they had shields, that the shield remained relatively clean, even if different resolution scales such that if that was a
key read of that unit, that would maintain, right? And we had to do that
with each kind of unit to make sure that the unit's
still read is the unit. (object thudding)
(graphics clinging) - [Earnest] For voices, for Age two, for example, we recorded all the voices, mainly campaign voices. So those are the things that
we completely re-recorded for "Age of Empires II." - [Narrator] Despite
their fearsome aspect, the huns might have been little more than raiders,
(crowd screams) had it not been for the
leadership of Attila. - For authenticity, we wanted
to keep as much as we could. If we had good source
and could clean it up, we would do that over re-recording. - Right, yeah. You didn't have anyone
chatting Wololo into a microphone, it's like...
(Adam laughing) - Right, that was from
like a sample library. - Wololo.
(bright twinkling music) Yeah, we did re-record Wololo
actually because of that. We didn't want to... 'Cause, you know, some
of the... (lips clicks) There was a time I think
when people were pretty fast and loose with audio assets
(laughs) in terms of ownership and we wanted to make sure
that this time around, we were doing the DEs that we... Everything was buttoned
up in that respect. - Do you have any idea why that was chosen (laughs) for that particular unit? - I don't know that one. - I do not know. I think it was literally
something like the name of the audio sample
was like "Priest Chant" or something like that.
- Okay. (laughs) - And then maybe they just saw
it like, "Oh, Priest Chant, maybe that'll work." And they're like, "Well,
okay let's just do it." - [Character] Wololo, wololo. (air whooshing) - [Adam] Every Definitive Edition game, we reached out to the communities that were holding those games up. I mean, a lot of these
games were maintained by the community for
years and years and years without us being involved at all. So we reached out to them and we're like, "Hey, we'd
love to improve these, what would you like to see?" We don't wanna break
the spirit of the game, like, absolutely. So how can we improve them
without breaking them? 'Cause there's a certain... I think there's a certain amount of things that you would love to
modernize sometimes, but that would might not
make it Age I or Age II. If you're familiar with Age II, you know that things like
when we put in auto scouting, how contentious that was for
some people, even though... Then you play it and you're
like, "Well, okay, I get it." For new players it works, I'm not gonna use it
as an advanced player. - Maybe some folks
remember that for example, for Age II, we actually ran multiple betas that were literally, like... I think the first time was like
tens of thousands of people and right before ship, we
have like lots of people 'cause we want to stress the server. We also want to see what... People always have
opinion on what they like and what they don't like. The ideally, we do those
before the game even comes out. And of course. we have
our internal QA teams and they know the game very, very well.
(sword clanking) - So for years, real-time
strategy developers have tried to make their
PC games work on consoles and we've had mixed results. Some of the better examples
are games that were developed from the ground up for consoles, but that wasn't really an option here. Console players wanted to play
"Age of Empires" after all, not some reduced version. And that's what makes the console version (package thuds)
of "Age of Empires II" so interesting. You see the various teams
working alongside World's Edge made some fairly significant
changes to the game to get it to flow properly on consoles. Not just new interface elements to better suit the controller, but full-blown automation
systems to unburden the player from some of the game's micro, especially with how you assign citizens to collect various resources. So how did they change so much and still seem to satisfy these players? - [Adam] As your economy grows, you will train more villagers and gather different types of resources. Villager priorities automatically
distribute your villagers between resources, making it
easier to manage your economy. (lively upbeat music)
(arrow whooshing) - So when we first started being part of the Xbox organization, we did talk about like,
"Hey, do we need to do a... Do we need to do an Xbox version as well?" But luckily, our boss, Shannon
Loftis, at the time said, "Now concentrate, make the best PC game that you guys can." We have space to really
focus on the PC version and that's what we did. We spent all our resources to make sure, like, we get the best games out possible. - So I've made... Over the years, I think
I've made four console RTSs starting with "Red
Alert" on the PlayStation and then going through the years. And my previous one was
"Universe at War," right, that Sega put out. So there's been a history
of us kind of working on and trying to think through them. It's just the fundamental difference of a mouse is a precision instrument. It's like I click this
thing, I click it over here, I'm making very precisiony
kind of movements, right? Where a controller is like, I drive, (imitates car revving)
(controller clacking) I move a camera, I move a unit, like I do something direct. And it's really hard to
(laughs) make the two of those work together. So we did a lot, a lot of experimentation, I mean just a ton. And I have to say that Phil
Spencer was really like, "When am I gonna get my console version?" 'Cause Phil loves the Xbox. And so, the whole time that we were like, "No, we want to do the PC first and then we'll think about console." Which is what we did.
(horse whickering) But he was just like, "No,
I want when." (laughs) "When am I gonna get this?" And he plays, like you go online right now and you can see him playing
a couple times a week. It's great. (characters speaking in foreign language) (tense music)
(object thudding) - After Age II comes out, I would say every single
time we make any announcement of anything, someone is going to be in the feedback comment
section where it's like, "When is it coming to Xbox?
When is it coming to Xbox?" Literally, I want to
say like, "Two years." Like, nonstop that fans are asking for it. Like I mentioned earlier, our studio principle is
to make our fans happy So at a certain point, we say like, "Okay, this is not just
one or two guys. (laughs) You really need to, like, make this work." So we started looking at it seriously. The fun part is from a
production standpoint, like we internally try to
hook up a controller directly to emulate the mouse because when you ask a
programmer, "How you will do it?" That that's exactly what a
lot of games have done, right? They looked at like this
is your mouse, and A and B, which is left and right click. Man, was it bad? (Celtic characters speaking) The mouse, you can actually move across the screen really quickly. And the way that people play on PC is they click on the screen and then they hotkey back
and then click again, right? You can't do that with the analog stick. It is just way too slow. The game example we actually
talk about is actually Diablo. 'Cause when you look at like Diablo, it is a very click game, right? So you click a lot, but they transitioned
to console really well. What's the Diablo equivalent
for real-time strategy game for "Age of Empires," that's literally like how
we start thinking then, "Okay, let's make this stick
feels really good first." (controller thuds)
And in order for that pacing to be right, you cannot just do the
repetitive, pick a guy, do this here, guy... Yes, you can, but it is boring. That is not how people want
to interact with the game. So the AI is done in a
way to help take a lot of the tedious work out,
but we actually make sure that you get to pick the automation level. So all the strategic
decisions are still made by you, the player. So that was very important
for us to make sure that it is not like auto everything and then you don't even
need to play the game, but it's auto enough that
you can enjoy the game and enjoy making strategic decisions. So that was the key key part on how the team actually come together. And once that happened, we
add the context sensitive... Sorry, site based command menu, (laughs) then magic happens.
(horse whickering) - Based on my previous work
and Tantalus's previous work on doing things like Cities
Skylines and other games that they've done, we're like, "Okay, we need
to put our minds together and figure out what interface
would really work here." And the radials and all
that stuff came out of that. But the thing that really
was fascinating is watching how it evolved. Like the thing that really
brought about what I feel is it's really hard to go back, honestly, even to some of the stuff on
PC now from what we've done on console with villager automation and the contextual actions based on... That was the original conversation. I'm like, "I want
contextual actions in here. How do we do it?" All of that, like click on a gold mine, just build the gold mine. Please, just don't... Like all of that... And it's great to see that
people are really enjoying it. But all of that came about
through time and just, we were really fortunate that we were prototyping console controls. I mean, probably even
before we admitted it, to be honest with you. I think that we've been
working on them since... Right around the ship of... I think after DE III, we started messing around with the radials and trying to figure
out what to do with it and how we could do it. And we had some people
free on one of the teams and we're like, "All right,
let's just go to town on this and figure out how to make it work." (character groans) I've always said that
RTS games are basically, you're spinning plates, right? You're balancing plates on sticks. And it's how many plates
can you keep going at once and which ones are you letting
falter determines how good of a player you are. So just because the
villagers are automated, doesn't mean they're optimal. Our goal is never to
replace the high-end meta with something that's automated, right? It should be something that
allows people of the same level to be like, "We're just gonna have fun and I don't need to
worry about this as much so I can concentrate on
fighting, and scouting, and building buildings." (sword clanking)
(character groans) One of the things we always
say about the Age games is we always wanna make sure
we leave room for mastery that that can have its moments, right? And that people can get good and very good at doing certain things. And so, but villager automation
was one of those things that we thought like,
"Okay, people might be a little upset over it,
but it's not going to break the high end of the game," right? The spirit of the game. (object thudding) - The village automation AI, and it's actually a lower
level AI and that has evolved over time completely separately as well. And the reason we get to do a DE AI is because the game now has
been played for two decades now, and actually, pro players, they play it. So what we have done is during development of Definitive Editions, we actually looked at how
these pro players play and what strategies do they use, and we actually adapted
and added those strategies and bring it to the game, for example like, "Hey, it's open field, you build crossbowman." That we build it into the game so that people actually realize how to... The AI actually have that understanding and apply those strategies
like a pro player would. So that is how we added it. - (Character speaking Gaelic)
(object thudding) - I have this theory about video games, I call the one button of fun. And it's like (laughs)
anytime, I should be able to push a button and
have some fun be that, you know, in a main menu,
I wanna get into the game, just stop with all the... Just one button. Like you just had fun. Like, but in the game,
you're like, "I want..." Especially RTS games, right? RTS games are all about... If you think about it, a click
in an RTS game is insane. Like with one click, you
selected a bunch of units, you clicked across the map. Well, you just did a click, but what did you really see in your mind? Go here, go this way. Go the way I intend you to do, make sure you engage
or don't engage, right, the things that I want. Go around that rock this
way, don't go over that. Make sure you go this, why aren't you listening to me?
(tense music) (Danny laughing)
Right? - Right, yeah.
- And all you did was click. And so, how can we take more
of that into the console? And I think that was part of
our driving spirit was like, "How do we just make it a
button, like do the thing? Don't make me hunt for it, don't make me dive into a
building to get to a thing to do, like blacksmith, do this thing. Yup, I can do it right here." Boop, that I think was our defining light. Pull those, bubble it up,
I guess, for the console to make it just much more accessible. (object thudding)
(gentle music) (object thudding) It's actually good that
we did them one at a time because we would find a feature
that we would love, right? Or we would experiment and say, "Oh, let's try putting this in." And it would be so great. We're like, "Well, it has
to go in all the DEs now." And then we'd have to figure
out how to move that feature across the games given
all the different engines and the different tech. But it's been fun, it's been a fun journey of like learning and leapfrogging all of those DEs in order to create kind
of the package, right? It's been great, just the features, you know, as we kind of leapfrog features, like, you know, we put "Art of War" in because I really wanted
to help people learn how to play RTS games. And then we're like, "This is so good, it has to go on all the games." And so, then it ended up in III and IV. And now, you know, what's the
myth version of "Art of War?" Well, we gotta figure that out, you know, how do we manifest that. Things like villager
automation and context, do we have that show up now from now on? Like, is that just part of the game? We gotta talk about that. And like how do we bring
that alive if we want to across all the games and
like what do we do with it? So it's been great. Like a lot of the learnings
and everything that we take from every game, we're just
gonna roll forward with and keep evolving. - [Narrator] The English
pretensions in Scotland are surely at an end. The forces of Wallace are triumphant. (object thuds)
(triumphant music) - [Adam] I think that we... A lot of the sentiment
got to people, right? About like, "Oh, you know,
this is long in the tooth." RTS really did have a heyday and the industry's very cyclical, I guess, it's the way to put it, right? Where something will
come up and come down, and come up and come down. There's a time for racers,
there's a time for shooters. You know what the really hot thing is. And I think the great thing is, is that RTS never really
went away completely, but it did wane in terms
of being in the public eye. I think everyone was waiting
for someone to take a bet on a big game again, a big RTS game. And that's what, you
know, we did with Age IV. And now, honestly, it's kind of delightful to see that, you know, we've got what? Three splinter companies from Blizzard that are all working on RTS
games of different types, right? Everyone was just waiting
for someone to take that. Like, "Hey, this can be quality and look, it can be successful." And then everybody else
is ready to dive in. (horse whickering) - "Age of Empires" is
now a generational game. So there are literally people who are now have their own kids that
they try to play with. So we want to make sure
you get to someone, maybe one person plays on the console and the other person plays on the PC, and they can play with each other. When we do something, we go all out. We are very happy with
how the games turned out. Hopefully, the fans will
continue to support us and we listen to the
fans, so keep telling us what they like, what they don't like, and we want to keep building
"Age of Empires" more and more. (lively upbeat music) (lively upbeat music continues) (lively upbeat music continues) (lively upbeat music continues) (logo warbling)
(keyboard clacking) (keyboard clacking) (keyboard clacking)
Most of this video was about the console version of AoE2. I was hoping to hear more about the community itself and how it grew to where it is today.
I still hear so much more talk about the remaster of 2 than the release of 4. When they first showed gameplay for 4 I was so excited but it seems like most of that hype I was sharing with a ton of people vanished pretty quickly.
I've never taken the games seriously, me and friends will usually play games with a huge starter economy and all techs unlocked so we can build huge cities and armies before we start to fight each other. For this experience I preferred 2, but I can't really complain about 4s approach elsewhere. It's just indescribably not as good.
AoE4 couldn't live up to AoE2 for a multitude of reasons.
The first one is that AoE2 has been polished for many years by an expansion, many mods, and now the HD version and DE version.
AoE4 was released in an essentially unfinished state compared to AoE2 - full of bugs, lack of features, lack of fully customizeable bloody hotkeys. Ontop of that, one of the funnest things about AoE2 is how fun the micro is with archers and siege...sadly AoE4 made all arrow shots 100% homing.
Lastly, the camera angle for it was super frustrating, although they did improve it a tiny bit.
Its a shame though because I really thought it was both similar and different enough to AoE2 to be a great sequel....but they just released it in an funinished state. That may have worked if AoE2 didn't exist....but it does exist, so I had very little reason to not return to it.
4 was pretty disappointing for me, because it seemed more intent on staying trapped in the past to satisfy longtime AoE fans than to actually move into the future and become a product with modern tech. Lots of 4 was needlessly antiquated in design, look, and feel.