With the NDA Lifted a public Beta seems to be on the horizon. But till it is announced, I thought it would be nice to share my experience since now I am legally allowed to do it. For those people looking for a Beta key for the closed Beta, you can try your luck by following the instructions here.
Age of Empires holds a special place in my heart. After all, this is the game that brought me to the world of Real-Time-Strategy. I still cherish the day when I took up my mouse and commanded Joan of Arc over a seemingly never-ending campaign of Age of Empires II. After my first tryst with Age of Empires, I just couldn’t have enough, and I had to check out everything that was related to the series, even so far as to going back and checking the first game in the series. And till now, the series, with its gems like Age of Mythology and Age of Empires III, the hasn’t disappointed. So, naturally when Microsoft game studios announced Age of Empires Online, I had to take a look, even though I tend to avoid online games like the plague. And luckily, I was also sent a Beta key. The game is being developed by Robot Entertainment (founded by former Ensemble Studio members of the original AoE repute) and Gas Powered Games (the developers of Supreme Commander). Though the initial core development was done by Robot Entertainment alone which included most of the game, as of 24th February 2011, they have handed over the further development, the polishing and balancing, to Gas Powered Games, moving on to one of their own IPs, Orcs Must Die! Finally before beginning, I want to say is that this is an review of the Beta version of the game. The problems and bugs mentioned here shouldn’t discourage you from trying gout this game, as they are still in the Beta stage and might get fixed or changed. So the final product might change a lot.
The first thing about designing a sequel is to answer the question, how do you improve over the predecessor. In case of Age of Empires (AoE), it’s a tough question to answer, because the previous game wasn’t broken, in fact it was down-right beautiful, the best looking Strategy game of its time. The answer for the developers seems to be to attract a different audience, while keeping the older core players satisfied. With the games featuring a progressive advance through the ages, throughout the series, it was a little shocking, if I might say, when the game was announced to go back to the ancient civilizations of Greece and Egypt. Even weirder is the fact that the game that revolutionized strategy game’s graphics department, to go for a cartoony look. All these things, at first glance seem to point to a younger audience. But due to my infinite curiosity, I had to look into it, and I’m very happy that I did. In simple words, the game is indeed geared towards a new and younger demographic, but the game doesn’t forget its core players.
The game has changed, with respect to its predecessor AoE III, but most of it is because of the new game play model suited to the online play. The first time you load up the game, you’re given the option to choose a civilization, for now it’s just Greece, with Egypt disabled and a yet unannounced civilization. At the bottom left, you have an option of choosing a realm, alternate for server, though there’s just one for the Beta phase, with hopefully more to be opened. After you choose your civilization, you are dropped onto a map containing 4 basic buildings, including your capital palace, at a corner of a huge map. This is your capital city. Very much like the home city of AoE III, all the things you do, the XP, the coins, the empire points, the raw materials and the loots (Yeah, there’s even a loot system), are used to improve and expand this capital city of yours.
Your game play is basically divided into the time you spend in your capital city and the time you spend on accomplishing different quests, which are basically skirmishes with definite objectives. Unlike the home city of AoE III, where the customization was just cosmetic, here in addition to the decorative customization, you can also add some functional buildings that in turn produces raw materials required to build other buildings, which in turn produces different types of objects depending on the building type. Apart from these there are also other functional buildings, like the Arena, which lets you host party matches, or the Mercenary camp, where you’ll always find a quest giver to sign you up for a PVP match. It’s a good design, which could’ve been done through menus, instead of integrating it into the city itself. Building these buildings is easy. You need to buy blue-prints for each individual building by spending coins, and then having the required raw materials at hand which are required for the building. If you happen to have them in store, you can place the building directly, which results in a nice little construction animation of scaffoldings being thrown up and the construction sounds playing as your building is constructed up. The process is fast, you don’t need to wait, but it’s nice to watch. As you build these buildings, your city grows, not only in then space that it consumes, but also it the way the landscape changes. The buildings that you build brings with it cobbled streets, squares and little details like it. Just like AoE III, your streets aren’t empty. You have tiny villagers strolling around, some relaxing, some just roaming around the bazaar, or praying at the temple, or even fishing! Once you have an industry up, donkey pulled carts will also show up ferrying goods from your workshops to the bazaar and stores. The details are cute and add to the overall charm of your capital city. Among these there are some static persons, who don’t move around much and tend to stay in front of specific buildings. These are your quest givers. Only clicking them, they’ll give you the option of accepting a quest, or if you’ve already done so, abandoning one. The screen where you do these, a sprite of the quest giver with a speech bubble containing some background about the quest, along with the occasional humorous comment, along with a dialog box, detailing the quest, the objective and the rewards.
These quests are skirmishes that you can play in order to earn XP, Coins, Empire Points and Loots and Equipments. This brings us to the second part of the game, the Real-time part which is familiar with most of the strategy players out there. This is the part where you start off with a town center and some villagers and gradually need to build up your economy as well as your military depending on the given objective. This is the part where old players will feel the most “at home”. Most of the game play mechanics are unchanged, apart from small things, which are actually taken from a previous part, like the fact that your villagers are no longer the Atlantean villager types that doesn’t need a drop point for whatever they are carrying; rather they need to build drop sites like AoE II. Another change is that you are not granted access to the full arsenal on the outset, rather you need to play earn XP and unlock the units from the tech tree through leveling up. This restriction also applies to the aging up. In order for you to research the later ages, you need to first unlock them. What this does is that it brings down the learning curve to a gentle slope, with which both new comers as well as veterans will be satisfied. On one hand you aren’t made to feel powerless, but at the same time you aren’t over-powered either, much like the gradual unlock of the campaigns. This gentle learning curve is further reinforced with the tutorial, which gradually eases you in with the different mechanics of your city as well as the game in skirmish mode. The skirmishes are like the older games, which I feel isn’t that bad. After all the old mechanic wasn’t broken and didn’t have too much of a flaw, so retaining that and not changing the game play was a good move. You are given some starting villagers and a town center along with a scout, which this time around, for some weird design concept or perhaps due to the Beta, is irreplaceable and can’t be built from the Stables. From this point you need to build up your fledging settlement and the economy related to it to a strong one to support your offence as well as your defense. Some of the UI elements help you in getting the work done more efficiently. For example, idle villager button no longer cycles through single idle villagers, but rather selects the groups of nearest idle villagers, so you issue quick commands to them. And, as older players would know, during the mid-to-late game sometimes you’ll find villagers standing around because you have finished gathering a resource. On mousing over the resources the game tells you exactly how many gatherers you have and on clicking them cycles through nearest group of gatherers. Also issuing way-pointed commands are much easier, you press shift and order a group of soldiers or villagers, the respective orders and they do it one by one in the order issued. This was a feature that was needed very much and thus allows you to execute some amount of strategic command and tactics, not too advanced, but still it’s welcome.
Like AoE III there is bandit camps here too that holds treasure chests which contain loots in the form of Raw materials, equipments or even blue-prints and recipes. These equipments can be applied on the different units and buildings for a permanent bonus to them, as long as you keep the equipments on them, through the equipments hall in the capital city. The recipes are like the blue-prints, except they allow you produce consumables, which are like the god-powers of Age of Mythology, granting you bonuses like free gold mine or spawning mercenary soldiers or even spawning buildings. Producing these consumables require raw materials given that you have learned the recipe and have space in your inventory. The inventory itself is very basic, just a 16-slot space, that is used to store everything that you get, that’s not currency, on your quest or from your work-shops or as rewards. There are no auto arrange function, but you can drag and drop to organize it the way you like. Each of the slots can hold 100 units of similar objects. So, you see the game play has been stream-lined to welcome new comers but doesn’t forget the older players.
Then there’s the graphics. AoE III introduced very beautiful graphics that included beautifully rendered objects and trees and included are good Physics system. Age of Empires Online instead of going for even more cutting edge graphics, probably due to being an online game, goes with a cartoony approach. With Caricatured characters models and buildings, the game indeed looks cute. Purists may shun it due to the simple graphics, but it fits well with the settings of the game. The game isn’t meant to be very serious, after all. But that doesn’t mean details are missed. Even in this new approach the attention to details is great. Like mentioned above, in your capital city, villager strolls around, fishing, relaxing, tearing grass and the likes. The same amount of details is found in the skirmish too, although a lot less autonomous. Idle villagers from example, sleeps, with “Zzzz” floating over them. Defeated enemies, like the bosses, fall down on their knees or collapses clutching their heart. Normal soldiers, some of them fall down and a grave stone and flowers erupt in their place, while some of them just collapse. Mounted soldiers are thrown off while their horses as both of them die spread-eagled. Trees crash down with the leaves trailing behind, bushes fall-apart, fish jumping at the back of fishing boats, dust billowing around a building under construction, Ships have a rickety feel with planks sticking out from the decks, and being jostled after firing, the flashing of swords of soldiers, donkey-pulled carts that have a carrot dangling in front of the donkey on a stick. Small details like these are abundant, and make the game enjoyable. Sure the buildings don’t go off as spectacularly, but does burst into fire before falling apart. Overall, the effects are quite enjoyable and sometimes it is quite satisfying just looking at your villagers and units scampering around carrying your orders.
But no effect is complete without a believable sound effect backing them up. And this is one field that this game hasn’t disappointed. The sound effects are quite brilliant, with the sounds changing appropriately according to the part where the user is focused. For example when you’re over the market you’ll hear carts and merchants shouting, while when in front of the Temple, you’ll likely hear people praying. The same thing happens in the Skirmish too. Miners have that distinctive sound of their pick-axes striking against ores, gatherers rustling the bushes while gathering, horses neighing, arrows swishing and bows going twang, people shouting when their Town Center are under siege and many more. The sound really does a good job immersing the player in the game. The background score is quite good. Some of them are remixes of the older AoE trademark tunes, while some are new.
The AI in the game is also commendable, with it scaling itself along with the user. Think you can over-run an opponent with just foot soldiers? The AI, even if defeated at the first encounter will send out the proper counters. And it is also intelligent enough of not setting up just lone towers; rather, it’ll put up a range of towers each supporting each other. Thus sieges of enemy towns, especially in the early game without any siege units is quite challenging, requiring multiple stabs at it and a strong economy supporting the effort. The AI doesn’t seem to be cheating too, and earning its resources truthfully. Though one quirk that I noticed is that even when I have a superior army, a group of villagers will attack the soldiers rather than running for the town centers. And when under attack some of the villagers will just run a little distance and stand there, waiting to be killed. But then again it’s the Beta.
But still with so much improvement, there are still many quirks. For example you have to buy a Blueprint for every single building every time you want to build it. That means not only are you paying in material for the building, but are also paying in Gold for every blueprint. Next on the list is the lack of formation commands. While the older AoE was known for being able to command soldiers in formations for some really good and effective tactics, that mechanic is completely missing in this game. There’s just an attack-move command and nothing else related to advanced combat maneuvers. Then there’s the soldiers charging into battle with whatever they have, against a building. A friend once asked me, why is it that people striking with a sword can make a building burst into flames? With AoE III it seemed like the developers had heard such things, but why is it missing here, especially with attention to other details, this aspect sticks out. Another weird aspect is that you can’t save your game while on a quest. So even if the quest drags on for hours you have to play it for hours (even in quests marked as single player only), till you get to your capital city where the game is saved automatically. Then there’s the final controversial point. Though the game will be free to play, many of the juicy units will be only available for premium city owners. I really don’t want to comment on this, but just for the sake of knowing I thought it would be good to mention it here.
Age of Empires is something that I always loved and Age of Empires Online hasn’t let me down. Some people might not like the new looks, but I think this new look gives this game a fresh look and separates it from just a remake. The work by Robot Entertainment, Gas Powered Games and Microsoft game studios is truly commendable. Though, I would’ve preferred a offline game, but with other game companies making you stay online even in a single-player game, the prospect of a game that has online feature built into it, but still having single-player element, is good enough for me. If Microsoft can get the pricing right, they might just have another success story on their hands with Age of Empires Online. On a last note, this is a very enjoyable game that I have enjoyed very much, and often find myself drawn to the game just for that one last quest.
Scores:
Overall: 9.5
Game play: 9.3
Graphics: 9.5
Sound: 9.9
Here are some of my in-game screenshots:
