“We’re always struggling with the impact of authenticity and the abstraction of that authenticity into gameplay. “That’s always an interesting battle,” he says. In reality, says Duffy, while this may feel ‘authentic’, it is inaccurate: as the Mongols spread from the Ghengis Khan era into his sons and grandsons, they settled, building cities and fortifications. The Mongols in Age of Empires 4 are nomadic: their towns can be packed up on wagons and relocated across the map. “Everyone hated it,” says Adam Isgreen, franchise creative director at World’s Edge, collaborating with Relic on the game.įinally, there were the aspects that both Duffy and Isgreen acknowledge are simply ahistorical.
Relic entertainment age of empires iv full#
Instead of the cartoonish turn-on-a-dime the animals pulled off in the previous games, in the new one, horses would be realistic, with a full suite of animations, slowing down and arcing in circles to their target. The team at Relic reimagined these into small stone circles: outposts that give units a speed bonus as they ping around a player’s base. Odegai Khan, the third son of Ghengis, expanded a giant Yam network, an early pony express: postal stations where a horse or runner could rest as they transmitted a message across the empire. Some elements of history mapped perfectly. The task now was to reduce 500 years of history into “an essence” of a civilisation: an abstraction concocted to fit the rules of a game. “So now we can start to figure out who else we can include.” Or, to put it bluntly, “We were like, Okay, well, they fought everybody,” says Quinn Duffy, the game’s director. They were the clear lynchpin civilisation, both an iconic force in Age of Empires 2 and an iconic force in history, famed for their lightning-fast horse cavalry, with an empire stretching nine million square miles, from East to West, encompassing nearly all of Relic’s game world. Speculating, it’s likely that Microsoft paid Sega for the right to work with Relic, as it probably did for Creative Assembly.
Relic entertainment age of empires iv series#
Known for its strategic gameplay founded on historical civilizations, the series spans a period of time from the Stone Age to early modern time, and even includes an. Age of Empires 4 will be Relic’s first game produced for a publisher other than Sega, its owner, since it was purchased by auction in the selling off of THQ’s assets in 2013. Relic Entertainment knew, from the very beginning, that Age of Empires 4 had to feature The Mongols. Age of Empires is the critically acclaimed, award winning Real Time Strategy (RTS) game with a legacy spanning more than 20 years and nearly a dozen titles in the franchise. The key to a great historical game is to ensure that the history doesn’t spoil the game.
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