Since Age of Empires 4 was already announced in 2017, it seems fair to say that news about the game’s progress has been fairly sporadic. It is possible that this may start to change in 2021, following a promising end-of-year update from World Edge CEO Shannon Loftis on the game’s progress.
In a blog post on the official Age of Empires website, Loftis reveals that the development team at Relic is “making great progress” with the game, adding that “we play this game literally every day – in Washington as well as in Vancouver. ”
Loftis further explained: ‘RTS development is funny: it takes a while to build the separate systems (AI, economics, sim, version, etc.), and then it takes a while before they come together.’ Now that things has come together to make a fully playable game, which Loftis says ‘feels like an Age of Empires game’, there is still ‘debugging and balance and polishing’ before anything can be released.
Before this spark of hope was the last we really saw of Age of Empires 4, in November 2019 when Microsoft unveiled a game trailer as part of XO19, which you can see below.
Keep up the pace
In the blog post, Loftis also mentions the change in homework that was inevitably necessitated by the pandemic that caused the studios around the world. However, it appears that the Age of Empires 4 team has managed to stay on track.
According to Loftis, the Age of Empires team changed our processes (through trial and error) to facilitate productivity to keep the game on track. So much passion, such great developers, artists, designers, narrators, sound experts and the community – not to mention the backbone functions that keep the business going. ”
Although we do not yet have a release window for Age of Empires 4, it’s good to know that the game is coming together well. We can only hope that 2021 will bring more regular updates and maybe the fixed release date we all hope for.
If you fancy more Age of Empires experiences, it’s worth remembering that Age of Empires 3: Definitive Edition was released in 2020, while a brand new DLC for Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition is on Xbox Game Pass for PC, Microsoft is coming. Store and Steam later this month.