Sometimes at night I lay awake asking the fates for one single day where somebody doesn’t drag out that confounded image as irrefutable proof that AoE4 will take place during the 20th Century. I hope that perhaps some further information will help clarify things.
Tracking down official proclamations from this series’s old guard is a bit of a crapshoot, but I am able to find an unsourced supposed quote from Sandy Peterson. AoE’s wiki page narrates it as: "Several collectors’ editions of Age of Empires III included a hardcover artbook. The last page of the artbook has a pictorial depiction of the series; the Roman numerals below each panel range from I to V, indicating the series would include an Age of Empires IV and Age of Empires V. Ensemble Studios employee Sandy Petersen said that the image "was total speculation on [their] part."
I dug a bit deeper. The actual citation goes like this:
“Sandy commented on the subject of Age 4 & 5:
Quote: 4) the collectors edition on the back page of the Art Work book there was a picture of a World War I or II solider (actualy looks like a later one a M16 is in his hands) for AOE IV how will that work
A — it was total speculation on our part.”
@dariakus, as a former executive producer of the Age franchise and resident historian and overall good guy (as well as, critically, a present day outsider looking in with no hand in the AoE4 mix), do you have any thoughts?