Just a fun thought that came across.
Heavy speculation incoming:
-
With a reveal in 2017 and another year of pre-production I just put in leading to it, AoE4 is unusually long in the development, considering the rather conservative result and experience at Relic.
-
Relics most successful games are the CoH entries and in the “roadmap” from Ensemble Studios, a new AoE would kinda fall in the age of the two world wars.
-
It would make sense, that MS approached Relic to talk about an AoE4 in a WW2 setting when thinking of candidates to revive the franchise.
-
The (then) recent failure of DoW3(which got a lot of hate for taking it too far away from its roots), the enormous stress they probably felt by inheriting a so established and beloved franchise, may have resulted in the desire, to “keep it real” this time.
-
Instead of having a coh ~ish AoE4 and the backlash that this might’ve introduced, they went for fan service in going for a best of AoE as a starter to establish trust and test the waters.
-
The scraps of the first prototypes went straight into a new CoH with an added macro layer.
-
I don’t remember Relic as a multi-team studio, working on different big games. So CoH3, which came amidst the development of AoE4 along with a playable build, came quite as a surprise.
Have fun