Age of Empires, at the time of it’s original release the technology was limited. I’m assuming that to maintain high quality performance and frame rates - many of the assets were 3D modelled and textured then rendered out as 2D sprites. These 2D sprites spread on an isometric grid would work much differently than in a 3D environment. So how exactly is this remaster going to update a 20+ year game? If the original models still exist - they’re probably sub par to today’s standards, meaning they would need to be remodeled and textured then rendered out as sprites to maintain that classic isometric feel. Similar to what Blizzard is doing with the StarCraft remaster. I’m just curious.
- Performance
- AI
- Interfaces
- Graphics
- Stability
- Balance
- Multiplayer
And some other ways.
If you watch the trailer you can see how the graphics changed.
Basically a huge upgrade in 2D graphics rendering. It would be a huge cost to try and develop 3D.
So the game will be remastered in the following ways:
(Shamelessly stealing @“Andy P” 's list. Original thread here
- It’s the Genie Engine, we built on the 1997 version of the game so we can also support a classic gameplay mode.
- All-new graphics & artwork: They’re still sprite graphics actually
Just much higher fidelity, but all is still 2D isometric. The animations in the original game were rendered at varying framerates between 10 and 20fps. The animations in DE are all rendered at 30fps.Things like scrolling, UI interactions, Mouse movements, etc are not capped at 30fps. That’s the just rate at which animation frames are changed. 30 FPS was deemed the sweetspot, along with 32 directional facings, and up to 25x the pixel density of the OG when fully zoomed in. At the maximum zoom, for every pixel that was in an OG unit, there are 25 pixels in it’s DE equivalent. And that’s before considering that the unit may have up to 4096x the colors, 4x the directions and 3x the animation frames. - Remastered soundtrack: The new orchestral soundtrack covers a bit of a mix of both the MIDI-only tracks in the original and the redbook CD audio, which were only excluded from CD audio because they run out of space.
- Remastered sound effects: Completely new narration throughout. Hundreds of new and rebuilt sound effects.
- Completely revamped UI
- The good old campaigns with proper spit and polish
- Countless balance adjustments
- New terrains & scenario editor objects
- You can import old scenarios.
- You can train more than one unit at a time like AOE2
- Features that are now considered standard in RTS games: attack move, gather points, and intelligent villagers
- No unique units or new buildings or new civs.
- The price is definitely not $60
- Just as in the original, there will be no gates, or villager garrison. Balance is tweaked UPatch, and at least for the initial release, there will be no new unique units, buildings or civs.
I think that something that was very critical was the stability of the game itself… I can recall a lot of times that my game closed itself and leaving my desktop in a 16 colors bit format… So I can say there is a lot to work on.
Game was more or less crash free for me on my machines with Windows 98, 98SE, ME and XP.