I have collected various information on the game (from this website, forgottenempires.net, reddit, etc.). I am not citing my sources here, but I didn’t edit much of the language, so you could google your way to them if you really wanted. Anyway, I hope this helps clear some things up.
To be clear, the “I,” “we,” “us,” and “me” in the language below are not me. They are the guys I am plagiarizing.
Overall
- The game will include everything from Age of Empires and the Rise of Rome expansion, including both single player and multiplayer modes.
- It’s the Genie Engine, we built on the 1997 version of the game so we can also support a classic gameplay mode. This is an intentional choice: “Had we gone with a different engine, we might have an “Age Game”, but it wouldn’t be AoE (1). Consider that each of Ensemble’s games had a drastically changed or different engine than the game that came before it. And each of those games has it’s own “feel”. Changing engines would result in the game losing it’s feel.”
- They are starting from the UPatch balance indeed (http://upatch-hd.weebly.com/)
- The game is being released on PC only and exclusively through the Windows Store — not on Steam: Microsoft felt that the Windows Store was the place to put it so they made that decision. Microsoft believes this is best for their platforms and the game. They believe competition is healthy, that the Windows Store/Windows 10 has improved, and that these are the best places to play games due to Xbox Live features. It would likely take a lot of community pressure to make it happen. I understand the argument on both sides but purely in my own personal opinion, I would really like to see the game on Steam (and also with Windows 7 & 8 support) as much as you all do! As long as FE keeps me around, you can know someone is always listening and sharing your thoughts. I can’t win all these battles, but I am here to keep the feedback flowing.
New Features
- 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. You get a high level of smoothness when the fps reaches or exceeds 2x the animation playback rate. The game is designed to run well on low-end and mid-range systems, just as it was 20 years ago. Most laptops and non-gaming monitors run at 60 Hz. 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. Higher FPS would increase minimum memory and download size significantly, and thus have to have sufficient return to justify. Given that it still is 2D sprite based, frame interpolation is complete crapshoot, and thus avoided. We use efficient compression, but yes the memory and storage requirements have gone up a tiny bit in 20 years. On a low memory machine, you may not be allowed to zoom into the scene all the way if the game detects you would be thrashing the disk / swap file every frame. 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. Multiply those together and pretty soon “we are talking about real memory.” - 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. We did roughly 100 takes to get the “wololo” right. We’re definitely striving to stick to the original ones. At least on the iconic effects.
- Completely revamped UI
- The good old campaigns with proper spit and polish
- Countless balance adjustments
- New terrains & scenario editor objects
- Classic Mode — The original 1997 experience with a few minor necessary changes (like higher resolution support). No new assets or anything. All new balance adjustments will not affect Classic Mode. Just a few minor changes, but we’ll detail those out later (one of the changes is higher resolution support, unless you want that real 800*600 original experience again :))
- You can import old scenarios. AoE and RoR scenarios are compatible. But you’ll have to manually update them to make use of all the new terrains and trees. We don’t support backwards compatibility though. Scenarios made in AoEDE cannot be opened in the original games.
- You can train more than one unit at a time like AOE2
- We introduced a few features that are now considered standard in RTS games: attack move, gather points, and intelligent villagers
- They are not expanding on the existing game, so no unique units or new buildings or new civs.
- Just as in the original, there will be no gates
- Villager garrisons definitely won’t be in, would completely change the gameplay and we want to stay true to some of the original gameplay concepts in Age1.
- There will be blood at release. We are currently in beta and still polishing the game. Adding blood to the corpses is something we will do after we have completely finished the unit graphics.
- There will not be female villagers.
- Not going into great detail here, but better visibility on population limit and idle villagers are definitely coming.
- 250-300 population cap
- Rally Points Basic
- Rally Points Contextual (Intelligent Villagers)
- Grid default key layout
- Select Idle Military
- Select Idle Villagers
- Unit queueing
- Right-click mouse scroll
Release Dates
- The game will be available on the Windows Store on October 19, 2017 this year.
- The price appears to be $20 and is definitely not $60.
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