Late Night PC

One of the most exciting games for me to see at E3 this year was Age of Empires III (or AoE3 as it is affectionately abbreviated). I was an avid player of the first and second games in the Age of Empires series, and it was one of the few games I would go out and buy an expansion pack for without doing the usual heaps of research. Jeff and I have spent countless hours playing late night games of AoE, generally two of us versus computer controlled enemies (also called CPU or AI for artificial intelligence). The AI in AoE isn't that brilliant, but there's enough variety in the game types and maps in AoE to keep us entertained for quite a while. I think part of the reason I haven't gotten bored of fighting the AI is that I've never really tried to find a repeatable quick-win strategy. Instead, Jeff and I share some scotch over the internet while we blow an evening with Ensemble Studio's golden child.

When Age of Mythology came out, I anxiously snapped it up and played through some of the single-player campaigns (something I'd never done in AoE). The single-player campaigns in AoM are basically focused around a few heroes and you play through parts of their story. The heroes are special characters named for historical or mythological figures. You have to keep them alive though many of your other soldiers and civilians will die during a game. The games are set up so that cut scenes finish up each game and introduce you to the next chapter. The cut scene is the standard choice for explaining a player's goals in any game these days. The ones in Age of Mythology mixed a pile of different myths and cultural histories together. AoM was a good game, with some nice eye-candy, but perhaps it just departed too far from AoE to get the same level of enjoyment. For multiplayer, Jeff and I still fall back on the tried and true Age Of Empires II (Age Of Kings) with the Conquerors expansion.

In Age of Empires III, they create a new story (there was no central character to the earlier AoE games) and you play a person from each of three generations in the same family. If you choose to play the campaign, as I started to in Age of Mythology, you'll have 24 scenarios split up among the three generations. Each generation will be one 'act' in the story of AoE3.

I hope that AoE3 will return back to it's roots with regard to gameplay. I understand of course that the game engine will be more in line with what was done in AoM. They've also added the popular Havock physics engine for realistic ragdoll body-flying-through-the-air effects. One of the demos I've seen they like to show features a crowd of soldiers being picked off one at a time by a canon. Each soldier dutifully bounces in the air and falls over a cliff. Pretty cool the first time you see it, impressive compared to older renditions of the game, but I hope they tone down the canon power a little by the time the game ships. Too much of that would get tedious. Another feature that's being touted is a 'fully destructible environment.' I've seen shots of windmills being blown apart piecewise. Cool.

The enhanced graphics will be welcome in big troop deployments, I expect. One of the joys of AoE (although players hate to admit it) is in the endgame - the final moments when the game is all but decided and your massive army collects to run rampage over whatever buildings the enemy has left standing. A common complaint is that the aftermath - when the AI has one cowering fishing boat remaining in a secluded corner of the map - lasts too long. A marauding army is fun when there's stuff to blow up, but a game that finishes because of a ship that sank somewhere off-screen is no real fun. Developers have tried to make the AI smart enough to concede in those cases, so the game doesn't drag on. What would be nice, and I hope you developers are listening, would be an instant replay of that last 3 seconds of action if it happened when I wasn't watching. Technically the game would already be over, but I wouldn't know it yet since the trumpet of victory hasn't played. Nothing can be changed, the game is decided, but just take whatever happened and show me that last slice so I can have the feeling of completion. You could turn off all the controls and I wouldn't even notice.

Anyway, building a massive army in that last part of the game gives some sort of primeval satisfaction to the RTS player. Say it's testosterone-induced euphoria, but it's all the player's been wanting to do since the start of the game. Once you build that army, full of cavalry, foot-soldiers and artillery, you want to go out and put it to use. Or at least watch them march around... Cue despot standing in military regalia overlooking the army parade... The new Age of Empires should be pretty cool for that step of the game. The ego-stroking part of the game. The person I spoke to (should've got his name, sorry) at E3 said the camera would be a fixed position, so there won't be any zipping around for a photo-shoot of the troops. That was something I enjoyed in Empire Earth - the snapshots of a battle in progress and the imposing angles of artillary rolling over wreckage. I think they'll choose a good distance to appreciate the detail and they've designed the game such that it won't be necessary to move the camera to see the action. Still, I wouldn't be surprised to see a cheat code or patch come out that unlocks camera positioning.

A new addition to AoE this time is player experience. The idea is that a player (you or I) gains experience points as games are played. Some experience comes from killing things, some comes from trade, and points can also be had for doing other activities. In the game, a number flies up from enemies as they're killed and trade ships as they arrive to show how much experience you've accrued for that action. As I understand it, the experience points will be used for advancement in technology between games. There should also be technology advances available during normal gameplay as they were before, I believe. One example that was given during the group demo at E3 was trade routes. Trade routes can start off as a sled (?) then be upgraded to a stagecoach and finally a train route. I got the impression that those upgrades happened during gameplay.

Be back soon with more about the game.