The 'Age Of Empires 3' Remaster Looks Great, Adds New Civilizations
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Featured Image Credit: World's Edge
While Microsoft continues to busy away at Age of Empires 4 (and refuses to tell us much about it at all, those secretive rapscallions), the publisher has decided to give us a little more Age of Empires as a treat. It's giving Age of Empires 3 the definitive edition treatment. That means 4K graphics, modernised UI, and even new civilizations.
Many of the updates were shown off in the new trailer:
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"For Age III: DE, players can expect 4K graphics, rebuilt 3D assets, modernized UI, cross-play multiplayer, and fully enhanced soundtrack and audio," Microsoft wrote in a blog post. "Beyond all previously released content, Age III: DE features two new game modes and two new civilizations exclusive to the definitive edition."
Those new game modes are a set of handcrafted historical battles for you to replay in game. There's also going to be new Art of War challenges, which are specifically made to teach you particular strategies and tactics of real-time strategy games.
The two new civilizations coming in Age of Empires 3: Definitive Edition are the Swedes and the Incas. The Swedes have never featured in the series before, so it will be interesting to see how the studio captures their particular strengths and weaknesses.
Something that stands out with this remaster is the team is working to right the wrongs of the original game when it comes to cultural representation. "A key focus of our work at World's Edge is to authentically represent the cultures and peoples that we depict in our games," the team writes in the blog post. "In creating Age III: DE, we realized that we weren't upholding that value as well as we could regarding our Native American cultures. So we set out to fix that, working directly with tribal consultants to respectfully and accurately capture the uniqueness of their peoples, history and cultures. Returning players will find there's been some changes to the Native American civilizations, and we hope you find them as compelling as we do!".
We don't have long to wait until the remaster is released, as it's due for release on October 15. And, if you own the Age of Empires III: Complete Collection on Steam then you'll get a 25% discount when buying the definitive edition. (Or get it for free as part of Game Pass).
Still, I can't wait to see more Age of Empires 4, though.
