Age Of Empires III – Preview

It's been a long time since the last Age of Empires. The fans await with great anticipation this new sequel, especially because of the beautiful, story like graphics, screenshots and trailers.

For those of you who have been waiting for something completely new, you're in for a disappointment. With a few exceptions and the introduction of a new feature you will see nothing revolutionary.

Age of Empires III picks up where its predecessor, the Age of Kings, left it. Focusing on the colonizing of the Americas, AoE 3 follows the actions of the European powers as they strive to carve out their influence on the New World. The time period covered by AoE 3 allows an interesting mix of medieval and gunpowder-early steam-age technologies.


You will be able to play 8 powers, each with its distinctive gameplay (not sufficient, as you might notice) and a multitude of units. Unfortunately, they don't differ much from other RTS games that have surfaced this days and which cover the same time periods. On account of this, Ensemble Studios decided to introduce the new feature we were talking about - The Home City- which actually looks like the castle in Heroes of Might and Magic, which you can access anytime. [read full review]

This is a good review, might want to take a look and read through the lines as I did :). Of course, the images are the ones that catch our attention. And I don't recommend reading the review just because it's written by a Romanian ;).

Age of Empires III goes gold

September 23, 2005

Prepare for Battle as Age of Empires III Goes Gold

Armies of the Third Age Prepare to March on October 18

Ready your troops! Age of Empires III, the stunning real-time strategy (RTS) landmark from Microsoft and Ensemble Studios, is complete and poised to invade retail on October 18. Available in two versions - standard and Collector's Edition - Age of Empires III will fire up gamers with groundbreaking new features like the persistent Home City and jaw-dropping graphics never before seen in an RTS. Gamers can now experience the game first-hand with a recently released playable demo that offers hours of exciting combat challenges, as well as the ability to upgrade the player's Home City.

The third game in the illustrious Age of Empires series that has sold more than 16 million copies and defined the historical RTS, Age of Empires III is being hailed by critics as a new benchmark for real-time strategy games. The minimum system requirements for Age of Empires III are: 1.4GHz processor, 256 MB RAM, 64 MB video card that supports hardware transform and lighting, Windows XP, 56k modem for online play, and 2GB hard drive space.

In Age of Empires III, players assume the role of a European power between 1500 and 1850 A.D. as they struggle to explore, colonize and conquer North and South America. Find out more about Age of Empires III by visiting http://www.ageofempires3.com

So what does this mean? The final release is getting closer, only 23 days left. I didn't install the demo yet, due to the bugs others have reported, but I'll install the full game when it's released. Have anything to send regarding AOEIII demo? Drop me an email to spuby2000@gmail.com and I'll publish it here.

Age of Empires III demo released!

Yes the demo for Age of Empires was released today by Microsoft. This didn't take as long as I expected but unfortunately it seems that it is a little disappointing (I didn't test it yet, I'm just speaking from the posts other people made on the official forum).



First of all, before you download, see if you have these minimum requirements:

• Microsoft Windows XP


• 1.4ghz Processor


• 256 RAM


• 64 MB Video Card that supports HW T&L


• Approximately 370MB of Hard Drive space (not including installer)


• DirectX 9c

After that you can download the Age of Empires III demo, this is a direct link and has about 350MB.
If you have problems installing you might take a look at this thread on Direct3D Initialization Problem in Demo or make sure the following requirements are met:

AntiVirus software is temporarily switched off
Programs that provide a "shield" around your system settings should be temporarily switched off (The new ZoneAlarm 6 does it, as well as MS's Anti-Spyware software and Spybot's Teatimer)
Your video card drivers are up to date
Your DirectX installation is up to date (current version is 9.0c)
Your system is spyware and virus free
You should close as many programs as possible before you install the game to minimize any chances of error

I'll post my impressions too after I test it, but as I said I didn't see too many good things being said about this Age of Empires III demo. My opinion, let's give it some time people, it is just a demo and there were something like 800 bugs at that time, I'm sure the final release will look better.

Age of Empires III demo released this month

Dave Pottinger from Ensemble Studios announced on the official Age of Empires III forum that a demo should be released somewhere this month (September 2005).



The game however will take a little longer until its final release, since is being tested by Microsoft, and we all know how meticulous they are ( :)) ).
These are fragments from the original post made on the Age of Empires III Heaven Forum:

Demo's done (it went out the door to marketing today)... Finally
The highpoints:
* SP only, no MP
* 2 scenarios from the CPN
* 2 RMs
* 2 civs
dave

[...]

Yes, to be quite sure, a ton of folks helped pull the demo together. Or, more appropriately, pull things out of the demo to pull it together. It actually ended up a very download-friendly size by the time we got done with it. Much smaller than I feared it would be
Yes, there are limits to things like the max HC levels and whatnot. We can't quite give away *that* much gameplay in the demo. And, yes, for those pesky hackers out there, we did actually go nuke the high end content, so you can go hack out the level limits, but it won't get you anything...

The demo's actually a good time. I didn't go back and specifically compare, but it's quite a bit more gameplay than I recall the AOM demo having. Though there's no need to start a petition if that turns out not to be true

It's liberating to actually get it done so soon; one less worry post-ship. But, since we're also putting it in the CE (to give to a buddy), we had to actually finish it with the rest of the game anyway.

On some of the other questions... Someone did properly guess both civs. No, the civs that are in the demo are fully functional (minus HC visual upgrades (too much space) and most of the HC card content (too much game)).

dave

[...]

It's about 375MB, IIRC.
I honestly have no idea where it's going to show up first, or when. I'm sure the Internet will blaze with the fires of communication and posting once the mythical location and timing of the demo's release is thrust upon the ever-waiting populace. Or something like that

dave

[...]

I'm not going to 'approve' everyone's specs... Sorry if trying to do that once was the wrong thing.
That said, an X800 card and 1GB of RAM isn't a high end system. 2GB of RAM and a better video card would be required.

The game looks great in shader model 2, but it just doesn't look as great as it does in 3.0. 1GB of RAM will run the game fine, but 2GB will run with more details on and less swapping.

The minspecs will be coming out soon; I'll prolly just let those speak for themselves.

dave

[...]

Demo code is about 3 weeks old by now. It's missing some fairly heavy optimizations that we've made, plus quite a few bugfixes. I cut the code for the demo when we had ~800 programming bugs in our DB (we're at 0 now).
It's definitely not perfect code and there are lots of rough edges given how much we sliced out to get the size manageable. But, hopefully the fact that it's out well ahead of the game (instead of a few weeks after the game like usual) means folks will cut it some slack... If not, I'm sure we'll hear about it

dave

The demo will be about 375MB and it seems that is going to be a little buggy :). I'm going to love it anyway and I hardly wait to play it.