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.
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