Age of Empires 3 Complete Collection released on Steam!
Great news for Age of Empires 3 fans! Today Microsoft Studios have announced the release of the compete Age of Empires 3 collection on Steam. The full collection includes Age of Empires 3 and both expansions, The Warchiefs and The Asian Dynasties and is available on Steam today with a 50% discount on the price. The standard price is £29.99 but the game is £14.99 with this time limited launch offer. Currently the complete collection is available in stores for around the £22 price range so there is good value in picking up the Steam edition with the discounted price. Read more
Kenny Newell goes on location to interview Justin Korthof at Robot Entertainment HQ!
Avid Age of Empires Online players and Robot forum-goers will no doubt recognise Kenny Newell often under the guise of “RadioKenny”. Usually Kenny is the man behind adding a touch of humour to the community with some golden humour classics such as:
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Kenny Newell's Interview with Robot Entertainment - December 2011 [ 25:07 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | DownloadPrawny interviews Ryz0n over at RTS-Sanc
Age Community, or “AgeCom” for short has had numerous moderating personalities over the years to name a few we have the likes of Yeti, Paragon, Lethe (Aloysius), MrMilo, SOLUS, Thunder and various others. Yesterday Prawny over at RTS-Sanctuary interviewed the current AgeCom moderator Ryan “Ryz0n” Chaply. So if your’re hanging around AgeCom and want to find out a little more about the famous moderator, check out this interesting interview which includes information about how Ryan became moderator for the peaceful land that is AgeCom. Read more
Bruce Shelley talks about the evolution of social gaming. Plus more AOE-O animations and Robot swag!
Recently the legendary Bruce Shelley has been in talks with Gamasutra along with Brian Reynolds another industry veteran about their roles at Zynga in the social gaming space. Brian Reynolds before joining Zynga worked at Big Huge Games which collaborated with Ensemble Studios on the Age of Empires 3 Asian Dynasties expansion. Bruce and Brian had also worked closely with each other in the past on Sid Meier’s civilisation games. Now they are both re-united again at Zynga where is has become clear that the company is hiring industry veterans to push their gaming business forward.
When talking to Gamasutra Bruce detailed how he was recommended to join after the company was looking for designers from the “Sid Meier School of Design” era. Read more
Charles Tinney begins Age of Empires Online animation blogs
Charles Tinney an animator at the late Ensemble Studios who worked on Halo Wars has recently started a blog about his awesome animation work with Age of Empires Online. Charles or “chazbot” Tinney has been taking care of most of the animation on AOE-O while the game was developed at Robot Entertainment.
My initial role, once the art style was finalized, was to concept and visualize the animation style that best complimented the game’s art direction. It was great pulling reference from Looney Tunes and old Disney shorts. Through animation reference, exploration, pushing, pulling, trial, error, I eventually hit a style that was wacky and exaggerated in some circumstances, and kind of an overly animated subtlety for most cases; both with an overall defined timing and spacing that melded the extreme and subtle together
Halo Wars beat MGS sales targets and could work on Kinect says Frank O’Connor
Halo Wars has recently cropped up in conversation between Computer and Video Games and 343 Industries creative director Frank O’ Connor. Frank talks about Halo Wars as being ”a huge success” and rightly so as he also revealed that the Ensemble Studios developed game “beat our sales forecasts, so it was a bigger success than we expected” and that:
“It was a big critical success and it’s still the number one selling RTS on consoles this generation. In that regard it was a huge success but is the will to do a sequel there? Who knows. We could do something that works on Kinect, for example. There’s no will against it but we’re not working on it right now.” Read more
Graeme Devine describes the past and present game industry
Graeme Devine has recently given a presentation to the Baskin Engineering School in Santa Cruz, where he now resides talking about the past and present state of the gaming industry. Graeme describes the previous generation of the gaming industry as “dead” and that the industry is moving forward into new business models. Stepping away from the “four year dev cycles, massive teams and publisher budgets” and moving towards smaller teams, indie development and “creation games”. Graeme kicked off his presentation with a mention to his time at Ensemble Studios working on Halo Wars. Ensemble had a 120 strong team working on the Halo Wars project (although there were other projects in development along side). Graeme made note that 120 is alot of people to work on a game and questions whether such a team size is sustainable. Read more
Slight ESO maintenance changes and downtime consultation
Just a quick note for all Age of Empires 3 players. Ryz0n the community manager at Microsoft who are now running the support for Ensemble Studios Online have announced the times for ESO maintenance is changing slightly. Previously On the 1st and 3rd Tuesdays of each month, ESO underwent scheduled maintenance with Robot Entertainment. Going forward this maintenance will occur on Tuesdays between approximately 10AM PST (GMT -8) and 12PM PST.
There are some discussions about ways users can be better informed about this downtime. You can read about the downtime and the announcement plans over at Age Community:
http://forum.agecommunity.com/forums/thread/908610.aspx
Robot Entertainment signs off from Age Community
January 3rd 2011 marks the day when Robot Entertainment officially retires from Age Community both the forum support and the support for ESO. Robot took over the support for Age Community and ESO shortly after Ensemble closed its doors In February 2009, the support in place at Robot was similar to the support offered at Ensemble. Microsoft has decided to take operations of Age 3 in house and will be lead by some of the same Community team behind Age of Empires Online plus a dedicated community administrator for Age Community. Read more
Microsoft to take over Age Community
Unfortunately, the time as come for Robot Entertainment so sign off on Age Community and hand over day to day support for community operations to Microsoft Games Studios. The transition starts today, with Ryz0n 
taking the reins as community support moderator. Ryzon commented:
The folks here at MGS are transitioning into supporting the AOE community. Along those lines, I’ll be working on forum administration, account support, and generally keeping everything running as well as possible. Our goal, as we move through the transition period, is to make the user experience change very little and have the service chug along without any issues into the foreseeable future. I’ll be coming up to speed and working with Robot on the community, server issues, and support for the titles. Read more
