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Age of Ensemble, Part 3: The Closing ChaptersThe final Age of Empires game, and then an orbital drop into the Halo universe: Age of Ensemble comes to an end in Part 3 of Troy S. Goodfellow's feature.
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Tis a sad time. I'll wait to hear why Microsoft shut the studio down, maybe it'll be better for them in the long run and they will be rejuvenated in what they want to do. But still. It does suck and is so weird and entirely unexpected.
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A beautifully written and well-researched piece. Thank you, Troy, for bringing some closure to many people that were still in shock at this decision.
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A sad story in the closing days, but still, I think a happy one for gamers. Ensemble is a studio that has never known failure, and has succeeded in game design in a wide range of climates. Even though all of their games (so far) were "Age" games, you can't accuse them of milking a franchise because they worked so hard at innovating at every stage.
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Fantastic series, Troy! I hope you can find a proper place for all the other info you obtained. I vividly recall my various levels of excitement and wonder as I fired each new game up, as well as the merciless but hilarious drubbing the original AoE3 UI took on Qt3. AoM for teh win!
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Great series of articles Troy. Its things like this that draw me to Crispy Gamer from time to time despite my general policy of not reading commercial gaming sites.
Hope some of the Ensemble guys still manage to get together and make some more games. Would be a great shame if their talent just dissipated away.
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Great series of articles, just as the AoE franchise deserves! I remember the old competition between the Red Alert series and the Warcraft rts's. Each would outdo the other. As a member of a LAN group that started with Duke Nukem, I've played dozens of great RTS games. AoE3 is the current favorite, with good depth and variety. I hope the prime members of the Ensemble group keep on making new, challenging games. The Ensemble closing reminds me so much of the closing of Access Software (the
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This was a great piece about such an important aspect of PC game development. I remember how blown away I was by AOE when I first played it. I will never forget the first time I saw my villager lugging a mammoth size pieced of beef to the storage pit! Though AOE was not the first RTS, IMO, it had more influence than any other series on the RTS genre. Thanks Troy for assembling Ensemble's story, they deserve to have it shared with the gamers who appreciate and will miss their collective work.
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This was an outstanding article and fascinating to read. Kudos.
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Primemover wrote:
"Though AOE was not the first RTS, IMO, it had more influence than any other series on the RTS genre."
Certainly not the first, and I would argue that Starcraft is more influential. Even AoE abandoned the "slightly different races" model for more starkly drawn factions.
But the Age series introduced a lot of things that are now standard. Garrisons, idle peon button, formations...all small things, but crucial game play innovations as the genre evolved.
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