“For me, it’s the Rise Of Moscow campaign,” Duffy decides. I try to bamboozle Isgreen into revealing what historical event he is talking about, and while he is tight-lipped on the whole, he does end up expressing his disbelief that “they just completely stopped fighting to do this.” Was this a medieval version of the infamous World War I Christmas football match? Who knows! Answers on a comments section postcard, please. It just kept getting beat up, and kept coming back." It feels like something that happened in a video game.” "Moscow is kind of like the John Wick of medieval cities. When I read the mission layouts and found out what we were doing with it, I genuinely had to check it was based on a real event. “There's a mission in the Hundred Years' War campaign that is… completely unique. Now that things have warmed up again after the initial grilling over insects, I decide to stick with the subject of scenarios, and ask Isgreen and Duffy their favourite moments from AoE4’s campaigns. So, our objective is indeed to launch that tool to players, probably just post-launch, and it’s going through its own beta test right now.” “Obviously that tool has undergone huge revisions over the years, and now has a lot of stuff specifically for Age Of Empires. “We’ve got our own world-building suite that attaches to Essence ,” Duffy explains. Needless to say, talking about DOTD got me thinking about AoE2’s venerable scenario editor, which I wrote about last week, and wondering if AoE4 will offer players an equivalent. If Dawn Of The Dukes was an indicator of the consequent level of craziness to expect from AoE4, then I’m all for it, ‘cos it was brilliant. “I think that that's partially our mentality rubbing off and giving the message that it’s OK to get a little crazier now.”
The Forgotten Empires guys are coming up with these new civs and units for AoE2, and then they’re also helping us with the balancing on AoE4, so they can do a lot to up our game.” Likewise, he explains, the more experimental, innovative unit designs in the last couple of AoE2 expansions - like the Hussite wagon - are partially a result of AoE4’s design mentality rubbing off on designers from Forgotten Empires. “Not in that case, I don’t think,” replies Isgreen, “but ideas do travel. The trailer offered a glimpse of Russia's warrior monks: monks who do war, and who appear to make a deeper, more threatening version of the classic "wololo" sound. The wagons act a bit like pavises, soaking up incoming arrow fire so weaker units can advance behind them, and I wonder if they were perhaps an outcome of the pavise-mania which presumably swept through the Age franchise teams earlier in the summer. Pavises remind me of the Hussite wagons recently introduced to AoE4’s older brother AoE2, in its Dawn Of The Dukes expansion.
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“Some of those hands-on history videos we’ve done - I gotta be honest - we put together the scripts, and then we're like, ‘Wait, why can't we do this in the game? We should put this in.’” He brings up the example of pavises: portable wicker barriers which were used to shield advancing crossbowmen from defensive fire, and which were included in AoE4 after coming up during production of the game’s embedded documentary material. Unwilling to take the bit any further, in case these two men think I am genuinely attempting to bully them into last-minute feature creep, I decide to drop the bee demands, but it turns out it’s got Isgreen going.
“I mean, beehives wouldn't necessarily break our T for teen rating. “They threw rotten, diseased pig, corpses, the heads of enemies… there was some really awful stuff that could get thrown over the walls…” He pauses then, looking quizzical, and circles around to a new thought. “I mean, those trebuchets launched some nasty stuff,” interjects Isgreen, coming to his colleague’s rescue. I find this diagram of a trebuchet's key parts, from the AoE4 documentary, to be extremely satisfying. I want to put my enemies through Sting’s greatest hits, on the hour every hour, from a range of three hundred metres. I don’t want animations of bees I want bees.
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“In the future,” Duffy offers, in an attempt to placate me, “we'll, ah, we could add a cosmetic mod which makes the trebuchet firing animation show a nest of bees being fired…” It’s a spirited offer from the Relic Entertainment director, but it’s not enough. “Maybe we should have pulled some punches on the dialogue there, as it also talked about firing dead bodies, and I’m not sure that’ll work for a teen-rated game.” “I’ll be quite upset if there aren’t bees,” I add, just in case this was mistaken for a cheery nod to the trebuchet film, rather than a brutally serious question.
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