LogFAQs > #953105694

#1 Age of Empires II: The Conquerors (Microsoft Windows, 2000)

Not many commercial games from before the year 2000 are still releasing paid expansions. I think just Ultima Online, Everquest, and Age of Empires II? 22 years is a long time to still get money out of people, and there was a long period without any new official content, but Age of Empires II (the original release was in 1999) has recently resurged to a level of popularity that it has not enjoyed since the original release.



My history with this Real-Time Strategy game is off-again, on-again. I got started with the first expansion back in the year 2000. First played the game on a demo disc, and was hooked instantly. Quickly picked up the full game on release, and played it like crazy. Soon started playing with my brothers over LAN, which took up countless afternoons. I dabbled a bit in online play, but at that point I just did not have a good enough connection to make it enjoyable. Few people did.

I would come back to it from time to time, just messing around versus AI or playing the campaigns. Microsoft stopped supporting the game after a couple years, but the community remained active and an enthusiastic group of people made patchwork improvements to the game, which improved and maintained compatibility with future versions of Windows. An unofficial second expansion was even developed. When I heard about the "HD Edition" coming to Steam in 2013, it inspired me to really get into it again. I had a couple online friends who also picked it up, and we played online against each other or versus the AI. At that point, with the advent of twitch.tv, I started getting into the competitive aspects of the game. I turned on a random stream one day and watched a game between two of the top players in the world. That level of play was completely mind-blowing to me; I was transfixed.



That's where I learned about Voobly. It's a third-party multiplayer client for the game, and at the time of the HD edition release, it's where the most competitive players played. Turns out the HD edition was rather shoddy and did not really match up to the improvements the community had made over time, so, while the HD edition boosted the profile of the game immensely, the top players more or less ignored it, content to continue playing The Conquerors expansion from 2000.

That is, until Microsoft decided to make an investment in the game again. Microsoft hired the team, Forgotten Empires, who developed the second expansion to make it for the HD edition, and it was a huge success. The team stuck together and started making improvements to the HD edition, along with another two expansions over the next three years. The product still paled to what was on Voobly, but modders found a way to integrate the new expansions into the Voobly version, which for years more remained the way that pro players preferred to play.



Along with the investment into the HD edition, Microsoft also made an investment into the esports scene. Tournaments with not-insignificant prize pools were staged on the HD edition, luring the top players over, if only to participate in these games. Seeing the potential, Microsoft commissioned another release of the game, this time a full remake, dubbed the "Definitive Edition." The game was developed and designed by fans of the series, including the Forgotten Empires team, and was embraced wholeheartedly by the community when it came out in 2019. The release coincided with a fifth expansion, and a sixth one came out just a couple months ago.

The competitive scene remains vibrant, at least internationally. Almost all the top players are from Europe or China, which is a stark contrast to the Korean/Japanese/US domination that you see with many other online games. Prize pools totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars annually support the top-tier players, and a lot of them make a living as streamers as well. Seeing as the game is almost 22 years old now, very few of the current pro players were playing the game when it came out, and those who did are now well into their thirties, which makes it difficult for them to compete. The current top player, a teenager from Austria, was not even alive when the game first came out. Weird to see that, but it makes sense.



I'm not a pro player in any sense, although I did play in a tournament or two. I'm currently on a break from the game, and I follow it very casually right now. Life is too short and busy to play Age of Empires II all the time, and the competitor in me does not enjoy it much if I can't dedicate the necessary time to playing at my best. When I played most recently though (2019-early 2020), I was skilled enough to be just short of the brink of the competitive scene. Good enough that I could at least play in the same atmosphere as the pros, even if I could not take one game in a hundred from them. But I could take the rare game from people who could take maybe a game in a hundred from pro players, if that makes sense. The skill cap for the game is just so incredibly high.

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At least your mother tipped well