The popular Age of Empires franchise on PC looks to be taking on a new direction moving forward to appeal to a younger, more mobile audience. After seeing the success of even games like Diablo 2 with terrible monetisation as well as heavy hitters like Genshin Impact, Age of Empires is yet another older game looking to take on more new players to mark their 25th-anniversary celebration. Age of Empires Mobile should be making its way to iOS and Android devices soon with a teaser trailer available for viewing already on their official YouTube account.
The teaser shows little beyond a cinematic visual, but the visual elements are akin to the latest PC instalment, Age of Empires IV. This game launched with a bold design helping players easily pick out individual gameplay elements and will likely translate nicely to mobile similar to other kingdom building games that are already popular on mobile. The challenge for the company would be giving players the same experience with a vast array of choices and graphic settings in order to cater to all the mobile devices. This might be more of a problem for a game reliant on hardware to process an enormous amount of computed information such as Age of Empires.
It’s reasonable to be concerned about how an Age of Empires game would work on mobile, but many of the best strategy games on Android are nearly direct ports of their PC versions as well such as XCOM 2, Total War, and Northgard. These are all titles that use clever UI tricks to replicate a desktop experience as well as showcase new mechanics specifically for mobile players to give them a similar or only slightly different experience sacrificing what made the PC versions great.
It is an exciting for Microsoft. The giant company has been making great strides into the mobile gaming market in the last year, working with Logitech with its new gaming device to ensure the Game Pass is an integral part of the Gamevice Flex, along with controllers from GameSir and MOGA. Despite a solid footing in the market, Microsoft had yet to actually step into the mobile game market for IOS and Android likely due to heavy competition and lack of control due to both platforms being owned by semi-competitior companies, Apple and Google. Game Pass on Xbox is a great way for players to pay a decent price for the game they would like without the gacha aspects one might expect from typical mobile titles but it remains to be seen how Microsoft intends to monetise Age of Empires for mobile.
As always, we encourage people to check out our guide to playing gacha games in order to stay ahead and keep a look out for dodgy tactics used in gacha games to lure players into spending!