Age of Empires IV Dev Thinking About Xbox Version - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 01 November 2021 / 1,807 Views
Publisher Xbox Game Studios and developers Relic Entertainment and World’s Edge released the real-time strategy game, Age of Empires IV, last Thursday, October 28 for PC and Xbox Game Pass for PC.
World’s Edge creative director Adam Isgreen in an interview with Multiplayer.it was asked if the game would get an Xbox version. While there are no definitive plans the team is looking into it.
"As soon as we're done managing the launch of the game on PC, we'll start thinking about how to make it work on consoles," said Isgreen. "We don't have any definitive plans yet, but it's now that we're going to really start thinking about it."
Age of Empires IV in its first weekend the game reached a peak of 73,928 concurrent players on Steam. This figures is enough to make it the second highest concurrent players ever for an Xbox Game Studios game on Steam ever. Halo: The Master Chief Collection is the one game to have a bigger peak as it peaked at 161,024 players. It should be noted Xbox Game Pass players are not included in this figure.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel dedicated to gaming Let's Plays and tutorials. You can contact the author at wdangelo@vgchartz.com or on Twitter @TrunksWD.
More Articles
Playing an RTS with a controller would be a haif baked experience.
Agreed...Hopefully they can enable M&K support then if it does end up getting ported.
Plus the audience would be extremly small on consoles, which would be another hesitation.
Not necessarily - with gamepass its fair to assume a decent chunk of subscribers would at least check it out.
Not those with a M/K setup. If they make it playable with a controller however that will take away from the experience.
They should bring the entire series to Xbox whether or not it has gamepad support. Mouse and keyboards are dirt cheap.
I mean it wouldn't be the first time a game was designed without gamepad support on a console.
There is really no reason this game shouldn't be on Xbox. You can have M&K games on Xbox, you can even have it be mandatory, it wouldn't be the first game to require peripherals. It's just an anti-consumer dobbelt standard from Microsoft really. Their console can't have exclusives, but the PC can for some reason.
It's not chronic for Microsoft to release games only on PC. And they've done so here, and then immediately pivoted to seeing if/when/how they could release it on Xbox as well. Despite all the effort that Microsoft has put into harmonizing their development tools between PC and Xbox, putting it on Xbox is more than just a straight recompile. And doing that work while requiring M&K would mean doing that work for a terribly small market.
If they release it requiring M&K there'd probably be complaints and refund requests from people who didn't read the description of the game closely enough. So they'd need to find a way to make controller an at least semi-reasonable input option.
Then they would also need to figure out what combination of settings (resolution, frame-rate, levels of detail, etc.) would work well on each of the new consoles (X & S). And they might playtest extensively and come up with different pre-sets (quality mode, performance mode, balanced mode, etc.). So that's a non-trivial amount of work when the Xbox wasn't a lead platform here.
Doing all that work before launch would have likely delayed the PC launch where it will sell well, just to also release it on Xbox (where it probably won't sell well) so I don't begrudge them putting all their pre-launch effort into PC. But then they've immediately pivoted to talking about if/how/when to release it on Xbox as well, so fair enough IMO.
I think the best option for them was to focus on getting the PC version to a good state and launching it. They've accomplished that, Digital Foundry was impressed which is good enough for me on that score. Now I think the best thing for them to do is to figure out what performance settings would work best for each console, then get it at least somewhat playable with a controller, and then release it but with a commendation that people use M&K despite the controller compatibility.
Either that or let it be streamed from the cloud, but require M&K. That'd work too.
While some RTS experiences have been good on controller... like Halo Wars and Civ 6, they've got to seriously overhaul the user interface or else it will be clunky as hell
My two cents on this RTS seems to be much better on PC that is all
Agreed. The Halo Wars games work on Xbox because they were designed from the ground up to be played from a controller, and have gameplay mechanics designed around that (such as restrictions on where you can build bases).
Essay Pro