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Age of Empires III: Asian Dynasties

May 18th, 2007 by Troy Goodfellow · 3 Comments · Ensemble

Full press release here.

Big Huge Games is developing the game for Ensemble and Microsoft. Where’s my Rise of Legends expansion?

EDIT: The first Q&A is up at Gamespot.

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3 Comments so far ↓

  • Natus

    This is absolute craziness, but I’m very, very pleased. Maybe ES learned from the DoW franchise that they could indeed make multiple expansions without reality folding in upon itself. And this after I was telling all the AoE n00bs on AoE3 Heaven it would never be made! Gah!

    So, Troy, does this truly mean no RoL expansion? I’ve been playing RoL quite a bit recently, and I must admit being irritated by a number of design decisions that I think helped to sink RoL. Of course, I am in no way an industry insider, but I’m not surprised that there’s not an RoL expansion in the works. Disappointed, but not surprised.

  • Troy

    No idea if this means there will be no Rise of Legends expansion at all. But it has been a year with no announcement. BHG generally has a few projects on the go at any one time, but I wonder if they could sustain two RTSes in simultaneous development in any case.

    And I’m sure that BHG was disappointed in the sales of RoL so it makes financial sense to get hooked up with the Age series. It’s an easy million seller.

    But the lack of an expansion for RoL could just be typical Brian Reynolds management. Rise of Nations II, for example, would have been an easy sequel to do but they decided to do something else. Unless they thought that the expansion for RoL would change the game in the same dramatic way that Thrones and Patriots changed RoN, I can see the team just saying “Let’s move on.”

  • Dave Long

    It makes sense to let Rise of Legends go and move on. It doesn’t seem like the game sold as well as Rise of Nations, and there are just a lot of big dogs out there in RTS at the moment that you would have to compete with.

    It makes more sense to hitch onto the Age of Empires III train right now because you’re going to get a reasonable number of sales by default having that name on the box. I figure we’re due for a C&C3 expansion within a year, Company of Heroes is getting its sequel/expansion and who knows what will happen with Supreme Commander?

    RoL is $20 now as an MSRP. If they were going to do an expansion, they probably would’ve had it hitting by the time that price drop happened.