Is that all there is?<\/p>\n
The Age of Empires III<\/i> demo was released yesterday, and I gave it a thorough play through. Three or four skirmish missions, the campaign scenarios, the “deck-building”. And through it all, I was only mildly amused.<\/p>\n
Ensemble’s goal to make the best looking RTS ever seems to have been relaxed to “a RTS a little prettier than Empire Earth II<\/i>. The water effects are nice, and even on my marginal video card, the game looked a lot more photorealistic than Age of Empires II<\/i>. But there is more to art design than photo-realism. I liked the ships in the Cossacks<\/i> series better.<\/p>\n
The demo didn’t give me any sense that I was settling a new world, and the deck-building mini-game was not very interesting; I assume that it is better suited to multi-player. The combat and resource gathering is nothing that I haven’t seen before, and I got a general feeling that Ensemble is resting on its gameplay laurels while making things prettier. Even the much ballyhooed Home City concept turned out to be little more than a time-release supply depot.<\/p>\n
Part of the disappointment is rooted in my expectations of Ensemble. They are still the kings of RTS, and have made three amazing games in a row. All of the previous Age<\/i> games played differently and had major innovations from one to the next. The demo shows me little evidence of this.<\/p>\n
Compare this to the demo of Rise of Nations<\/i> a few years ago. That demo infused me with a zeal and excitement that made the first title from Big Huge Games rocket up my gift list. Though I will still pick up Age of Empires III<\/i>, it’s no longer the urgent matter it once was.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Is that all there is? The Age of Empires III demo was released yesterday, and I gave it a thorough play through. Three or four skirmish missions, the campaign scenarios, the “deck-building”. And through it all, I was only mildly amused. Ensemble’s goal to make the best looking RTS ever seems to have been relaxed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-3M","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}