Age of Empires: the game 90s kids love to boot up again and again
Many gamers may remember the good old days of video gaming back in the 1990s, commanding legions of Roman soldiers in the first Age of Empires game, praying that no one calls the house while you were on the dial-up internet connection. What, that’s just me? Anyway, I’m saying Age of Empires will always have a special place in my mind for nostalgia. One thing about the game was always spectacularly frustrating: scouting. I would always forget to scout the map in the early game, remember as I was just advancing into my third age, and then realize how small my army actually was compared to my opponents.
That will no longer be the case with the most recent update to the widely popular Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition (released last year in celebration of the popular Age of Empires sequel). Game Update 35584 adds a new feature called “auto-scouting” which comes with a new command for your scout cavalry unit to set him to automatically scout the map based on the AI algorithm (it will scout in a similar pattern to your opponents’ scouts). This new feature will let you set your early scouting unit onto whatever fate awaits him on the other side of the map while you try and keep your villagers at work while you build walls around your town.
The Age of Empires Twitter account was encouraging its players to give try out the new features while some were already expressing dismay.
Welcome, one and all, to the massive FEBRUARY UPDATE for #AoE2DE! It may be a short month, but we’ve taken advantage of every day to put together a package of changes and improvements to the game!
👉 Read about Patch 35584 right here: https://t.co/F1wFYGO9nU pic.twitter.com/KlRj3r6oKB
— Age of Empires (@AgeOfEmpires) February 27, 2020
The fear is that the new auto-scouting feature will supposedly take away from the human intuition involved in managing multiple tasks at a time and will change the game in a significant way. Only time will tell if this will mark the “end of Age of Empires” but, until then, let’s continue to ignore our scouts.
Microsoft announced the fourth installment of the Age of Empires series of games with an official trailer back in 2017.