Originally released in 1999, Age of Empires II quickly became one of the most iconic real-time strategy (RTS) games of all time, thanks to its epic blend of history, realism, engaging gameplay, and strategic momentum. As part of the game’s 20th anniversary in 2019, Microsoft released Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition, which took the classic RTS game and modernised it with fancy 4K visuals, several updates, and fixes. With many out there still playing for others, it was an excuse to dive back in or check it out for the very first time.

And it was an immediate success, led to Definitive Editions for other Age of Empires games, and even saw new content in the form of new civilization packs and campaigns. And now, with the game coming to Xbox, it feels like the next step for the iconic RTS experience. With full controller support, cross-play, cross-save, and full keyboard and mouse integration - it’s almost like the best of all worlds. It’s also coming to Xbox Cloud Gaming with touch controls.


And much like Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition on PC, it will pave the way for the release of Age of Empires 4 on Xbox consoles later this year. Having played through a near-final build of the game and marveling at some of the design decisions made to bring this heady RTS game to an Xbox console - and make it work - I got the chance to sit down with Earnest Yuen, Executive Producer at World's Edge, and Alex Liu, Design Director, at World's Edge, to talk about bringing this iconic game to console. Starting with why did it take so long?

Age of Empires II has a huge legacy as an RTS game, and the Definitive Edition has been around for a number of years now. At what point did the team go, ‘Okay, let's bring this to Xbox’? Also, why did it take so long?

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Earnest: I'm the executive producer, and my team works on all of the Age of Empires Definitive Editions. I, II, III, and now Age of Mythology Retold. We grew up playing Age of Empires, we love it, and it’s very important to us. It's also super fun to be able to bring the titles to a wider audience.

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"All of our focus was on PC because that’s where Age was and where you’d play. After we shipped, every time we announced anything new, and it didn't really matter what we said, every single time people were asking about an Xbox version."

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When we began work on Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition, our goal was to ship the best Age II experience ever. And with that, all of our focus was on PC because that’s where Age was and where you’d play. After we shipped, every time we announced anything new, and it didn't really matter what we said, every single time people were asking about an Xbox version.


We build these games with the community, and for the community, so we decided to investigate how we could bring the game to Xbox. In the first prototype, we literally lifted the game, put it on Xbox, and then hooked up a controller. It was functional, but that’s a nice way to put it. It worked, but to answer the question as to why it took so long, that was years ago.

If the point of doing this was to grow the Age of Empires franchise and introduce new players, we realised we needed to do this right. And the right thing to do was to make the game feel like a console game for a console audience. Based on that idea alone, we rebuilt the UI at least twice or three times from scratch.

Alex: Basically, we wanted to make the experience feel native to Xbox. That means forget about the PC interface and start with the fundamentals. For the team, it was about being given a controller and thinking about how you would want it to be controlled. How do you want the UI to look? What do you want in there? That’s where we started, and then slowly integrated PC components into what we had. We feel confident that we have a version of the game that plays as smoothly as possible on a controller.


There were definitely a number of challenges we had to overcome. Creating an RTS for consoles is not easy. With the sheer amount of mouse clicks and actions that a PC player would normally perform, replicating that on a console is extremely difficult. It may not even be appropriate for new players. That means it’s also a matter of making the gameplay experience feel good, so we’ve introduced a number of new features and expanded the tutorial. These brand-new features were designed to lower the barrier of entry, make Age of Empires more accessible, and improve the quality of life of players.

We see that with workers and being able to manage them dynamically as a group in the Xbox version. Have them collect a bit of everything or stuff specifically to rush and build an army. It’s very cool and a smart accessibility addition, but at the same time, it fundamentally changes something in a game that has been around for decades. This feature specifically, was that an early decision? Was it a difficult decision to go this far with accessibility?

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Alex: It was a difficult decision, but we wanted to bring innovation into the console version of the game. Economy gameplay, in particular, there’s a lot of repetitive and tedious action. Stuff that takes a player’s attention from making strategic moves. At the same time, we wanted to preserve the authentic Age II experience, and changing anything could lead to issues. The system we implemented is optional, it’s not on by default, and you turn it on whenever you need to. Secondly, it still leaves the strategic stuff to the player.

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"In the first prototype, we literally lifted the game, put it on Xbox, and then hooked up a controller. It was functional, but that’s a nice way to put it."

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It won’t create new villagers for you or build houses or even build resource drop-off structures. The only thing being automated is the tedious clicks of actually putting villagers on a particular resource. That strikes a good balance between accessibility and leaving the strategy in players' hands.

Full cross-play with the PC version means both versions of the game will be updated simultaneously from now on. And when it comes to adding new features, does that make something like cross-play or even new DLC harder to pull off?

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Earnest: It all comes back to doing it right and listening to the community. If someone wants to play the game with the controller on Xbox, that’s job number one. From there someone might ask if they could plug in a mouse and keyboard. Okay, we’ll let you do that too. And that changes the UI to match the PC version.

From there, the next step is cross-play with PC players. And even though we want to bring new players into the game, we don’t want them to get stomped by someone who’s been playing for 20 years on PC. So by default, cross-play is turned off if you’re playing with a controller. We leave it up to players to decide, and from a production standpoint, all of this is complicated to do.

Alex: We didn’t take any shortcuts; as Earnest says, it was very challenging. All the work we do for the console version must be shared with the PC version. And the version that we release has to be the most up-to-date version of Age of Empires II.

Age of Empires development involves the community with pre-flight testing and access to early builds. Bringing the game to consoles, were newcomers also brought into the testing process?

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Earnest: There were definitely times when we deliberately picked people who played games on a console. They had heard of Age of Empires but never actually played it. Watching them play helped us realise what was important. The brand-new tutorial that eases you into the basics of the game doesn't teach you everything but teaches you just enough. That was born from having multiple groups of players to call on. We have fans that have been playing this game for years, some of them at the esports level, and they gave feedback as well.

The tutorial and early campaigns have a different feel in how they slowly ramp up the complexity and introduce new controls and classic Age of Empires concepts. What was the approach to looking at Age II’s campaign structure?

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Alex: Quite a bit has been changed when it comes to our William Wallace tutorial campaign. All of the maps have been adjusted to teach you the controls. The Art of War stages have been tuned and adjusted to better teach you how to play on a console. We also added a new Story difficulty to make things a little easier for players.

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"There were definitely times when we deliberately picked people who played games on a console. They had heard of Age of Empires but never actually played it. Watching them play helped us realise what was important."

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And that was mainly because we realised that even though the early Age of Empires II campaigns were fine, some of the later ones that were released many years later are quite challenging. Especially for new players. Even the first map of some campaigns can absolutely kick your butt.


Earnest: For those later campaigns, we deliberately keep the design the same because it forces us to ensure the UI and controls work so well that you can play those difficult campaigns using a controller. And we want people to be able to use a controller to play against people on PC or players using a mouse and keyboard.

I assume the UI has to consider that people aren't as close to the screen as they are with a PC monitor. Everything needs to be bigger, but make visual sense. Not cover everything, so you can't see what's happening.

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Alex: We definitely wanted to make sure that in terms of the size of the UI elements, the text, the colour contrast, and everything like that was appropriate for a TV. Especially with super bright TVs, it needs to be readable for a console player. As you said, we don't want half the screen to be covered up in UI, but in some of our early prototypes, that's exactly what it was like.

That was difficult because we had to trim as much as possible to give you as much game space as possible. That said, once you are really familiar with the controls and understand how all the UI elements work, you could go to the options and change your interface to Advanced. That trims even more elements from your screen to free up more space. That was something we designed specifically for advanced players.

That reminds me, there’s also an Xbox Cloud Gaming version. Is that simply the Xbox version? Have you looked into testing or implementing touch controls?

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Earnest: I’ve been waiting for someone to ask about the Cloud version!

Alex: We did not take any shortcuts. We could have just put the Xbox version of the game on the Cloud and said use the controller and be done with it. But this game makes sense to play with touch controls, right? I want to be able to tap on a unit, and I want to be able to control them as if I'm holding a mouse. We created an interface mode specifically for touch with enlarged buttons, so it's easier to press those commands on a phone. Plus, a number of other changes. If you go to the options menu, you will notice that we have three input types; controller, mouse and keyboard, and touch. It's all there.

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"It needs to be readable for a console player, we don't want half the screen to be covered up in UI, but in some of our early prototypes, that's exactly what it was like."

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Earnest: Actually, you can't use a keyboard and mouse with the Cloud version.

Alex: Right, you can use the controller or touch. The Xbox Cloud Gaming app is still in Beta, so features are still coming.

Going back to RTS gaming on consoles, it's something that has been done in the past. Going back to StarCraft on the Nintendo 64 or, more recently, Halo Wars, which was built for consoles. These case studies exist, different developers throughout the years bringing traditional RTS games to consoles. With Age of Empires II, did you look closely at what has worked in the past and what hasn’t, or was it approaching it purely from the perspective of Age of Empires with a controller?

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Earnest: The answer is both. We’re friends with people that worked on Halo Wars, so we had direct access to talk about their choices and the challenges they faced. It’s funny that you mentioned StarCraft, a producer on StarCraft 64 works down the hallway from me, and he's a good friend. When he heard about the project, he asked me if I was crazy. You know, why would you do that? But then we talked deeper about it, and he mentioned what we needed to know. So, we definitely had some help from people that have gone through this journey. We definitely salute all the brave souls that have done RTS on a console before. We learned a lot from them.

Once we really started development, though, we realised that so many things are unique to Age of Empires. One of the cool things created by the design team is called site-based command. Context sensitive, where if you select a mine, you pull the right trigger, and you’ll be able to build a mine right next to it.


Alex: We told everyone on the team to leave no stone unturned. If you have a good idea that could improve Age of Empire’s gameplay on a console, introduce it. Villager automation was one of those. Someone asked, ‘Do I really need to select the villager before I create a new building?’ ‘Why can't I just build here and then have it done?’

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"It’s funny that you mentioned StarCraft, a producer on StarCraft 64 works down the hallway from me, and he's a good friend. When he heard about the project, he asked me if I was crazy. You know, why would you do that?"

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Has there been any discussion about bringing these accessibility updates and features to the PC version? Maybe not at the competitive level?

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Earnest: That has been brought up, and there are things that we will look into. But to be completely open, we’ve spent all our resources on making the Xbox version the best it could be. If the community wants to see them, depending on feedback, we would evaluate bringing some of these features to the PC version. But I want to do it carefully. Let's see how the new features are received first!

Age of Empires 4 is also getting an Xbox version. Is it safe to assume that a lot of these new features and ideas will make it into that version of the game?

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Alex: You can definitely think of Age of Empire II and 4 as being in the same family regarding console gameplay. We work very closely with the team and share designs, feedback, mistakes we’ve made, and so on. The two games are different, and a new feature in Age 4 required special functionality, so the controls aren’t identical. But when it comes to the core ideas, there are a lot of similarities. And you should have that continuity of gameplay when you move from one to the other.