Hail Caesar and welcome, I'm hidden Dingman from PC world and I'm here with
Patrick Muriel Adam Patrick, Murray, and we are checking out Age of Empires
Definitive edition today wait this is an old game isn't this is a very old game now. This is a
Going on 21 years old last year was the 20th anniversary so can it can drink alcohol you note. I had that scary
Yeah age of empires this is the original Age of Empires?
and is the remaster it was supposed to come out for the 20th anniversary last year and
Didn't quite make it Italy and then there was a beta last month, but this is the full game
with the campaign's no multiplayer yet because we are pre released but
Yeah, let's jump in pick a random one jump into the Ceasar campaign. I just wanted to show off these menus
Obviously that everything's rescaled. They still have the guy
Explaining the the story is this the original file, or do you think they rerecorded?
I don't know they rerecord on the music so I wouldn't be surprised if they recorded this voice also
We'll just stop that real quick anyways one of the things
I really like about Age of Empires and have always liked about it. Is they actually like bring the history into the stuff
They're like the the missions that it surrounds so in this case. We're fighting real world history
Yeah, so we're fighting off Sicilian pirates
And you can click over to the history tab and there's like a whole
encyclopedia
entry about a period of time that you're in so
Caesars life obviously everybody knows quite a bit about but like the ascent of Egypt campaign for instance
You can jump over and like read all about the the hick sauce
And Lower Egypt, so seems seems very in-depth. Yeah, it's it's it's cool. Like it's a kid
I liked reading about all this stuff. We're just gonna jump in and take a look at the graphics mainly though
I don't think we're gonna finish a whole campaign mission, but
Here we have our hero Caesar
It looks very pretty
Yeah, so what I can say about what I'll say about this game or this remaster
is it looks a lot like Age of Empires 2 HD, which no if you spend a lot of time in the
Age of Empires 2 already looked quite a bit better than original Age of Empires and Age of Empires 2 HD looked really great
When you compare like the looking at this just in isolation it's like yeah, okay, it looks crying
No, but man if you compare this to the original page of Empires graphics. You know I have a laptop right here
I'm gonna bring that up because I
It's like pretty astounding especially when you zoom in like the amount of detail you get when you zoom in on these sprites
Is pretty amazing so?
Yeah, this is a this is one of those part. Can you zoom in very far like that? Oh, yeah?
Missions, which yeah when you consider what these sprites looked like 20 years ago is actually pretty phenomenal. Also the look better. Yeah
All right, and also like if you click on the water image there. You can see that this was just like plain blue now
We've got like this nice look effect on it fancy, so yeah this mission
We get like this hero Caesar character who just basically runs around kills a ton of these pirates on his own
It's a pretty funny opening
for an Age of Empires
campaign, but yeah spread sails like
Really out all by himself
Now he's got ship firing at him we got some triremes
Maneuvering very fast I think we are on fast mode it defaults to that actually okay in the in the settings
I'm not sure. Why maybe they just think that slow is like the normal mode is too slow for everybody nowadays
I mean this this is for the people who love Age of Empires right yeah, not really trying to suck in new players
yeah, well I bet they're like the UH I would bet the
Speed of this. Yeah fast mode probably matches Age of Empires to a lot better
Because I've Age of Empires two of our remember correctly was a little faster
And we're just getting besieged right off the bat here, which is pretty nuts yeah. I'm just gonna go ahead and uh
Let's see if I remember my cheats from 20 years ago. I don't I can remember the fog of war one
There you go, maybe it's just a revealed map yeah
See like some of the stuff around here, we got some some nice sentry towers just hanging out
You know all this so I tried this earlier all the cheats actually worked from back in the day
So you can also spawn the baby with a shotgun riding a tricycle
Baby pres mountain infantry
On a tricycle a cute innocent baby with a poopy pants and Daddy shot. Oh nice, so yeah anybody who's played
These vampires back in the day will remember that the cheats in that game were always pretty crazy
Which I never did so this is a this is fresh to me. Yes
Fires two of the big ones were furious the monkey boy
Which would spawn a monkey who would just like kill everything in one hit okay?
You can also spawn in like a sports car with a gun on the front
zoom in on this
Didn't remaster the baby graphics oh
The old graphics versus the new ones look like this is what it would look like running on a modern machine
Do you think they did that on purpose?
Like I don't know
I don't like maybe they just don't even care cuz like you can pull in also I think photon man is another one yeah
We've got this uh this laser trooper and same thing you could tell that has not been
Redone, it's kind of fun. Yeah, and it looks fine when you zoom out you can still tell he's a laser trooper
But yeah when you zoom right in you get that nice
Shadow you know everything yep
so yeah we I've been playing this I've been playing this for the last couple days now mmm and having a
Good old time with it who knows fish. They get the little school of fish, yeah
Pretty detailed. Yeah, it looks great all the towns look really good. We can jump over this main town over here for our enemy
Got a nice archery range Town Center
There was some weird
Things when you go back to Age of Empires 1 so for instance you can build walls
But you can't build gates in the original Age of Empires that didn't come in until Age of Empires - ok
Yeah, you basically end up making like ya choke points or like big tower defense type structures where you're like making mazes for here
So that's a bit weird I
Don't know I still think it's weird for instance if we come over here, so we're researching
Triremes right now and you can't cue up research for anything else while you're waiting
So you just have to hope that you realize when it's like you have to have that timing down and remember to check in on
All your buildings, and that's true of Age of Empires 2 also
But it is still from a modern standpoint kind of weird to have to
You know queue up to a one type of unit and you can't queue up the other type of unit afterwards
And your little smoke
troopers a real beast Wow
And we have some random villager up here
I think he was supposed to actually be ours
Waterfall with what's going on with this me? I don't know that's a little bit weird a little weird, right
But yeah it plays like old Age of Empires you build a lot of villagers and try and rush food all that stuff
I've been having a good time with it. I play mostly Egypt campaign so far and some of the other random missions
Do you have a sense that this will be?
accepted by the community
Yeah, I think the community we find with it in fact. I think in some cases it Hue's a little closely to the original
There are some things. I think they could have changed to make
Like some good quality of life changes. They didn't end up changing and I can see why from like a purist standpoint
But it is hard
especially when Age of Empires 2 HD has been on sale for
Years at this point like I think that went on sale back in like 2012
It's a little bit hard to go back to Age of Empires 1
There's not like a great reason unless you're very fascinated with the time period that's the one main draw here is it's all
like classical era
ancient Greece ancient Rome
Whereas Age of Empires 2 is medieval Europe, okay, so like if you if you love?
Triremes and and failings and stuff like that. That's a good reason to go back and play the original
But other than that like in terms of how the game actually plays Age of Empires 2 is
Probably a better game the path finding here can be really wonky at times
I've had people just get like stuck on a tree and just keep walking into it it makes it
Very you know they didn't have things like pathways. Yes, it's very like
1997 in in some ways do you know what I mean, yeah?
So yeah, I really enjoy it for as like a historical document. I'm not sure
How much I would want to play it if I could just go play Age of Empires - well are they?
Have they announced any sort of long-term support? I'm err
They do anything or putting it out there
And then I'm not sure but it's like Age of Empires 2 when they put out the HD thing
they made two or three new expansions on top of the old content and
Those expansions are I don't know if they're quite up to par with the originals
but they're
Good like if you want more Age of Empires 2 like that was a good way to get it interesting so maybe I'm not sure
Maybe they'll put out something similar for this throw another campaign
I will say that it's amazing playing
This game again after you know 20 years and realizing how many missions were in these games back then
Just the the Egypt campaign alone is like 15 different missions
And then I think most of the campaigns are around the same like 10 to 15 missions each night
And they're like nine nine or ten Kings a lot, so yeah
There's already a ton of stuff to get through well and does it have steam mod support
I doesn't because it's not on Steam at all hold up
Why is it not on? Yeah, let's see, that's the other thing about
This one versus Age of Empires 2 HD is you can still go grab down on Steam but?
Microsoft has made this a Windows and store exclusive for I don't know reasons that escape me
But I'm sure they really care about it, but yeah that means that you are
It's running you WP which is not great we noticed earlier when we were checking the settings
You can't set a custom resolution. You could just make it fullscreen and you actually show this
hilarious
Yeah, this is is it so you
Can you can change it to full screen and not full screen, but there's no also limited to 30 frames/second
Yeah, but there's no resolution scanner and yeah, you can see over here the speed or Ahnold fast, okay?
And so yeah if we change it to normal. I think everything just slows down a little bit more
Yeah, you can sort of see all the animations slow
Even these Eagles that's something the fun one. I think we can change this too
I
Don't know what the code is anymore. Yeah there. We go change all the Eagles dragons. I have another good sheep
Yeah, I don't know I think it's a fun little like it's a it's a cool historical document to me. How much is it?
It's play bucks, so okay. That's not bad for for something. That's a remaster. I'd say as far as remasters
Go, this is a board up you up there with the nicest of them
It's just it's all the game that you remember from back in a day except
It looks a lot lot nicer, but it but really that last question is it worth
buying from the Windows Store
Sure
Like especially especially games like this that aren't super graphics intensive. I don't mind it as much true
It's not like I'm really concerned about my framerate or anything
It works fine, right?
If you hate the Windows Store well, that's your prerogative. I get it. I still don't like you play. It's fine
Yeah, but yeah, that's each of Empires definitive edition. We'll leave it there this campaign mission is very very long
I started playing it earlier
And there's a lot of uh you have to take out a bunch of these camps and stuff you have to destroy every dock on
And each one of these is a dock so you can see we've got nine or ten of them to destroy
Well, it's an undertaking and maybe maybe people will have to go over to a twitch
TV forward slash PCWorld us
Maybe will stream it up
Just remember the code for laser troopers is photon man
And the other one is baby how with an exclamation point or you can type in Austin Powers that also really?
Yeah, it was a different time. It's nineteen
Yeah, thanks Adam for joining me, and I'm hitting Dingman. We will see you back here soon