“I don’t want to make you jealous, but we are literally playing this game every single day – both in Washington and in Vancouver,” Shannon Loftis, general manager of World’s Edge Studio, writes in a year-end review. “RTS development is funny: it takes a while to build the separate systems (AI, economy, sim, rendering, etc), and then it takes a while for them to come together. But when they do, you suddenly have a game – a game that needs debugging and balance and polish – but the core of the game that you know you’re going to ship.”
The long-awaited next mainline Age of Empires was announced back in 2017. In 2019, World’s Edge was revealed as the studio that would be handling the future of the medieval games within Microsoft, as Tantalus Media and Forgotten Realms managed the definitive editions, and this is the most substantial news since.