When the official multiplayer servers went offline in 2006, players found alternatives in third- party multiplayer networks like GameRanger and current favourite Voobly. When Ensemble Studios shifted attention to newer iterations of the game-before being shut down by Microsoft in 2009-they took up the mantle of refining the game and adding new content through fan-created patches and mods.
By 2010, the RTS game had retreated from centre stage, replaced by first-person shooters and role-playing games.īut Age of Empires II never truly went away, kept alive by a small global community of fans. Sadly, it was also the genre’s high watermark. But it was Ensemble Studios’ Age Of Empires franchise-and in particular the critically acclaimed Age of Empires II-that represents the pinnacle of the genre. The early 2000s saw the release of a number of seminal RTS titles, including Rise Of Nations, Command & Conquer: Generals and StarCraft. That was the golden era of the real-time strategy (RTS) game, a subgenre of strategy video games where the action takes place in real time rather than the conventional turn-based gameplay. The last time I played Age of Empires II was in the early 2000s, a few years after its release in 1999. To be fair, I’m not quite sure what I had in mind going in. When I received the invitation to attend a LAN party hosted by the Mumbai chapter of AoE India-an underground gaming community dedicated to a 19-year-old strategy video game-this wasn’t exactly what I was expecting. It’s all a little Silicon-Valley-meets-football-hooligans, the boisterous atmosphere belying the sheer geekery of the conversation.
When the game finally ends, everyone troops out to the balcony to thump the winner on the back and immediately fall into a jargon-heavy discussion about tactics. The other people in the room have no such problems though, and for the next 25 minutes the energy never lets up. Tiny pixelated characters scuttle across the screen, constructing farms, hunting boars and occasionally attacking each other, though the action moves far too fast for me to follow.
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