The name Age of Empires is practically synonymous with the real-time strategy genre. It’s hard to overstate the series's influence on the genre at large, but in 2002 Ensemble Studios took a crack at something wildly different with Age of Mythology. Unlike its historical counterpart, Age of Mythology gave players control of the gods and pantheons of Greek, Norse, and Egyptian mythology, crafting one of the best campaigns real-time strategy (RTS) has ever seen while putting the focus on asymmetric gameplay that revolved around dynamically different civilizations.
Now 22 years later, Age of Mythology is finally getting its second chance in the sun.
“There’s no other game that lets you have all these mythological pantheons fighting on a grand battle scale. It’s fantastic,” says Earnest Yuen, senior producer at developer World’s Edge, “Many of us started playing the game 20 years ago, and thought ‘This game should have been way more popular.’ So how do we actually build the game so that more people can play? Age of Mythology: Retold is the most accessible RTS that we’ve ever built.”
Yuen is a producer on Age of Mythology: Retold, a remake that hopes to finally realize the full ambition of Age of Mythology after two decades. The studio behind the remake, World’s Edge, is the current steward of the Age of Empires franchise at large, in recent years releasing Age of Empires 4 in collaboration with Relic Entertainment.
Age of Mythology bears many similarities with Age of Empires, using the same basic formula of base building, resource collecting, and unit management. But the mythological aspects were what made the former so unique, giving players wild god powers to affect the flow of matches, intimidating Titans you could summon, and a cornucopia of varied creatures to control, from cyclops to dragons.
An Age of Mythology remake is something that’s been requested by Age of Empires fans for years, with the topic popping up at nearly every live stream and event featuring the series in any way. But according to Yuen, it’s something that simply wasn’t possible until now.
“It’s something that we’ve wanted to do for a while now, but honestly there were some challenges on how do we actually build something unique about the Age of Mythology feature set?” Yuen tells Inverse, “Now is the time that we can really do the concept justice. Machines have gotten powerful enough to do some of the things we want, like the idea of a Wonder Age where it does god powers for once at everyone. Even just five years back it could not be done.”
Rebuilding Age of Mythology is a delicate balancing act, reworking the game so it’s more accessible and exciting to newcomers while simultaneously satisfying fans who have been replaying it for decades. World’s Edge wanted to take a different approach, one that kept in mind the long history of the real-time strategy genre, and the lasting legacy of the game itself.
“There’s a couple of specific audiences we’ve been thinking about. One is the person who played this game as a kid and carries it with them, and has a gaming group now, like a Discord of friends who may not play strategy games. We want to give those people the opportunity to say “I really want you to try this game I played as a kid,’ and have everybody meet there,”says senior game designer Kristen Hanlon-Pirillo, “The other one is, because this game is two decades old, a lot of people who fell in love with it have kids now. We really want to be able to make an RTS that you can play with your kids.”
While real-time strategy’s popularity has waned from its glory days, recent years have seen a huge resurgence for the genre. Age of Mythology: Retold clearly hopes to be the next step in that, but as good as an idea sounds on paper, the actual act of remaking something is much more difficult.
“We had all these great ideas, but there was a little bit of ‘What if we do this, and we play it, and it’s awful?’ But we went ahead and tried anyways,” Hanlon-Pirillo tells Inverse, “It was a learning experience for us all, and that’s really why we're calling it a retool versus a definitive edition – we are changing a lot of the core mechanics.”
The original game contained constraints on unit population and favor, the currency used to make myth units, due to technological limitations. But with the advent of new tech, those limits have been removed, so that players can now produce units with virtually no limit, allowing for humongous armies. A few of those mechanics being altered is the complete removal of caps on unit population and favor, the currency used to create myth units. On top of that, God Powers are now on a cooldown, instead of being a single-use ability. The team at World’s Edge was able to play around with things more, and see if there could be more variety to the strategic options players have at any given time, or strategic “branches” as Hanlon-Pirillo says.
Part of the process was trying to create new meta stories – enabling players to have memorable moments that could surprisingly emerge from the way the game’s enhanced systems worked together. “Our guiding principle was to maximize the mythology, as cheesy as that sounds.”
Leaning into that idea, and making the game more accessible, required a few other foundational changes, namely in how two specific civilizations played – the Norse and the Atlanteans. In the original game, the Norse are focused entirely on combat, gaining their favor and bonuses from keeping units constantly fighting. “There was simply too much that could go wrong, too quickly, and it was a case of the snowball effect with the Norse, and players wouldn’t want to play them again, " says Yuen.
Because of that, the development team focused on diversifying the Norse’s strategies, giving players more options to use in any given match, versus being strictly set on that singular focus. The Atlanteans, on the other hand, are almost the exact opposite problem as that civilization lacks the complexity it needs to stand out.
Originally added with The Titans expansion, the Atlanteans are by far the most accessible of the four civilizations, and Retold is making changes to “balance” the faction so it feels more dynamic against the other three. This includes big changes to how favor is generated, as you can now gather the resource through Oracles that are stationed around the map. Villagers can now build Village Centers from the Archaic Age, free god powers have been removed, and units have received a host of changes, too. While the Greeks and Egyptians have also been tweaked, Yuen notes those two civilizations practically felt “perfect,” and needed very little alteration.
While these host of foundational and mechanical changes make Retold practically feel like a new game, its visual upgrade is equally impressive. That’s also another area that World’s Edge sunk a ludicrous amount of work into, as the studio astoundingly worked on each asset individually.
“We bring something up to the forefront and ask a couple of questions, like, when was this asset made? Were there any limitations with processing?” Hanlon-Pirillo notes, “That’s why we’ve got a lot more myth units now that have idle animation, and everything has a bit more depth. These are things that just couldn’t happen before. Also, our team and our dev partners have a lot of diversity in backgrounds. We have historians, experts in Norse mythology, etc, so that was also brought to the table with art assets.”
The development team looked at every asset individually and applied as much historical knowledge as they could – things like if Vikings actually wore horns on their helmets – to try and make Retold’s new graphical style feel as unified as possible.
That further applies to not just the general gameplay and style, but the story and campaign as well. Age of Mythology tells a story about an Atlantean champion named Arkantos, who travels across the mythological world to unite the different gods and pantheons and bring a stop to a world-ending threat.
Over the years, RTS games have veered more on the side of multiplayer and competitive play, but Age of Mythology has always been a prime example of the genre’s storytelling potential, how massive battles and strategy can be used to accentuate a narrative. With that in mind, World’s Edge wanted to handle the beloved campaign with particular care.
“RTS has an amazing capability to be able to tell a story because you’re able to zoom out more often than you see in something like an RPG. You can have a strong cast of characters that the player gets to know intimately, but you can also choose scale. You can show entire civilizations, entire battles,” Hanlon-Pirillo tells Inverse, “The changes we’ve made to the legacy campaign are mostly things related to quality of life that, if they’re done well, should be seamless. Things like animation being smooth, high-quality audio, and we’ve added ‘talking heads’ (during gameplay) to give plates more one-on-one time with characters.”
Recently, there’s been a substantive lack of meaty campaigns in RTS games, though there are a few standout examples like Starcraft 2 or Iron Harvest. Hanlon-Parillo thinks the recent resurgence of RTS will lead to more robust campaigns again, but notes the three ingredients they really need to nail. “You have to have strong character design and strong environment design, which is one reason we’ve had such a fun time with Retold because the environments are beautiful, especially with the big engine and all the work we’ve done on Flora and fauna,” she says. “And you need a strong base of storytelling.”
Strategy games, in general, are changing right now, and that’s exactly what makes Age of Mythology: Retold such an important game for World’s Edge. It’s not just a chance to reimagine a game beloved by both the team and fans, but a way to look to the future.
“There are more expansions we want to do. Of course, we need the game to be successful enough for that,” Yuen tells Inverse, “We were worried going to showcases that people might think ‘Oh the game is too old,’ but the acceptance has been really encouraging for the team, and really made morale stronger. We want to push and make the best game possible right now.”
Age of Mythology: Retold launches September 4 on PC and Xbox Series X|S.
