GDC Plays Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition with lead developer Bert Beeckman

hi everyone welcome to the GDC twitch channel my name is Brian Francis I am the invisible voice inside your head I'm here as always checking out interesting games and talking with the folks who worked on them for those who are not familiar with the GGC twitch channel welcome this is the place we are tied to Game Developers Conference like I said just a second ago we tried to take this opportunity to check out new and interesting games that are on the markets talk to the people who made them and hopefully answer some questions from folks in chat so we're curious about how that got made in the lower left-hand corner of the screen I'm joined by Burt Beekman of Forgotten Empire Burt how you doing this well thanks Bryce thanks awesome and the game we are playing today in case you haven't figured it out already is Age of Empires 2 definitive edition you might say brains this isn't a new game this is a very old game no you're right but earlier this year the folks have forgotten Empire and Microsoft work together to put out a

definitive edition for H vampires - that includes content from the original game content from the expansion Age of conquerors content from the HD Edition and a new expansion I think for this game that's what you mentioned earlier Burton yes actually that I think that's like 5 expansions currently active into this one alongside of change they are pretty pretty big amount of content in here yeah makes it well because it means Age of Empires 2 is sort of been in development for over two decades that means yeah like - it's been 20 years of age of empires - I picked the the Saladin campaign to do a brief mission because this is one of the first campaigns one of my favorite things about Age of Empires 2 is a game when I was a kid was this this game got me through history class it got me through a bunch of things that I would have otherwise thought we were they were boring because I could play it in in this game Age of Empires um Bert I guess

I should be asking did you have a similar experience that Age of Empires back in the nineties and how did you and your team get started on working with Microsoft on this those two questions aren't linked I'm sorry but I'm just trying to make a segue happen well it's actually they are actually kind of lame because a lot of the people all of the events were called net bars are actually a longtime fans of the game we played if vampires to most of us as kids the kind of irrelevance and then we all kind of came back same time importance this team now how we kind of got involved with age of empires too is that we we all started actually modeling the game I think that was in 2011-2012 around the time period and we started looking at a diversity at the time there was no active development on the game we kinda were like okay this is very interesting there's all kinds of people who played the game when they were a kids now they're coming back to

this game to developing all kinds of modding tools hey we want to make some people with us so we're starting to look into like what are the possibilities and there was one thing that was not done at that point which was having used in violations to the game so we you know it'll throw out a bit and then after some time we managed to add the new civilization to the game they were like okay we can make my new expansion or something any new civilizations was never gone at that point as a vault so we haven't made a lot was all goods we brought it out and we put it on websites we put it on our website at Christmas Eve which in hindsight was a terrible idea but at the time we thought okay that's great agree because we're going to give to the fans and people who are looking forward to this pot nice Christmas presents I remember like and we're gonna have let's say 20,000 downloads and wife time downloads that would be great the problem was with 20,000 downloads in

I think the first power website went down it was Christmas Eve as I said before so yeah I know around to developers there so I got all in all very very weird and hectic launch of the malts but eventually the mock-up in poplar and we I think we have like a lifetime amount of downloads of 1 million downloads medley which was yeah way more than with you that we never dreamt off and at the same time Microsoft was also looking at HD Edition so we reached out Microsoft we're like hey you guys are you know showing interests again in the franchise in the series and we just made this small step that really did well is there some way that we can incorporate and we did we started to work on more expansions for the HD Edition man at the time and then we started to work on the definitive

editions as well so yeah we we really own 8jo empires and basically builds your ended as well right now apologies for focus and gently as something of a cold so I'm trying to muscle through to a stream I was gonna try I'm trying to catch my coughing and keep it off mic but quick shout out for folks and chat we are gonna take questions so if you're someone like aqua blue title NS lurker sauce or robo boar oh we would love to hear from you we'd love to know what questions you have Herbert's and if you'd like to know more about how this game got made um my first question for you then started talking about the transistor diving into that transition from modders to full time Game Developers how did that transition itself happen once once you guys started talking to Microsoft like when did you and your friends sort of go from becoming a group of moderates to becoming like professional developers with what I assume as an office in the

studio and what was that process like it's been a very gradual process we because we would have been working on those expansions for quite some time it really allows us to grow slowly at our own pace so it was not like okay we're now higher and now it starts to do we need to get people together all in a matter of months or weeks now we we literally have the years to slowly go up and that was actually really good because we each of ours is a slow game but we are the studio also like to take it relatively easy going in way like we don't want to take crazy visitor do crazy things but you know take it take it gently and that's really allowed us to make intelligent decisions and in growing as a studio now the thing is we emerge Lee a virtual studio we do have some in smaller local presences but overall most of the people are working from home or working from like shared offices so that's that's kind of how we're still doing it at this point

nice I brought that up in chat right on well just to talk about that it's diving the definitive edition you already worked on an HD Edition and obviously I know that there's a definitive edition for hmm far as one age and age of empires to what did you see as the sort of the temples for a definitive edition what do we need to entail like what we're sort of the project goals of that that separated it from the prior HD that you've done so back in the day if you look at the HD Edition the main goal that was so painless creative in Paris too bad to the players there were almost people who have all played I mean you go east as a CD player in their laptop for example those are all things that you know people like h2 but they have no idea how to play it and that was kind of the goal of the HD Edition to bring it back to the players and it kind of grew on that might be we brought more content because there was clearly a very strong

demand from the community like hey we want more h2 we definitely want more but then when the definitive additions were made plus more than okay let's just bring back h2 less that's actually the whole project Bowl from within Microsoft M from from us as well was okay we need to make the best age to possible that was the intent here so it was a very very different approach it's a book just bring it back it was like okay let's make sure that everything we have at this point is further improved and is the best possible thing that we can make and that's enough that's really the big difference and that can kind of manifest itself in in many ways as well if you look at the graphics if you put them side by side you can really see okay this was the 90s and this is no longer the nineties like you just see it on the screen here as well like you know the

building's now beautifully collapse paint I'm probably now or we have the the kind of call that - the smoke that comes out of the barrel of the cannon and fires a cannonball no like a little you know the birth of the a virtual game and that really you know make it looks a little prettier we have said like basically every accent in the game that has been remade which was not the case in the HD Edition in the HD Edition all the graphics were the original graphics but the resolution was just scale up so your viewport is like bigger larger but it was still the same sprites and now we have much higher quality sprites look man what was the process of remaking an entire games worth of assets forgive me okey but it really got remote work from home team like I assume I assume for not a large amount of people that was a lot of work yeah so this is

where we're we also have a chance to work together with all the studios oversight arc over Simon or erection that's something that we hold its in-house and that was all done by Yeti in cooperation with Microsoft but a lot of the assets worth was luckily done by partner studio that helped us out now with that step it was still a crazy amount of work yeah when we started this and we made you a list of assets that we actually had to remain it was like okay this is not just one getting early making this six games worth of assets even after painting which is an insane amount and it also took ages to actually redo all those but and also actually we didn't have any of the original assets those were all lost so literally we have no choice but to make everything from scratch but other than that it was just yeah two things that that were on earth science and one thing was definitely that we we have the

original arts and one of the things that we really want stick to us okay if people have been recognizing this specific unit has being a channel as you can see on the screen now these camps we want to make sure that somebody still recognizes that viewing it as a camel twenty years later so we didn't really have to go around and redesign all those essence there's more like okay we kind of have it here it might only be done under fixable time now it's like an adult or time stupid fidelity we need to imagine what all those pixels in between look like but as an overall view you kind of know what units come to look like and that's really helped in speeding up that process helped us you know stick to the original design and then you know trying to just bring that back as good as possible no no good going gone no I actually forgot my dream fault I'm sorry okay yeah from that point on

moving on from the individual assets I guess my next question would be it would be foolish of me to say you could just copy and paste the original code from the game the original like programming and logic to make it work one-to-one in your new software what was the for rebuilding the scripting and the 30 like the AI like a lot of the logic that may determine buyers what it was well I don't know how I can get here but there were a few challenges here so we did have the code we do the original work from and luckily because of HD we could also start from HD which will set up more recently however the the biggest issue and that was also an issue that HD actually have have two issues which is that if you take a game that was compiled back in the nineties and now you take it and recompile it again with latest settings not everything will be

exactly the same there was there were a lot of places where we noticed at the way you can follow the game kind of defines like behavior like okay okay there's an unfinished nice pet parrot how does the compiler handle with that at the only hands and the way I'm the reason I'm saying that is because all the sudden every kind of recompile the gate you make not a single change with all the sudden in place differently and that's you also need to accountable and that was especially disappointing for example particle-like you can take it pathfinding from 1999 just compile the code again did not be you do it and if I find a slightly different specially for you know you have a very big passionate communities don't forget about in our school they will definitely notice that like hey this is different you guys do it or like yeah nothing yet but detectives still different yeah so then you need to go back in there and oh

that's a funny count em yeah make its make it better now which goes to this we also went into pop onion and converted water furrow but never engineering it was also not just to make its difference right from the baths but also a lot of things that were true in nineties coding or no longer true in 2020 or 2022 company standards have changed by practices have changed what is now efficient hardware might not be efficient thing more so yeah it's not like you were ahead of the game that's mean it still works but the kind of intricacies and the efficiencies from builder work are no longer true right on I'm going to chat real quick we got folks like present cow moooo 3,000 commenting that we need unique units for each sieve that sounds like a lot of work that sounds like a ton of work I don't know like I like I'd like games like Warcraft that have you know unique

units for every sip but they still like they keep things analogous I like how we do empires does it - I like that there's all the basic units and then the unique units there's a bit of an issue there like we definitely talked about it but they're salutely things to consider there one thing is of course that we have now 11 different architecture sets 35 civilizations but 11 architectures does let's assume that we're not going first sip but for our Tech's ourselves yeah that still all of a sudden you have 10 times as many years of being recognized which make things a lot more complicated one of the beauties of Age of Empires - is that you see the units and you know what it is and it's very very important RTS games I can quite imagine if you have sort of ten times a month units it's much much harder to do that let alone with 35 different sets of units not to mention is a lot more assets and that will take a lot more memory space and more disk

space because it's it's one of those things as well if this game is still to the lot of people think that it's actually treaty now but it's still to these products because we really wanted to keep that bolt filled but at the same time that's also very very heavy on one of our computers Mike locates loft space that is taken on your hard disk for all those sprites all those facets so yeah then there's a few considerations before we can look at individual unit skins moving on lurker sauce has some interesting insight the initial size of Age of Empires 2de and beta was 60 gigabytes you managed to half fat and compression split the four case of our new DLC that's true I'm sorry we're not playing with the 4k support today my machine is you know dude it can do the best I can I wanted to make sure we had the best image quality for the stream because unfortunately a 4k one might have had

some trouble but yeah what was I guess I guess some what was your process for in decision making process for including that 4k support and how did you work to the point of including as DLC instead of making it a main feature of the game that's really interesting question actually so when we started working on this one of the ideas was okay Age of Empires 2 has been going on for 20 years we want to make sure they can go on for another 20 years and then you just have to add 4k graphics there is I mean at this point I think if you look at Steve RS curve it almost people are on HD or tiny above that but it is slightly moving higher and that will always keep on happening so in 20 years maybe 4k will be tiny and then you won't 4k graphics especially in the to the environment that it's over it just won't be readable but indeed as as the chat mentioned as well this came with a large like an explosion

in data size as its price on your hard disk drive and at some point in either a t-38 way to de beta was 60 gigabytes then we Spokane with 60 you guys a lot of people won't be able to run that which is naughty intent at all we want people to play the game and have us you know in this wide range of computers I can play as possible and at that point we're okay we need to look further into depression and I think we went down to take 30 gigabytes so if you have everything installed and you're about thirty large at this point and as the chat also just mentioned we once were at the point where we had 120 gigabytes of data slice just just in the yeah I think it was a pre beta but that was that was really really big at the time and then at that point we really noticed this is

larger than most Triple A game coming out today we really do go hard and get that size down and we did at this point you can say okay I'm just playing with the HD graphics and then you know it's much much smaller I would have to take the mini spec on how small it exactly is but yeah we rather much better position in this point right now as you can see in the stream folks have just to do I was I was about to go a few more campaign missions and I remembered most of my time in a gym apartment - was spent just playing random random games usually 8v8 player games on islands where I would just usually just build a fort a fortified island and use cheat codes to chicos to win the game because I was just a kid and didn't know how to play this game very well but I decided for the purposes of our stream just boot up you know just put up a classic game and sort of see how it plays out in the new HD vision move on to my next question

which has to do with the new factions and sort of the new historical bacon thing one of the coolest things about Age of Empires Age of Empires - for me as a camper that helped me learn more about civilizations that they don't teach you about in the American school system I don't think you you don't really get a lot of perspective on say Saladin and his campaign until you're in high school but here it was you know at age 11 in middle elementary school getting to learn sort of about perspectives and people that I had never met before what was your team's philosophy for building out the new factions not just from a fun standpoint but from kind of the historical standpoint that the series is known for well that's that's a massive question I can probably fill the whole store you're just answering that so but it's really interesting actually so cities mine and how I'm trying to get to those tips and how we approach it yeah there's hopefully we along a set

process when we start working on expansion and that we learn from all of our earlier expansion is actually is we try to approach a story gently think refers to that video from a kingdoms for a kind of focus on light after history I mean I went south east asian history and allow for the addition or like okay what region is really interesting and we have a confident and then we went to Eastern Europe and Central Asia so that's the theme for the system this one now in at that point we're like okay what saves from that region or interesting for Age of Empires and that's what way is the most difficult discussion to her at the beginning you it's always easy you can say okay okay medieval civilization British Chinese and you know everybody kind of knows knows and everybody is like okay that's quintessentially many

evil stuffing and everybody can name something about those civilizations but as soon as you get a bit more obscure the questions become a bit harder like okay what's exactly sets them apart and then you look up at a few things that make it really interesting for example we have a ton tires of the game and if we think other topics were like okay we have a story of Tim early that's a super interesting story to tell sort of like okay even if the Tatars not saying they were not interesting but even if the others were not as knowing as for example the Chinese of the British story that we can tell any campaigns is so interesting as we absolutely want those guys in so that's that's one thing that can also be something else for example the Chinese this is again an older sieve with an example you can say okay the Chinese have the ciccone there they're repeated cross bone that's a very in weather and that's something that you absolutely want to have in the game

always like okay what's an interesting facets of a civilization and and at that point you can now build around that so it's it's not just one thing that makes us decide what makes an innocent but always like yeah what what are a few interesting things that we can start on and then we start researching is that building researching that is always very interesting because we try to look at it from various perspectives yeah history that's history history is always written from certain respect it's always in a certain yeah yeah this sort of looks like the exact words in English but that we try to you know keep its I should I say it's only has over money this possible we for example when we were working on the Tatars we reached out to other

universities from the region and thought that in the sense of the Middle Ages that countries no longer Rapids so we were looking for universities and the region's reached out to them with research papers from States to those as well went to a lot of libraries and some good old-fashioned research in there to be honest yeah and which is which is actually good fun I mean you can start going to keep eat yeah but after that you really need to go to I get down and dirty with its actual proper research that you that you can find all over the world and and that's kind of how we can find you those is further now at that point once we have like today a lot of information to work from then at that point it's more like okay we're still making a video game here we're not just making a history book because that's that's obvious we're making a video game

for people to enjoy and that's kind of where you you have okay we need to make decisions for example we have like the Kumar's that we just added to the game the commands they got extinct before most of the civilization native empires were around does that mean that this civilization needs to you know stop being relevant askew and fast through the game yeah probably not because then the game will be completely imbalanced so this is kind of where you also need to wait game playing versus history at that point man how does it feel to sort of walk in the footsteps of the original Age of Empires Debs in terms of building and adding new factions like you're sort of sitting there going you know we're embarking on the same mission that they did in the 1990s but we're doing it you know but the tools available to us you know in a much faster internet for one yes in the modern day it was interesting because

I've read some interviews about them and how they kind of went around that and I can't imagine how they would have to go to like more obscure Sims because sometimes almost like okay we have the children's books that we work from or we you know we had some articles from magazines that we cut those out and that was kind of a reference are those are things that I wrote as heard by the Reds in alternatives from ensemble Studios now with the world of information that we have on the internet and the ability to just say like okay I'm gonna you know Center and email to the University or Istanbul begin to research from Central Asian history that is something that we now can do and they could not so in a way I really appreciate the word that they did back in the day and in you know researching up with the tools available right on King 3,500 actually has a really good question um is there so space in human history you

can tell in new campaigns or sibs at this point we haven't thirty five civilizations to the game which is crazy amount there's still more war is that the law coming to eat vampires I don't know we've we've been saying problem that for civilizations were probably did you don't really expect to have more civilizations never say never but we don't really expect it at this point but for campaigns you have there's loads of stories to tell we actually you went through the campaigns all of them actually we kind of rebate and repolish them where necessary I mean you just played this Hardy mission that one is still very very familiar to the old salty but there were emissions that we completely who revolt or completely replace with with new ones and and then we noticed like okay we have a sticks and then we're

talking in were telling stories about the Franks to the park and William Walton and there's so many stories that we told but then we noticed oh we've never really told some stories about the by case or the Chinese or our tactics it's like yeah those are have very rich history and a lot of interesting stories to tell but yeah they're not in they're not told he has many different parts to at least moving on to that point okay let me dive into my question about waking with Microsoft you mentioned earlier that the the company was able to provide a lot of QA and localization support when you checked in with them and see at all what was it like as a small to mid-size team like working with a larger company that in this case owned the IP obviously like sort of how did

you build a working relationship with them and what do you think other developers should know about when about opportunities like this to work with you know companies that are willing open built handing their IP over to you Wow weirdest thought so I have to say we've gone through quite a few corporations remarks was over the years like we started with bluntly lots and importing that's to to be an official product and at that point Age of Empires was still at that point it didn't have that much attention internally at Microsoft I mean because yeah there was something in Age of Empires for quite a few years at that point so there was there was no massive team supporting it but these things have have really changed lately if you look at well they just opened live studio just to support these vampires so those are things that

really show it now right now you're working with a bigger group but to really the best advice I can get to give is light be humble like listen and look around they're a big company Microsoft hasn't been around for ages we're very very lucky to be supported by a team that has been around for quite some time as well they they've so much experience like that people who work on nail in the hospital people overcome okay yeah I'm like so many games also RTS games in the past and that really really helps like these guys know what they're doing and then being with them like okay we might know the game better working on it but they know so many other things and it's it's more about like no getting the best for each other and that's also what most goods about or work in relation with Microsoft that you know when they absolutely recognize cake you guys really know each empires please do your thing we will be supporting you guys

with all the experience that we have to offer and it's and it's very nice working relationships to do that sense I'm gonna quick shut up for the bots or excuse me it's the bottom of the hour we are gonna be talking with Burke for about another 30 minutes um we would love to take your questions from chat we've heard from folks like lurkers awesome King 3500 but if you have questions about the making a mage of empire to definitive edition we would love to ask them on your behalf um excu tickin sorry dealing with the cold and Chinese streamed video games is very difficult Bert let's talk about I guess like you mentioned yourself as a team of modders you know you're sort of lucky to get to come together and make him content for a game that was popular 20 years ago and now you get to revitalize it and refresher for the same community and keep it alive today what has been your

team's approach to continuing that mouth support for other users because obviously a gym Empire still has a really good built-in modding tool that has an online mod community what has been your approach in that respect to letting people take the age of empires to using tools and go buckwild with them alright so yeah they're so long is like the modding community just doesn't start right yeah even even as we're talking is probably you stuff in development and new things going on and there was also a chance when we made the definitive edition like paint the the mods toolset forgive me : slate typical all right sue the globe for the old game at same time we were making another pen fine every month we were like okay this view multi-tool came out for this thing just came from the community how do we can how can we ensure that this gets you know finds its way to EE and that is also more of an ongoing story actually because at this point Microsoft has also

said one day we're not dominating our school I just released the game an hour ago supported for quite some time because we definitely notice that there's absolutely people playing that the game is so big you can you can support this for quite some time if you want to so that's that's kind of what we're doing now so in in modeling tools we're not there yet actually even we actually passed coming out next week something we have shared the exact date yet the next week we have a very big batch coming out where we will be focusing more on fixes for any audio model for example so there were a lot of people in the community you are trying around all the amounts were like okay this can be better this kind of improved then we took that advice and we implemented that so that's kind of what we're trying to do at this point because we recognize it as well we come from the

modding community and we want to make sure that that's that's spurious stays around as much as possible as finalized we will continue doing that and providing tools but would that sound like when we ship the game already included some of our dev tools into the package so people who really want to have been really with things they can just go to the tools folder and look around there and if they have any questions about that me I'm just just asking the disc working or in the on the ports and parts or somebody will get to it lurker sauce was actually your friend of just asking about the audio support audio Mazda port and just to follow up on their question for them is it mp3 or wav support for that tool it's actually W a.m. this is specific ports we didn't make the whole process if it's easier there's a I'm judging from his questions it seems like he has been diving into

that quite a bit he definitely read the holy night there but that's going to be a lot more relevant that was passed without next week right on what does it feel like when you're when you're updating this kind of game you're updating a game that kind of has the you know and you're balancing gameplay for something that has just kind of the deathmatch mode you know the mode where everyone's just competing and you don't just win by sometimes beating other players but you know like completing monuments and such how sometimes the the content you're making has to be sorted for the campaign which is for mission mission driven content for updating this kind of content and then creating and adding new things for it what's been your approach to make sure that something works across all the different game modes of agent empires so that it works for players you just want that classic experience or who wants something new and something that they can sort of cook up themselves I guess if that question makes sense that makes a lot of sense you actually just just describe top of the discussions that you always have you know it's actually something that's very

very common we often run into issues like okay baby we have this new unit and it looks really cool and I think we'll be happy with it they were like okay what can we do with units like an a things like yeah we want it there and then we're thinking how can we also just you know put it in a normal day and they were like that no because then the balance will be broken so that there's constantly we're thinking about those things and it's something that you see very very often actually like okay this small tweaking behavior might work in this instance but it will break something completely seemingly unrelated in all or a part of the game now we as I said before like a lot of the people on the team come from the agent of arts community so we were usually quite quickly catching those things which really helped us a lot like when we were discussing a pick and we hope I'm trying to find a good example here now for example if you do an AI

updates where you say okay we have units that kind of kinds back and forth trying to evade project ops that's something that we can add it makes the game a lot more harder especially on the higher levels and you might think okay that's interesting to past like you have that Titan behavior that you see all of expert players - can we put that in the AI and then we put it in and then we say okay the AI can not use it they ask how much harder but someone is having more fun and especially for more casual players it's just downright annoying and then you're like okay that's not a good idea condition though it technically makes the AI better but better is not always you know better for everyone so that that's those practical examples for yeah you have to look at everything that goes all in the game and in developers do is a massive game we

notice that flower you know and it's not just the game mechanics it's also that real birth normal game wits with history and we're kind of telling you know people's history but for a lot of people it's also like if this is their heritage this is their background is their country and people can want to make sure that that is represented in a correct way or in English and if you go way off track there then people understandably see like hey why do you represent my country like this it's never like that so there's also a historical caution that we do exercise there man I didn't even think we'd get to that line of questioning today cuz I forgive me idea of an understanding of the the nature of the the de work here I guess I'm gonna dive into that a little bit um you're and I'm just gonna sort of get to brass tacks which is you know you you European

you and your colleagues I'm sure come for hail from a different host of different countries I myself an American I mentioned earlier in the stream how I was thankful the age of empires for helping me like learn a little bit about civilizations from far cost across the globe what yes like it's so hard to so hard to ask what did you learn when you stepped into working on sibs that were based outside of Europe and how did you sort of avoid making those mistakes that can lead to them being stereotyped or or boiled down into something that doesn't represent them like it's hard to just say how and expect that to cover everything but it's sort of the only question I can ask is like how do I approach that sensitively and like make it fun and compelling without like without sort of only making it happen from a Western perspective but it's going to happen from a Western perspective anyway because that's your that's your background that's sort of all you can do in a way yes and and in a way we also kind of leader - that age vampires has always been a

bit of a Hollywood version of history likely it's very much like that the basis history everybody starts from history and that's kind of what the whole game starts run but in me there is some representations that would say that's more holy Luton and realism not not completely of course I don't want to say like we do all over good data historical research and sometimes if our historical theme is what you move me there like Jesus what are these guys doing 15 century helmets in that eighth century it's spectacle that doesn't make sense so that's kind of the level let me try to go so where most my right how do we look at that it's kind of something that we kind of talked about earlier so we just doing history and trying to go to to find sources Palestine sources that we have available but so it's you know you're going for the children's book or going for the you know the local

library try to reach out to a university from that area yeah all the people speak English now they're very very happy to help each members is very international brand as well and if you reach out to a university film for example and you ask them something about eight members of Konya eight vampires like it's it's not just knowing him in USA and Europe it's it's knowing all over the world and a lot of people are very enthusiastic to help on that to kind of help them represent their country and their culture and game and they often also get questions like a you kind of represent the game or a certain theme have needs to be contained in a certain way and they would be like hey that that's maybe not the best way to do it okay okay and we give that that kind of make changes there so yeah there's a little bit duration in that sentence as well yeah this that whole field there's a community I mean I'm envious isn't a

specific way that it's like such a great challenge to to tackle like you celebrate other people's history and culture well also just like it's fun agent virus is fun like getting to Boyle get like getting to tackle the challenge of like doing that deep dive research Wow Wow yeah previously bringing them part of the community I guess it sounds like a good time like hey you guys get to come to the table now yeah exactly and that's also a lot of people off and then usually that's also where we get the most fierce feedback from like oh we now added your history your civilization to the game you can expect a lot of people from those countries also reaching out to me like hey this isn't isn't this our this is great under that is something that that is probably been weird but usually we try to anticipate that as much as possible of course actually almost was a fun it's not from way way back I think one of the first campaigns we were looking at new civilization like okay we're coming after new campaign for

the civilization or like okay this guy had an interesting story to tell and then we asked at the local community or you know there are the people from that country you to get some ideas and they were like oh that's that's kind of like our local hit but you don't have to glorify that guy or like okay then we won't say so yeah it's it can be tricky but that's also a perfect example of showing like okay what is showing here in Western history is limited or is a very limited or a different perspective and you need to be careful with that yeah that reminds you of one of my favorite quotes I've ever heard about Age of Empires sorta give credit to the original team was from a writer named Latoya Peterson I saw her speaking it indicated and she was talking about on how the age of conquerors campaign like the first campaign you dive into is the the Incans or Essex Aztecs thank you

yeah and how the Aztecs fought off Spanish conquerors and in her perspective she said that's such an that's such an interesting perspective for a game to to Center especially given how Age of Empires sort of celebrates it's fair to say Age of Empires celebrates like the technological advance of European you know Nations a lot it you know once in this game he gets exciting ones gun gunpowder and horseback riding you know get added to the mix and you feel like you're a stronger civilization but to have Age of Empires be a game that took another you know this nation sort of put them on even footing with the Spanish from the gameplay perspective and say you know hey this is the story of their resistance and their perseverance against against a conquering group her perspective on that was super and I already enjoyed that campaign so much when I played this I was younger and I thought her her take on it was um was

really good starting we think we added like treat you supplies a sre three new campaigns with definitive edition yeah and all three of them were like a very very different approach to find a story wanna tell I think one is about just conquest it was a good stories over like against just about homeless but it's such a good story just need to do it and then there was one about like well basically a people that was about to be extinct so yeah it's it's very very different kind of approaches that's know that you know that we all want to tell yeah I guess that's a come to think of it as both a designer and a modernist your perspective one thing Age of Empires is their agent person is really good you know RTS war game like it's great when you want to build an army build the most advanced army you know play rock-paper-scissors with your opponent's and figure out what what's good against the whites how was it designer do you do you make a joke empires fun when players just kind of want to do what I'm doing here and focus

on building building a town and making you know sort of playing into the economic or wonder victories of the game the more peaceful alternatives which is it to say like like the piece size in there they better or anything just more like my favorite thing in Age of Empires was always just sitting and fiddling with my with my toy soldiers I guess more than it was like diving into other people's territories and screwing up their stuff I guess how do you make age empires fun across those different game modes playstyle okay there's a first time I'm getting and I loved it so so this this is really interesting because when we design new content they use civilization there's I think in law okay before I get to that first of all like the credit of the original developers for making a game events has this kind of incredibly interesting Erlanger like ambient absolute Pro and and enjoy the game in a

very different way or it can be very casual just played and built a city and still have the same amount of fun and that's that's the absolute beauty of edge vampires so when we started working on new sips we always the balance that we eventually want to go for the gameplay that we eventually want to go for needs to be suitable for the absolute top players like they need to play it's that it needs to be balanced for them but then at the same time they're like okay we have new mechanics new units are they also fun for people who just want to mess around a bit have some fun because that we were like okay for example the unit that pass let's let's say they have extra visibility range that can be a strong bonus for expert players but a more casual player will be like I don't care I don't care

about that that's that's like nothing it for my play style has a casual players just seeing a bit further that's absolutely nothing and then you're like the game might be interesting for a certain but absolutely not for a different group right a lot of the bonuses we kind of iterate like that like okay it might be technically a great bonus but for a lot of people it's just fun then it just goes out so yeah it's it's it's it's certainly something that is yeah it's very presence and it's actually interesting its first time I get the question it's such a big part of the development of the new civilization hey hey I'm happy I'm happy the questions are that good yeah we have 10 minutes lot about 10 minutes left maybe a little less depending on how how we go but we're gonna try and wrap things up by the top of the next hour if you've got questions for Bert drop them in chat I'll ask him we'd love to have them for myself I guess I might as well ask there have

been a lot of changes in conventions for how people interact with RTS games that's kind of a ui/ux question is where I'm sure bringing this to is I was super surprised when I booted this up and the menu was really faithful to what I remember Age of Empires to being I was then confounded by the problem of oh right I don't know where to research my new technologies because I forgot that in Age of Empires the tech tree is not just a thing you dive into and tell something to research because I've been playing sieve and gauge of one person all these other games you have to go to the buildings and research them as the as you unlock tier by tier with that said how did you sort of deal with the concept of changing me changes in menus how did you sort of preserve the old game while making sure it followed like modern menu logic I guess yeah that was another big challenge because we know these steps especially UI flow the Age

of Empires did not evolve in the last 20 years at all so we have to have some catching up to do but at the same time we don't want to eliminate older players existing community but also there there's a lot of you know the UI that's just inherent to the Gateway like you said like your technologies or research the buildings not in the tech tree tree here in Age of Empires more important if rather than interactive and in that sense a lot of the UI improvements we did was more looking at a what to our yes modern art yes base offer and what we don't have and then we know just a lot of things that were completely or these games are a lot about management's about resource management unit management have time management fight everything is management and oversight and then we noticed like a gauge my price just doesn't have that much information that you actually should

have there's a quick example I mean there's a few things that you can see on the screen right now you're making a model right now and right after that you're researching a technology in the past if you don't do that you could only do one at a time you would have to come back to your building afterwards to do it at the same time like if you click on on that monastry you will see that there's two bars on top of it one is the bar which is just for HP and then one is a bar that shows Mike how how the progress is all that specific technology so it's like little things that help you and see what's going on in your empire without the need to constantly click around a long time so what do you our approach was like a less time by the UI and more time fighting your problems that was really the big approach time trusting you see me in the stream starting to do one my favorite things which was build a wall around my

territory I don't know why it's the result is just nice helped me organize my space I think it felt like I will grab one of lurkers ask questions from chat this is kind of a technical question how did you guys write or excuse me did you alright how things renders that they don't take up much space before like before all units would be rendered on the map that did not matter where you moved your view they wonder how the compression was done to have it to fifty percent so I guess that's the question is how did you change how the game rendered could we were talking earlier about the large file size for the game the cook for context yeah so the river is completely new actually so we in the past we had yeah I think we had a 265 colors in total or everyday so units - rains water layer colors all that was displayed with just two other six five crops now we also notice the reason that each members who

was so efficient was because it only has 200 system cost so that makes the assets very very very small it's like comparing a gift or a chip and you now pronounce it to be achieved the amount of colors is just staggeringly different and that's kind of but then we have these very dummy Aviv's you okay we have a de version we need to have more than 265 course so what we did then was creates specific pallets of 265 colors for assets which means that a core space is so much bigger so much bigger but we still have that efficiency from the old compression like we can still compress to to a certain extent while having a much greater quality just by doing per for an asset pallets sorry right on that hopefully makes sense for people who understand that technology I I am more

of a writer than a programmer unfortunately probably and before we go I will grab high waters question thanks for dropping by high water what does the future look like for spectator mode for the game they hit they also has that been asked already know it's not been asked uh are you guys working on a spectator mode I should have looked this up beforehand are you working on a spectator mode and if so how's it going and what does it take to implement a spectator mode yes so there is a spectator mode in the game you can go to a lobby which currently showcases all the games that are currently being played in multiplayer now there is still more work that can be done that just just like I said before like the multi tools that can be used from some more effort and then work on improving that's side of the game the same for spectating about there is everything much or that you can do with that and it's one of those things where again we have

this example of you know we community working alongside while the II was in developments like all of a sudden they were big spectator tools specifically for the Overton they're like okay that is amazing that's currently not in the East so what what do we don't do with that so that's one of those things that we're just collecting or looking at and then see see where we end up but that said before we do have a lot of supports currently going on for a diverse group and we will keep on adding into this game and spectator mode I'm quite sure there will be improved this without us book actually next week there will already be improvements to that mostly bug fixing but you know anything that helps in making better spectacular experience is a basic laws of this point mill funny enough mill is asking a question that sort of involved that involves my wrap-up and the mill wants to know if

age of M you and the Age of Empires team will be at GDC at all next year I have no idea I that is all Microsoft decision and I am at this point basically I know everything that's fine um that actually helps me start wrapping things up this has been another stream on the Game Developers Conference twitch channel thank you all for coming out today everyone thank you to the Age of Empires two community for coming out thank you to all the interesting game developers who drop by I think this is a lot of overlap between two when you come but then to it high water to answer your question is what in wait up in chat yes this will go up on YouTube you can watch the entire archive on YouTube or twitch later this afternoon if you enjoyed watching the stream and you're new to our channel we would love to have you follow us because we go live regularly with interviews with really great interesting game developers big and small we've had triple a depth on the channel we've had great Indies on the

channel with everyone from insomniac games to the folks from night in the woods it's been a great year on this channel I'm really thankful for everyone who's dropped by and watched and next year we're gonna keep doing some amazing stuff the holidays start ramping up for us so this is actually might wind up being our last stream of 2019 but that's fine we will be doing stuff in the new year as we get closer GDC if you yourself are a game developer or interested in game development and want to go to GDC you can scroll down and click on the register for GDC button and get more info about passes and prices for next year's show which is from March 16th of March 20th um if you're going to register for GDC I'm obligated to tell you that now is the best time to do it because early pricing will go up in January I believe other than that that's about it Bert if they have questions about the making of Age of Empires to where should they ask or definitive edition specifically where should they ask them most of the communication is

actually through the the official a departs this corner but if you have more because kind of Christmas where specifically or Fergie specifically you can also go to Twitter Age of Empires from Roman Empire so just my own handle it just seasoning that might help make it to tempest yeah that this this River were pretty open to the community we come from the community were pretty open to them and want to chat with them so yeah any any place will usually work the poorest there's an age of empires who suffer the despoil of point I mean these so big your and your answers will probably will finance or some our problem right on with that have a good day everyone and happy holiday if you are playing to have one bye