The developer that made the game, the venerable and severely underappreciated Ensemble Studios, was fully shuttered over a decade ago, forcing the license into development limbo. Nor was Age of Empires the most prominent longstanding historical strategy franchise – that honor goes to Sid Meier’s Civilization series. WarCraft and StarCraft – and it wasn’t bolstered by other spinoff games as those Blizzard titles were. The Age of Empires franchise never reached the stratospheric heights of the Blizzard RTS properties- i.e. The genre it belonged to, the real-time strategy (RTS) genre, was at one time supposed to be dead or dying in AAA game publishing, and even though recent history has shown the vitality of strategy games, and even RTS games to an extent, there’s no reason to think it would make Age of Empires II relevant now somehow. This is what we’re working with, people: we’re back to Eadweard Muybridge and the zoopraxiscope for our graphics tech.
