Xbox's latest big first-party release is Age of Mythology: Retold, which comes from the excellent studio behind all the recent Age of Empires releases. Essentially, this is a modernising of the classic Age of Mythology PC title from back in 2002, not only enhancing the visuals and controls, but also introducing some brand-new features.
Ahead of the game's release, we had a chance to speak to a couple of key members from the Age of Mythology: Retold team as part of a video chat at Gamescom 2024 a couple of weeks ago, and we left feeling extremely enthusiastic about not only playing the game, but also seeing how it evolves as the weeks and months roll on.
So, given that Age of Mythology: Retold is available on Xbox and PC Game Pass as of today, let's dive into this interview so you can get an idea of what to expect. There's even a bit of talk about Blinx: The Time Sweeper in here too!
GameParadise: Hello! Could you give us a bit of background about your roles on Age of Mythology: Retold?
Earnest Yuen: I am the senior director of production at World's Edge, so I have been working on World's Edge projects since the very beginning. I've been at Microsoft for almost three decades at this point, and the person who hired me into Microsoft was the program manager for the first original Age of Empires. So for me, I go all the way back! I like it so much that I can't get away!
Kristen Hanlon-Parrillo: I am a senior game designer with World's Edge, and for Age of Mythology: Retold I've been the design lead pretty much since the inception of the project. I've not been at Microsoft for 30 years, but I did play Age often when I was a kid. So for me, it's also kind of full circle.
Earnest: You're right, this is the very first time we've shipped any Age games on PC and Xbox at the same time. We took a lot of learnings from our Age of Empires titles [on console], and what we have learned is that we have integrated a lot of features to help console players feel at home.
For example, the Villager Priority System - we use this system to really help people be able to manage the economy, so it's much easier for them to concentrate on battles and all the other stuff.
(Editor's note: As hinted by Earnest, the Villager Priority System is an optional feature that allows you to automate how villagers carry out certain tasks for collecting resources in Age of Mythology: Retold. The feature was not present in the 2002 version of the game.)
So, honestly, if you have never played an Age game before, Age of Mythology: Retold is the best one to start with. It's the most approachable game that we've ever built.
Kristen: The Villager Priority System is the biggest one and I think that watching people play the game... they just go straight to it and they turn it on and jump in. And that's been honestly very fulfilling to see because RTS can be somewhat of an intimidating genre for a lot of people.
We have other features as well, so we have Story Mode for our campaign if you just want to focus on the cool battles... we also rebalanced a lot of the game, not necessarily to just make it easier, but to put the mythology up in front of the players faster. We've rebalanced one entire civilization (the Norse) to be less punishing, which is kind of what they were famous for before. And they're still punishing. They're just punishing in a nice way.
So we've got more mythology up front, we've got more assists, and it's been a bit of a balancing act because we want to still stay true to our roots. It's still just Myth, but Myth-ier! We're really proud of it and it's definitely the most approachable Age game.
Earnest: You asked me, what can people expect if they've never played this game before? No other game I can think of lets you have all these different pathways. You have, like, Greek gods fighting Norse, fighting Egyptian gods - all in a ginormous, epic battlefield - that just doesn't make sense in other games. Usually, even if they are mythological based, they're based on one story, right? But here you really cross everything, and it is amazing!
Earnest: We got a lot of feedback. I was honestly very grateful...
The honest truth is, we didn't see anything super surprising, but because we've been working on the game so closely, it was hard for us to pick which [task] we actually work on next. The test really helped us prioritize the stuff that people really care about.
Kristen: You know, we've been sitting with this for so long that every issue is our darling, and we want to be able to fix every single one. And so it's funny, because it's like, I can sit down with the art director, and we'll have a huge list of art things she wants to fix. I'll have a huge list of design things we want to fix. And we just, we can't. It's so hard to figure out what comes first, and so the tests gave us so much clarity.
GameParadise: When you were first brainstorming ideas for Age of Mythology: Retold, what were you hoping to achieve? And do you think you've been able to achieve that?
Kristen: So I think from the design side, we took a look at the legacy game, and we thought about the game we had in our heads, right? And what we realised is that the original legacy game, due to technical constraints, just due to the way Age games were made, [had a] lot of room for improvement in terms of maximising more mythology. The game, of course, couldn't render too many units on screen. The graphics at the time were amazing, but they kind of pale in comparison to what we have now. So it was kind of like, we know what people love from the legacy game. We have great storytelling characters and heroes, and so for Age of Mythology: Retold, that's just what we want to enrich.
Earnest: The goal has always been, like Kristen said, we want to build the title that's in your head - not the actual title, because if you go back and run it, it does not live up to what your memory [remembers].
Like Kristen says, we just want to push, like, every single thing under the sun, so we have ray tracing, every single art asset has been completely redone... it is a lot more approachable, it's a lot bigger and colorful, the physics system as well is completely new... so yeah, it's amazing. It's just a lot of fun to play!
Earnest: When we worked on Age of Empires 2 for Xbox, honestly it took a lot longer than we originally planned. First, what we did was we looked at previous RTS games that had been running on console and tried to emulate [them]. It worked, but it wasn't fun. So, we went back and literally did the whole controls from scratch, and we got to something similar to what we eventually shipped with, and then we started fixing things.
And this is, I would say, like version 2.4 of the [Xbox control scheme] in Age of Mythology: Retold - we talked about those learnings, added some of the feedback, and Mythology has a lot of features that are not in Age of Empires so we had to integrate those, like God powers and other things as well.
Kristen: On our player council, we have actually a couple console players, like dedicated controller players. They're actually competitive players, and that's fantastic, because that's a bit of a niche voice in the terms of, like, RTS on console, and so we've been working with them... because, you know, our PC players generally have different wants and needs for things like the Villager Priority System or auto queue. And then for console, there's still a need for it, but it's just tweaked a little bit. And so that's part of what I said earlier, I've been really happy we've been testing so often and so early, because sometimes the console audience is just smaller, so it can be harder. I do want to point out, though, that smaller does not mean small!
I'd say the other thing that was fantastic for Age of Mythology: Retold is that we're working with pretty much the same developers who worked on the other titles for console, and so it's more or less just continuing to revisit an existing design. So it does feel like it's constantly evolving.
GameParadise: In terms of opening up your game to a huge audience of players on Xbox Game Pass from day one, is that an exciting thing, terrifying thing, or maybe a bit of both?
Earnest & Kristen: Both!
Kristen: Yeah, I mean, we don't really know what's going to necessarily be waiting for us on on day one, but it's like 50% excitement and a little bit of terror. But I think also a very Age thing of us is that we plan on continuing to listen, and so this is just the beginning for us, and we're excited because whatever we learn here, we can also learn from our other titles as well, right? This is just more information for us, because... console, RTS... it's a big thing to tackle, and I mean we're quite committed to it, so there's just going to be so much more information on that day. So, we're excited.
Earnest: And I would say I'm definitely very excited to be able to bring the game to both controller and mouse / keyboard players on the same day. It's a big deal. A lot of the controller players, they are dedicated, because we can see the data that they play the game a lot. So it feels good to be able to bring the game to everyone at once.
This time is actually the first time you can actually play with a controller on PC. We have never done that before. So that is now possible.
Kristen: My mom is so excited for that.
Earnest: Yeah, and then the reverse, you can plug in a mouse and keyboard on Xbox, and you can play it that way as well.
Earnest: Wow, you're going deep on this one!
Let's go back to when we were talking about Age of Empires 2 on console. One of the reasons I worked with the team and we said "this is not good enough to actually go back, and we need to redo it", is probably because I have experience working on Minecraft for Xbox 360. So, we learned a lot from that. How do you adapt something like Minecraft from PC? It was truly a lot of trial and error. We picked out, like, okay - what actually feels good, what doesn't feel good, and why do people play the game in a certain way? Like Kristen said, there's a different audience for console and PC. There's overlap, but there's also a big part that is unique to them. And a lot of those learnings actually got brought up. I brought a lot of those learnings in when we were working on Age of Empires 2 for console to say - hey, we actually did it this way. I could point to examples on how it worked and why, so that really helped a lot in us making decisions.
But I'm really glad someone talked about Blinx! It has a special place in my heart.
GameParadise: We all love Blinx! Plenty of people would like to see a sequel...
Earnest: Blinx was great! The team in Japan, they're lovely people, and I was really happy to work with them on that. Once I became a producer, that was one of the first titles I got to work on. And I feel super, super lucky to have been able to work on that game.
Kristen: I feel like you've seen everything.
Earnest: I've seen a lot, but not everything!
Honestly, Xbox has such a long history, and with each game, you can't help but take what you work on with you to the next one. It's almost like a recipe that you actually pick, and then, like, how do you make something even more awesome?
Kristen: I think really what we're proud of is that we do feel we've made our most approachable Age game, you know. And just content wise, this is also our most creative one. And so, as the designer, I'm just so excited to see what players do with it, because we just don't know yet. I just welcome everybody to come in and play their way. I mean, I'm so excited for for all the custom levels people are going to be creating, that's something I've thought about since day one. We have an in-game Mod Manager, which is not something that we've had before, so players can go in and play with all these cool assets and tell their own stories. They can make their own UI mods. There's so much that I'm excited to see how players play. Everyone's welcome, like the hardcore players, the people who are just in it for casual play, people who want to play with friends... I'm just excited, yeah.
Earnest: The way that World's Edge build our games is that we build them continuously with the community. September 4th is the launch day, but then it's really only the start.
Tell your readers to bring their friends and bring their family to play together. That will be amazing!
Kristen: That's what I'm doing!
