It takes more than Age of Empires 4 to save real-time strategy

Here we tricked: This artwork is not from Age of Empires 4, but from Medieval 2. And that’s part of our discussion!

We love real-time strategy. And with »we« we don’t mean Michael Graf and Maurice Weber, but GameStar as a whole: Age of Empires, Command & Conquer, Warcraft (without Reforged) & Co. – the real-time classics will always have a home with us.

We owe that largely to our ex-editor-in-chief Jörg Langer, who bursts the bomb in the podcast with Maurice and Micha: His love for real-time strategy has noticeably cooled!

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Jörg is not al one in this, the genre has been in the shadows for years .. We had the hope that Age of Empires 4

would alleviate this misery – and it did! Age 4 is played on Steam by an average of over 30,000 simultaneous players, and there is also the real-time epic in the Microsoft Store and with a Game Pass subscription. Age 4 even made it into the Trending Games on Twitch, a mature achievement for an old-fashioned strategy game.

There are good reasons for the success of Age of Empires 4 (for Micha even the campaign criticized by Maurice and Jörg is one of them), but one of the key words in the previous paragraph is “old-fashioned”.

Because Age of Empires 4 plays well and mixes the AoE principle with Starcraft bonds like the more diverse races, but does not dare to be surprisingly new either technically or playfully. There is no – to put it bluntly – the wow factor.

But we could well imagine this wow effect for the real-time strategy – and the genre will need it if it is only to find its way back to its former glory. How exactly? You can hear it on the podcast!

You can read more from Jörg Langer Gamersglobal and do you hear in Game Veterans Podcastyou too on Patreon can support.

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We would also like to recommend our new podcast »What are you playing like that?«, In which members of the GameStar editorial team and also guests present their current favorite games. You can read more about where you can hear “What are you playing?” In this article.