With Age of Empires IVThe first-ever ranked season ended in a few days on June 30th, we thought it was time to celebrate! So we come with the gift of news – including a Season 2 update first mentioned in our post hereas well as a brief overview of what we’ve heard from you over the past few months and how we plan to respond to what we’ve heard in Season 3, tentatively scheduled for October/November!
Before we begin, however, we would like to thank all of our players who have participated in Season One: Festival of Ages over the past few months. Whether you’ve fought your way up the leaderboard to become a conqueror, collected rewards from our seasonal events, or created mods for you and others to enjoy.
Not only that, since the release of the Season One update on April 7th, our modding community has released more than a thousand modsth, but we also had more than 42,000 participants who made their mark in the Season 1 leaderboard. Keep it up – we appreciate your passion and will continue to listen to your feedback on how we can continue to improve Age IV Experience!
Season Two: Just on the Horizon
We shared a little bit about Season 2 back in March, and we’re here today to say that features like the map settings system, fully remapping inputs, and player color selection are on the way in July… along with some other exciting ones changes !
Those of you who attended our recent public update preview may have already had a chance to try out some of these features (and thanks for the feedback, by the way!). Here’s a rundown of some of the things you can expect:
- introduction into the Player Color Picker! You requested it and it’s almost here. With this new setting, players can choose a color or have a color assigned randomly at the start of a match that appears in-game and on the mini-map in single-player skirmishes, custom multiplayer, quick matches, and ranked matches.
- Based on your feedback, we’ve further refined hotkeys to ensure you can customize and play them however you want. In the second season we introduce the new Fully remapping hotkey layoutalong with changes to how hotkey conflicts work and reorganization of remapping menus to make hotkeys easier to find.
- For a while now, we’ve been getting requests from the community for a way to give players a say in the maps they play in Quick Play and Ranked multiplayer matches. With this update we add our first version of acard preference systemThis gives you control over the maps you encounter in ranked play. When the Season 2 update is released, we will be sharing FAQs and other details that will further explain how the system works!
- Speaking of maps, we’re introducing a brand new map called The Pit in Season 2! This map has a competitive focus with a mostly open layout.
We’ll have more to share in the coming weeks, including significant balance changes, new Season Event rewards, and our Season Two theme!
With all that and more Age of Empires IV Very soon, it’s the perfect time to join! Age IV is included in the Steam Summer Sale starting today, June 23rdapproxand also available with PC Game Pass or Ultimate.
Season 3: What’s Next
At the beginning of the first season, we sent out a player survey a lot of of questions about how our players felt about the update and asking for guidance on our next steps. In some cases your answers validated some work we already had in progress (e.g. the card preference system) and in other cases your answers helped us change our priorities.
One thing we learned is that we have a lot of players who would theoretically like to play ranked, but would rather play with others. Based on that feedback, we’ve made it a priority to introduce our first iteration of Team Ladder in Season 3. Based on other insights from the poll, we’ll be investigating some other meaningful changes to the leaderboard, and we’ve also started discussions early on about what we can do to provide more opportunities for players to have fun Age IV in a more social and less competitive way.
We’ll also try to introduce two features you’ve been asking for for a while: taunts and cheats! While our starting point with Taunts and Cheats is heavily inspired by what you’ve seen and experienced before Age Title, we will try to expand this section over time. When it comes to cheats, we’re going to offer some of what you’ve seen in the past as well as some new stuff – both functional and gameplay. When it comes to unique units, we expect that we’ll be asking for your opinion once our first offering of cheats is released so we can keep you entertained.
And of course, it goes without saying that this is just a small taste of what’s to come. There is a lot of We expect to share more with you as we get closer to Season 3.
Tell us how we’re doing
We asked for your feedback regularly before we launched Age of Empires IV, and we don’t intend to stop just yet! Here’s a quick reminder of how you can help shape our direction:
- Share your thoughts on our short notice officially Age forums!
- Our Public Update Preview (PUP) of Season 2 recently ended, but we have more planned! become one Age Insiders to stay informed when the next PUP is coming.
- If you liked the sound of the Season 1 poll, don’t worry: we did too! We’ve found this to be a powerful tool for hearing from all of you; We’ve learned a lot from your feedback and continue to plan based on what you’ve said beyond what we’ve covered in this post. To make sure we keep hearing from all of you, we’ll be sending out another poll shortly after the release of the Season 2 update. Be sure to tell us what you think of the new features and content, and what you’d like to see more of in the future.