Age of empires games series#

Often, he says, they got it wrong: one expert pointed out that the way they had translated the name of a weapon was offensive, ascribing it an origin that is contested. Duffy says the team consulted scores of experts and academics and linguists to try and mitigate the sense that Relic was speaking for other cultures. Gone are the caricatural accents and bad acting, replaced by a dispassionate, History Channel-esque narrator. Taken seriously, these mechanics are not just ahistorical as a point of fact, says Devereaux, but mirror ideas that have had awful historical consequences. Games like Age of Empires are all about annihilating your enemies and stealing their land, which leaves those games and their creators open to imperialist and colonialist criticism, like the kind Elizabeth LaPensée levels against Age of Empires III in this article on video games and indigenous cultural expression. It still provides an excellent metaphor for the game-as one streamer points out in extraordinary depth-and for the real-time strategy genre in general. The original opening cinematic of Age of Empires II opens with two kings playing chess as they make moves on the board, their armies on the battlefield fight correspondingly. The most grievous historical issues stem directly from the game’s mechanics. “And I rolled my eyes because they’re like, ‘As the French get into the feudal age’-there were no French in the feudal age! France was a patchwork in this period.” “They just released the trailer for the French,” he says. It’s also been pointed out that there’s no class conflict in Age of Empires: Villagers labour happily on their farms without question or pushback.

Age of empires games series#

What’s more, he explains, nations in the game series are both homogenous and anachronistic, perpetuating cultural stereotypes modern people continue to hold.

“The empires in Age of Empires are not empires at all, but fanatically murderous nation-states, projected backwards in history hundreds-if not thousands-of years before any such idea of a state existed,” he wrote in a 2019 blog post on the topic. Devereaux, an assistant professor in ancient history at North Carolina State University, Age of Empires contains no actual empires. Like most historical games, the Age of Empires series has been criticized for its presentation of history. “And how can we drive towards that goal of connecting people from all these different backgrounds and histories and cultures, in ways that they can relate to each other?” Isgreen says that he was galvanized by Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s 2014 reboot of the show-he wants the game to feel like a passionate and adored history teacher. “The thing that drives Age of Empires is to inspire a love of history in everyone worldwide,” says Isgreen. Duffy and Isgreen emphasize that it was the physical traces of history-metallurgy and artwork in the British Museum archaeological sites finding Byzantine coins in Japan-that most inspired their return to the Middle Ages for Age of Empires IV. It’s classic Age of Empires: iconic battles brought to life. Bold horsemen gallop up a green hill into a swarm of spears. A narrator, speaking in the past tense, explains that the player must rout Harald of Norway's troops. Suddenly, the player is transported to 1066, to the Battle of Hastings, controlling William the Conqueror.

The Bayeux Tapestry unfurls before the player you will soon be at the heart of it. There is no better example of a perfect Age of Empires setting than in one of the earliest missions in the new game.