Rumors of Trojan in Age Related Hack: Our community team is investigating rumors that downloadable software that supposedly allows you to cheat in Age games has a little bonus inside. We are trying to confirm rumors that at least one of these hacking programs places a Trojan on your PC and then steals your account information. The hack gives a losing player a chance to take a losing game and turn it into a win. Apparently enough people are looking for a fraudulent edge that a market exists for this...

TAD Patch Update: It didn’t take long for the community to find and exploit a bug uncovered by Patch 1.01. The bug allows players using the French Home City team Church card to obtain an unfair wood advantage at the start of a game. Basically we intended that the card drop the cost of team Churches by 80% from their original cost of 250 wood. Instead of an 80% drop we mistakenly set the card in the original Age III to drop the wood cost by 200. Then, when Patch 1.01 reduced the cost of the Church...

Age of Empires III Patch Update: Oscar Santos from our community team tells me that the patch is getting very close to shipping. We are waiting for the localized versions (international languages) to be tested and for our counterparts in Redmond to sign off on the work. Response on the forums has been among the most positive for any patch we have done. Keys to that response seem to be twofold. First, the patch team addressed the single unit strategy where a player could succeed by building a single...

The Asian Dynasties Patch Update: Oscar Santos, head of our community team, has told me that the design and balance changes for the long awaited first patch for The Asian Dynasties (patch 1.01) have been finalized. From this point, the patch will be built, playtested by ES and Microsoft, and verified by our Quality Assurance team and our beta playtesters while the localization teams are doing the translations. If no serious bugs are discovered, we expect to release the patch sometime “before the...

Age of Empires III 2007 Sales Ranking: Gamasutra published sales rankings for PC games recently and it was great to see my favorite RTS set in the Age of Discovery in the top ten at #7. That is an impressive performance for a game published in 2005, but it may also point to a weakness in the PC market overall. They credited the game with sales of 313,000 units. Check out the list here. http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17129 Sales- Exxon Mobil Versus the Game Industry: As gamers...

The Asian Dynasties Patch: After several months on the market the China civilization is the most popular, especially in any tournament where prize money is involved. Expert China players are able to get a sizable army engaged within six minutes and are hard to stop at that point. If China is not available to play, then the Dutch or the Sioux are popular alternatives, which is interesting because that gives us one strong civilization at this point from the original game and each expansion pack. Addressing...

Age of Empires in Uruguay: Patrick Hudson is one of our two Executive Producers and in a past life he spent some time working in Uruguay. He was recently invited to return to Montevideo and be a judge in Uruguay’s second annual game development competition (there were sixteen entries). The contest was sponsored by one of the local game companies (Powerful Robot), the Uruguay government, and the US Embassy. Gonzalo Frasca of Powerful Robot was the chairman of the competition. While there Patrick was...

Child's Play Charity Auction: The guys at Penny Arcade have been raising money for a charitable program called Child's Play for a while and this year we got on board. The Halo Wars team donated some original artwork for the live auction at the Child Play dinner next week in Seattle. We are also auctioning off a group of 14 Age of Empires/Mythology items in one e-Bay lot that is live right now. Included are copies of all of our games and expansion packs, some “making of” DVDs, sound track CDs, and...

Vacation Clue #1: Here is one photo I took that is a first clue to where we went. A second hint is that the country we visited has been a playable civilization in several of the Age games. The Asian Dynasties: Our community team tells us that the Thanksgiving weekend was a very busy one on ESO, with lots of games being played. For the first time we saw TAD numbers slightly higher than for Age of Empires III vanilla (the basic game) and The Warchiefs. We also learned that The Asian Dynasties was ranked...

The Asian Dynasties Launches: Jim Ying of our marketing group sent us the official launch news last week and the reviews have been coming in since. First, a big thanks to the Big Huge Games guys for making a fine addition to the Age series. We think they worked fast and efficiently to bring this to conclusion and put together a nice mixture of old and new ideas. We think all Age 3 fans will enjoy giving it a try and exploring the new content. The Japanese remain my favorite of the new civilizations...

The Asian Dynasties Trial Version: We had over 26,000 downloads of the trial version from our community site in its first four days. There are maybe a dozen different sites where you can get it. Check out our site forums for opinions of the trial version as people try it out. The game itself has gone gold and is working through the duplication and packaging process. The WarChiefs at World Cyber Games: Our expansion pack to Age of Empires III was one of the competitive events at this year’s WCG and...

The Asian Dynasties News Coming: Stay tuned to the Age of Empires community site for breaking news about release dates, etc. It’s all good. The Asian Dynasties in Japan: While in Tokyo for a conference related to the Tokyo Game Show I also got an opportunity to show The Asian Dynasties to key Japanese media. I’m happy to say that they seemed pleased with the way Big Huge Games had represented their country’s history in the expansion pack. Japan is in the top 15, or so, of the markets for Age of Empires...

The Asian Dynasties Wrapping Up: Big Huge Games and our testers, both here and in Redmond, are working through the final testing of The Asian Dynasties. Our test regimens are very rigorous and the standards at Microsoft are very high for shipping software, so publication is not imminent, but soon. It’s looking and playing great. The Asian Dynasties Campus Visit: The Games for Windows group in Redmond invited several key media outlets to their campus to see first hand the latest update for the coming...

Halo Wars Demo Download: You can get it here. Narration by Lead Designer Graeme Devine. The demo gives some information on the control system, built from scratch to make RTS come alive on the X360. http://www.halowars.com/ RTS Console Controls: Our Halo Wars team has put a big effort into the controls for this game because we want playing an RTS on the X360 to be easy and intuitive. We started the research on this project several years ago by actually reprogramming Age of Mythology to be playable...

Asian Dynasties at Leipzig Game Show: Microsoft has set up four stations at this show where press and the public can walk up and play. They expect to have tens of thousands of consumers pass through here over the next few days. My camera quality is not great, but here is a photo of the Asian Dynasties stations. In this photo the station to the left is actually showing Settlers VI, but it was changed over to the Asian Dynasties. Halo Wars at Leipzig: Harter Ryan (Executive Producer) and Brian Lemon...

Asian Dynasties in Polish Mode: We recently got a look at box covers to be used in different parts of the world and a new version of the trailer. Big Huge Game is completing the content and polishing what is there. We are waiting to hear how much of a presence the Asian Dynasties will have at the Leipzig Game Show, the year’s biggest European trade show for games. Our internal balance test team reported recently that in their opinion Asian Dynasties is on the right track and is reasonably balanced....

Halo Wars Web Site Live: Our community team, lead by Oscar Santos, got our site up recently and it is just in time to provide links to the incoming E3 coverage. We like the site a lot and will be using it to keep you informed of progress on this big title. http://www.halowars.com/ Halo Wars at E3: This once huge industry trade show may be a shadow of its former self but it is still a key opportunity to get new games in front of the world game press. Our team worked hard preparing a special demo for...

Brian Reynolds on the Asian Dynasties-India: IGN has posted an interview with Brian Reynolds, studio head at Big Huge Games, discussing the Y pack for Age of Empires III. I had the Indian civilization in mind a while ago when I mentioned that I thought one would be a surprise to most of you. I am happy to see India make an appearance in one of our Age games. It has been considered before and was a reasonable candidate for inclusion in both the original Age of Empires and Age of Empires II: The Age...

Y Pack Testing: Brian Lemon recently organized a large playtest of Age of Empires III: The Asian Dynasties in our offices and he seemed very pleased with the response and feedback. The test was intended to get people from our other projects involved, most of who had worked on Age of Empires III itself and even earlier games. These included several of the Age of Empires III scenario designers. The overall opinion of longtime Age veterans seemed to be that while the expansion pack has a way to go it...

Warchief’s Treaty Games: The innovation of the Treaty Game, in which players are unable to attack each other for a set period of time, seems to be working very well. Players wanted to be free from early rushes and we forced that in the Treaty Game. We hear from our community team that over 10% of Warchiefs games use this mode. The only complaints we get now about rushing come from people playing the original Age of Empires III (Age 3 Vanilla) who can’t get other players to play correctly under agreed...

New “Age of Empires III” Expansion Pack- “The Asian Dynasties”: A second expansion pack to “Age of Empires III” has been in the works for many months now and was announced just recently. This “Y” pack (as opposed to an “X” for eXpansion pack) is being developed by Big Huge Games of Timonium, Maryland, the developers of “Rise of Nations” and “Rise of Legends”. It will add several Asian civilizations and takes its name from that setting. More details on what is included will be forthcoming over the...

Official Halo 3 Web Launches: Great to see this long awaited site up. We should have news of interest about Halo Wars soon also. halo3.com ESO Accounts: Our community team reports that we recently went over the 500,000 mark in ESO accounts created. That seems like a big number to me. I remember when we were hoping to sell that many copies of Age of Empires I. Our community team tells that we also are nearing 16 million Age III games played online and more than 1.6 million WarChiefs games played....

Scenarios Coming Soon: The next patches for both Age III and The WarChiefs will include support for custom designed scenarios for multiplayer games. This should open the door for lots of new content from fans around the world and bring a new dimension to really competitive play. A tournament, for example, might be played on a series of custom designed maps released ahead of time. Players taking part would have a chance to practice on the tournament maps prior to the competition. We stand behind our...

Play Age of Empires - Study History in College: We got an inquiry recently from a college student majoring in history who is writing a paper on how and why history was used in RTS games over the last two decades. He tells us that he believes playing Age I and Age II is what got him interested in history as a field of study. I have said many times that we are in the entertainment business, not the history business, but we do believe that our history based games could be a good introduction to the...

Office Reorganization: Last week over 50 people in our studio changed offices. This happens periodically at the start and end of major projects when people move to something new. In this case we were just getting our teams together and looking ahead for when those teams might be growing. Each project now has pretty much its own floor in our building with space available for growth. We try to make these moves as painless as possible and hire professionals to help us get it done in one day. The most...