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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Warchiefs Patch Coming: We are working diligently on a new patch and perhaps by the time you read this there will be details about it published on our community site. I don’t want to speculate on a release date or content, other than the new Ozarks map I mentioned recently. The patch is being tested daily and moving along well. Warchiefs ...

Age III Warchiefs New Map- Ozarks: Karen McMullan and Nick Currie have created this new map that will be released in a forthcoming patch. It is loosely based on the hilly terrain of the Ozark hills of Missouri and Arkansas. The key features are the hills spread around the map, especially down the middle. A Trade Route (TR) runs across the hills ...

Age III Manual Receives Recognition: In early January we received notice that our manual and Quick Reference Card had received from the Puget Sound Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication a Distinguished Award for technical writing and editing. These game components are now eligible for national and international Academy Awards voted ...