Microsoft Confirms New Age of Empires II Expansion Coming Later This Year

For whatever reasons, real-time strategy games have become pretty rare these days. Even those few titles in the genre that are released from time to time are made with low budgets.

Obviously, this doesn't mean that some of them aren't very good, but we would sure want to hear about big publishers and developers investing more in old franchises that seem to have been forgotten.

Age of Empires is one such memorable franchise that can't be missed by any RTS (real-time strategy) fan. The franchise is still owned by Microsoft, which also launched an expansion that some of you might still remember from back in 2013.

The Forgotten Empires expansion was developed by a team of dedicated community members that got Microsoft's approval to work on the franchise.

“Transitioning from a community collective into more rigid timeline schedules and people management of development team often is where projects can break, but the FE team had great discipline, and awesome content ideas as we brought new bonus campaigns to the expansion through last summer,” said Microsoft.

That being said, the Redmond-based company confirmed plans to launch a new expansion in the Age of Empires franchise later this year.

New civilizations, campaigns and game modes

Details on the expansion will be shared with fans throughout the year in developer blogs coming directly from the team. The first thing Microsoft plans to reveal in the coming weeks is one of the new civilizations that will be implemented in the upcoming expansion.

For the time being, the picture attached to this article is the only teaser for a future Age of Empires expansion, and shows us one of the new units developers are working on.

The only info provided by Microsoft about the upcoming expansion is the fact that it will include a lot of content, such as new civilizations, campaigns, game modes, units, and many more.

So there you have it folks, Microsoft is determined to continue to add new expansion to the Age of Empires franchise and that's a great thing. Stay tuned for more on this one.