Welcome, Cysion, to this interview looking at Age of Empires II one year after the Definitive Edition has been released. About the current state and future of the game.
Some people might not know you, some only as leader of the development of Age of Empires II DE and HD, some remember 9+ years ago with AoCBox, the Forgotten Empires mod and Arena streams against Barbie. So please introduce yourself quickly. Who exactly are you?
My name is Bert Beeckman, I’m a producer at Forgotten Empires, working primarily on the Age of Empires franchise. I’m currently 32 years old and I’m a Belgian living in Spain. Some people may know me as the person who started the “Forgotten Empires” mod and for those who have been in the community for a decade, from the AoCBox website.
This interview will be structured in 3 parts:
Part I: Your past and current involvement in Age of Empires.
Part II: Some details about you as a person.
Part III: Discussion about the future of the game, including community questions.
I.
When did you start to play Age of Empires 2, how much have you played Age of Empires 1/3?
I started to play Age of Empires II back in 1999, I got the CD as a present from some friends back in the day. Then a few years later, my CD player was acting up and literally shredded the CD inside. The sound was horrific and that put a break on my AoE playing days. In 2006, I rediscovered the game when a friend introduced me to GameRanger and we started to play multiplayer. I haven’t been away from AoE 2 ever since.
My story for AoE 1 started with a demo CD that came with a cereal box. I played the demo campaign over and over again as a kid at my grandparent’s computer. I eventually got the full game as well and played through all the campaigns.
AoE 3 I picked up from my local library back in 2006, the game was way too heavy for my computer, but I wanted to try it out, so I managed to get a copy from the library, which I managed to play on the very lowest settings.
Luckily, nowadays, I don’t need to get cereal boxes or libraries to get Age of Empires, with all the online stores that sell the game . Just looking at my Steam library, I’ve played over 4000 hours across the series, which doesn’t include the 1000s of hours before Steam.
How did you come up with your AoE alias “Cysion”?
It just sounded cool. Despite all the puns, it has nothing to do with decision, precision, incision or circumcision.
What was the most deciding factor that Microsoft agreed to include your work (FE) back in 2012-13? How did it happen?
I’m unsure what the most deciding factor was, I think the huge community support for the FE mod played a major role. At the time we approached Microsoft, the mod had about 1 million downloads.
Have you participated in tournaments in the past?
I did participate in some smaller tournaments in the past, but never got really far. I do remember playing vs TheViper in CivCup back in 2011, I tried to pull of a Mongol MAA +tower rush (way before it was meta), but my skills let me down dramatically :D Nowadays I much more prefer to watch tournaments than play myself. I’m just too slow of a player to take part in tournaments.
How much do you still play yourself now and at which level?
I still play a lot of Age of Empires, but it’s mostly internal playtesting at Forgotten Empires. I do play on the live builds as well, but less frequently.
II.
Which city do you come from/live in? What do you like/dislike about it and where would you like to move to?
I grew up in Belgium, in a small village near Antwerp. When I moved out of my parents’ house, I moved to Germany, to work at Nintendo. Although I really enjoyed my time in Germany, I got so tired of the cold winters that I packed all my stuff and moved to Malaga, in the south of Spain. I’ve been living here for 6 years now and have been really enjoying the city. It has everything a big city has to offer, but still somehow manages to feel like a small town. The food and the weather are a plus. And I met my fiance here as well, so I’m not moving anywhere anytime soon .
What would you like to tell the readers about Belgium they probably don’t know?
The most famous statue in Brussels is probably that of the little peeing boy (Manneken Pis), but there’s also statues of a little peeing girl and a peeing dog elsewhere in the city.
Favourite things:
What is your favourite food and drink?
Japanese food, especially Sushi, is amazing.
Which foods from your home country/region and family background would you recommend?
Chicons au gratin. Belgian endives with cheese and ham in the oven. Super simple dish, not even fancy, but quintessentially Belgian.
What can you cook well yourself and how often do you do it?
The missus always makes me prepare the tuna, so I guess tuna .
What would you put on top of a pizza?
Artichokes.
What is your favourite colour? (Does not need to be one of the 8 AoE II colours.)
Purple.
What is your favourite animal?
Dogs with no sense of personal space.
What/where is your favourite place on Earth?
This is a tough one, different places evoke different memories. But if I just had to focus on the place, it’s a three-way tie between the Plitvice Lakes in Croatia, the Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia and the Antelope Canyon in Arizona. All three of these places feel completely out of this world, as if you’ve landed on a different planet.
What is your favourite song at the moment, of all time (can be top 5)?
Brain Damage/Eclipse - Pink Floyd Probably the best song of all time.
What is your favourite movie at the moment, of all time (can be top 5)? Who is your favourite actor?
Into the Wild.
What is your favourite book?
Round Ireland with a fridge by Tony Hawks.
Do you have a favourite sports team and/or favourite athlete? (football, basketball etc.)
I like to watch cycling once in a while (the classics races & grand tours), but don’t really follow a team or a rider.
What would you do to make the world a better place?
Get rid of a lot of social media. While it’s amazing that we’re so connected, we could do without the absolute vileness that comes with it.
If there was anything you could tell your 16-year-old self, what would it be?
I really don’t know, I’m pretty happy with my life, and even though I could’ve done a lot of things differently and better as a teenager, it made me the person I am today. And I’m perfectly fine with that.
Which countries have you visited? And where would you like to go to? Why?
I love to travel and have been lucky to visit quite a few countries already. I’m originally from Belgium and have been to the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, UK, Germany, Denmark, Liechtenstein, Portugal, Spain, Italy, San Marino, The Vatican, Croatia, Austria, Slovenia, Hungary, Czech Republic, Turkey, USA, Canada, Japan, Australia, Peru and Bolivia.
In the USA, Canada, Japan, Australia, Peru and Bolivia, which places did you visit? I’m asking because that’s the ones you can’t travel to in a day or for little money if you live in Europe and also I haven’t been to any of them.
Actually, just typing out that list, I think at least 10 of those countries I’ve travelled to because of Age of Empires for events, meetings, tournaments, conventions,... With Forgotten Empires we also do yearly LAN parties, where part of the team meets up somewhere in the world to play Age and visit the country. We’ve met in Phoenix, Tokyo, Malaga, Cincinnati and Prague before.
There’s still a lot of places I would like to visit, Iceland, New Zealand, Uzbekistan (Samarkand!) and so much more. When is someone organizing an AoE event here?
Which languages can you speak and which would you like to learn?
My mother tongue is Dutch, I’m very fluent in English and I can keep a conversation going in Spanish. Even though my German and French are a bit rusty, I can still get by. Given I live in Spain currently, my only priority is to improve my Spanish.
What are your hobbies beside AoE?
Definitely going out, travelling, going to new restaurants and discovering new dishes. Nothing super crazy, but it really gives me life to discover new things. Unfortunately, due to Covid and the crazy amount of work going on with AoE, these are mostly on hold .
Who would you like to meet once, who you have not met? One AoE player and one other person.
I have met so many people from the AoE community that I’m not even sure where to start with this one. If I can say a non-player, I would love to meet Bruce Shelley one day, one of the original designers at Ensemble Studios. I’ve read some of their original design documents and would love to pick his brain on some of the crazy ideas they had back then :P
Spoiler: most of these ideas were insane and wouldn’t make the game better today, but it would be super interesting to get into their original reasoning and follow their train of thought. Things like off-map trade routes, stronger wolves, snow affecting food production, etc...
I think you had a good relation to the Czech AoE 2 scene in the past. Do you know what happened to The_Prophet? He was such an important person when I started to be involved in competitive AoE 2, but he hasn’t been on AoEZone since 4+ years.
I still talk to The_Prophet regularly, he’s working with Forgotten Empires and does all the map work on AoE2. Our first meeting was quite hilarious as well, I travelled to the Czech Republic, where he invited me for a LAN party with the Czech community. We would do some mini tournament for the FE mod there, with some of the Czech pro players at the time. We went out for dinner, had a good time and then headed over to the LAN location. Which was located in a basement in a small alley somewhere in Prague. The entry to the LAN cafe was a slippery staircase that went to a poorly-lit door. At that point I had to do a double take and think “hey, I’m going into a dark basement with a bunch of guys I’ve never met before in a foreign country, what can go wrong!”
In hindsight, a bit funny, but we had a great time and I still have both kidneys.
I did not know that about The_Prophet. I just knew that he created a lot of maps and was involved in tournament organisation, but then disappeared from AoCZone in 2016. Does his work not allow him to do the community work? For me he was the original famous map creator, now we have Zetnus, Algernon, Chrazini, TheMadCADer and more, but many of the still-used maps go back to The_Prophet.
And another question: So he did the new MegaRandom too? In the original MR basically all the included maps where available as single maps (from UR, standard maps or somewhere else) too? How about the current MR? It has so many maps, and I would like to use some of the specific maps included there, do you have a collection of the single-map scripts?
The_Prophet did the new MegaRandom as well. Due to how the new MR works, it’s not as easy to just extract specific map scripts, since so many factors are randomized nowadays. So even though the separate map scripts don’t exist today, if a certain generation proves to be interesting, it can still be turned into its own map script.
It probably can, but it is difficult to find, if you don’t even know the name of the map.
What is your favourite civilisation, map and unit?
It’s a close call between Byzantines, Malay and Bulgarians. Arena is by far my favourite map and I’ve played 100s of games trying to beat as many AIs as possible on it. My favourite unit is definitely the Monk. I really like these glass cannon type units that can really turn a battle around. Oh and the Teutonic Knight, just because they’re so rare, so it’s super satisfying if you can pull off an effective play with them.
What is your favourite in-game sound? (e. g. farm, water buffalo, relic…)
105 and the sound of a trebuchet slinging.
What is the funniest moment in your life you experienced because of AoE?
I’ve had so many good moments thanks to AoE2, just looking at in-game moments, I recall a specific LAN game with a lot of familiar AoEZone names: we had a 8 player FFA with me, BugA_the_Great, The_Prophet, ryshep, iPhone, Promi, StepS and 1302. We each pulled 2 names out of a hat and if these 2 names were defeated, we would win the game. So basically a mix of AoE2 and messed up diplomacy. It took ages, it was hilarious and in the end, BugA won out of nowhere, when the top 2 players were surprisingly defeated.
Outside of that, I don’t even know where to start. Age has really consumed my life for the past 10 years and it has led to so many good moments. Having beers with the FE team at gamescom, barbecuing with the German community at nC LAN (and that one guy who got so drunk he threw up outside of the window of our bedroom that night), playing Chin-Chin with Turk after an exhausting E3 show. Playing Cards Against Humanity with our MS producers, climbing a hill in Canada to buy a toy bear with The_Prophet (twice because he couldn’t make up his mind). Almost getting lost on a snowy hike in Arizona with BugA, ryshep, 1302 and Hector. Oh, and ice sticks. A lot of ice stick jokes.
Did you follow any tournaments recently? What was your favourite tournament? Which settings?
I like to follow tournaments when I have the time (which I unfortunately don’t have much of), the most recent events I’ve followed were the Age Royale event and King of the Desert 3. I personally love tournament formats with a twist. I’m a huge fan of Hidden Cup, but I also love Nili’s Appartment’s cup, just because of the really cool LAN atmosphere. Also a shout-out to the Escape team, who really pushed the production standards for AoE tournaments.
III.
How satisfied are you with the current state of DE? How far away from what you expected 1 year ago is it now?
I’m quite happy with where AoE2DE is at right now, the game has never had that many players, tournaments and engagement before. Recent reviews on Steam are overwhelmingly positive and there’s just overall a very positive vibe in the community. There are certainly still bugs and we’re still actively supporting and expanding the game, so hopefully the only way is up.
From the original FE team in 2011, who is still around being involved in the game development?
Most people who started in 2011 are still around actually. Although people have come and gone, we have a very low turnover rate. Which I really love, we really grew a lot as a team.
This year we saw [BBQ]Turkman and robo being employed by Microsoft. Were you involved in the decisions? How did something like that happen, which did not happen for the last 8 years after Microsoft started remaking AoE 2 for the first time?
Turkman is part of the FE team, so his involvement with the official MS channels I’m certainly aware of . Robo is also directly involved with FE, but in the end, it was MS’ call to take him on board to organize tournaments going forward. And they couldn’t have picked a better person for it. I think the main reason it’s happening now and not 8 years ago, is because the game is so much bigger than it has ever been. The prize pools are bigger than ever before, we have 3rd party sponsors and viewerships that only 2 years ago were unheard of. And on top of that, we just have a lot more players than ever before.
Now to some questions about the game itself, including questions from community members:
Are you generally interested in advancing the scenario editor? It feels like the weakest part of DE and every time I wanted to create something it ended in a bad mood. Generally I would love, if you focussed on a script based editor toolbox, which is for me so much more comfortable and powerful. I want to change attributes directly and not by clicking wildly around in a UI.
It should be way more beginner friendly and have like basic functions like copy paste a selected part of the map.
This is a very interesting balance to find actually. On one hand, script based tools are stronger and much more powerful, but they’re much less accessible. The beauty of the AoE2 editor is that even my 7 year old cousin can play around with it and make his own scenarios, while script based editors have a much higher level of entry. With that said, we hope the new .xs scripting functionality adds some of that more advanced functionality to the editor; as well as the other additions to the Editor in the November patch.
I did not explore it much after the new patch, but what we already saw now is that the editor crashes very often when generating a map and that terrains get replaced by black terrain.
We’ve received reports about stability issues for some users in the editor and this is currently being tracked.
Are there plans to make repeated tasks easier to do in the scenario editor? E.g. creating triggers for every player. Any info regarding implementing the scripting features we had on Voobly with UP 1.5? There is still a bunch of stuff missing like effect amount, unit upgrade, guard state etc.. There is also stuff that scripter never added because it might be used to “cheat” in rated games in custom maps, like the ability to add HP loss over time for example - with DE that shouldn’t be an issue anymore (E. g. in AoE III poison damage was just introduced). Like to have the option to create custom special maps where you combine a scenario with an RMS. Is there hope for such features to ever make an appearance in DE?
We’re not done supporting the game and we’ll continue to work together with the community to see which features are the most highly requested and measure them up against other requests.
Will it be possible to have a modified dat file and random map script bundled in a single mod?
Yes, that is now possible since the November patch.
What is your opinion on the current state of water warfare? Your team decided to add fire galleys and demolition rafts and since then it has changed. Some people call it better than before, some people call it worse. Any regrets? If you had the time to make it work well, would you like to add more different ships? There have been suggestions for ships that can capture other ships, about siege, repair or builder ships, more naval unique units, etc.
Why are there no predators in the water that can attack ships (e. g. sharks)?
Water play is always an interesting topic in AoE. I’m quite happy with where water is at now, we’re now seeing more variations in water play and have moved away from the “only galleys” meta. I’m sure a few tweaks wouldn’t hurt to bring more variety in opening plays, but we’re definitely on the right track. Water predators I don’t see us ever adding to the game, land predators are meant to limit base expansion in the early game (e.g. going for the middle in Gold Rush right away), but since there’s no base building on water, this would not be very useful. I’d love to add more types of ships, I think there’s a lot more room to expand water play, but that’s more like an outspoken dream than a plan of action. We did experiment with boarding (conversion) ships in the past, but these small scale micro moves don’t fit the water play in Age2, which is dominated by larger fleets.
In African Kingdoms you introduced cracked terrain, in Rise of the Rajas mangrove shallows. So you were definitely not against adding new terrain types. Back in Forgotten Empires the space was limited, both for terrains and objects, now there is still a lot of space. What would you like to add still?
What do you think about terrains that affect unit movement speed or damage – both on land or water? E. g. swamp that slows down (certain) land units, deep water that increases ship movement.
There could be more different rock terrains, a terrain that looks like forest on the mini map, where you can place trees in the map script without using a forest terrain (single trees don’t appear on the mini map). Lava is another one that has been used in mods, but never been implemented officially.
New terrains functionality is possible but rarely very exciting. Very few RTS games get terrain modifiers right. I think there’s some room in AoE 2, something like a swamp in the middle of the map where cavalry goes a bit slower so archers have the upper hand; it could make for some interesting plays. Similar to how the Battle of Crécy was largely decided by French cavalry struggling with the muddy terrain and not being able to put their full strength on display. Regardless, if we would add new terrain modifiers, they would have to be visually very distinct, we would never add new functionality to existing terrains to not break older content.
There’s also a long list of potential objects that could be added. From cosmetic objects like lilypad leaves, many different trees to animals like wild monkeys, capybaras, kangaroos, pandas, polar bears, seals, snakes?
There’s always room for more in Age of Empires, that’s for sure.
What do you think about units that could move both on land and water (not shallows)?
Amphibious units can definitely be fun, you just need a historic precedent to add them to AoE2 and I’m not sure we have a lot of those in the Middle Ages Viking Longboats come to mind as they were carried over land as well, but I think after 20 years, that unit design is locked and loaded.
Why are full-map screenshots not possible in DE? Is it difficult to add? It is quite important if you want to show your custom maps.
In the original game, the full-map screenshots were a crafty hack, implemented by Matt Pritchard to allow full map captures for their marketing team. The way the updated renderer works, this is no longer supported and quite a bit of work would be required to bring this feature back. It’s certainly possible, but we’ll have to weigh that up against other features.
It is unlikely that another civilisation will be added. Is there any civilisation that you still would like to see in the game or would have liked to be added earlier?
I’m actually surprised how many people still ask for more civilizations. It seems there’s just no end to people’s thirst for more . I think there’s easily a dozen of civilizations that could’ve been added. We could’ve visited the Caucasus, South Asia, Persia, Sub-saharan Africa or even the many kingdoms in Europe that have not been covered yet.
Do you want to name your favourites that have not been added?
Given the speculation that would cause, I would prefer to not go into further details .
I wonder, what was the reason behind adding Lithuanians and Bulgarians after Europe already had so many civilisations and the previous expansions were more about regions that had no civilisations yet. That’s also partially my “ignorance”. Apart from Malians and Malay, Bulgarians are the only civilisation about whose history I have never read, never learned in school. Burmese, Lithuanians, Cumans and Tatars are not civilisations you learn about in a Danish school either, but I had read about their history already; the latter two especially, because I read a lot about the development of the Mongol Empire.
We look at potential new civilizations through a very wide lense. Some of the questions we try to answer for new civilizations: Do they have an interesting story to tell? Do they have name recognition? Did they take part in a famous battle/war? Did they have a special, unique military characteristic, tactic or unit? Did they get involved with other civs already present in the game? Going into full detail on where each candidate civ scored points for inclusion, would make this interview many pages longer than it should be, but basically, both Lithuanians and Bulgarians had a long, interesting history and both had military involvements with the Mongols, which tied in nicely with our “Last Khans” theme.
You added the Art of War, campaigns and historical battles with DE. Even if there are not any new civilisations added, is it likely that more official campaign content will be added?
This is mostly about AoE 2, but for AoE 3 I would have almost the same question, as the campaigns are really good; at least they were 14-15 years ago, as I did not play AoE 3 DE yet. Why was there no new campaign (with multiple episodes) added?
Another related AoE 3 question. 2 new civilisations were added (Swedes and Incas), but more revolution options and in the historical battles there are civilisations like Ethiopians, United States and Berbers. What is the difference between adding them only to the campaign and scenario editor from making them playable in standard games?
If there’s a high demand for new story-driven content, I don’t think it’s impossible to see more of that in the future. For Age of Empires III specifically, we wanted to offer a more historical experience for the campaigns as well, alongside the more fictional main campaign. Which is the reason we added the selection of Historical Battles to AoE3. The (new) civilizations we see in these historical battles are essentially mini-civilizations. They have a few unique units and characteristics and set a unique stage, but they’re still a long shot from a full civ with a full unit roster that spans all ages. Not to mention a custom home city, voices, AI personality, decks and general MP viability.
The ranked map pool has some good points, but also some weaknesses. Maybe you can tell a few words about it:
How long do you wish AoE 2 will still get official support? I think many players won’t leave it even when AoE 4 comes. However, if the focus shifts towards AoE 4, what are your goals to be implemented to AoE 2 DE until then?
I’ve been working on AoE 2 in an official capacity since 2013. Who knows when it ends, but I think we all hope it can last as long as possible. If the game keeps on doing well, everyone would benefit from it. We have some goals to achieve with AoE2 still but those will be announced on official channels.
What comes next for Forgotten Empires and Age of Empires? You probably want to have a job still for the next 3+0 years. What would you like to be involved in after AoE is done?
I never expected to still be working on AoE after “The Forgotten” expansion, but here we are. I can’t talk about what comes next, but we’ve now grown to a company of ~40’ish creative and dedicated people. I’d love to see what else they can create in the future. Be it on our favourite franchise, or elsewhere.
Thank you for the interview, Cysion. People will probably still ask a lot of questions when this is published, so if you have time, maybe you can also have a look at it once this is posted on AoEZone.
Will do!
Some people might not know you, some only as leader of the development of Age of Empires II DE and HD, some remember 9+ years ago with AoCBox, the Forgotten Empires mod and Arena streams against Barbie. So please introduce yourself quickly. Who exactly are you?
My name is Bert Beeckman, I’m a producer at Forgotten Empires, working primarily on the Age of Empires franchise. I’m currently 32 years old and I’m a Belgian living in Spain. Some people may know me as the person who started the “Forgotten Empires” mod and for those who have been in the community for a decade, from the AoCBox website.
This interview will be structured in 3 parts:
Part I: Your past and current involvement in Age of Empires.
Part II: Some details about you as a person.
Part III: Discussion about the future of the game, including community questions.
I.
When did you start to play Age of Empires 2, how much have you played Age of Empires 1/3?
I started to play Age of Empires II back in 1999, I got the CD as a present from some friends back in the day. Then a few years later, my CD player was acting up and literally shredded the CD inside. The sound was horrific and that put a break on my AoE playing days. In 2006, I rediscovered the game when a friend introduced me to GameRanger and we started to play multiplayer. I haven’t been away from AoE 2 ever since.
My story for AoE 1 started with a demo CD that came with a cereal box. I played the demo campaign over and over again as a kid at my grandparent’s computer. I eventually got the full game as well and played through all the campaigns.
AoE 3 I picked up from my local library back in 2006, the game was way too heavy for my computer, but I wanted to try it out, so I managed to get a copy from the library, which I managed to play on the very lowest settings.
Luckily, nowadays, I don’t need to get cereal boxes or libraries to get Age of Empires, with all the online stores that sell the game . Just looking at my Steam library, I’ve played over 4000 hours across the series, which doesn’t include the 1000s of hours before Steam.
How did you come up with your AoE alias “Cysion”?
It just sounded cool. Despite all the puns, it has nothing to do with decision, precision, incision or circumcision.
What was the most deciding factor that Microsoft agreed to include your work (FE) back in 2012-13? How did it happen?
I’m unsure what the most deciding factor was, I think the huge community support for the FE mod played a major role. At the time we approached Microsoft, the mod had about 1 million downloads.
Have you participated in tournaments in the past?
I did participate in some smaller tournaments in the past, but never got really far. I do remember playing vs TheViper in CivCup back in 2011, I tried to pull of a Mongol MAA +tower rush (way before it was meta), but my skills let me down dramatically :D Nowadays I much more prefer to watch tournaments than play myself. I’m just too slow of a player to take part in tournaments.
How much do you still play yourself now and at which level?
I still play a lot of Age of Empires, but it’s mostly internal playtesting at Forgotten Empires. I do play on the live builds as well, but less frequently.
II.
Which city do you come from/live in? What do you like/dislike about it and where would you like to move to?
I grew up in Belgium, in a small village near Antwerp. When I moved out of my parents’ house, I moved to Germany, to work at Nintendo. Although I really enjoyed my time in Germany, I got so tired of the cold winters that I packed all my stuff and moved to Malaga, in the south of Spain. I’ve been living here for 6 years now and have been really enjoying the city. It has everything a big city has to offer, but still somehow manages to feel like a small town. The food and the weather are a plus. And I met my fiance here as well, so I’m not moving anywhere anytime soon .
What would you like to tell the readers about Belgium they probably don’t know?
The most famous statue in Brussels is probably that of the little peeing boy (Manneken Pis), but there’s also statues of a little peeing girl and a peeing dog elsewhere in the city.
Favourite things:
What is your favourite food and drink?
Japanese food, especially Sushi, is amazing.
Which foods from your home country/region and family background would you recommend?
Chicons au gratin. Belgian endives with cheese and ham in the oven. Super simple dish, not even fancy, but quintessentially Belgian.
What can you cook well yourself and how often do you do it?
The missus always makes me prepare the tuna, so I guess tuna .
What would you put on top of a pizza?
Artichokes.
What is your favourite colour? (Does not need to be one of the 8 AoE II colours.)
Purple.
What is your favourite animal?
Dogs with no sense of personal space.
What/where is your favourite place on Earth?
This is a tough one, different places evoke different memories. But if I just had to focus on the place, it’s a three-way tie between the Plitvice Lakes in Croatia, the Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia and the Antelope Canyon in Arizona. All three of these places feel completely out of this world, as if you’ve landed on a different planet.
What is your favourite song at the moment, of all time (can be top 5)?
Brain Damage/Eclipse - Pink Floyd Probably the best song of all time.
What is your favourite movie at the moment, of all time (can be top 5)? Who is your favourite actor?
Into the Wild.
What is your favourite book?
Round Ireland with a fridge by Tony Hawks.
Do you have a favourite sports team and/or favourite athlete? (football, basketball etc.)
I like to watch cycling once in a while (the classics races & grand tours), but don’t really follow a team or a rider.
What would you do to make the world a better place?
Get rid of a lot of social media. While it’s amazing that we’re so connected, we could do without the absolute vileness that comes with it.
If there was anything you could tell your 16-year-old self, what would it be?
I really don’t know, I’m pretty happy with my life, and even though I could’ve done a lot of things differently and better as a teenager, it made me the person I am today. And I’m perfectly fine with that.
Which countries have you visited? And where would you like to go to? Why?
I love to travel and have been lucky to visit quite a few countries already. I’m originally from Belgium and have been to the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, UK, Germany, Denmark, Liechtenstein, Portugal, Spain, Italy, San Marino, The Vatican, Croatia, Austria, Slovenia, Hungary, Czech Republic, Turkey, USA, Canada, Japan, Australia, Peru and Bolivia.
In the USA, Canada, Japan, Australia, Peru and Bolivia, which places did you visit? I’m asking because that’s the ones you can’t travel to in a day or for little money if you live in Europe and also I haven’t been to any of them.
Actually, just typing out that list, I think at least 10 of those countries I’ve travelled to because of Age of Empires for events, meetings, tournaments, conventions,... With Forgotten Empires we also do yearly LAN parties, where part of the team meets up somewhere in the world to play Age and visit the country. We’ve met in Phoenix, Tokyo, Malaga, Cincinnati and Prague before.
There’s still a lot of places I would like to visit, Iceland, New Zealand, Uzbekistan (Samarkand!) and so much more. When is someone organizing an AoE event here?
Which languages can you speak and which would you like to learn?
My mother tongue is Dutch, I’m very fluent in English and I can keep a conversation going in Spanish. Even though my German and French are a bit rusty, I can still get by. Given I live in Spain currently, my only priority is to improve my Spanish.
What are your hobbies beside AoE?
Definitely going out, travelling, going to new restaurants and discovering new dishes. Nothing super crazy, but it really gives me life to discover new things. Unfortunately, due to Covid and the crazy amount of work going on with AoE, these are mostly on hold .
Who would you like to meet once, who you have not met? One AoE player and one other person.
I have met so many people from the AoE community that I’m not even sure where to start with this one. If I can say a non-player, I would love to meet Bruce Shelley one day, one of the original designers at Ensemble Studios. I’ve read some of their original design documents and would love to pick his brain on some of the crazy ideas they had back then :P
Spoiler: most of these ideas were insane and wouldn’t make the game better today, but it would be super interesting to get into their original reasoning and follow their train of thought. Things like off-map trade routes, stronger wolves, snow affecting food production, etc...
I think you had a good relation to the Czech AoE 2 scene in the past. Do you know what happened to The_Prophet? He was such an important person when I started to be involved in competitive AoE 2, but he hasn’t been on AoEZone since 4+ years.
I still talk to The_Prophet regularly, he’s working with Forgotten Empires and does all the map work on AoE2. Our first meeting was quite hilarious as well, I travelled to the Czech Republic, where he invited me for a LAN party with the Czech community. We would do some mini tournament for the FE mod there, with some of the Czech pro players at the time. We went out for dinner, had a good time and then headed over to the LAN location. Which was located in a basement in a small alley somewhere in Prague. The entry to the LAN cafe was a slippery staircase that went to a poorly-lit door. At that point I had to do a double take and think “hey, I’m going into a dark basement with a bunch of guys I’ve never met before in a foreign country, what can go wrong!”
In hindsight, a bit funny, but we had a great time and I still have both kidneys.
I did not know that about The_Prophet. I just knew that he created a lot of maps and was involved in tournament organisation, but then disappeared from AoCZone in 2016. Does his work not allow him to do the community work? For me he was the original famous map creator, now we have Zetnus, Algernon, Chrazini, TheMadCADer and more, but many of the still-used maps go back to The_Prophet.
And another question: So he did the new MegaRandom too? In the original MR basically all the included maps where available as single maps (from UR, standard maps or somewhere else) too? How about the current MR? It has so many maps, and I would like to use some of the specific maps included there, do you have a collection of the single-map scripts?
The_Prophet did the new MegaRandom as well. Due to how the new MR works, it’s not as easy to just extract specific map scripts, since so many factors are randomized nowadays. So even though the separate map scripts don’t exist today, if a certain generation proves to be interesting, it can still be turned into its own map script.
It probably can, but it is difficult to find, if you don’t even know the name of the map.
What is your favourite civilisation, map and unit?
It’s a close call between Byzantines, Malay and Bulgarians. Arena is by far my favourite map and I’ve played 100s of games trying to beat as many AIs as possible on it. My favourite unit is definitely the Monk. I really like these glass cannon type units that can really turn a battle around. Oh and the Teutonic Knight, just because they’re so rare, so it’s super satisfying if you can pull off an effective play with them.
What is your favourite in-game sound? (e. g. farm, water buffalo, relic…)
105 and the sound of a trebuchet slinging.
What is the funniest moment in your life you experienced because of AoE?
I’ve had so many good moments thanks to AoE2, just looking at in-game moments, I recall a specific LAN game with a lot of familiar AoEZone names: we had a 8 player FFA with me, BugA_the_Great, The_Prophet, ryshep, iPhone, Promi, StepS and 1302. We each pulled 2 names out of a hat and if these 2 names were defeated, we would win the game. So basically a mix of AoE2 and messed up diplomacy. It took ages, it was hilarious and in the end, BugA won out of nowhere, when the top 2 players were surprisingly defeated.
Outside of that, I don’t even know where to start. Age has really consumed my life for the past 10 years and it has led to so many good moments. Having beers with the FE team at gamescom, barbecuing with the German community at nC LAN (and that one guy who got so drunk he threw up outside of the window of our bedroom that night), playing Chin-Chin with Turk after an exhausting E3 show. Playing Cards Against Humanity with our MS producers, climbing a hill in Canada to buy a toy bear with The_Prophet (twice because he couldn’t make up his mind). Almost getting lost on a snowy hike in Arizona with BugA, ryshep, 1302 and Hector. Oh, and ice sticks. A lot of ice stick jokes.
Did you follow any tournaments recently? What was your favourite tournament? Which settings?
I like to follow tournaments when I have the time (which I unfortunately don’t have much of), the most recent events I’ve followed were the Age Royale event and King of the Desert 3. I personally love tournament formats with a twist. I’m a huge fan of Hidden Cup, but I also love Nili’s Appartment’s cup, just because of the really cool LAN atmosphere. Also a shout-out to the Escape team, who really pushed the production standards for AoE tournaments.
III.
How satisfied are you with the current state of DE? How far away from what you expected 1 year ago is it now?
I’m quite happy with where AoE2DE is at right now, the game has never had that many players, tournaments and engagement before. Recent reviews on Steam are overwhelmingly positive and there’s just overall a very positive vibe in the community. There are certainly still bugs and we’re still actively supporting and expanding the game, so hopefully the only way is up.
From the original FE team in 2011, who is still around being involved in the game development?
Most people who started in 2011 are still around actually. Although people have come and gone, we have a very low turnover rate. Which I really love, we really grew a lot as a team.
This year we saw [BBQ]Turkman and robo being employed by Microsoft. Were you involved in the decisions? How did something like that happen, which did not happen for the last 8 years after Microsoft started remaking AoE 2 for the first time?
Turkman is part of the FE team, so his involvement with the official MS channels I’m certainly aware of . Robo is also directly involved with FE, but in the end, it was MS’ call to take him on board to organize tournaments going forward. And they couldn’t have picked a better person for it. I think the main reason it’s happening now and not 8 years ago, is because the game is so much bigger than it has ever been. The prize pools are bigger than ever before, we have 3rd party sponsors and viewerships that only 2 years ago were unheard of. And on top of that, we just have a lot more players than ever before.
Now to some questions about the game itself, including questions from community members:
Are you generally interested in advancing the scenario editor? It feels like the weakest part of DE and every time I wanted to create something it ended in a bad mood. Generally I would love, if you focussed on a script based editor toolbox, which is for me so much more comfortable and powerful. I want to change attributes directly and not by clicking wildly around in a UI.
It should be way more beginner friendly and have like basic functions like copy paste a selected part of the map.
This is a very interesting balance to find actually. On one hand, script based tools are stronger and much more powerful, but they’re much less accessible. The beauty of the AoE2 editor is that even my 7 year old cousin can play around with it and make his own scenarios, while script based editors have a much higher level of entry. With that said, we hope the new .xs scripting functionality adds some of that more advanced functionality to the editor; as well as the other additions to the Editor in the November patch.
I did not explore it much after the new patch, but what we already saw now is that the editor crashes very often when generating a map and that terrains get replaced by black terrain.
We’ve received reports about stability issues for some users in the editor and this is currently being tracked.
Are there plans to make repeated tasks easier to do in the scenario editor? E.g. creating triggers for every player. Any info regarding implementing the scripting features we had on Voobly with UP 1.5? There is still a bunch of stuff missing like effect amount, unit upgrade, guard state etc.. There is also stuff that scripter never added because it might be used to “cheat” in rated games in custom maps, like the ability to add HP loss over time for example - with DE that shouldn’t be an issue anymore (E. g. in AoE III poison damage was just introduced). Like to have the option to create custom special maps where you combine a scenario with an RMS. Is there hope for such features to ever make an appearance in DE?
We’re not done supporting the game and we’ll continue to work together with the community to see which features are the most highly requested and measure them up against other requests.
Will it be possible to have a modified dat file and random map script bundled in a single mod?
Yes, that is now possible since the November patch.
What is your opinion on the current state of water warfare? Your team decided to add fire galleys and demolition rafts and since then it has changed. Some people call it better than before, some people call it worse. Any regrets? If you had the time to make it work well, would you like to add more different ships? There have been suggestions for ships that can capture other ships, about siege, repair or builder ships, more naval unique units, etc.
Why are there no predators in the water that can attack ships (e. g. sharks)?
Water play is always an interesting topic in AoE. I’m quite happy with where water is at now, we’re now seeing more variations in water play and have moved away from the “only galleys” meta. I’m sure a few tweaks wouldn’t hurt to bring more variety in opening plays, but we’re definitely on the right track. Water predators I don’t see us ever adding to the game, land predators are meant to limit base expansion in the early game (e.g. going for the middle in Gold Rush right away), but since there’s no base building on water, this would not be very useful. I’d love to add more types of ships, I think there’s a lot more room to expand water play, but that’s more like an outspoken dream than a plan of action. We did experiment with boarding (conversion) ships in the past, but these small scale micro moves don’t fit the water play in Age2, which is dominated by larger fleets.
In African Kingdoms you introduced cracked terrain, in Rise of the Rajas mangrove shallows. So you were definitely not against adding new terrain types. Back in Forgotten Empires the space was limited, both for terrains and objects, now there is still a lot of space. What would you like to add still?
What do you think about terrains that affect unit movement speed or damage – both on land or water? E. g. swamp that slows down (certain) land units, deep water that increases ship movement.
There could be more different rock terrains, a terrain that looks like forest on the mini map, where you can place trees in the map script without using a forest terrain (single trees don’t appear on the mini map). Lava is another one that has been used in mods, but never been implemented officially.
New terrains functionality is possible but rarely very exciting. Very few RTS games get terrain modifiers right. I think there’s some room in AoE 2, something like a swamp in the middle of the map where cavalry goes a bit slower so archers have the upper hand; it could make for some interesting plays. Similar to how the Battle of Crécy was largely decided by French cavalry struggling with the muddy terrain and not being able to put their full strength on display. Regardless, if we would add new terrain modifiers, they would have to be visually very distinct, we would never add new functionality to existing terrains to not break older content.
There’s also a long list of potential objects that could be added. From cosmetic objects like lilypad leaves, many different trees to animals like wild monkeys, capybaras, kangaroos, pandas, polar bears, seals, snakes?
There’s always room for more in Age of Empires, that’s for sure.
What do you think about units that could move both on land and water (not shallows)?
Amphibious units can definitely be fun, you just need a historic precedent to add them to AoE2 and I’m not sure we have a lot of those in the Middle Ages Viking Longboats come to mind as they were carried over land as well, but I think after 20 years, that unit design is locked and loaded.
Why are full-map screenshots not possible in DE? Is it difficult to add? It is quite important if you want to show your custom maps.
In the original game, the full-map screenshots were a crafty hack, implemented by Matt Pritchard to allow full map captures for their marketing team. The way the updated renderer works, this is no longer supported and quite a bit of work would be required to bring this feature back. It’s certainly possible, but we’ll have to weigh that up against other features.
It is unlikely that another civilisation will be added. Is there any civilisation that you still would like to see in the game or would have liked to be added earlier?
I’m actually surprised how many people still ask for more civilizations. It seems there’s just no end to people’s thirst for more . I think there’s easily a dozen of civilizations that could’ve been added. We could’ve visited the Caucasus, South Asia, Persia, Sub-saharan Africa or even the many kingdoms in Europe that have not been covered yet.
Do you want to name your favourites that have not been added?
Given the speculation that would cause, I would prefer to not go into further details .
I wonder, what was the reason behind adding Lithuanians and Bulgarians after Europe already had so many civilisations and the previous expansions were more about regions that had no civilisations yet. That’s also partially my “ignorance”. Apart from Malians and Malay, Bulgarians are the only civilisation about whose history I have never read, never learned in school. Burmese, Lithuanians, Cumans and Tatars are not civilisations you learn about in a Danish school either, but I had read about their history already; the latter two especially, because I read a lot about the development of the Mongol Empire.
We look at potential new civilizations through a very wide lense. Some of the questions we try to answer for new civilizations: Do they have an interesting story to tell? Do they have name recognition? Did they take part in a famous battle/war? Did they have a special, unique military characteristic, tactic or unit? Did they get involved with other civs already present in the game? Going into full detail on where each candidate civ scored points for inclusion, would make this interview many pages longer than it should be, but basically, both Lithuanians and Bulgarians had a long, interesting history and both had military involvements with the Mongols, which tied in nicely with our “Last Khans” theme.
You added the Art of War, campaigns and historical battles with DE. Even if there are not any new civilisations added, is it likely that more official campaign content will be added?
This is mostly about AoE 2, but for AoE 3 I would have almost the same question, as the campaigns are really good; at least they were 14-15 years ago, as I did not play AoE 3 DE yet. Why was there no new campaign (with multiple episodes) added?
Another related AoE 3 question. 2 new civilisations were added (Swedes and Incas), but more revolution options and in the historical battles there are civilisations like Ethiopians, United States and Berbers. What is the difference between adding them only to the campaign and scenario editor from making them playable in standard games?
If there’s a high demand for new story-driven content, I don’t think it’s impossible to see more of that in the future. For Age of Empires III specifically, we wanted to offer a more historical experience for the campaigns as well, alongside the more fictional main campaign. Which is the reason we added the selection of Historical Battles to AoE3. The (new) civilizations we see in these historical battles are essentially mini-civilizations. They have a few unique units and characteristics and set a unique stage, but they’re still a long shot from a full civ with a full unit roster that spans all ages. Not to mention a custom home city, voices, AI personality, decks and general MP viability.
The ranked map pool has some good points, but also some weaknesses. Maybe you can tell a few words about it:
- Would it be possible to just rank the maps from the map pool or have more favourites, as now for a good portion of people just closing the game is the way to avoid maps they don’t want to play. If you could just rank them from 1 to 9, that would help a lot.
- Why does the RM 1v1 map pool always just have 7 maps. RM TG and DM have 9 or more. Especially if you could rank or favourite more, it would be very good to have more maps, as sometimes you have to wait for months to play e. g. Nomad or Islands ranked.
- It should be noted which map is created by who, e. g. Four Lakes by TheMadCADer. That way we don’t forget the creators and know who to contact if we like the maps.
- What do you think about regular contests to add a community-made map to the map pool that has not been in it before?
How long do you wish AoE 2 will still get official support? I think many players won’t leave it even when AoE 4 comes. However, if the focus shifts towards AoE 4, what are your goals to be implemented to AoE 2 DE until then?
I’ve been working on AoE 2 in an official capacity since 2013. Who knows when it ends, but I think we all hope it can last as long as possible. If the game keeps on doing well, everyone would benefit from it. We have some goals to achieve with AoE2 still but those will be announced on official channels.
What comes next for Forgotten Empires and Age of Empires? You probably want to have a job still for the next 3+0 years. What would you like to be involved in after AoE is done?
I never expected to still be working on AoE after “The Forgotten” expansion, but here we are. I can’t talk about what comes next, but we’ve now grown to a company of ~40’ish creative and dedicated people. I’d love to see what else they can create in the future. Be it on our favourite franchise, or elsewhere.
Thank you for the interview, Cysion. People will probably still ask a lot of questions when this is published, so if you have time, maybe you can also have a look at it once this is posted on AoEZone.
Will do!
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