If any of you are Age of Empires fans...
 

The screenshots for AOE 3 might possibly be the best screenshots that I have ever seen for a PC game. The game looks *incredible*! :)

Thanks for the link.

You're welcome.

Wow... those ARE nice... but, damn... I think my graphics card will explode if I try to run that.

I'd like to see what it looks like zoomed out to normal view.

My first reaction after seeing shots like this:



..is NO FUCKING WAY!!!!!

WOW! I can only hope they put half as much effort into the gameplay as they did with the graphics!

Looks great. I loved AOE1, never got AOE2.

Errant cannonballs knocking down trees, sounds cool.

Unreal. I've been resisting a PC upgrade for a few years now, but this game might push me over the edge.

lets hope my radeon x800 xl is enough!!!!!!!1

hmm, I am trying to find in the fine print what system they used for the screenshots. My guess is a 32CPU Windows Data Center Edition with 4 video cards in a 4X SLI mode...

:)

There is NO FUCKING WAY that's a screenshot. Impossible!!! But I'm hoping it is....that is too good to be true.

I don't know about this. Age of Empires is a cool game...but it's not generally a series that I think is played by the hard-core, high-end-machine gamers. I have a feeling a lot of the "look" is going to be lost on a lot of people.

Those screen shots are ridiculously good.

The "home city" shot might be a static shot (same for some of the others), but there was at least one that was clearly dynamics (the snow shot) and it looked terrific.

I played the original AOE and the unit AI was awful. Worse than awful, almost wilfully incompetent. Edit: It's too bad, because the game looked nice and generally played pretty well, but the AI made it very difficult to play for me because I had to babysit every unit to make sure they weren't trying out for a Darwin award.

I dunno how I feel about this. The gameplay is what made AOE 2 great for me. The graphics didn't matter in the least. Hopefully this isn't being done with gameplay being sacrificed. Plus, does anyone know how these high end graphics affect online play in terms of speed?

High-end graphics should have minimal effect on online play if they don't really do more than just be eye candy (i.e. if they're just really pretty renditions of the same things that were in previous games).

yeah, that's kind of what I was trying to say...but couldn't get my brain around it.

The way the networking code worked in the past, from what I understand
it doesn't affect online play. They came up with a novel approach for
networking and save games. What gets sent to other players and what gets
saved is just the mouse and keyboard commands you are doing. I
remember reading about it on the Ensemble site years ago. So if you
move the mouse, click something, or hit a key it sends that and stores it,
and does whatever it is supposed to do. I imagine they also send syncing
packets, and at the beginning of the game seed the rng on all the systems
with the same data.

Seeing and experiencing how well Ensemble has handled online play
makes it extremely frustrating to see how fubar it is in other games like
Railraod Tycoon 3.

Me too. AOE II is just a fun game, not too in depth and not to arcady. Just perfect for killing an hour or two.

I have to admit the screenshots look nice, but the second screenshot kind of puzzles me on the logic/realism sector. The caption in the article says "The level of detail is almost astounding. Look carefully--those are turtles sunning themselves on those logs." but if you look at the terrain, trees and the buildings it would seem to be a scandinavian island (looks quite like many small finnish islands). Or northern european atleast. So my question is as follows: WTF are turtles doing in this habitat ? :D

The deal with AoE3 is that it takes place in the new world. I think you can
either play a colonial power, or a native american tribe. The Scandanavian
look is most likely the Russian player. With older AoE games though map
settings and the powers that were played were not connected in any way.
If you were a turtle in finland, wouldn't you want to sun on a log though? :)

Exibit A.

A really interesting keynote speech from a game devloper.
http://dynamic2.gamespy.com/~fof/for...ad.php?t=37087

This seams pointless and overkill.
It has to take time and money away from the game play and AI.

its not like AoE3 is being published by a company with limited resources