Relic’s roadmap has already foreshadowed a massive improvement to Age of Empires IV, but Season 2 will follow suit.

The RTS enthusiast community has celebrated the arrival of Age of Empires IV, as they already believe that the return will live up to their expectations. The Relic-developed title has been covered in glory from the very first days, after outperforming other titles in the franchise with a very high number of concurrent players. However, the makers are not done yet and want to keep users’ attention until the end, which they have already promoted with a roadmap for 2022 full of new features.

The qualification period starts on 13 April

With all this information in advance, we can now say that Age of Empires IV has received its first significant update of the year. As Relic shared earlier, a patch that kicks off the first season with ranked games, a beta editor, challenges for the more adventurous users, and a bunch of experience balance improvements.

Relic is debuting its own mods to explore different ways to play

The patch notes go into more detail about what Relic learned during testing. After all, they were essential for preparing for the qualifying season that starts on 13 April, as well as for all the elements that rank users based on wins. In addition to all this, there was the much-talked-about request from the community: a global build queue that would allow us to track the status of all developments and units in progress at any time.

This Age of Empires IV update will also include a beta version of the content editor, as mentioned above. This not only introduces the ability for players to share their original ideas but also adds mods created by Relic to explore new possibilities in the games. Thus, several “in-house” mods have been announced, including new maps and game modes inspired by other parts of the franchise.

The update also includes a new Art of War challenge with Advanced Combat.

After hearing from players, Relic also expands the keyboard and mouse reconfiguration options to maximize customizability for each playstyle. In this regard, the developer cautions that there is still a lot of work to be done, but they already allow for the configuration of mouse keys 3, 4 and 5, as well as the assignment of other commands to keys such as Alt and Shift.

But if you’re a true Age of Empires IV connoisseur, you’ll probably be interested in other options, such as the new Art of War challenge with Advanced Combat. Relic invites us to hone our strategies while earning gold, giving users endless hours to become the title’s most impressive strategist.

On the other hand, and as expected, the massive update also includes corrections on many points, such as minor changes to maps and civilizations or adjustments to the difficulty of the six campaign missions. Sticking with the latter, Relic has reduced the number of units and adjusted the experience to make each game slightly more accessible and, in some cases, shorter.

And, the icing on the cake: this is just the first major update the developers have planned, so there’s even more, to come in the second season of Age of Empires IV! At least for now, what is unknown is whether Relic intends to release this fourth game on Xbox, although they have said that they would consider such a possibility.

Source: Ageofempires.com