The developers behind the revamp of the 2002 real-time strategy game are aiming for a much better experience than what we saw in the Age of Empires Definitive Editions.

In the video embedded below, we see the modernized version of Age of Mythology in action for the first time (even though it was announced in late 2022). The mythological monsters (Medusa, Flying Pegasus, Titan Cerberus) have made an appearance, and we can’t complain about their looks at all. Obviously, the goal is to show a real improvement over the original that was released 22 years ago, but the new edition keeps the old sound effects and the animations are shown with a twist.

PCGamer caught up with Earnest Yuen, producer of Age of Mythology: Retold. He’s been with Microsoft for almost 25 years, his first job was as QA for the first Age of Empires, so you can sense his passion for the franchise (Age of Mythology is a spin-off!): “Age of Mythology: Retold goes way beyond what we normally do for definitive editions. We want to build the game in your mind. We start by adding ray tracing, increasing the population limit, [and] adding a special effects engine.

In Retold what we are doing is we are actually making the power usage of units user controllable, you can actually micro and use that if you want to. The change of god powers to being cooldown based is great both for e-sports and for watching the game. The anticipation makes it a lot more fun to watch. Those [exploit] things need to be updated, if we don’t patch those and fix those exploits the game will not be viable as an esports game, it’s important that we fix those things so that our community can have the tournaments that they love. All the changes we’ve made, we’re not going to break that promise,” Yuen said.

Age of Mythology: Retold is coming to PC and Xbox later this year. It uses an updated version of the Age of Empires 3 Definitive Edition engine.

Source: PCGamer