Age of Empires II HD – Dev Blog #5 – African Campaigns

A new expansion isn’t complete without a new set of campaigns for you to complete and this time we’re sending you on a trip to the African continent and its surrounding areas.

Lessons from the past

But first, let’s take a look back at the campaigns in Age of Empires II HD: The Forgotten. After seven campaigns, we have a lot of feedback to go by and we even adjusted our design style during the development of The Forgotten based on it. The most loved campaigns are the ones that are open, leave a lot of room to build and offer various tactical options to destroy your enemy. So called “fixed force” scenarios where you lead a limited army through various quests are less popular but still a quintessential part of each campaign in Age of Empires II HD.

So we’re going further down that road: more open maps, less side quests and generally a whole lot of cities to conquer.

Epic of Sundiata

The first campaign we’re revealing is about Sundiata Keita, founder of the Mali Empire and the first “King of Kings” of Mali. His tale is one of the most famous epics in the area and has been told from generation to generation for many centuries. And now it will be digitally immortalized in the Age of Empires universe as well!

Listen to the voices

Last but not least, your voices have been heard! The African Kingdoms expansion will feature English voice acted campaigns!

Next up

We’ll have a special little competition at the end of September where you can make yourself part of the game. And in October’s dev blog, we’ll go deeper into the game’s balance and spotlight one of the new units, which despite only having an attack of “1”, is actually incredibly strong.