How TiMi Studio revived Age of Empires Mobile for a new age of fans

October 18, 2024 8:30 AM

Mobile gaming fans around the world are ready for battle as Age of Empires Mobile has launched worldwide on the Apple App Store and Google Play.

Co-developed by TiMi Studio Group (Call of Duty: Mobile, Pokémon Unite) and World’s Edge, an Xbox Games Studio, Age of Empires Mobile is a fresh and innovative experience for the beloved series, bringing familiar elements from the iconic Age of Empires games with brand-new and mobile-specific gameplay to mobile players. We’ll see how mobile players take to it. Reviews are mixed, but fans are going to get their chance to weigh in with their opinions in a big way now.

It’s been hard to translate PC and console games to mobile, but TiMi Studio Group in Shenzhen (and multiple other cities) has had enormous success in hardcore mobile games over the years. Started in 2008, the studio is a part of Tencent and its Level Infinite brand. TiMi’s hit games include Honor of Kings, Speed Drifters, and Arena of Valor. TiMi has also created Call of Duty: Mobile and the first strategic Pokémon team battle game Pokémon Unite.

In the game, you can take your own strategic approach through your civilizations, heroes and troops with hundreds of combinations to pick your most effective plan of attack. You can participate in massively multiplayer online player alliances and Siege, an alliance-versus-alliance game mode, where large-scale castle sieges unfold with authentic weapons and complex defenses, with hundreds of players controlling thousands of units in one on-screen battle.

Honestly, I don’t know how they pull of this tech on mobile, but it’s a sign that they’re now able to put what used to be supercomputers inside the brains of mobile devices. I got my first demo from Marta Hu, marketing lead for Age of Empires Mobile at TiMi Studio Group, and Emma Bridle, director of player engagement at World’s Edge, at Gamescom.

You can play multiple single-player modes built on the Age of Empires lineage and featuring iconic elements from the original series. You can build your empire in a vibrant medieval world, with big civilizations, imperial cities and legendary historical figures and test your mettle to becoming the strongest governor.

And the game promises you can experience original gameplay on immersive battlefields, adapt your strategy to dynamic, interactive terrain and changing weather conditions and manage multiple troops with real-time control.

“We wanted to bring fresh experiences to the Age of Empires franchise, giving newcomers a taste of what makes this series so important to its fan base,” Robin Xin, producer from TiMi Studio Group, said in a statement. “Age of Empires Mobile is delivering a lot of strategic depth to players, with a resonant, intricate art style that respects history and mythology.”

Expanding on the series’ lineage, Age of Empires Mobile offers players the opportunity to select from some of the world’s most legendary historic figures to lead their armies. Players choose from dozens of these leaders, such as Barbarossa, Darius the Great, Hammurabi, Joan of Arc and Leonidas I, each featuring unique individual talents and synergies with each other to unleash on their foes.

There are eight civilizations at launch – play as the British, Byzantines, Chinese, Egyptians, French, Japanese, Koreans or Romans.

“Age of Empires Mobile introduces a brand-new entry point to the franchise for mobile gamers, with its alliance gameplay and siege battles featuring hundreds of players at war,” Earnest Yuen, senior director of production from World’s Edge, in a statement. “And your empire feels so dynamic, you can hear the world come alive, with water lapping the shore and wind blowing in the trees as your empire grows.”

Back in August at Gamescom, I was briefed by TiMi on the work in progress, when there were 200,000 players testing the game on servers. They called it a 4X mobile strategy game and showed me the details of the title.

They were most proud of the massively multiplayer siege gameplay, because this requires dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of players. It enables teammates — an entire alliance — to go to war against another alliance in an attempt to take the enemy’s fortress.

This is where the strategy, the collaboration, really comes into play. For your alliances, everybody goes on the attack and tries to take out the city center in the end. Players have to coordinate, not only with troops but with ships coming in from a river or with massive siege weapons to take down walls.

The single-player modes include “battlefield survivor.” It’s a bullet heaven mode, fighting in a compact moment. You can do a military exercise where you can test your heroes and builds and tactics as you take a hill or something like it. You can also engage in “island tactics,” which is akin to an autochess experience, as well as “lost borderland.”

“If you press luck and go one step too far, you may lose everything,” TiMi devs said, in our briefing.

There are collections of heroes where you can play as famous figures from history who have influenced the ages. You can engage in fishing if you like, as a kind of mini game, as you go about gathering resources. You can also train your troops and level them up to get more power. A given land can have thousands of different lords, which each lord being a human player. Getting thousands of human players into one game, such as a Siege, is a pretty amazing achievement.

Each civilization and city will have distinct architecture. And every faction will have its own advantages and disadvantages in battle or resource production. You can see things like the wind blowing things around. It’s like triple-A graphics on mobile.

You can use trebuchets, which are giant rock throwers like catapults on steroids. An alliance can be huge numbers of players, or as small as 16. You can zoom in on the action and see some amazing details. It’s a new frontier for Age of Empires.

VB Daily

Stay in the know! Get the latest news in your inbox daily

By subscribing, you agree to VentureBeat’s Terms of Service.

Thanks for subscribing. Check out more VB newsletters here.

An error occured.