Profile of SturmtigerCobra

https://www.pcgamesn.com/age-of-empires-4/dlc-expansions
Age of Empires 4 will be arriving with a new business model, giving players the option to either outright purchase the game or play it as part of Microsoft’s subscription-based Game Pass service. But one thing it won’t have is microtransactions or in-app purchases.

“The idea of microtransactions in a real-time strategy game isn’t a thing,” said Age of Empires creative director Adam Isgreen at XO19 in London. “DLC, expansions – all of that is things that we’re going to be exploring for Age 4.”

In fact, Isgreen said Microsoft’s new dedicated Age of Empires studio World’s Edge is looking into expansion content for all the Age of Empires games, which includes Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition, which launched this past week.

As far as what that expansion content will look like, Isgreen says that’s in many ways down to the games’ player communities. As an example, he said, new civilisations probably won’t be coming to Age of Empires II, since it already has 35.

“Our pro players are even like, please don’t add more civilisations, please do other things,” he said.

“But we want to have those conversations with the community, to figure out what we can add,” he said. “What are the things they want to see in the game? Things like game modes.”

Isgreen says they’ll be starting those conversations up with fans as the team shifts its focus to Age of Empires III, and that the approach for Age of Empires 4 will be no different.

“While we definitely already have ideas in terms of where we want to go past Age 4, in terms of expansions and stuff, a lot of that is going to be driven by the community and the players, where they want to see the game going,” Isgreen explained.

As Worrall noted, this is mainly due to the lack of a DRM. In order to demonstrate this exploit, Worrall used Borderlands 3 as an example. This exploit can be easily reproduced on newer EGS accounts, and it most likely affects all games on the store. Now while Borderlands 3 uses the Denuvo anti-tamper tech, it does not – apparently – lock your copy to your Epic Games Store account.

"We began this journey with Gears of War 4 and now I feel that we’ve hit our stride with Gears 5," he says. "Part of my mission since 2014 has been, how do I grow the franchise and bring it back? Epic put it on the shelf to essentially die, so Microsoft brought it back. Not only are we trying to bring it back, we want to grow and flourish."

Gears 5 has debuted to critical praise, currently sporting an 86 percent on review aggregator site Metacritic. Meanwhile, the mobile game Gears Pop! hit one million players in its first week of release in late August. There is also the upcoming spinoff title Gears Tactics, a real-time strategy game based in the series' universe; a series of comics; a second novel; and, of course, a feature film in the works at Universal Studios, which Fergusson says he meets with producers on to discuss the script.