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Fighting Retold Battles Again

Age of Mythology Retold and the Chip on my Shoulder

I honestly never thought I’d be here.

As I touched on in my previous article on the series, it’s probable (likely, even) that Age of Mythology is my most played game ever. I’ve been playing it basically continuously since it came out in 2002, and even when Retold was announced as I was writing that article, I didn’t actually believe it until the week before it came out. A number of people had been granted early access and suddenly, all too suddenly, it was real. And, I also really wasn’t sure what to expect from it. The other Age games made a large number of changes, some superficial and graphical but many around accommodating modern expectations of games. Can my favorite RTS game, one that means so much to me, ever truly be Retold? Now, having played entirely too much of it, I am on the verge of having an answer. “Retold”, as it turns out, is a very fitting title, as taken as a whole it is a radically reworked version of the game I fell in love with all those years ago. Much for better, and some for ill. 

Glitches, bugs and other distractions

Unfortunately the game launched in the state that every single one of the Age remakes and IV did as well, with an uneven and persistent bugginess that multiple, tens-of-gigabytes patches have addressed but not been able to completely remove. I played the original so often that eventually I reached the point where the enemy AI just would not actually work (a well known glitch which has happened to me more than once); once, I modded it to the point it wouldn’t even load and I was forced to make a fresh install (resolutely my fault, admittedly). In neither instance did it feel anywhere as consistently buggy as Retold does every single time I boot it up. Even playing it to get screenshots for this article I encountered a brand new bug which crashed to desktop every single time.

Saving your game just will not work sometimes, normally only for your first save of the session, a bug I’m baffled by and that hasn’t changed at all with any patch. Continual audio issues, distracting texture pop-ins and just plain peculiar issues, of the kind that it seems should be easily spotted and dealt with. The game’s 22 year old (or so) engine would, occasionally, simply teleport your units somewhere they can’t escape from for reasons only it knows, but the alarming frequency with which this happens in Retold is much more noticeable. The only good thing I have to say about the bugginess is that I had made my peace with it long before Retold even came out, and it hasn’t stopped me from playing it more or less every day since launch. 

Finer details

But the biggest, most obvious and most expected update to the game is the graphics. Age of Mythology remains one of the most beautiful games I’ve ever played, a colorful, highly stylized world that feels as if gods and monsters must exist there. Palms clinging to an oasis in the sands of the desert, snowy mountain passages and sun-kissed Mediterranean hills, brimming with shrines and ruins that hint at an untold past. We also have a benchmark we can compare it to with Extended Edition’s release in 2014 (closer chronologically to Retold than the original AoM release in 2002). So whilst EE brought AoM to a more convenient platform with a number of quality-of-life changes, the actual visual changes like the new art were widely regarded as inferior to their 2002 counter-parts. Without wanting to insult any of the people who put their time and effort into EE, a game I have hundreds of hours in at this point, it was very much what you would expect the generic game art of the day to look like. It was oddly blurry and indistinct, and lacked the instantly recognizable feeling of the original. The Chinese civ was cobbled together almost entirely out of rejected beta assets, and felt exactly like it. Retold, then, presented the rare opportunity to fix these past mistakes, and do the original release justice.

Having spent a lot of time with Retold at this point it is… so, very close. The graphical improvements are many, with some parts being completely unrecognizable from their old versions. So much of Retold looks and feels like an enhanced version of the stunning aesthetic of the original, and I was genuinely shocked at how good certain specific aspects, like the new water, looked and felt to play. And, at one point during the campaign, the sun gleaming off of a polished copper axe in the desert gave me that old feeling of history being brought to life for me (whether that’s a constructive feeling or not I will leave as an exercise for the reader). The stables even have entire horses in them now, as opposed to the polygon-saving well hidden half-horses. A number of the more radical redesigns look and feel fantastic too, such as the Minotaurs brought to life as fearsome fairy-tale monsters, wielding weapons that dwarf the human soldiers in size. On top of that, many of the aesthetic changes serve gameplay purposes as well, and have introduced a number of visual indicators as to how far along you or your opponent is in the game. Those same minotaurs, upon being upgraded, have a golden axe and a more fearsome appearance, and the Sphinx changes heads depending on what upgrades you’ve researched. Others I’m less sure about: the redesigned wadjet, seen below, feels less like a creature of myth than something an MMA bro would get drunkenly tattooed on him, and the new Cerberus looks less like a large, scary dog and uncomfortably like a right wing militia logo.

These are pretty minor complaints all things considered, and on the whole I am impressed with how much of the feeling of the old game the new one is able to recreate. But there is just a certain dullness to it, a dun-colored formlessness and lack of contrast common to many modern video games where it just fails to pop. This is especially prevalent the more hours you spend at the game, and is in direct contrast to how beautiful the majority of it is. Part of the issue is AoM’s good fortune to have come out in that glorious period in the late 90s and early 2000s, where 3D graphics were developed enough to have these very distinct, stylized and uncluttered visual styles but not yet demanding enough to require hundreds of people working thousands of hours to generate. And this is, of course, purely subjective, as I’m sure many people look at my good friend the 2002 Sphinx up there and conclude that the graphics are simply too dated for them to take seriously.

There is one thing, and although it is minor all things considered, it does stick out to me. A few weeks ago there was a tweet going around (which I can’t find now) comparing how remasters, remakes and reimaginings tend to have less detailed and interesting interfaces compared to their original releases. You will not find a better example of that than Retold, having stripped its interface of all texture. You can see it demonstrated in the loading screens, below with the screen for the original Age of Mythology, The Titans expansion, Extended Edition and finally Retold

Campaigns are important, too

Sadly I am still the person who cares a great deal about single player mode in RTS games, so let’s talk about what Retold brings to my favorite ever campaign. To start off my new adventure into my favorite RTS, I cranked the difficulty all the way up, as I am wont to do. It must’ve hit me three or four missions into the campaign, as I fought off another giant force of enemies I had no answer for, that I realized I hadn’t macro-ed enough from the start of the mission and would need to try again. Slowly, it began to dawn on me:  Am I… Bad? At this video game I’ve been playing since 2002? 

And I was, indeed, bad, or least overconfident and not playing correctly. The campaign, for all that it’s a thing seemingly only I care about, is the one area that I can say is a true enhancement of what I loved about the original, genuinely and without qualification. 

The gap between what I considered my skill to be, and what the game was expecting of me, is one you can see play out in a number of games, including the Age remakes from the past few years. If you play the early campaigns, they’re often less developed than more modern ones because the developers and players hadn’t been refining it for years or decades. The nostalgic simplicity of the Joan of Arc campaign even on the hardest difficulty in Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition can’t compare to the eye-watering difficulty of anything they put out in the modern DE expansion packs, created by and for a fanbase that has been refining its skills and technique since the original game came out. More than once I got myself into a winning position, and then just stopped pushing so I could explore the map a bit for any secrets or things I’d happened to miss. And more than once, this gave the enemy AI the opportunity to mass units and destroy my hard work, forcing me to start from the beginning once again. Many of the campaign missions are radically overhauled and re-balanced, both smoothing over rough edges and giving them a bit more substance to sink your teeth into. And this is not just for the benefit of the new players unfamiliar with the game’s mechanics, but provides a brand new challenge for people like me who regularly replay the campaigns. All of this is precisely what all of us who have been playing all these years wanted.

The newly re-recorded music absolutely hits the mark as well, and it’s a big part of what made the game click for me, drawing me in. Sadly the voice work is something of a mixed bag, as a lot of it (mostly for the campaign) has been dramatically reworked and re-recorded. On the whole it is extremely good, and a long time coming, that the African characters Amanra, Setna and some of the minor Egyptian characters are now (mostly) voiced by African and Middle Eastern voice actors. This is a low bar in 2024 and it was a low bar in 2002, and the new voices are great (if campaign only). This is a broader change with the other civs as well, with more authentic Scandinavian and Mediterranean voice acting in the game as well. Sadly a lot of the voice acting just doesn’t quite hit as well as in the original, although I think this is more something to do with a stylistic change in video game voice acting more broadly, rather than anything about the actual performances. The original has larger-than-life reads for every line, even if there’s only half a dozen or less to set up the current mission. It’s very reminiscent of going to see a live theater performance, or even cultural stories passed down orally, hearing someone put on a big voice for your favorite hero. 2002 was a pre-Call of Duty world and video game voice acting has trended grittier and more “realistic” since then. Gargarensis, the main villain of the original Age of Mythology campaign, is hit particularly hard, and his chilling, anachronistic of GK Chesterton’s Lepanto in the original is memorable in a way that isn’t as well served by the more modern direction for voice acting. 

(Gargarensis also has a gap in his teeth now like a cartoon 9-year-old, in the game’s visual novel style close up portraits. It’s less threatening).

On your Macro, on your Micro

The actual mechanics of the game have also received a far-reaching and prodigious overhaul. Almost no part of the game has been left untouched, many things have been added or replaced, and I still get confused looking at the menus, expecting one thing and seeing another. Units can nudge each other out of the way now, which causes some funny interactions with the physics engine. It’s still disconcerting to me to see my favour resource just keep going up, one of the big new changes to the game. Many of the upgrades have been changed or replaced entirely in order for them to have a larger effect on gameplay: this makes them more interesting from a systems perspective, and seems to be intended to have the player feel the effect of them much more substantially. So many of the changes, such as being able to cast your God Powers multiple times, are to an overall design philosophy of giving your army more sustain, making Retold a faster, deadlier, more action-packed real time strategy. 

There are countless little Quality-of-Life changes to make the game more modern, more approachable, less arcane and taxing. Everything has a hotkey now (I had to spend and evening painstakingly re-binding all the keys, one at a time, to the ones I have decades of built up muscle memory for), special abilities can be turned off of autocast, and you can even select all army if you want to develop that bad habit. And all of these changes are on top of what you might consider the game’s main mechanics, age advancement, resource gathering, production, macro and micro, making it much more of a frictionless modern gaming experience. 

But here’s the thing: I don’t want a frictionless modern gaming experience, I want AoM. The StarCraft: Brood War community have said for many years, and I have come around to their way of thinking, that the jank, uncomfortable, weird parts of the game, the ones that don’t quite fit in to modern gaming sensibilities, are the game, and mastering them, loving the game because of them and not in spite of them is what makes it amazing. So much of the Age of Mythology is balanced around the things they took out: the single use god powers, the favour cap, the very specific ways in which you obtain favour. It genuinely feels like a lot that is essential and significant, the things that make Age of Mythology into Age of Mythology, have been QOL’d out. 

Yes, it is annoying that before Retold, Norse gatherers can’t build anything: it’s annoying that you have to use precious build time for ox carts, it’s annoying that Atlantean favour production is meager, it’s annoying that your myth units use their abilities on a timer, it’s annoying that you can’t build town centers anywhere you want, it’s annoying that your Titan can’t be transported and can’t walk across deep water, it’s all annoying and it’s supposed to be! That is the highly asymmetrical game we fell in love with, where you are, at every turn, being forced into making consequential decisions with what limited resources at your disposal. A lot of the balance of the game is centered around this, forcing you to choose between two or more options which can often be equally as valuable as each other, and so much of this has been sanded off.

At the same time, however, Retold feels like the next iteration of the game, like how we still played vanilla AoM when Titans came out, and still played the original when EE came out. And despite everything I can see myself playing Retold into the future. 

(it is baffling to me that there isn’t a “classic mode” with the old mechanics set, single use god powers and a cap on favour, all that fun stuff, in the settings. Please?). 

Looking to future instead of the past

So what does the future hold for Retold? Well, the game launched with paid DLC, something the community hated but I am indifferent to for no reason other than being extremely numb to the modern day strip-everything-for-parts approach to games (‘though apathy towards things getting worse isn’t really where you want to find yourself). Retold has also been added to the esports calendar, sponsored by World’s Edge (the internal xbox game studios developer who has been lead on developing the Age remakes as well as on IV). And I won’t lie to you, this is a dream I have held in my heart since the original came out, for my favorite game to be treated as an exciting 1v1 esport and to bring it to a wider audience like I feel it deserves. But I’ve also had my heart broken, just, so many times in the past over the whole esports notion that I’m afraid to get excited. I am trying to be cautiously optimistic but it takes strength, and I’m afraid that getting emotionally invested in it only to have it taken away might actually kill me. 

And then there is the elephant in the room, the unavoidable notion that we are living in the infinite present, of nostalgia packaged and sold to us over and over again rather than investing in new things. Old music outsells new music, adaptations of existing works far exceed new works and re-packaging old things to be sold again is a trend which is only going to increase rather than recede with time. Retold absolutely does not get a pass for this, for being a thing that I personally like and being done to my satisfaction in spite of all my criticism. I am keenly aware that I am part of the problem, and that the time and energy being poured into four(!) remakes of games from my childhood could easily be one new property to get invested in, to give the children of today the same experience I had when I was young, when I found something new that felt like it was made for me. I am part of the problem. As I said, I like Retold a lot and I don’t feel like I’m going to stop playing it.

Also, please nerf Centaurs. 999. 

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    Inaki spent more years in higher education than he has close friends and brings a strongly academic and political focus to his lifelong enthusiasm for anime. Twitter had a ruinous effect on his life so you might as well give him a follow so he gets something out of it.

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