Regardless of loads of successes and a few formidable plans throughout the whole Age of Empires franchise, there was a cloud looming over the upcoming DLC for Age of Empires 3 Definitive Version. Introduced nearly 12 months in the past and set for a late 2024 launch, the DLC was then delayed to a really imprecise “future date.” In a brand new announcement, it’s now been revealed that the DLC has been fully scrapped.
Whereas official particulars about this DLC have been concerningly skinny on the bottom, what we did know was that it was set to convey two new civilizations to Age of Empires 3. A teaser from the developer stream during which the DLC was first revealed steered that these would hail from Denmark and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, bringing the overall variety of civilizations within the Definitive Version as much as 24. Nevertheless, this thrilling enlargement to the technique recreation was delayed in October 2024.
“With many energetic tasks throughout the franchise, we’ll be pushing out the discharge for the DLC to a future date,” Age of Empires mentioned on the time. “This determination was not made frivolously and is predicated on the bandwidth of the whole Age staff throughout World’s Edge and our associate studios.” Sadly, it’ll by no means see the sunshine of day, because it has simply been canceled. World’s Edge says that the choice got here after “severe consideration” and “was not made frivolously.”
“We apologize that we haven’t offered updates to you since our announcement of the DLC,” it says in a brand new weblog publish. “Whereas contemplating the inclusions for final yr’s present, we needed to make sure that Age III: DE gamers felt a part of the franchise celebration as we all know you’ve gotten enormous ardour and love for the sport. Nevertheless, pushing to make sure that the sport was included meant we introduced content material earlier than it had been constructed, and we now really feel that announcement was untimely.
“We all know that this can be a enormous disappointment, and lots of of you had been excited for extra content material. We had been in a position to put out a patch for the sport in the direction of the top of final yr however perceive that it was not the scale and scope you had been hoping for.”
It’s unclear if this implies there might be no extra DLC or content material updates sooner or later, or whether or not it can return to Age of Empires 3 as soon as it has extra bandwidth to take action. The developer does guarantee although that it’s going to “proceed to take care of servers, rotate civs by way of the free trial model, and supply Buyer Assist for any points you could encounter while enjoying.”
This can be a actually disappointing sequence of occasions and is a irritating blemish on what’s been an important run for Age of Empires just lately. Age of Mythology Retold was launched to constructive critiques, a cell model of AoE has been let free into the wild, and Age of Empires 2 received some game-changing new content material.
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