Tag Archives: Robot Entertainment
This evening saw Robot Entertainment challenge their EU publishing partner GameForge in a best of three OMDU showdown match! The fighting was fierce. In the first match Robot and Gameforge took very different strategies with Robot opening two war camps at level one with GameForge choosing to focus on the initial upgrade of their first war camp to level 2. With some very aggressive pushing from Robot they were able to win the match quickly with a 20-0 rift points score with thanks to Ogres.
On the second match GameForge faired a little better with a more equal early and mid game, but continued aggressive pushing from Robot saw that match too end with 20-0 rift points.
You can check out the replay of the battle right here with excellent commentary from SixOkay!
Things are hotting up this week on the Orcs Must Die! Twitch channel. This week there is a new Thursday stream titled “Fortress Cup 2014”. Following North America’s recent loss to Germany in the World Cup, Robot Entertainment are attempting to redeem themselves by battling with Germany once again, challenging Gameforge to an OMDU face off!
Its all happening this week on the Orcs Must Die! Twitch channel on Thursday 3rd July at 2pm CDT. For conversion to your timezone check out our stream page.
Many gamers will have heard that for a while Microsoft has been aiming to replace their currency for Xbox Live and Games for Windows Live from Microsoft Points to real local currency. Ie. Dollars, Euros and Pounds Sterling, or what ever your local currency is. In doing this the Xbox Live and Games for Windows Live services will need to make the switch over. This is scheduled to be be kicking off on August 22nd.
However, the bad news is that Games for Windows Live will not be making the transition to local currency and as such, Microsoft is infact closing the GFWL service all together. Infact as of just August 22nd the Games for Windows Live Store will be closed to new purchases of any kind. This means that no additional copies of Age of Empires Online or any DLC will be available via this store from August 22nd. It would seem that any DLC purchased through Steam would also not be available based on a now removed article on the AOE-O support website as reported by Age of Empires Online Heaven. Although the Steam issue is still awaiting official confirmation.
The bad news continues I’m afraid. While existing players will be able to continue to play Age of Empires Online beyond the August 22nd cut of date, the game will be shuttered completely on July 1st 2014 when the entire GFWL system will be taken offline.
This is of course very sad news for the co-developed Robot Entertainment and Gas Powered Games title. Many AOE-O fans are incredibly disappointed by the closure news and discussions are aplenty on the official forums. According to a recent article on Gamasutra there was another “post-mortem” conducted on Age of Empires Online by its Executive Producer, Kevin Perry at GDC 2013 just recently. The presentation was titled “F2P the wrong way” indicated that there was not enough content at launch, and by the time they were rolling out new content the efforts unfortunately did not result in bigger enough population boosts. As a result development was halted in January earlier this year.
I would say that now would be the time to spend any Microsoft Points you were thinking of spending on AOE-O before August 22nd. However, as it seems the game will be closing entirely in July 2014 this will no doubt be a quandary for many players.
Stay tuned for REF for further updates on this sad situation.
Since its release in August 2011 a vast amount of content has been released for Age of Empires Online. Firstly the Greek and Egyptians civilisations were (along with the core game) largely developed by Robot Entertainment until production shifted to Gas Powered Games as part of a planned transition in February 2011. Post-release Gas Powered Games have released various content packs including Skirmish Hall, Defence of Crete along with 4 additional civilisations – Norse, Persians, Celts and Babylonians. However today it was announced on the official website that content production and development of the game is now ceasing.
Cost reasons were cited as a factor in the decision to stop producing content. The scale of the post-release content we have seen from Gas Powered has been extraordinary and is not like traditional DLC packs with other games. Each civilisation and other booster packs required a vast amount investment and development resource. The production quality on these packs has always been very high. Content packs have also been reactive to community suggestions, most notably the Skirmish Hall.
Unfortunately the scale of content being produced could not be sustained as the game becomes older. Whilst we will no longer see new content for the game in terms of booster packs of new civilisations the game will continue to be supported. This is not the end of online play. Much like the ESO service that runs Age of Empires 3, Microsoft Studios’ Community Team will continue to offer support for the game as well as community features such as competitions. The official blog post reads:
However, nothing else changes for players, nothing that currently exists will be removed. You can still play everything you own, earn EP, and purchase any content you do not currently own. We will still fully maintain and support the game and its players; no one is losing anything that you have earned or bought. Our Community team will continue to support the game by way of Community Challenges, streams, contests, PvP tournaments and more.
Before Gas Powered Games finish on Age Online there is one further content update to be released which will contain as of yet unannounced final content.
Whilst its sad to see content be stopped for Age Online, the game has certainly had a very good run with sustained, high quality content. I’m certain Age Online is not the last we will see of Age of Empires. The full blog post about todays news can be found on the link below. Fans may want to engage in discussion about this news on the games official forums.
Robot Fans audio interview extraordinaire Kenny Newell has recently been invited to an interview by Tony Goodman in his own home over dinner. In case you don’t know, Tony Goodman one of the key founders of Ensemble Studios and served as CEO and Studio Head for the lifetime of Ensemble Studios. He then went on to head up and create Robot Entertainment after Ensemble closed its doors.
If you ever wondered how Robot Entertainment came to form, and how it came about that they started working on Age of Empires Online your going to want to check out this fantastic interview between Kenny and Tony Goodman. You can also find out about Tony’s brand new venture, PeopleFun and their first game – Word Chums!
Listen now:
Hero Academy fans may remember that back in late June this year Robot Entertainment announced that it was partnering with YoDo1, a Chinese video game studio, in order to bring Hero Academy to the mass Chinese market. Hero Academy has been available in China for a number of weeks now and the launch has been a great success. So much so that the YoDo1 localized version of Hero Academy made the Top 10 list in free games, and Top 25 iPhone apps overall in just 48 hours after going live on the App Store.
Localizing the game & servers
The results are very impressive and it is great news that Hero Academy is reaching a global audience. Robot Entertainment partnering with YoDo1 have really shown the industry the kind of results that can be achieved by localizing games for the Chinese market. Recently Henry Fong, CEO and founder of YoDo1 took part in an interview with Gamasutra to give us an insight to how we arrived at this point. There were a number of considerations and challenges that Robot Entertainment and YoDo 1 had to address to achieve this success. One of the key decisions was to provision the servers in China and have a separate Chinese version of the game rather than connecting players to the same USA based servers. This was an important consideration not only for technical reasons (connectivity from China to USA servers was slow) but also it was important to give Chinese players and experience they were familiar with. As Henry Fong tells Gamasutra:
As a multi-player turn-based game, Hero Academy needed a local server presence in Asia. Otherwise, it would take forever for Chinese players to find opponents, and cause long delays in between moves. On top of that, the Western version of Hero Academy has a lot of connectivity to Twitter and Facebook, so players can share content with their friends, and find fellow players on those social networks. Trouble is, neither Twitter nor Facebook are even accessible in China.
Robot and YoDo1 set about replacing the existing US based social network links (Facebook & Twitter) and replaced them with Chinese social network Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo. After all its no good having functionality to invite friends by Twitter if all the Chinese players are using Weibo. This move was certainly important to allow players to connect with friends in China.
A brand new exclusive team
In order to help entice the Chinese players a brand new team was created based on the Chinese equivalent of Middle Earth “Jiang Hu”. Think “Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon“. As Henry describes:
Hero Academy is full of elves, orcs, and other character types that Western gamers are totally familiar with, from Lord of the Rings and other classics. So what if we introduced a China themed heroic team to the game? We thought that this would certainly be a bigger draw to the Chinese gamer audience.
New marketing materials
The concerns that Chinese players wouldn’t be familiar with the Western style characters also centred around the need to create new marketing materials such as a new video trailer to promote the Chinese launch of the game. YoDo1 went about creating a brand new trailer unique to the Chinese market and the results are pretty impressive – check out the trailer below!
Its fantastic to see that the Chinese version of Hero Academy has had such great success. YoDo1 are continuing to work with Robot to add new content to the game. The Chinese launch of Hero Academy is clearly a beacon of success that says Western games with the right level of localization can make it big in China. Hero Academy is now at the forefront of this kind of game localization. Congratulations Robot and Yodo1!
Further reading
Check out the full article with Henry Fong and Gamasutra here:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/177767/How_Hero_Academy_went_big_in_China.php
Want to win a cool collectors item from the Robot Team at RTX 2012? After all of the fun and interviews, the Robot team was kind enough to autograph a couple of my media credentials. The Pass was signed by Justin “Sixoay” Korthof-Community Manager, David Kubalak – Art Director, Nate “N8” Stefan – Concept Artist, and Bart Tiongson -Concept Artist.
The guys swore that wearing the pass will add +10% damage to any Hero Academy units attack and increase you head shot percentage in OMD2. This may just be an urban myth, but it’s worth a try.
To win one just email me at kenny@robotentertainmentfans.com or send me a tweet to @kennygamer and say “enter me for the pass contest”. We will pick a winner at random.
Later, Kenny
