#gameface
Last month 25 employees at Age of Empire developer Robot Entertainment stopped shaving in honor of the annual Movember men's health awareness event. Aside from one transforming into a woman, it seems to have gone pretty well. More »
#gameface
It's Movember, the time of year when males spend 30 days growing facial hair to raise awareness of men's health issues. The team at Age of Empires Online developer Robot Studios prepares to do its part. Track their progress here. More »
#clips
Back in August we learned that the popular strategy series Age of Empires would return as, oddly, a colorful online game. Odd? Let's look at 2011's Age Of Empires Online in action, shot today in Manhattan. More »
Age of Empires Online may be a freemium title, but Microsoft Game Studios General Manager Dave Luehmann tells us "it's not a nickel and dimey microtransaction thing." During an interview at Gamescom today, the executive expressed that the studio doesn't want it to feel like some other freemium titles where "what you don't want to do in the game is what you pay for," or "that you pay to skip the parts you don't like." Luehmann explained, "I don't like to pay for things I don't like to do, that seems kind of backwards. So how about we produce things that people actually want?"
Robot Entertainment Designer Jerome K. Jones, who is working on the game chimed in, "So it would be like paying for an expansion pack. ... You won't buy one thing at a time. You might buy an entire civ or another region with a bunch of quests in it."
The game is currently in Beta and will officially launch in the first half of 2011. Both Robot and Microsoft are trying to figure out how much to eventually charge for content. The duo told us the game currently has over 25 hours of free stuff available, which kind of stops making the game sound "freemium" and makes it sound more, um, free?
