Third times a...

...failure?

Apparently, Ensemble continues their tragic and confusing slide into mediocrity. I'd been guardedly excited about the third installment in Ensemble's Age Of Empires series. Evidently I can now stop. Reading between the lines of Tom Chick's recent review, along with reading the actual lines themselves, it seems that Ensemble is continuing in the very unwelcome direction they headed with their previous release, Age of Mythology. Specifically, that direction involves systematically removing the vestiges of intelligent design from their first two ambitious games in favor of shiny pretty graphics. Ooo... look at the polygons!

Let's pretend Age of Mythology never happened. Had Age of Empires 3 simply fixed some of the UI flaws in AoE2, it'd be a decent game that would be obsolete by the likes of (already years old) Kohan and Creative Assembly's Total War series (see Shogun). But it seems AoE3 doesn't even offer that, let alone the kind of progress of which Ensemble seemed so capable initially. To simply have dropped a heavyweight DX9 era graphics engine on top of busted play mechanics smells like a game developer who doesn't care anymore. They've checked out. Hire a few really smart graphics guys, pair them up with about three dozen artists and modelers, and call it a game.

Tom includes a particularly pithy comment:

"The difference between micromanagement and strategy usually boils down to the interface".

So it does, and thus the one thing that desperately needed Ensemble's devout attention is the one thing about which they seemingly don't give a hoot.