Despite plenty of successes and some ambitious plans across the entire Age of Empires franchise, there has been a cloud looming over the upcoming DLC for Age of Empires 3 Definitive Edition. Announced almost 12 months ago and set for a late 2024 release, the DLC was then delayed to a very vague “future date.” In a new announcement, it’s now been revealed that the DLC has been completely scrapped.
While official details about this DLC have been concerningly thin on the ground, what we did know was that it was set to bring two new civilizations to Age of Empires 3. A teaser from the developer stream in which the DLC was first revealed suggested that these would hail from Denmark and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, bringing the total number of civilizations in the Definitive Edition up to 24. However, this exciting expansion to the strategy game was delayed in October 2024.
“With many active projects across the franchise, we’ll be pushing out the release for the DLC to a future date,” Age of Empires said at the time. “This decision was not made lightly and is based on the bandwidth of the entire Age team across World’s Edge and our partner studios.” Sadly, it’ll never see the light of day, as it has just been canceled. World’s Edge says that the decision came after “serious consideration” and “was not made lightly.”
“We apologize that we haven’t provided updates to you since our announcement of the DLC,” it says in a new blog post. “While considering the inclusions for last year’s show, we wanted to ensure that Age III: DE players felt part of the franchise celebration as we know you have huge passion and love for the game. However, pushing to ensure that the game was included meant we announced content before it had been built, and we now feel that announcement was premature.
“We know that this is a huge disappointment, and many of you were excited for more content. We were able to put out a patch for the game towards the end of last year but understand that it was not the size and scope you were hoping for.”
It’s unclear if this means there will be no more DLC or content updates in the future, or whether it will return to Age of Empires 3 once it has more bandwidth to do so. The developer does assure though that it will “continue to maintain servers, rotate civs through the free trial version, and provide Customer Support for any issues you may encounter whilst playing.”
This is a really disappointing series of events and is a frustrating blemish on what’s been a great run for Age of Empires recently. Age of Mythology Retold was launched to positive reviews, a mobile version of AoE has been let loose into the wild, and Age of Empires 2 got some game-changing new content.
If you want to explore some other titles that offer similar thrills to Age of Empires, check out our best RTS games and best grand strategy games.
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