When Ensemble dissolved back in 2009 after putting together Halo Wars, I mournfully looked back on the decade-plus of Age of Empires that I’d enjoyed. I wouldn’t consider myself an avid RTS geek, but AoE was always a favorite, and back in the days of dialup, it was one of my first experiences in online gaming. I can recall having barely reached the Iron Age and muttering “Yeah, yeah, keep your shirt on…” while my buddy, a much better player than me, held off multiple opponents by himself and screamed for reinforcements. My centurions would save the day, but they required a lot of tech research, damnit.

It’s with these fond memories that I signed up for the Age of Empires Online beta. It’s distributed by Games for Windows Live, and has been given a vague 2011 launch date. There’s always a mix of hope and trepidation when a beloved franchise, especially one from childhood, is passed to a new developer and charts a new direction. Gas Powered Games, you’ve got a lot to live up to in your attempt to turn AoE into an MMO.

Happily, Age of Empires Online seems not to have taken the microtransactions road. The game will be free-to-play, but I would consider the content that’s actually free to play to be a mere demo for the main game, which will require a one-time purchase for each “Civilization Pack” you choose. Unfortunately, that means a purchase for every new civ’s full features, and there has been no word on pricing yet. But if you’re a through-and-through Greek loyalist, you don’t have to buy the Egyptians.

I credit this game for taking an RTS and MMO-izing it in an interesting way. The MMO features come from your need to build and spec your civilization’s features. Just like the MMOs you’re used to, this process plays out with leveling up through a tech tree and acquiring gear that you apply to adjust your stats, or in this case, the stats of your units. The gear is at the heart of the player-to-player economy, and your hard-earned gold can be spent purchasing other gear or new features for your home city.

Your home city is where you do all of your speccing and management, but you don’t actually do anything about resource gathering or battling from there. In fact, I don’t think your home city can ever be in danger of being pillaged by other players. There aren’t any units to command, just buildings that offer all the specialization options, shops for resources and equipment, and questgivers. The battles are where the action is, and those play out like I remember from the first Age of Empires with elements of the second (castles/fortresses) and the third (persistent farms) thrown in. The art style has abandoned semi-realism for bouncy cartoonishness, but the animation is sharp and flows well, and series veterans should find the feel of the action very familiar. Send your villagers scurrying about to gather food, wood, stone, and gold so as to construct the buildings that output military units and research tech upgrades. You’ll periodically need to sink resources into advancing to the next namesake “age,” in which bigger, badder units and upgrades become available.

For example, I’m level 10 with the Greeks and I’ve spent my tech points on boosting resource gathering and unlocking robust infantry upgrades, but almost nothing on cavalry. In battle, I can access the upgrades that will have my barracks churning out fearsome armored phalanxes, but my riders will only ever be little more than scouts who would be outclassed by a level 5 player that bothered to beef up his own cavalry.

This capacity for specialization is where I think they could get really creative with co-op content. I could see battles that would require players to fill certain roles in certain spots on the map, and the chat channel would read “LFM Battle of Corinth Narrows. Need a navy and a siege” prompting players that fit the bill to step up. Victory could result in a loot drop that adds stamina to a specific unit, or makes villagers gather food faster, etc. And this is just for one civilization out of what will probably be five at launch (Greeks, Trojans, Egyptians, Libyans, and Nubians). Properly executed, I could see Age of Empires Online being a hit – as long as players don’t get too frustrated that their spec makes them too vulnerable to certain other specs in PvP.

Sadly, the battles are very simplistic for now, and are merely “quests” to go build up and beat a really easy computer opponent. Sometimes it’s a curveball like playing tower defense on a single building, or constructing 10 farms in 8 minutes. And I suppose that’s too be expected. By level 10 in WoW, you were on your umpteenth boar-killing quest with the game just barely beginning to flesh out, and that’s essentially how it seems to be going for me in AoEO. Multiplayer is limited to plain 1v1 and 2v2 matches.

I’ll stick with the beta and I’m sure I’ll enjoy it, but when launch time comes, the big question will be pricing.  Purchasing a “premium” civilization unlocks deeper tech trees, more options for your home city, new single-player quest chains, and other goodies, and there are already post-launch content expansions in development. I seriously doubt they will design the game so that free-to-play players will be able to handle fights with those that have put their money down, but as long as I don’t have to constantly be buying in-game money to keep up, I’m alright with it. Maybe I can convince my buddy to join me, and we can relive past glories. I’ll even promise to read up on how to more efficiently advance my economy.