Age of Empires IV in 2022 – introducing Seasons, an updated roadmap and feedback tools

Shortly after the release of Age of Empires IV last year, we shared a quick view of what we were planning with our first ever Community Roadmap. Since then, we’ve been keeping an eye on your feedback across a variety of social platforms; assessing data to better understand what civilizations need more tuning in the short-term, and what civilizations and maps will require more focused attention over time; and running previews, such as the 1v1 Ranked Seasons Preview, with our Insiders hosted this January.   

By compiling and synthesizing the above feedback, we’ve put together a more comprehensive view of the next five or so months, which you can find below. With our first major update of 2022 approaching, along with the official start of Ranked Seasons, we wanted to take a moment to thank you all for continuing this journey with us as we continue to maintain and grow Age of Empires IV. It’s not only your time playing the game that matters to us, but also the time you take to let us know what is or isn’t working for you; Age of Empires is built upon the premise that “it takes a village,” and we continuously learn that with you by our sides.  

To provide a more specific view of what’s coming to Age of Empires IV, we’ll be covering a few key items we think you should know, including: 

• Our philosophy for Seasons and strong belief that Seasons can benefit all Age IV players, regardless of whether you lean into competition or prefer a more solo Age experience.
• More insight into our strategy for introducing improvements to the game – including our approach to providing larger quarterly updates that introduce significant quality of life features and new content, as well as our commitment to doing balance tuning and bug fixes in between these major updates with our monthly patches. 
• The features and improvements we’re looking to introduce between now and roughly July 2022. Please note that some of these plans are still earlier in development and could change as we hear from you and as development progresses. If and when we decide to make significant changes to this view, we also plan to let you know.    
• How we collate feedback and data to guide our decision-making and how you can help us continue our journey to make Age of Empires IV the best it can be.  

If you’re interested in hearing more on the above, you can find it here.