Age of Empires II HD: Rise of the Rajas Launches Today!

This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: Xbox Wire.

With much excitement, I am proud to announce Age of Empires II HD: Rise of the Rajas.

Rise of the Rajas brings the series to new territories in the dense Jungles and azure seas of Southeast Asia. The results of this team’s efforts have been stunning, and include new environments, animals, and an architecture set unlike anything seen before in Age of Empires. The DLC introduced four brand new civilizations: the Burmese, the Khmer, the Malay, and the Vietnamese.

The team also added four new campaigns, each rooted in the history and culture of one of the new civilizations. It has been an awesome and humbling experience for me to learn these amazing stories from these four distinct civilizations, and that may be what excites me most of all to share with you.  To quote Bert Beekman, lead designer from Forgotten Empires: “The campaigns are what tie everything together in the end. Months’ worth of work come together: the storylines, the new terrains, the new units, the impressive architecture sets, the exotic voices. When you dive into those campaigns, they all feel familiar, yet new and refreshing. As somebody who grew up with the game, it feels great to recreate your childhood like that.”

Overall, we are looking at over 20 hours of new content in the single-player campaigns alone.  When you add in the new random maps, special maps and real world maps for multiplayer, there is a lot of fun to be had by those who chose to explore all that Age of Empires II HD: Rise of the Rajas has to offer.

It has been an honor to work on new content for this classic title.  The Age of Empires franchise has a very large and rabid fan base, who always enjoy the new content that our team has the privilege of creating.  The team here at Microsoft, Forgotten Empires, and Skybox Labs all believe that this latest entry will only further enhance the fun that millions of people are already having with Age of Empires II HD.

I hope to see you all online soon for a multiplayer match!


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