Backtracking is a blogging project that I’m embarking on in 2024 in which I will play one game from each year since I was born. My goal is to engage with games I’ve never played and divert some of my attention away from new releases and towards older titles. I hope to cross off some major backlog items, learn more about the influences and intertexts that informed the games I grew up with, and practice my analytical skills. I’m using US release dates as the relevant year for my selections.
Why I Chose This Game
I think I've established a pattern here. Once again, I find myself looking for new ways to explain how my latest game selection was an influential and beloved title (check) and a wider stretch of my genre preferences (check). Perhaps I need to find more interesting reasons to pick em, but for now, these criteria have kept me playing games that are, if nothing else, worth talking about.
So far, I’ve enjoyed exploring the widest extents of my taste. In many ways it's been a tour of the genres I've enjoyed in the past. Previous choices like System Shock, Earthbound, and PaRappa have been fond and enlightening returns to immersive sims, JRPGs, and rhythm games, respectively. But Age of Empires II is the furthest that I’ve taken this particular bit: it's a genre I’ve never touched before, but always wondered if I could get into.
After playing a good 30 hours, I can say pretty confidently that I probably will not be "getting into" Age of Empires II... real-time strategy games in general are still uncertain.
What I Thought
Age of Empires II was mostly a letdown for me. I engaged exclusively with the campaign and AI controlled opponents, and I didn't actually finish the base campaign. The packaging felt hollow and the gameplay felt varyingly slow or inscrutable. I don't really believe that it's a bad game, per se. But I did have substantial problems with it.
The story framing of each campaign is melodramatic, mostly in a fun way. I'm no history buff, but it seems that the campaigns generally eschew historical accuracy in service of fitting iconic figures into the center of a series of historical battles and encounters. From what I can tell, the choice to represent cultures and empires through singular historical figures is a new addition since the first Age of Empires (which is sparser on story). It's a fascinating and limiting choice, perhaps borrowed from the inescapable Civilization series. The use of a mythologized historical figure as both the title and the driving force of each campaign reads to me as a capitulation to the power-serving "great man theory" of history. It's reinforced by flattened structure of the various civilizations, which share the same "ages" of progression as well as a core set of troops, buildings, and upgrades — albeit with minor variations. The few unique details of each civilization wither in the shadow of the sweeping generalizations, and the differences only manifest as situational tactical advantages.
Meanwhile, the storytelling threaded through the campaign missions suffers under the same weight of mythologized history. Caught between the drama of its central characters and its begrudging adherence to some semblance of truth, it all ends up fairly bland and stereotypical. The military histories of these cultures and empires become stories about Main Characters, not actual people or their histories and traditions.
There are certainly looming genre limitations, so maybe I'm being uncharitable. Maybe I don't have enough inherent interest in the war stories that it's telling to appreciate them. Maybe it's the... troubling accents of the seemingly uncredited narrators (or single narrator? I couldn't say) that makes it difficult to take seriously. Regardless, the scenario design tends to tell stories more successfully than the overt storytelling.
In any case, the historical set dressing (lavish though it may be) feels more aesthetic than meaningful. But, you may ask, what was it like to play? Well, as an introduction to the RTS genre, this game was... rough. I got through 2 and a half of the 5 campaigns (among which I conveniently include the tutorial) before determining that I had had enough. I poked at the remaining two for a bit, and then finally put it down.
Things started out okay. I enjoyed learning the basics in the tutorial campaign, an embellished story about the First War of Scottish Independence. The core base building mechanisms of the game are readable and fun to tinker with, and the tech trees and building capabilities have a certain clarity after some amount of experimentation and observation. The interface is often clumsy but broadly serviceable. But as the campaign's difficult escalated, I found gaps in my knowledge that I didn't know how to address. Certain tactical approaches wouldn't result in clear outcomes until half an hour of pursuing them, if any insights emerged at all. Experimentation was slow, expensive, and fuzzy. Lessons that could have been imparted through tutorial or scenario design were elusive and hard-won.
I had a lot of difficulty finding the general rhythms of the game; the dance of harassing enemies while building up my forces felt impossible to actually learn, since most missions began with well-established enemy factions. Obviously, fighting off harassing troops while exploring the map and deploying armies towards objectives is intended to be a challenging attention split, but it compounded with very little instruction on what those individual pieces of focused play actually look like. Managing villagers and resource gathering is fairly straightforward, but troops are another story.
"Micro", short for "micromanaging" units (usually in combat), is a term that I know through vague cultural knowledge of the Starcraft esports scene. It was not one that I understood to be inherent to the DNA of the genre. As an intentional gameplay technique, it was completely absent from the tutorialization and hints provided in the game, not even acknowledged as a tactic, by name or otherwise. In fact, the only indications that micro was an expected technical skill were the sheer difficulty of playing some missions without it and the enemy AI's propensity to effortlessly dodge and weave between projectiles (when it chooses to micromanage units). I got as far as I could trying to focus on using battle formations and unit composition as optimally as I could, but it often felt insufficient to match the challenges the campaigns presented, or too slow to experiment with.
At the end of the day, the overall pace of the game was too slow, the micro was too fiddly and unexplained, and the packaging was unremarkable. I felt like I played the game wrong. I wasn't supposed to play it in a vacuum, relying only on its own explanations of its rules. I wasn't supposed to presume that micromanagement was as optional to casual play as the game seems to tell me it is. I wasn't meant to poke at the game's under-explained corners alone. But I attempted to, and it left me unsatisfied and disappointed.
Reflections
As with all the games in this blog project, I tried to meet Age of Empires II as I believed it would have existed at the time it released. I played the tutorial, I flipped through an uploaded copy of the manual that would have accompanied it, and I experimented with the various modes to try to figure out how it ticked.
What I didn’t do, though, is play the game socially. Age of Empires II might be better learned via community: at the time of its release, this could have meant friends or siblings. Today, it means the huge communities on Steam, GameFAQs, Discord and elsewhere on the internet. It’s a game that presents wide possibility spaces and relatively complex simulations, all of which plays out at a pace that’s difficult to quickly experiment with. Unit descriptions explain strengths and weaknesses and basic stats, but the actual outcomes in play are too complex and micro-dependent to calculate or intuit. With Age of Empires II, I never felt that I had the space to learn these things deeply on my own.
The Backtracking project started as a way to chip at my backlog. But it began with games that came out more than 30 years ago, and I made decisions about how I would engage with those games. I played original versions when possible, or at least minimally modified ones. I avoided DLC or post-launch changes. I made concessions for things like emulator save states, graphical remasters, and up-scaled resolutions, but I was otherwise strict about using outside support or modern affordances. I've always been stubborn about reaching for external help like walkthroughs and guides, so maybe this was just my natural posture.
But I'm finally seeing the cracks in this methodology. Sure, sticking to original versions keeps me true to the release years I'm targeting, but also it also generates friction that may or may not be productive. Before Age of Empires II, I’ve been able to contend with the consequences of avoiding newer remakes, even when they really sucked. I’ve turned to guides infrequently, hoping to let the game produce the effects it might produce. By and large, I have not been asking for help. But now I have to wonder: does this let me see the game more clearly, or does it leave me caught up in frustrations I'm refusing to work around?
I can reasonably guess that players of the original release of Age of Empires II had some combination of prior genre experience and community with whom they could play and learn. Some would have ignored the campaigns entirely and duked it out in multiplayer. Some would have turned to the internet, where people were surely sharing strategies somewhere (though the evidence is now heartbreakingly difficult to find).
After a lot of frustration with Age of Empires II, I did violate my self-imposed rules: I sought strategic advice from internet guides for a couple of especially brutal campaign missions. I chatted extensively with a friend who had RTS experience and was playing more recent remakes of Age of Mythology and Age of Empires II. These compromises equipped me to push farther than I otherwise would have. But it was too little, too late. I stopped playing partway through the Saladin campaign, numbered 3 out of 5 original campaigns. I was relieved when I finally decided to call it quits. Maybe the game just isn't to my taste, or maybe I spent too much time being frustrated, and it soured. It's hard to tell at this point.
I've been counseled by the same friend that a better introduction to the genre might be Starcraft II. It's hard to say whether I'll find a strong desire to pick up another RTS. But it's clear that my own vague notions of influence or significance within a genre's history aren't the right way into those niches. Finding my way into a complex genre with a long history is not a simple thing. I can and should ask for help, advice — even recommendations.