Age of Empires 4 is playable, needs “balance and polish” After a mostly quiet 2020 for Age of Empires 4, we’ve been given a sliver of news on the strategy game. The sequel is in a playable state, and currently undergoing lots of debugging and tweaking. “I don’t want to make you jealous, but we are literally playing this game every single day – both in Washington and in Vancouver,” Shannon Loftis, general manager of World’s Edge Studio, writes in a year-end review. “RTS development is funny: it takes a while to build the separate systems (AI, economy, sim, rendering, etc), and then it takes a while for them to come together. But when they do, you suddenly have a game – a game that needs debugging and balance and polish – but the core of the game that you know you’re going to ship.”