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Relic Entertainment, the Sega owned studio responsible for real time strategy games Company of Heroes and Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of War, will be developing the Microsoft owned Age of Empires 4.
The new game, announced yesterday as part of Microsoft and Xbox’s Age of Empires gamescom stream, will be releasing on PC in the future. Microsoft is currently working on Age of Empires Definitive Edition, with remasters of Age of Empires 2 and 3 to follow. The new title has only been announced for Windows at this stage and isn’t expected to come to the Xbox One.
Writing on the news section of Relic’s website, the company wrote: "1997 gave us two things that shaped who we are today: the start of Relic Entertainment; and a then-newly released game called Age of Empires. It’s no secret that we’re the biggest fans of RTS games and, over the years, we’ve spent countless hours building empires and taking to battle.
"We wonder what our team would have said way back then, if someone told us that Relic would eventually partner with Microsoft Studios to make the next game in that legendary series. Something tells us we might have been just determined enough to think, ‘yeah, of course we will!’"
This is not the first Microsoft Studios owned strategy game to come to a Sega owned studio. Creative Assembly, who make the Total War franchise, recently made Halo Wars 2 for Xbox and PC. Interestingly, both Age of Empires and Halo Wars are titles originally developed by the now defunct Ensemble Studios, which was closed by Microsoft in 2009.
