Age of Empires 4 Release Date: When Will Age of Empires 4 Launch?

Age of Empires 4's release date remains largely mysterious. Microsoft Studios revealed the game at Gamescom 2017 and confirmed it would be released exclusively for Windows 10, but information about when the game is actually going to arrive has not yet been revealed.

Age of Empires 4 Release Date: When Will Age of Empires 4 Launch?

Relic Entertainment and World's Edge, the development studios working on Age of Empires 4, have some big shoes to fill. The Age of Empires franchise is among the most beloved in real-time strategy history. The last game in the series, Age of Empires 3, came out in 2005, leaving fans 15 years to continue building nostalgia for the classic series.

Development continues apace at Relic and World's Edge. In a year-end post for 2020, World's Edge studio head Shannon Loftis said the game was slowly coming together.

"RTS development is funny," she wrote, "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. And the best part is that it feels like an Age of Empires game."

It's possible Age of Empires 4 will arrive in 2021, but almost certainly not before spring.