Age of Empires IV Sultanate screenshot

[Update]: Age of Empires 4's free 25th anniversary update will be adding Ottomans and Malians on October 25th.

After spending a fair bit of time in testing, Age of Empires IV's massive Season 1 update has now arrived. The most exciting addition is the new Content Editor which allows you to create or tweak your own maps, toy around with unit stats and abilities, assemble your very own rules for randomly generated maps that can be used for skirmishes and multiplayer, as well as build entirely new game modes!

Best of all, the Age of Empires IV team has gone to great lengths to ensure the freshly released Content Editor is as simple to use as possible. So if you just want to dive in and start messing around with the maps, you can find everything you need to know over at the official guide.

The update has also paved the way for the very first Ranked Season. So if you're curious about the competitive side of Age of Empires IV and want to see just how far you can go, mark April 13th on your calendar as that's when the whole thing will kick off.

Naturally, there's a whole bunch of balance changes and quality-of-life improvements mixed into the update as well. There's far too many to easily summarize, so if you're interested in all of the details you can find what you seek over at the Age of Empires IV website.

Have fun experimenting with the Content Editor, and here's to hoping we'll get some really cool game modes out of it in the near future!