Age of Empires: Definitive Edition comparison between the new and original visuals

If you were hoping to get your hands on the remastered version of the original Age of Empires this week, I'm afraid I have some bad news. According to the most recent announcement, Ages of Empires: Definitive Edition has been delayed from its October 19th release date all the way to early 2018.

As you might expect, the Definitive Edition is being pushed back in order to secure a bit of extra time for testing and polish, as well as what appear to be new features. There aren't that many details available as of right now, but here's the full announcement message if you're interested:

"When we set out to re-release the original Age of Empires (as ‘Age of Empires: Definitive Edition’), we had many debates over the extent of restoration that we should undertake. The challenge of re-releasing a classic is just that: it’s a classic and it deserves to be treated with careful reverence. At the same time, in a living, thriving genre, norms continually evolve, technology advances, and player expectations change. This is as true for RTS as for any other genre. So, the challenge is to recreate the experience not as it *actually* was but as we all remember it. How can we modernize the game while preserving the fun, discovery and magic of that first experience?

To that end, rather than a final release of Age of Empires: Definitive Edition on October 19, we will instead be inviting thousands more players from the community into our closed beta between now and launch to allow for more in-depth testing across single player campaign, multiplayer balance, fine-tuning the lobby, etc.

We don’t have a final release date to share quite yet, but are targeting early 2018. In the meantime, we will be actively engaging with everyone participating in the closed beta to gather additional feedback, set up multiplayer sessions, and ensure that the Age of Empires: Definitive Edition that we are delivering is the Definitive Edition that you want."

To sign up for the Closed Beta you should head over to the official website, but keep in mind that you will need a Xbox Live account in order to participate. This does also mean that Age of Empires: Definitive Edition will not be releasing on Steam or other such platforms, but rather on the Windows Store only. All I can hope is that this won't negatively influence the multiplayer population given that we're talking about a fairly old game in a fairly niche genre. That's a worry for another time, however, so for now allow me to send you off with the original E3 announcement trailer. Enjoy!