Viper also won the tournament’s previous installments and was never seriously challenged in this incarnation, sweeping the best of seven finals and going 14-2 across four rounds of play. Ørjan Larsen, better known as TheViper, is probably the game’s all-time greatest player and inarguably its winningest, with his Hidden Cup 3 victory putting him over $100,000 in lifetime prize money.
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It’s also complicated enough that pro players are still developing new strategies today. It’s simple enough to learn that a new player could hop in and defeat a low-level AI within an hour. Its most unique feature, the need to progress through four ages to access new troops and techs, is compelling but hardly unheard of in the genre. Its 35 civilizations offer unique units and subtle bonuses, and players have to balance four resources, a web of units with varying strengths and weaknesses, and technologies that eat resources but provide long-term benefits. On the surface, AoE2 is a typical RTS: establish an economy, build a base, destroy the opposition. Competitive players loved its strategic depth, while creatives appreciated its ability to serve as a historical playground, and together they played a large role in saving the game from obscurity. Instead, thanks to a passionate fandom that includes YouTubers, pro streamers, and modders, it hung around and became far more popular than AoE3 and the Mythology spin-off that followed. It was a hit, but there was no reason to think it wouldn’t eventually face the same ravages of time as its predecessor. AoE2 topped 1999’s sales charts, was lauded with a plethora of Game of the Year awards, and was popular enough to justify spinoffs ranging from a collectible card game to a turn-based Nintendo DS title to a bizarre, dumbed-down cell phone version.
Its 2018 Definitive Edition was nostalgic but clunky, of interest only to long-time fans willing to tolerate its eccentricities. It was well-received, but shoddy pathfinding and limited strategic depth kept it from aging gracefully as the genre evolved. The original Age of Empires was released in 1997 after being marketed, somewhat disingenuously, as Civilization meets Warcraft. But what is that appeal? What fanbase existed to justify revisiting AoE2 after all these years? And what does AoE2’s continued success mean for the upcoming Age of Empires IV ? Age of Empires II -a 21-year-old real-time strategy game-has been revitalized by the release of 2019’s Definitive Edition, which sought to modernize the title while still retaining its fundamental appeal. Compare that to 2018, when the first Hidden Cup drew in just 6,000 peak viewers with a purse of less than $1,500. On March 22, 2020, nearly 58,000 people watched the finals of Hidden Cup 3, an Age of Empires II tournament with a $56,830 prize pool.
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