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Age of Empires 4: The Sultans Ascend release date and details revealed

The Japanese and Byzantines join the fight

Marco Wutz

Age of Empires 4: The Sultans Ascend release date and details revealed
Age of Empires 4: The Sultans Ascend release date and details revealed /

The upcoming Age of Empires 4 expansion, The Sultans Ascend, will be released on November 14, 2023, for PC and Xbox Series X|S and will become available for free on Xbox Game Pass – and it comes with a huge chunk of content tailored to make fans happy.

The Japanese and the Byzantines are set to celebrate their Age of Empires 4 debuts in this pack and if you know anything about the Age of Empires community, then you’ll know that it’s basically obsessed with these two cultures. Getting them both in one expansion is an incredible piece of news for players of the real-time strategy game.

Now, that doesn't have much to do with any sultans, though, right? Indeed. This strange name for the expansion comes from the new campaign it contains, which will feature eight missions focusing on the Crusades – and those did have sultans.

Age of Empires 4 The Sultans Ascend artwork.
For a price of just $14.99, The Sultans Ascend add a ton of content to Age of Empires 4 / Microsoft

The developers are doing something extremely cool and exciting in this context: Aside from the two brand-new civilizations, they are giving us four variant civilizations. How exactly they will be different from their original versions is still unclear right now, but in essence The Sultans Ascend will double the amount of playable factions in the game.

These variant civilizations will provide fresh versions of the four original factions included in Age of Empires 4: The Abbasid Dynasty, Chinese, French, and Holy Roman Empire.

In addition, the expansion features ten new multiplayer map designs and two fresh biomes to serve as battlefields.

A landmark building and some samurai units for Age of Empires 4’s Japanese were already revealed earlier. Now we’ve got confirmation that Shinobi will be a special unit for the Japanese, serving as spies and assassins. The Byzantines will continue their Roman legacy by building networks of aqueducts and cisterns. They can also harvest a new resource and will be able to hire mercenaries for their armies.

You can watch the trailer below:

Check out the Age of Empires 4 cheat list to spice up your AI skirmishes in the game.

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Marco Wutz
MARCO WUTZ

Marco Wutz is a writer from Parkstetten, Germany. He has a degree in Ancient History and a particular love for real-time and turn-based strategy games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, Total War, Age of Wonders, Crusader Kings, and Civilization as well as a soft spot for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. He began covering StarCraft 2 as a writer in 2011 for the largest German community around the game and hosted a live tournament on a stage at gamescom 2014 before he went on to work for Bonjwa, one of the country's biggest Twitch channels. He branched out to write in English in 2015 by joining tl.net, the global center of the StarCraft scene run by Team Liquid, which was nominated as the Best Coverage Website of the Year at the Esports Industry Awards in 2017. He worked as a translator on The Crusader Stands Watch, a biography in memory of Dennis "INTERNETHULK" Hawelka, and provided live coverage of many StarCraft 2 events on the social channels of tl.net as well as DreamHack, the world's largest gaming festival. From there, he transitioned into writing about the games industry in general after his graduation, joining GLHF, a content agency specializing in video games coverage for media partners across the globe, in 2021. He has also written for NGL.ONE, kicker, ComputerBild, USA Today's ForTheWin, The Sun, Men's Journal, and Parade. Email: marco.wutz@glhf.gg

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