With just over a week until the first official expansion pack for Age of Empires II HD releases, the development team shares exciting news about some of the other features coming along with The Forgotten.
Age of Empires Steam Trading Cards
Earlier this year Steam launched the Trading Card program, and instantly one of the most frequent questions we heard around AOE II HD was, “will you be adding trading cards?” Several times over the last few months we confirmed that trading cards are, in fact, coming to the game and today I’m excited to provide a sneak peek into some of the cool things you can get with the Steam trading card program!
If you’re not familiar with the trading card program, you can read up on it here.
The short version: play your favorite games, get a bunch of cards, craft and trade the cards and get badges, icons, backgrounds, and coupons! So let’s start with step one:
Collecting cards. We’ve prepared a set of eight different trading cards with all brand-new AOE themed art designed just for this program and promotional events. As you play, you’ll receive at random times up to half of the cards for AOE II HD. Cards can be received while playing either the base game or The Forgotten expansion.
You’ll need a full set of cards to do more though, so get trading! Swap out cards from other games, sales, etc, and pick up the entire set to turn that set of cards into a badge for the game. Once you’ve gotten a badge, head back into the collector’s room – because you can level up that badge by crafting another full set of cards. It’s like the instructions for a bottle of shampoo, rinse and repeat. There are six levels to the badge platform, and the last one is definitely worth shooting for. Crafting badges also levels up your profile.
If that’s not enough, crafting those badges will get you some tradable rewards. These fall into different categories: First – profile backgrounds. Each card has a profile background variant, which are of course the coolest profile backgrounds on Steam. Secondly, the community program allows for coupons, and the Steam community certainly loves sales. Keep an eye out for discounts you can get by crafting badges, or see what types of coupons others may be willing to trade you. Finally, if you were paying attention to the forums – we had a thread asking for suggestions on Steam emoticons. We’re currently looking at adding a Sheep, Relic, Helm (like the desktop shortcut), Food icon, and of course the Monk. If you’re lucky enough to pick up the Monk, make sure to go around converting everyone on Steam.
I’m looking forward to seeing some great profiles, and awesome badge icons adorning everyone’s profile. Steam trading cards are of course free and will begin automatically dropping starting on the day The Forgotten launches. Before showing off the completed cards, here are a few of the concepts we didn’t end up using for our trading cards:
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The final news we’d like to share today is something everybody seems to be asking and that’s pricing. Age of Empires II HD The Forgotten will be available on Steam for $9.99 USD.
Thanks to Ryan for providing this update. We’re just as excited about this announcement as many of you are and can’t wait to start collecting cards and crafting badges. Of course this information is based on the version of the game under development so we have to say it’s possible it could change prior to the official release, but we sure hope it doesn’t.
We want Age of Empires Steam trading cards!