Was there ever any question it was going to be a soulless cash-grab?
Well, there was certainly question before we found out that Tencent was involved. Back when all we knew about it was that it would be called Age of Empires: Mobile. At a time not long after the AoE2 and AoE4 ports to console & controller had shown to be surprisingly a really good way to play the games we love on a novel input scheme. Back then, yeah I honestly thought the reason this was being done was because they thought they had come up with a good way to get a good RTS experience on a mobile device.
Well, there was certainly question before we found out that Tencent was involved. Back when all we knew about it was that it would be called Age of Empires: Mobile. At a time not long after the AoE2 and AoE4 ports to console & controller had shown to be surprisingly a really good way to play the games we love on a novel input scheme. Back then, yeah I honestly thought the reason this was being done was because they thought they had come up with a good way to get a good RTS experience on a mobile device.