Age of Empires 4 can be tested by anyone at the weekend. There are no entry requirements for the “Technical Stress Test”. Everyone is to be understood in a second dimension in the literal sense: The system requirements of the strategy game are low at the lower end.
In contrast to the closed beta test in August, the weekend is about subjecting the server and matchmaking to a stress test. Therefore, apart from the tutorial, you can only play online. There are matches against other players or against the AI via a dedicated lobby, which can be played on five different maps with the civilizations of the English, Chinese, Abbasids and the Holy Roman Empire. So everyone can now test for themselves whether Microsoft captures a classic real-time strategy game and the classic Age-of-Empires game feel as promised.
The test starts on Friday, September 17th at 7pm and ends on Monday, September 20th at the same time. It can be downloaded from the Xbox Insider Hub app in the preview tab or from the Steam product page. The finished game will be available around a month later on October 28th.
Low entry barriers
The entry barrier for the game is extremely low. An APU with an integrated graphics unit and 8 gigabytes of RAM are sufficient for gaming. With AMD, four cores are used, while the Core i5-6500U from the notebook sector processes four threads, but has to make do with two cores. Even the recommended hardware can hardly be described as particularly powerful. Here Microsoft pairs a graphics card of the lower middle class with a six-core CPU, whereby even a Ryzen processor of the first generation should be fast enough.
Intel Core i5-6500U AMD Ryzen 5 1600
Intel Core i5 (6 cores, 3, 6 GHz) RAM 8 GB RAM 16 GB RAM Graphics card AMD RX Vega 11
Intel HD 520 AMD Radeon RX 570
Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 Storage space 50 GB Software Microsoft Windows 10 (64 Bit)
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