As I‘ve written in earlier blog posts, Age of Empires is my most favorite game of all time. So, you can imagine my dismay when Microsoft announced in 2008 that they were shutting down Ensemble Studios, the development studio for all the Age of Empires titles. It would appear that Microsoft has reconsidered the decision to end the Age of Empires line, as they’ve recently released two significant updates—Age of Empires: Definitive Edition and Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition.
These updates improved the graphics quality and also moved to DirectX 11 as the graphics library upon which the games are based. I wrote about Age of Empires: Definitive Edition and Parallels Desktop in an earlier blog post, and in this post I will discuss Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition.
I won’t keep you in suspense any longer: because Parallels Desktop™ for Mac moved to Apple Metal and now supports DirectX 11, Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition plays great in Parallels Desktop on my MacBook Pro. You can see this for yourself in this short video:
Video1: Some short gameplay of Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition in Parallels Desktop
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Of course, the most important variable in-game performance is the specs for your Mac. The basic specs for the Mac used for Video 1 are shown in Figure 1.
Note: There does appear to be a small bug in Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition. Its check for video memory in a Parallels Desktop virtual machine is incorrect, and you may see the dialog shown in Figure 2. Just ignore this warning as it does not appear to affect gameplay at all. (I have reported the bug to the Age of Empires team.)
The Age of Empires team has also announced Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition and Age of Empires IV. I will test them in Parallels Desktop as soon as they are available.
Let me know in the comments about your experience with any of the Age of Empires titles or other games that you play (or want to play!) in Parallels Desktop on your Mac.
Download a free 14-day free trial to try Age of Empires and Parallels Desktop yourself to see how it works for your Mac set up!
I have written several times in the Parallels blog about my most favorite game franchise of all time: Age of Empires (Here, here, and here). Since Age of Empires is a Windows game, when I want to play it, I use a Windows virtual machine (VM) in Parallels Desktop – and that is why I write about Age of Empires here.
The last few years have seen a real resurgence in Age of Empires. (“There likely has never been a more vibrant community around this 21-year-old game,” said Jonathan Bolding). Newly released versions of Age of Empires I and Age of Empires II, called Definitive Editions, have fueled this resurgence and I have really enjoyed playing them on my Mac with Parallels Desktop. So, when I was asked if I would like to play the about-to-be-released new Age of Empires III Definitive Edition a few days before its release, I jumped at the chance. Age of Empires III has some major differences from its predecessors, and the new Definitive Edition adds two new cultures, Sweden and Inca. The two new home cities for these new cultures are shown in Figure 1.
We are proud to collaborate with Microsoft and officially support AoE III DE as a platform for playing this game on the Mac.
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I used Age of Empires III Definitive Edition on two different Macs: a MacBook Pro and an iMac, both using the same Windows 10 VM. The machine specs and the VM settings are shown in Figure 2.
As expected for any game with “Definitive Edition” in its name, the graphics have been dramatically improved. (Figure 3 and 4).
On both the MacBook Pro and the iMac, the Age of Empires III Definitive Edition game gave me the warning that it couldn’t detect sufficient video RAM (Figure 5).
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Undoubtedly, this is because Parallels Desktop allocates video RAM for the VM out of Mac system memory and it will provide the video RAM that an app needs (Figure 6), but the game had no way of knowing this. This warning can be ignored, and I detected no issues related to video memory.
At first launch, Age of Empires III Definitive Edition also checks the performance of the hardware, and Figure 7 shows the result of this performance check on my iMac. Please note the CPU score of “Very High” and the GPU score of “Ultra High”.
Because my GPU was rated “Ultra High”, for the Age of Empires III Definitive Edition screenshots (Figure 3 and 4) and the game play video (Video 1), I set all the graphics options to their maximum settings. As you can see in the video, the game play was fine, and the game never froze or crashed.
Now I freely admit that the Macs I used were high-end Macs. I would not recommend that you try to play Age of Empires III Definitive Edition, for example, on a four-year-old MacBook Air with 4GB of RAM. The suggested minimum requirements for a Mac to run Age of Empires III Definitive Edition are:
- Processor: Intel processor, Core i5, i7 or i9
- Memory: 16 GB or more
- Storage: SSD drive
- Graphics: AMD graphics card
These are my first impressions of Age of Empires III Definitive Edition after a few days. I look forward to many more days of playing both Age of Empires III Definitive Edition and Age of Empires II Definitive Edition. Watch for another blog post in a couple of weeks.
Age of Empires III Definitive Edition is available now on the Microsoft Store and on Steam. It is $19.99 and is a 34GB download.
Want to try it yourself on your Mac? Get the free trial of Parallels Desktop.