I hope that more new players actually discover and play and stay with this upcoming AOE3. Only if the game is succesful enough and receives lots of good reviews based on good gameplay and graphics, it can actually attract new players.
And I hope for the Age series, that there will be more new players, who play it online and keep the thing alive for more than a year without needing an x-pack. This can only happen to a quality game, of course, but it also needs a lot of potential players. And this is where the AOE series still stay behind, let's say Blizzard. One of the reason could be the semihistorical setting of the Age series, which obviously attracts less players than quality fantasy worlds like LoTR or Warcraft.
The reason for this could also be that there have been like 100 AOE-more or less-clons letting the player replay the same human history (or its conflicts), while there are considerably less clons of Warcraft that are worth mentioning. In other words, I think that another AOE must choose something different, change its main concept and so on. Of course, these new players won't know much about the changes. What they will know is that it is another Age of Empires. Ok they heard that. Not another history game please...
Well, and this is where the graphics come into play. The better they are (and AOE3 graphics are finally modern and truely surprisingly excellent... I would have never thought that I would see Havok physics in RTS so early) the better the first impression will be for a new player. They maybe start to inform themselves about the game, first just to see the great graphics, later, maybe, to know more about the actual gameplay. They give a try to this "another boring AOE" and then AOE3 has to prove that it has improved a lot and doesn't only clone AOK.
[This message has been edited by arnitald (edited 02-17-2005 @ 06:50 AM).]