Microsoft Game Studios hiring for "AAA strategy game in a well-loved franchise"

We love Microsoft's and Ensemble Studios' Age of Empires series. Those games are so well designed, they hold up even more than a decade after release. Just ask Sam, who reviewed spin-off Age of Mythology: Extended Edition , a spruced up version of the original game. Microsoft has been giving the series some love lately, cleaning up and releasing the Age of Empires games on Steam . Could it be gearing up for a proper sequel? A recent job listing gives us reason to hope that it is.

Our friends over at CVG first noticed a Microsoft job listing posted to the company's careers site. Posted on April 28, it's looking for a principal software development engineer lead to join Microsoft Game Studios at its headquarters in Redmond Washington. The crucial clue here is that this experienced senior games developer will be working on “a new AAA title within an established and well-loved strategy game franchise.”

Microsoft Game Studios owns a lot of franchises, so this could be anything, but between “AAA,” “strategy,” and “well-loved,” Age of Empires fits the bill. Another good contender is Halo Wars, a real-time strategy game that was released on Xbox 360 in 2009, and also developed by Ensemble Studios. It doesn't come up often around these parts, but an 82 on Metacritic probably qualifies as “well-loved.”