The Age of Empires IV team suffered a heavy loss, as one of two key people in the game’s development, Quinn Duffy suddenly officially left the studio after almost 24 years with Relic Entertainment, as evidenced by his resume on Linkedin, in which he tagged the last month of his Joining Relic was December 2021 and characterized that he was proud of the work done by the AOE IV development team and that he had a passion for the history and RTS genre and was therefore happy to help develop a new part of this beloved and iconic franchise.
Quinn Duffy worked at Relic since 1998 and started out as a progression and economy designer for the iconic space-based real-time strategy Homeworld before being quickly promoted to Chief Designer and Gameplay Lead for Impossible Creatures and the most highly rated RTS in WWII-inspired history. Company of Heroes wars, as well as additions to it. He was also the lead designer for an action game based on Warhammer 40,000 – Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine.
In 2010, he took over as director of RTS projects at Relic, where under his leadership the controversially accepted Company of Heroes 2 was created under his leadership. Despite this, the game became a great success and he continued to lead the production process additions to COH 2, until now, until 2016, he switched to the development of Age of Empires IV, first as the director of the project, and then as the director of design for this project.
AOE 4 was released in October 2021 and was warmly received by fans and critics, and was recognized as a successful sequel to the series, despite the controversial art design and the dominance of problems with balance, optimization, interface and a lot of critical bugs.
