Just got this one off of bluesnews. Seems that the Collector’s Edition of Age of Empires III comes with an art book, and on the last page of the book is this image (click to enlarge). It shows Age of Empires 1-3 with art depicting their various time’s in history, but there are also entires for Age of Empires IV (modern combat) and Age of Empires V (futuristic combat).

Also according to this same msg board thread on Age of Empires Heaven.com, Microsoft has purchased the domains for ageofempires4.com and ageofempires5.com. They have not reserved ageofempires6.com. Obviously this lends some credibilty to the story.

Hot freakin’ damn.

Also Ensemble is hiring programmers with Massive Online Gaming experience. It’s uncertain at this point if the hirings are related to Age IV or a seperate project (hell, we don’t even know if Age IV really exists). Ensemble has also said that they’d like to move in new directions after the recent release of Age of Empires 3, which probably means that AoE isn’t going MMO. That would be cooler than **it though.