17 years after release, Star Wars: Empire At War just got patched to support 64-bit
May the 64s be with you
Star Wars: Empire At War wasn't a great game, but it did fulfill a simple fantasy: it was a real-time strategy game with original trilogy Star Wars units. If what you wanted was to fling swarms of AT-ATs against swarms of X-Wings then, yeah, you could do that. Darth Vader versus entire platoons of rebel soldiers? That too.
Why am I talking about a 2006 RTS? Because it just got a new official patch to make it run in 64-bit and fix a number of bugs.
"It’s been a while, but we have been working behind the scenes to update Star Wars: Empire at War and Star Wars: Empire at War: Forces of Corruption to 64-Bit," begins the patch notes.
"This has many benefits, the most important of which will solve any 'Out of Memory' issues you might have been getting on certain machines. In addition to this, we’ve made stability improvements to multiplayer and fixed a number of gameplay issues that have been surfaced up to us by members of the community. This includes updating several maps, graphic assets, and core functionality of some of the units used in space and land battles."
The bug fixes are long and numerous, and also includes exposing certain lua scripts in a way that suggests they might be editable now. That's important because Empire At War had or has a fairly busy mod scene. We last checked in on it back in 2019 and found several ambitious projects in various states of completion, including YodenMod, pictured above.
To Petroglyph's (and Lucasfilm Games') great credit, they've continued to patch Empire At War pretty consistently. Its last similar update was around this time last year, with waves of fixes released in '21, '19, '18 and so on. The leap to 64-bit is a more significant change, however. To celebrate, the game is currently on sale on Steam too, making it less than the price a fancy sandwich from that deli I like.