Red Bull Esports Wololo tournament is more than just a funny name

When it comes to esports news, the biggest headlines are almost always for MOBA or shooter-games. Other genres have their own events, series, and fans of course, but it’s a bit rarer for them to make headlines. Red Bull Esports is here to change all that.

Introducing Red Bull Wololo. Despite its humorous name, the event promises to be the best AoE tournament yet. AoE in games means Age of Empires – a strategy game. The RTS genre is mainly dominated by Starcraft II – now Red Bull Esports is trying to show that there is more to the genre.

© Red Bull

Red Bull Esports takes on AoE

Age of Empires 2 is a pretty popular real-time strategy game – and the Wololo tournament aims to show the best of the best. AoE2 esports isn’t very big – yet. That means focusing on the late-game content rather than the fairly slow early stages.

Normally, AoE2 isn’t overly audience-friendly, but Red Bull Wololo is trying to change that – in a relatively small tournament format, for now.

The tournament

Only 16 players will get to participate and duke it out for the $20.000 prize pool. Half of them qualified based on their performance in another recent event – the Hidden Cup 3, while the rest will be selected from two open qualifying tournaments,

The first two days have already taken place – the opening matches of the round of 16 have been played. For the rest of the weekend, semi-finals and finals will be happening – and you can watch the Red Bull Wololo streams on RB’s Twitch channel.

The game

As for the individual match-ups, each player starts out with a small economy of 27 villagers already up and running. Necessities like blacksmiths, barracks, and the like are already provided, and the loom is also researched. The game starts in the Feudal Age, cutting out the slowest starts.

To those who find this setup familiar – it’s an adaptation of the existing Empire Wars game mode. For those who aren’t familiar with the game – there will be some pretty well-known casters at the Red Bull Wololo event in order to make sure that nobody misses anything important that’s happening. As far as esports games go, this one has a lot of potential – in no small part because of the players.

Big names

While the casters feature people like T90, Nili, Dave, and ZeroEmpires, the players themselves aren’t all unknowns either – between Helenês ‘F1re’ Cândido’s epic quest to qualify and Ørjan ‘TheViper’ Larsen’s participation, there is a lot going on. TheViper is the most successful AoE2 player ever, pulling over $100.000 in prize money. F1re on the other hand really struggled to qualify – it came down to a final game seven, in which F1re managed to prevail.

Joining the fun

In addition to watching the official stream on the Red Bull Twitch esports channel, you may also catch some stuff around the event on participant’s channels – and if you’re into esports betting, check if your favourite betting provider offers odds on the Wololo event.

In the end all we can say is: 31 11 14

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