Yes, it’s me complaining again. But for one last time.
1) Development is highly sales-focused.
Instead of putting some time and effort to to work on stability you guys continue to work on superflous marketable-features. This becomes more evident as the game is as unstable as it’s ever been and we will reach the point of no return.
But hey, at least you can auto-scout now.
2) A highly competitive RTS is now a casual game.
Age of Empires was like chess. Timeless, balanced, each game was different.
Do you think adding 20 new pieces to chess would make it better? Of course not.
Unless, you’re a toddler who just likes to mess around with the pieces because they look funny.
There was never need for 80 new civs. You had one job: improve stability and add quality of life.
Instead you destabilized the game with trivial features, increased crashes, and made the game perform worse.
3) There is no Quality Assurance
When Forgotten Empires mod came out many years ago I admired it because it did what you expect a mod to be. Lots of new content to enjoy for people that want to try something different.
Unfortunately, FE mod/expansion has become “official” now. Microsoft saw the opportunity to make a few extra bucks and without any type quality assurance, DE is released.
It’s a bit funny that nearly every “Art of War” mission is bugged. When you have no Q/A and just continue to add content nonstop, there are always other things that take priority, therefore certain bugs will remain forever. Piling more and more issues over time will only make this worse in the future.
This does justice to DE as it makes the game look like what it truly is by heart: a mod.
4) “More is Less”
I really like new maps. I think new campaigns are nice although I haven’t played them, I assume some people like them. However this trend of adding so many civs is mindnumbingly dumb. It’s so careless and lazy.
Being an AoE nerd, remembering all civ bonuses in AoC was hard enough. Now it’s impossible.
As a result, you reduced variety instead of increasing it. Because it’s now much more efficient to learn the top 5 civs and just ignore the rest. In the past, the limited amount of civs allowed you to have a pretty good understanding of their use cases. Now it all feels washed out and irrelevant.
5) Priorities
People, including myself, have had issues of crashing every single game. There’s people that had this issue since launch and continue it to have it today. It’s OK - you can release a crooked game because you already charged us for it anyway.
But the developer eyes don’t seem to be in fixing the instability issues. Even though, many people have paid THREE times for this game. What do we get instead? A PROFANITY FILTER. #Priorities
6) Incompetence
You managed to break things that have worked perfectly fine for 20 years.
As is the case of recorded games.
- You cannot watch a game past one player that resigns (FFA, huge comebacks, etc? haha no)
- When game updates, old recordings become incompatible. Yes, incompatible. Yes… incompatible.
Why this is important is not only because we had this feature working forever and now it doesn’t, but because tournaments & youtube AoE content heavily relies on recorded games.
Microsoft I hope you’re watching HC3 and the cringy rec-game crashes. I guess it properly represents the game.
7) Instability
As mentioned too many times, the game continues to get worse in performance, and will continue to do so as devs add more stuff without taking care of what’s already here and bugged as heck. There’s many symptoms of the game not being able to handle itself, among memory leaks, sounds that stop working, etc.
But the most infuriating symptom?
Units fail to respond to commands. For example, you send them to attack and the units freeze.
Sometimes they freeze for no reason at all. Before, you could grab 20 paladins and divide them in 5 groups to raid diff specific locations, or villagers.
Now, if you try to do that, they freeze, they don’t follow any proper orders as much. This is so detrimental to the competitive scene. There is excess evidence here, for example HC3 Nicov lost lots of camels to xbows because his units simply wouldn’t attack, lol.
8) Decade-old bugs are still there
After seeing all of this you’d think they must have done something right. But…
- Out of sync bug still there and frequent (1h into game? OOPSIE! NG!)
- Villagers still get stuck when gathering resources
- The unit pathing is still really bad and seems worse when you scout big tree blocks
- Villagers hunting boar can stop walking and get stuck attacking
And more issues if you look, really. I’m just trying to find something they did right besides the ability to queue techs.
9) Ranked Team Games are dead
I already made a topic on this so I don’t want to repeat myself.
Essentially, it’s impossible to get a 4v4 ranked with the new queue system. Half or more of the playerbase is all about team games. As the game continues to die, this will only be worse (even 1v1 takes over 5min already).
Unranked team games are toxic as f, imbalanced, and full of quitters.
10) Community isn’t heard
Because us, who were the AoE community for the last 10 years before DE (no vets actually mained HD), no longer matter. It’s all about fresh customers now, getting the juicy kid money.
- Big outrage about auto-scouting feature? Devs: implement auto-scouting
- Big outrage about profanity filter? Devs: no word issued at all
I don’t care about these 2 specific issues as much as being intrigued on why such trivial features get added when there is so many essential things that need to be fixed.
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AoE2:DE seems beyond repair. (I truly hope I’m wrong)
