Age of empires 2 definitive edition is fantastic. I think most of us can agree on that. It successfully revitalized one of the single best games of all time, without ruining it, overstepping boundries, or otherwise offending it’s existing, devoted fan base.
At the same time, I’ve noticed a whole host of bugs/glitches/exploits etc. At the moment i don’t take part in the competitive scene, but with some of the troubles i’ve faced just playing friendly matches and custom games, i think it’s safe to say there is a fair amount of “death by BS” so to speak, going on in that crowd as well, but i’m not here to speak for other people, I’m here to speak for my own experiences.
To start off, I spend a lot of time in the Scenario editor, which is great, but could be so much better. Don’t get me wrong it’s miles ahead of HD edition. but as far as game changes have gone, it seems like the editor has only had a minor modernization. furthermore, there are triggers that are just flat broken. Timers for example. they just don’t work. I built an entire map, hinging on having an onscreen timer, only to find that the &^!!ing function DOESN’T WORK. Luckily i was able to work around it in this case, but this small detail could have ruined many hours work had there not been a workable alternative.
Personally, i feel like the scenario editor is one of the foundations of this game. custom maps keep the game fresh. Randomly generated maps are great. However, in my opinion, well done user generated content is where it’s at, & without proper tools, our abilities are heavily stunted. i can tell you, even with copy & paste, it is still a huge pain to “code” a function for every player of the game. The trigger system, is powerful, but tedious. Some of these maps have thousands of triggers! personally i think my record is around 500 give or take, and i can tell you, i do anything i can to keep my trigger counts down, sometimes sacrificing features, which is not good.
It’s more than just the scenario editor though. It’s basically a running joke with players at this point, that the game just doesn’t always work as expected, from random lobby crashes, to constant version incompatibilities, to just silly things like the other day, everything i or a friend said came out as “*****”
Basically what i’m driving at, i guess, is that i feel that more of the development team’s focus should be on improving what we already have. now i’ve registered a forums account, i’ll do my best to post detailed threads about bugs i encounter in the game, but to be perfectly honest, I’m not playing as much as i used to, I mostly like to make and test maps these days, but with the tedium of replicating simple functions for every player, mixed with having to constantly work around bugs and glitches, my drive for it has died down a LOT. going from producing most of an entire map in a night, to working on one for months, a little bit at a time.
I can’t tell you how annoying it is to map out an entire space, code a bunch of functions that should make perfect sense, go to test it out, and then have the unit you just trained and then teleport to a different point on the map, suddenly jesus walk across an ocean because it had a waypoint set to the area that it teleported from. That’s a game bug, not a bug with my map, but i still had to create additional functions to hack a solution to it, or just completely scrap my whole map.
Hopefully i don’t sound too rude in this post, i genuinely do love this game and everything in it & appreciate all the work of the developers, I just want it to be the best it can be, and i have high standards.
One final thought, it would also be extremely helpful if some official documentation could be released regarding modding and scenario editing. we are sort of left to figure it out ourselves in a lot of cases.