There has been a lot of controversy around the recently announced Three Kingdoms DLC for AoE2, as well as to a lesser extent the Knights of the Cross and Rose DLC for AoE4. I feel like both are symptomatic of a drifting away from AoE’s core principles that’s been happening for a while but is rapidly worsening.
The fantasy of this franchise is to choose from a diverse roster of global civilizations and build them to greatness over centuries. That obviously gets heavily abstracted by gameplay, and campaigns tend to focus more on single individuals to more easily tell a coherent story, but that’s the core idea. Increasingly I feel like recent releases are losing sight of this.
Firstly, let’s talk about diversity of cultures. One of my favourite things about Age of Empires is learning about the rich histories and cultures from people all around the world, but increasingly it seems like the franchise is focused on only a few regions and is just splitting them into increasingly tiny and niche “civilizations” instead of exploring other areas.
Burgundians aren’t a civilization. Joan of Arc’s army isn’t a civilization. The Three Kingdoms aren’t civilizations. These are small factions that don’t fit the fantasy of leading an entire empire or cultural group. And it’s really frustrating because these niche and variant “civilizations” are cannabilizing design space that could be used for cultures that haven’t been explored.
AoE2 has as many civilizations from the Italian peninsula as it does from the entirety of the Americas. Come Three Kingdoms, it will have twice as many civilizations representing the Han Chinese than the entire continent of Africa. AoE4 has three different versions of the French but only one African civilization, zero American civilizations, and zero southeast Asian civilizations. That’s insane. I get that certain regions and periods of history are more marketable than others, but come on, this is ridiculous.
I get it’s a little harder for AoE4 to expand its roster because they set a higher standard for civ asymmetry and art design, but I’d rather cut some corners there if it meant exploring more of history than just keep redoing the same bits of history we’ve already done ad nauseam. Let other east Asian civs share some architecture with the Chinese like they do in AoE2 if it means we get Koreans and Vietnamese instead of French Variant #42.
I think the gameplay design is also starting to lose sight of the simplicity and readability that has made AoE so enduringly appealing.
Now, this is a tricky one, because you do need to keep introducing new ideas to keep things fresh. You can’t just keep throwing out minor variations on the same gameplay forever. But you do have to be careful that new ideas fit the core gameplay principles of the franchise, and you need to manage the complexity creep.
For me, hero units are a step too far. They can work in games that are designed for them – Warcraft III is one of my favourite games ever – but they don’t fit the macro-focused gameplay of Age of Empires. They also don’t fit the fantasy of guiding a civilization over the course of centuries. Are we to believe Joan of Arc lived for five hundred years?
I’m mostly okay with any of the other new mechanics introduced by recent and upcoming DLCs across the franchise, but they need to be portioned out better. Throwing multiple new gimmicks into a single civilization gets overwhelming.
AoE4 suffers from this severely. When I finally tried the Byzantines a few months ago, I was hopelessly overwhelmed by trying to learn the multiple unique units, olive oil resource, aquaduct system, and mercenary mechanic all at once. All of these are good ideas individually (I actually love the aquaduct mechanic), but cramming them all into one civilization is way too much. This isn’t as bad a problem in AoE2, but definitely some of the upcoming Three Kingdoms civs feel like they’re trying to do too much.
Finally, devs need to remember this is largely a casual franchise where most people are versus AI and campaign fans. AoE2 has mostly been good at remembering this, but it is distressing that Three Kingdoms is skipping campaigns for the Jurchens and Khitans, and personally I’m disappointed they’re not taking this opportunity to add campaigns for the Koreans and baseline Chinese. AoE4 is really neglecting campaign players, though; again, I’d rather they cut some corners than just give up on the idea entirely. Spend less on flashy cutscenes and documentary movies if it means we get campaigns for more civilizations. A simple narration over some static images like AoE2 does is good enough.
This is already very long-winded, so I’ll try to wrap this up, but in summary, I really think the developers across the franchise need to go back to basics and remember what originally made the Age of Empires games appealing.