The last standard expansions (some civs + some normal campaigns) was The Mountain Royals in October 2023.
Since then:
Battle of Greece: a strange experiment. No reason to have this in aoe2 at all, why not make this a stand-alone game?
3K: another experiment, antithetical civs with a magic non-historical campaign
The less said about V&V, an insulting low quality cash-grab, the better
Why is one of the best and longest-lived franchises in such a sorry state? Doing literally nothing would have been better. I personally would have preferred the aoe3 treatment of “announce a DLC and then cancel it” to what we got
Only one I disagree with you on, the rest of what you said is solid. Battle for Greece is supposed to be an aoe1 campaign that aoe2 players can enjoy in my mind and thus it belongs in aoe2. Making a new game with the exact same mechanics as aoe2 but ancient civs would feel like too much for too little imo. Also, I haven’t played them yet but I’ve heard the campaigns are on point.
I personally love Battle of Greece, and I want them to continue Chronicles, but I also agree with you that I want “standard” DLCs with civs that actually fit the game’s setting as well.
It’s more beautiful than AOE DE, at least for the most people
AOE DE is abandoned and ROR failed
Making a DLC in AOE2 DE is not that expensive and it seems for the latest DLCs of AOE II and IV (and the abandoned AOE III) that the budget is smaller than before for the franchise
It is made by Capture Age and not by FE which means more content without oversaturate the main devs
I dont understand either of these questions. My point is aoe2 is a medieval strategy game. any “expansions” that let you play with bronze age civs should be their own game. They can be on the same engine or a different one, I don’t care. They just shouldn’t be in aoe2
You cant crossplay RoR/Aoe civis against aoe2 medieval civis currently.Same with chronicles civis unless you have it turned on in options.
Both RoR and Chronicles are in there own tabs so they have no effect on aoe2.
If you dont own either of the dlcs you dont have bronze age civis in your game,so what is the problem?
that’s my point. so why not put them in their own game?
this like requiring you own aoe2 so you can play aoe3. these civs and their game modes are completely detached from aoe2, but have this arbitrary condition that you can only play with them if you buy aoe2 first
Aoe is still there so RoR is like that.chronicles is like a sister product as assets are shared.
Sure they can be its own products but this method is more cost effective.
3K IS the standard expansion wdym. No one has defined what “standard expansion” is. Just like how rougelite is totally legit sp content and variants are totally civs. /s
From a player’s perspective, I think the main benefit is disc space: if RoR and BfG were both separate games, anyone who owned all three would have a lot of duplicated content on their hard drive.
Another benefit (that only really applies to BfG) is crossplay (including in scenarios), but I expect that to be a very niche interest, especially since the BfG civs aren’t even really balanced against each other, let alone against AoE2 civs.
That said, I don’t think either of these benefits are the actual reason they’re in the same game. For RoR, I think it would have been considered more profitable than revamping and expanding AoE1DE would have been. For BfG, I think it was to fill the gap in AoE2 DLCs while most of FE were working on Age of Mythology. (I confess these are both guesses/speculation though.)
Pardon my ignorance, but what do you mean by this? If it’s a typo and you meant roguelite/roguelike, I don’t understand because Three Kingdoms is not one of those.
I don’t think that the single player base of any of the other games in the franchise is bigger than AoEII DE, i really doubt that.
If BfG wouldn’t be in AoE2, the natural choice would be AoE1 given the fact that the civs in BfG are from the same period of AoE1. Making another game while they’re trying to save Mithology and considering the smaller budget for the franchise is not a good option(at least for Microssoft)
BfG is not by any means low quality content and that is the point. Of course we all expect high quality content but Microsoft wants more money, i think that’s why we’re having 2 DLCs every year now. Considering all that, it’s better for us that there are two teams working on more content for this game instead of rushing the DLCs with just one team.
i am saying the player numbers are completely irrelevant to this discussion. an expansion should go where it fits thematically, not to the game that has the most players.
we aren’t getting the cancelled aoe3 expansion in aoe2 or aoe4 either after all
imo they have 3 valid options:
-make DLC for aoe1, that could be battle for greece as it fits thematically. however the engine is different
-make BfG a standalone game. then they can reuse the aoe2-engine
-make DLC for aoe2, that fits thematically
shoehorning in a DLC like BfG is not one of them. I don’t know which of these options is financially sound (and quite frankly neither do you)
it is. it doesn’t fit thematically at all.
well, V&V, mountain royals and 3K feel rushed nontheless
You don’t have to buy it if it isn’t your kind of DLC. Some people don’t mind playing with ancient civs so long as they are in a different gamemode. If that’s not your cup of tea, they don’t force you to play against the civs in ranked or play in lobbies where they are enabled. Also BFG doesn’t fit aoe2 because it thematically fits, but because it mechanically fits. If they just took all of the mechanics for aoe2 and made a new game they would be considered lazy. Also having it be an AOE1 DLC would be dumb from a monetary point of view because practically no one plays it. Also trying to make money is not a so called “cash grab”. A cash grab is when a company makes a low quality effort to make a ton of money. BFG is high quality from what I’ve seen, read, and played.
Have you even played or watched videos about the DLC’s content because it looks like you haven’t if you would consider this dlc to be low quality. Also as I’ve already said, it mechanically fits and if your worried about it not thematically fitting, then you don’t need to play it, everyone enjoys different content.
Mountain royals a little less but still yeah, agreed.