An Open Letter to World's Edge regarding AOE3's Abandonment

The injection of the culture war into the game in the first place was part of the betrayal. It’s more than fair game to criticize these people for trampling all over legacy content in the name of politics along with all the other stuff they did. They knew the culture wars were contentious and yet they chose to wade in knowing that they were going to tick off half their customer base. They own that decision and its consequences. I’m not interested in making excuses for these people or being deferential anymore. If they wanted that courtesy, they should have bothered to actually communicate with their customers for the last two years. They chose not to, and lost any right to my benefit of the doubt.

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It’s all over, let the knights celebrate the death of this game!

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Not a bad stereotype if you are from southamerica, perhaps the way it functions in-game is dumb, but the concept is still of use

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The basic concept is accurate for North American too. They had significant dance ceremonies across the continent like the Stomp Dance, Sun Dance, Ghost Dance, etc.

The implementation may not have been the best, but the depiction was correct. But now all we have is the same bad implementation and also a bad depiction.

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Brah. Is not a stereotype, at least not for Aztec, people around here they still celebrate on firepits and altars with dances. I Will not mentioning the sacrificial chikens and goats. México si wild :disguised_face:

History is a harsh mistress, and must be acknowledge. Somethign Words Edge is afraid of doing. They should just walkway, we have a good community, we are better without they.

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The worst part is the result. Sure, either side can make a point but at the end we got…annoying tribal marketplaces and a animationless plaza. Its improved over DE but still the plaza is not only visually stale, but actually hard to see who is assigned and will randomly kick vills out with no indication sans knowing plaza work rates to compare mentally on the ui. Tribal marketplaces are annoying and unwanted brake on playing those civs.

It was controversial in large part because it felt lazy and did not increase fun or depth. And so mamy changes from that to empire wars kicking out treaty to the WE intro logo all while scenario editor and in game ui was archaic, bugs persisted. Looking back its clear the design by comittee or someones agenda was forced through over gamers desires.

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I remembered thinking about the Sioux dance I learned as a teenager in the scouts. We all danced around a campfire. No consideration was made to our race. We were just kids who wanted to learn. We were taught about various reasons they might do a dance and how the basic steps might vary, and how an individual dancer might weave his own emotions into a dance based on various situations. For my part, I was terribly uncoordinated after hitting a growth spurt, but I had a great time anyway. It, among many experiences, fascinated me with Native American culture and I’ve long had a curiosity for it, even the parts which might have been distasteful to talk about. I’ve studied enough history to take the view that it is important to learn even the “ugly” parts of it so we can fully understand why people did what they did. To this day, Sioux are still among my absolute favorites to play in AoE3.

Naturally, I hated the change. I felt it was a good mechanic in the game. It set apart the Native civs in an interesting way and gave them a unique control over situational bonuses which gave them incredible flexibility that Euro civs never had. Replacing it with a stale, empty building with a soulless name that was totally disconnected with any culture I’d ever studied just felt like politically correct sanitizing when the stated goal was to bring some authenticity to the depiction of the native civs. Here, they had something that had some authenticity and they removed it.

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Hard to say there’s no culture war element here. They hated everything about this time period and were more interested in sanitizing history, than in helping us explore it.

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Age of Empire 3 DLCs is done by Forgotten Empires, not World’s Edge, at least do your research right

which they also help with AOM DlCs and AOE4 DLCS

World Edge help made AOE3 sure, but they didnt work on any of the DLCs

Check their Page

Imagine complaining about the Devs, but you keep saying the wrong one

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You are completely, abysmally wrong. World’s Edge is the managing game studio. All the decisions around DLC released, game support, etc. come from those corporate suits.

Forgotten Empires and Tantalus do the actual work, but don’t make the decisions.

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At least check the facts right on the Company page and everything

World Edge never made the DLCS

Its forgotten empires

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World’s Edge decides if a DLC is made and how to (or how not to) advertise and communicate with the community. Then Forgotten Empires is the one that actually does the work of making the DLC.

So essentially everything good that has been done is because of Forgotten Empires, and everything we despise is because of World’s Edge.

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Hey man (@ coyotekiller114 ) you are almost a copy of mine. I have been playing AoE series for 20+ years beginning with single player and the tranferred to AoE3 and later AoE3DE multiplayers…

I absolutely share your opinion.

What makes me angry the most is when I recall their announcing DLC video with two (“American”) smiling people presenting 2 flags of new DLC civs… And now I suspect they were presenting only those flags while having nothing behind that… No % of code had been done… So they lied to us on live session?

Btw I “admire” work of mods on this forum who are banning anybody who is not “absolutely satisfied with the news” :slight_smile: well done, go on…

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To be honest, I’m surprised quite a few people are more offended by the cancellation itself than THIS.
Cancellation is predictable. But they made a blatant hideous lie in front of the public and hid behind their mods and CMs for a whole year.

And even after that, they tried to hide that truth in the middle of a long nonsense bs article with an uninformative title. They should change the title to “GOTCHA!”
They said sorry sorry apologies I feel you but they never admit mistakes or make any compensation.

This is to protect fee-fees of the fragile little people in World’s Edge. Customers getting angry because of their wrongdoings is too much for them.

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I would have preferred if they removed the fire pit entirely instead of reskinning it, it’s a forced way of making unrelated civs similar to one another, but the way it works bothers me more than anything. Even if you argue that these rituals were a real thing, why should they be a gameplay element, and why should they even affect units? These are just a worse version of god powers from AoM.

I do agree the tribal marketplace is an annoying replacement to mining the way it was implemented (and according to people who know more about this than I do, only Lakota should be unable to mine, but they should be unable to build farms as well).

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Worlds Edge was the final say in what it done, released all that. Forgotten Empires and Tantilus make the content and games, something they did well.
So actually learn how these studios work before coming on and posting everywhere how it’s not WE fault.

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Where is the proof of that ? send me

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By changing the Fire Pit into the Community Plaza, it also removed most of the religious component of the Natives: Europeans have the Church and the Priest, Asians had the hero Monks and the Monastery and Natives had the Fire Pit and Medicine Man. By changing the Fire Pit, it took a bit away from that cultural “wholeness” that the civs had.

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Ah yes, because European civs having checks notes a single building based on their religion that they can probably ignore is the same thing as Asian civs having most of their design be based on religion and NA civs having a building they can’t even function without because the devs wanted those two groups to be different from the Europeans but similar between themselves

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Oh FFS. It is LITERALLY EVERYWHERE.

Per the very main website for AOE

“World’s Edge is the Xbox Game Studio responsible for the Age of Empires franchise.”

https://www.forgottenempires.net/about-us

The hierarchy is established EVERYWHERE.

Microsoft owns the Age of Empires IP. The Xbox division handles all things related to gaming. Xbox Game Studios (previously Microsoft Studios) is in the Xbox division and handles all the games. World’s Edge is a studio within Xbox Studios that manages and publishes all the AOE games. They are the ones that receive all the sales money. Per their own words, it is responsible for AOE. Ergo, they are responsible for launching new games and cancelling them; they are in charge off all high level decisions regarding DLC. How do we know? Because they themselves say they are responsible for the series! However, World’s Edge is just the management group. They don’t do the actual work. For AOE3, they contracted out to Forgotten Empires and Tantalus Media, independent development studios, to do the actual development. They are the ones that make the DLC under the direction of Worlds Edge. You can read all of this on their websites. And in articles written about AOE3 development. You can even ask one of them directly.

That’s how game studios work.

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