Arena of the Gods - Review + What could have been

Age of Mythology: Retold Discussion
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I’m gonna come out right away saying: AotG was very dissapointing to me.

Granted maybe I got my hopes up too much and expected more flavour added to the skirmish maps, various objectives and at the bare minimum a challenging AI. I feel like we got none of that.

If any of the devs read this: I would not write this if I didn’t see the potential, I got 5 friends to buy the game already and I love Retold. I merely want to provide criticism so that AotG can be great and a serious sales pitch for AOM (which I think it could be).

I want to start on a positive note though:

  • I thought the VO was nice. Hearing different gods speak was also a very nice touch. Furthermore it was a good way to set the stakes, a god challenging you with proper VO had some nice flair to it.

  • World Events and buffs obviously

  • Pages/Different Worlds

  • New music and SFX ? (could be wrong)

  • The final Kronos mission was promising (at least some variety),…

The negative:

  • …until it was so easy that I could basically run my caravans directly through the enemy “base”/wonder. I’m actually writing this as the game runs on “Extreme” in the background and Kronos’ forces dump into my units from time to time… fun. And the base around the “champion of freyr” was actually open on the North-East side.

  • Yet again, Kronos as the main baddie, Ragnarok yet again in the same makeup as in the campaign. Yet again the same hero(es).

  • The tutorial was okay, but at this difficulty way too long and since it’s non-skippable feels like lost time for players familiar with the game.

  • In the tutorial you have Kronos “warping in” units, but they don’t actually warp in. They just pop up in a different place.

  • In theory the tutorial felt like what AotG could have been were it any better, though still a little underbaked.

  • The AI is useless, and provides no challenge at all (Extreme).

  • Lack ofvaried objectives.

  • The music seems to bug out in some missions.

  • I don’t get why we have to be Gaia so often. Fine for the intro but some later missions are also Gaia only.

  • Freyrs weather changes make buildings bright as atomic bombs before you place them. + They have close to no impact and the visuals are not great.

  • Freyr just froze a single fishing ship! Oh no!

Basically I think someone made the decision that AotG was a good idea but decided to not give it a lot of budget. I think this was a bad call, as, again, I think it could be a major draw for new players. Unfortunately now it might be too late as the bad word is out.

I thought a lot about a mode like this before it even was announced, and I bet I’m not the only one. If you have any ideas please write them in the comments, could make for a fun discussion, some decent copium after what we got.

Ideas:

  • A defense mission, similar to the tutorial mission but an actual challenge. The player area is limited, expanding outwards will get you killed by idle units in that area. You cannot build but there are outposts that are captureable. Hold out for a set time. Could work with a wonder in the back, for some nailbiting endings.

  • A pure army mission, you can not build but you can choose your army comp (or the army is buildable with limited ressources and barracks in the player base). Larger armies than in the base game. Once the timer runs out the battle ensues and you need to move your units out on the battlefield (which is visually sexified with setpieces). Once only 10% of the AI units remain the battle is won. Similar missions with other varieties could happen.

  • Other objectives than “destroy enemy TC” are needed. Capture points like in AOE4 come to mind.

  • Winter mission, after a set time winter sets in and the enemy becomes much harder to beat and gets fenris wolves. So there’s a timing where you need to be sufficiently aggressive to win the game.

  • Objective: Kill 30 villagers before a set time. Could be a good way to learn the game for less advanced players.

  • Any one of the scenario maps from AOE3.

Looking forward to your ideas. In theory they could have implemented mods and it would have been more engaging than what is at offer rn. But in the end that’s just my opinion.

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In my opinion, there was too much hype around AotG, many believe that it was kind of a new campaign, instead it more about a different kind of skirmisher with some build on mods.

For now, I played only the first 5 scenarios (so the tutorial and the first real battle) and it’s not that bad.
It’s basically a coop that allows some replay with different kind of blessings, god’s and conbo. For being a free update that close the release of the game, it’s nice.

Although, here are some differences that I hope to see in the future:

STARTING CONDITIONS:

The start of every game was very weird, you start with extra resources and the age up to the classical age is super fast, you basically build the temple, age up, and then go on with you game.

This reminds me of AoE2 empire wars, where you start already in age 2, and with a base already quite developed (with houses, barracks, gathering points and several villagers).

I believe that the idea was to speed up the initial part of the game, by jumping in the action right away. But in aom you cannot start in the classical age right away, as the choice of your first minor god has mayor implications.

Still, this half-way decision is bad. You find yourself in the classical age too soon (and your opponent too) with and eco to fully develop and the enemy to ruch/harass. You basically have focus on different tasks that usually occurs in two different moments of the game *(in the archaic age you focus on eco and villager efficiency, while in the classical age you can overlook more the eco as it’s already established, and focus more on military).

In my opinion, this should be changed by either:

  • having an already build base, with 3 or 4 houses, a temple, one gathering building/cart on each resource (or a guild for atlanteans) and several villagers already working, depending on the civ you chose.

  • have you playing the archaic age as standard. This would also be beneficial for people who might want to transition from the campaign to the multiplier.

MAIN HERO

As much as I liked the idea of following up after the main campaign, by giving the flavor that the fight is never ending, as cronos will always try to escape, castor is my least favorite character, and the fact that you have him on every mission, despite being able to change gods, doesn’t add much on replayability.

So the main idea is to:

  • Add more heroes from the campaigns, and let us choose which hero we want at the start of a game.

  • I want to be able to chose at least Ajax, Amanra, Agamennon, Setna, Reginelf, Brook and Eitri, and Folstag.

  • Then, add a special bonus for each hero, besides their campaign abilities. For example Castor should just be the classical hero, that’s just strong and deals area of damage. Ajax can reduce the damage dealt to nearby units, Amanra can increase the movement speed of foot units nearby, Agamennon the training speed of military units, Brook and Eitri could halve the researching speed of blacksmith upgrades.

  • As with the other blessings, different heroes could be unlocked with the progression of the game. You can keep castor as the only available hero for the tutorial and the last/more story oriented missions.

This would not just allow us to play with our favorite hero, but it would add depth to the planning of strategy, and the choosing of different gods, blessings and heroes.

LET US PLAY AS THE BADDIES

  • Playing solo or coop against the AI is fun, but I would like to see a way also to play a 1v1 or a 2v2, of a series of games when one play for gaia, and another one for cronos.

  • This would be a game mode where who wins gain more blessings from their gods, and get closer to either free cronos, or sealing him for good. Who lose instead retire and play his home map, like in a tournament, and have reinforcements available in its new map.

  • Who play for cronos could get access to villains like Gargarensis, Kamos, Kemsit, the fire giant king, the cronus servant and so on. All of them of course with new passive abilities.

  • You can allow players to preselect the major gods that they want to use, effectively transforming the mode into a built-in tournament mode for playing among friends, across several days.

CHANGE SOME OF FREE UNITS

  • Gaia’s Remnants of Atlantis should not be atlanteans units. Either you give human units depending on the civ you choose (if I’m set, I have little use for turmas that I cannot upgrade) or you give only myth units (which are always strong).

  • Change the 3 starting units to the baseline units for that civ. If I’m playing greeks, I would prefer to have 3 hoplite instead of 3 murmillo, or 4 spearmen, or 2 berserker.

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Well and constructive written feedback from both of you. But I personally wasn’t interested in AotG so no hopes and wishes from my side. Didn’t see any hype for it too just curiosity/interest which is pretty normal for new stuff coming. But again I personally wasn’t interested much and thonk resources and time should have went into a completely new campaign or new civ aswell as new maps/objectives.
Personally much more interested into the Chinese dlc which we still didn’t get any news about…

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I had no expectations and somehow still found myself disapointed.
It really doesn’t do enough different to set itself appart from your average skirmish match except you are forced to play certain gods and potentially even a certain way.
Most of the games fall into two categories, hilariously easy either though rushing your opponents base with cyclopses or just the scenario in general even on Extrem or frustratingly difficult where you have to sit in your base and grind out a win because you are in a 1 vs 2 or even 1vs 3 scenario, especially with Freyer freezing your army all the time.
The buffs sound nice but the game mode is way to stingy with giving you anything that meaningfully affects the way you play, most just feel like standard relic buffs.
The writing was cringe, half the cast feels more like marvel quip machines than actual gods, kind of a waste of voice actors if you ask me, but I of course realise this is personal preference.

A lot of good ideas have been raised in this thread already so I wont repeat them, but I feel the strongest and simultainiously very underutilized part of this mode is the campaign map.

Instead of having like 2 campaign missions and 10 skirmish missions in between I would have loved to see something be done similar to campaign mode in SOVL or chaos wastes in Vermintide 2 or hades or many other rogue likes.

Instead of getting to do all missions, only some limitation as to the order you choose one path.
You get way more meaningful bonuses and the goal is to get a strong enough build to fight the final mission of couse those battles would then be significantly harder to compensate.

Those more meaningful bonuses could be campaign heroes, getting additional starting forces, extra villagers, a free hill fort god power. Ancestors now summons Mummys in addition to ancestor zombies, Change your hero to Amanra, start with a dwarven forge that researches upgrades for free but at a slower rate etc. etc.

Now I understand if this is just not logistically possible, Arena of the gods appears to be more of a passion project of a small subset of the development team and I applaud their efforts, but if manpower is the issue maybe open up these campaing maps to the moding community is the answer? We have very talented people that I am sure would love to get their hands on such a tool and they could then throw in some more whacky bonuses, new good powers even edited campaign missions to break up the monotony of fighting skirmishes over and over. Imagine how much fun people could have if they can create their own campaing trail for others to play.

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One big thing I noticed was the fact that pretty much all the maps were just generic supremecy on a normal map. I mean what about King of the Hill or Regicide?

Not to mention, this highlights how limited the other options are in terms of game modes and maps. Putting a game mode like this upon empire wars, or a Historical skirmish like from the latest AOE 3 expansion (not to be confused with Historical Battles, which also were in AOE 3) would be really interesting.

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Yeah those AOE3 maps are fire.

I’m hoping that AotG finds some love from the community and especially from the devs in the future. I’m still of the opinion that they have touched gold and made it lead, they just need to get the magic back in and make it gold again.

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