Despite Sultans Ascend’s success, it was a bizarre decision to not create the campaign based on the new civilizations. Random, almost. I have a suspicion that this is in relation to the production pipeline (separate teams working at the same time), meaning that people create the campaign without access to a finished civilization making it inherently incompatible.
But, this kind of sucks. Consider the following. What if I’m a massive fan of Japanese culture? I buy the DLC, but turns out, the campaign doesn’t cover Japan. So while I can play the civilization, it’s limited to AI or multiplayer. This… is kind of lame. I understand that AoE4’s target audience seems to be mostly multiplayer, but this seems like a missed opportunity.
There is no benefit of doing it the way it has been done. Sultans Ascend was successful, but it got some criticism exactly because it was such a random campaign and one that was lacking the critically significant Crusaders as a playable civilization–something we got later on, in a different DLC. In the patchnotes/reveal blogs since, the developers made the claim that the community was very excited about the Crusaders and that this is why they created Knights of Cross and Rose.
I don’t think that is right, I think they have it backwards. Though people may have been asking for Crusaders to some degree before, just as any civilizations, it wasn’t until the missed opportunity of adding them in Sultans Ascend that really got people riled up for Crusaders.
I fear this might happen again, but I hope to be wrong. If Spain and Aztecs are released next expansion, then I genuinely hope they’ve taken the time to develop campaign that features these brand new civilizations, making the DLC much more thematic.