I don’t know if you guy’s have just given up on the game, but it has numerous problem’s.
First off, most of the time during 4v4 game’s go out of sync. For the past 2 hours the small community who play AOE DE have been trying to play games only to get sync’d each time a new game is made. not just one person, but the whole entire group who are playing.
This needs to be addressed. We can barely put any games in for this problem.
Secondly;
The path finding in this version is disgusting. Take a CHO WAR game by chance. Legion’s get stuck everywhere, and i’m not even going to mention how the villagers work after building a town center. (oops). It’s stupid. They should continue on building things around them not finish a town center and start gathering random resources. thats not how it worked in the AOE/ROR Classic. the small fan base you have is dwindling down day after day. We have 0 news from you’s.
In closing;
It just seem’s like you have betrayed your customer’s + fan base as nothing has really changed since beta, the same problems persist, etc etc. Quit listening to people that like AoE 2 and want those mechanics. AoE is different from AoE 2 and they just gotta get over that fact. your changing the original game and pissing us off.
I’m having issue’s launching AOE DEFINITIVE EDITION. Something about the Sync. Whenever I click any option it shows. If you guys can address the issues it would be really appreciated. Keep up the great work on the awesome classic Aoe releases. The only games I have an interest for lately. thanks and bye
Not sure to agree with the one on the video, Starcraft Remastered had a new graphical style (based on the old one but still remade), had new voice acting for all non English languages, and changed some sounds.
For AoE1, I made virtual CD (cue/bin) of my AoE CD so I don’t need a CD player for them. For the rest, I would be ok.
GamerZakh isn’t in particular going in-depth into the real problems of AoE:DE. He is simply echoing what everybody else has been saying on the forums, internet and such. Nothing constructive being added to the already present drama.
Saying that this mod will sell better on Windows Store is a huge baseless assumption.
It isn’t rocket science, you know. Active development and release multiple global and popular platforms is the key to reviving a game, if not remaking it. AoE2:HD wasn’t that popular when it first appeared on Steam. It was buggy. Crashed a lot and had all sort of issues. But active development + new content is what had helped winning popularity.
Depends what you mean by “wasn’t that popular”, because AOE2: HD was in the top 10 selling Steam list everyday for almost 3 months after its release regardless of its problems. If you mean infamous, I agree, it did have lots of problems and they continued to develop unlike AoE1 DE.
But AoE1 can’t achieve the same success anyway because it is a much more rudimentary game in its roots. Thats not to say it couldn’t be more successful than it is now though, had they patched and implemented the right things, part of which should be rather easy to implement and among these are:
correct Friend or Foe colors: the current feature in the game only changes the colors on the minimap and also makes the player yellow as like the allies instead of blue. The player should be blue, allies yellow and enemies red, both on minimap and main screen. This is a deal breaker for me, as I can’t tell what’s going on in a team vs team RTS without proper friend or foe colors.
choosing player color
remove fish shadows; fish casting a shadow gives the impression they swim in a pool.
ELO (they were there during beta)
remaining bug fixes
And then there’s probably much harder implementations which require extensive code rework like recorded games or AI or some fixes.
Now the main problem is though the lack of communication from them. I mean maybe these features are too hard to fix, or they have too few people left working on AoE1 DE as they moved to 2 and 3, or maybe they plan to come back to fix it and complete it after they had finished the other two DEs as well, but you don’t see any post or statement from them whatsoever explaining these sort of things.
Last patch they released… nobody new it was in the works except for the occasional people listening to the Thursday AOE stream, they just released that all of a sudden. No official post whatsoever about a pending patch. Are they still working on more patches at the moment or no and why? I found Cysion talking about some of these things in a youtube video for a little known guy from the age community with less than 100 views per video. So they ARE allowed to speak their minds freely, yet they do it in a very wrong way. I know the responsibily is with the PR department, but why not take responsibility and come and post here on the forums making some things clear, it would take like 5 minutes, proper honest and polite conversation between people can take you very far so easily.
If you watch the postmortem analysis of AoE: Online by a MS internal (link bellow)*, you will see how he mentions the very same mistake (among many others) where they did have a plan but didn’t communicate it at all and that was one of the reasons they couldn’t fix that game anymore or fixed it too late. Even the marketed audience of that MMO game didn’t know what was going on. Seems they are making the exact same mistake again and this is what surprises me and disappoints me.
They put a lot of work in this remake unlike other remasters (including Starcraft Remaster) and I don’t agree with GamerZakh on some of his points (I do agree with most of his points though); they changed the graphics completely, it does look nice, they re-recorded the sounds they added some features etc, yet it’s just a shame they have this total lack of communication from any game developer or spokesperson, when much more could be achieved by simply communicating properly. And it is even more worrying when you think this should be training grounds for Age of Empires 4.
Starcraft Remastered had its bugs at release, but at least they communicate and they still release patches month after month 1 year after its release. And we are at 3rd season of their matchmaking system…
I think it’s training ground for AOE II DE release, AOE IV will become something totally new on a new engine from Relic Entertainment. Those developers are on a complete different track and have nothing to do with the AOE DE releases. They only share the same MS project manager.
Further the two genie engines from AOE 1 and 2 differ really a lot, the last being much better of course. Also they underestimated the time necessary to develop a high quality UWP product from the old genie 1 crap. It can be that after they got AOE II DE running up smoothly, because of it’s better engine they will port it for use with AOE I DE.
Let’s see how things evolve further, they will not stop development for sure.
So what? I don’t see a problem with that. A good game doesn’t need a lot of PR. And I’m sure the project manager is not the only one to decide on if it’s a good game. I’m really looking forward to the betas of AOE II DE and IV. The sun is always shining in my AOE never ever land.
Choosing colour isn’t as simple as you list it. AoE classic had same-colour ability to cooperatively control the same civilization. Second, the starting positions are also colour dependant.
As it is now, you’re forced to sequentially fill player slots without gaps or spectators. Otherwise strange things happen to the starting positions. Even if the host (p1) is spectating, it causes trouble.
I joined the last AoE:DE Thursday Stream twice as a player and this could be clearly seen. Joe was host and spectator. In the first game I played, I had an enemy player between me and my teammate. The second time I was isolated and surrounded by two side-to-side enemies.
These kind of things you cannot know as someone who rarely plays. It requires getting into the game rather than just randomly playing a few AI games and perhaps multi player games. GamerZakh’s conclusion is just too shallow. But then again, I doubt his goal is to go in-depth into AoE:DE’s flaws. In general, he is correct. Which is more than enough I guess for average visitors/viewers.
One of my suggestions during the beta was to seperate color choosing of starting locations, I don’t care of starting locations but I care about colors. Anyway, even if they are not seperated, I prefer random craziness in starting locations instead of lack of color choosing (like in Age1?), random starting locations can provide fun moments.
