One big point of contention that divides many users in this forum is the issue of significantly changing legacy civs to make them more historically accurate. While I am a stickler for historical accuracy, these standards only apply to civs added in The Forgotten and beyond. I am of the position that reworking ES civs to correct their mistakes is a slippery slope that will eventually lead to every single original feature of the game being removed or reworked, to the point where it’s functionally not the same game anymore.
Unlike with Minecraft, where you can continue to use an old update (and people still use 1.8 of that game to avoid getting the controversial combat changes), you simply cannot play with old versions of DE. If you want to get legacy civ experiences, you need to use the CD version or HD, which is a massively inferior experience. If legacy civs are irreversibly changed in DE, you have the tradeoff of losing either gameplay QoL and convenience or losing the classic civ experience that has been present for over 20 years. That’s not a reasonable tradeoff, and could easily cost DE the more hardcore players that have played the game since it came out, and like the civs the way they are. Losing such a large chunk of the playerbase will be harmful to DE in the long run, and will likely lead to more and more out-of-place mechanics being introduced, and civs will be more gimmicky to appeal to younger players who like novelty. That will ruin the game’s simplicity, which is part of what made it so fun in the first place.
That is the main reason I am opposed to considerably reworking ES civs.
On the other hand, there is a reasonable argument to be made that the devs have no excuse allowing 20+ year-old historical inaccuracies to remain intact when there is a huge effort to make the game much more historically accurate in general. I actually understand both sides of the argument, and respect both, due to being both a history buff and a purist. It seems very odd to have units like the Woad Raider or the Huskarl in a game that also has units like the Coustillier, which is arguably the single most historically accurate cavalry unit in the game. There does seem to be an odd disconnect that becomes much more apparent the bigger the game gets and the more that new civs outnumber the old ones. There’s a huge emphasis on vigorous research nowadays to make the new civs as historically accurate as possible, and I applaud it, which is why much more egregious examples of modern historically inaccurate civs like the Dravidians massively stand out. The original ES devs seemed to base a lot of their decision-making on pop culture, and it gave many civs historically dubious identities. This can be misleading and even misinforming; if someone wants to learn history from AoE2, they’re going to learn a lot of very wrong things because of the original civs.
While AoE2 is just a game, it’s also a great educational tool, and the presence of massive historical inaccuracies provides significant barriers to that secondary purpose. One might be under the impression that huskarls were indeed Gothic and not Norse like they actually were; unless one is also a Skyrim player, that misconception will likely permeate and color their perception of things until they do proper research. I know that that has been my experience. Similarly, one might assume that the Koreans used war wagons, that were actually Chinese, in battle, when they actually didn’t. Or they might assume that eagle warriors were used widely across American cultures, when they were really just an Aztec thing. Heck, one might assume that the mighty Teutonic Knights preferred to be unstoppable ground troops that took a while to get places, but were tough to stop. Such a person might be surprised to learn that they actually rode horses all the time. In a similar vein, one might question how on Earth the Arabs were able to conquer anything if they had to import all their camels from China and threw away their swords instead of actually swinging them. Historical questions and doubts like that only arise if one approaches AoE2, seeing the meticulous attention to detail as of late, and naively assumes that the entire game has always had that much care put into it and doesn’t think critically as a result.
As you can see, there are two main schools of thought when approaching this issue, and I happen to understand and relate to both. There will inevitably always be a divide when it comes to purism vs historical accuracy, and there is probably no way to adequately placate both.
The best way I can see to satisfy both groups without having to force one to go back to HD is by either providing a way to remain on previous builds instead of being forced to play the updated versions, just like Minecraft, or providing two versions of DE with identical base gameplay, one having legacy civs in it, and the other replacing them with more historically accurate versions. These are the best ways to approach the issue in my opinion, and even then, both sides probably won’t be totally happy.
In any case, I want to know your thoughts on the issue.
