The new DLC “Chronicles: Battle for Greece” is NOT made by Forgotten Empires!
Forgotten Empires is/was busy working on Age of Mythology Retold and the upcoming Immortal Pillars DLC.
The new DLC is made by Capture Age, who hired the creators of the mod Rome at War.
This DLC does NOT take any development resources away from normal AoE2DE DLC.
Given the focus on Campaign content in Chronicles: Battle for Greece, alongside the fact that we won’t be adding the new Civs (Achaemenids, Athenians, and Spartans) to Ranked, it seems important to mention that this does not signal a departure from the types of DLC we’ve been delivering in the past that have been reliably adding new Civs for competitive play. In the case of Chronicles: Battle for Greece, we really wanted to try some unconventional things with gameplay, play around with the Tech Tree, and try some new things with Naval that weren’t going to harmonize with the balance in Ranked. So we make choices like this in order to (a) make room for that kind of creativity, (b) respect balance in Ranked, and (c) look for diversity in the types of content we can create for you. A little more about this, from a different angle –
The alternative to this DLC would have been no DLC or something like Victors and Vanquished again. I think we can all agree that this would have been much worse.
Sometimes. But even if they don’t, it’s not immediately clear that Forgotten Empires were not involved in making this. From the announcement page you posted,
We have been thrilled to work with CaptureAge to present Battle for Greece
That sentence makes it sound like a collaboration between CaptureAge and Forgotten Empires – and it appears well before the part that says it’s made by CaptureAge:
Created by CaptureAge, a team of Age of Empires veterans, Chronicles is a series of DLCs set in the ancient world
Later on, they say things like (emphasis mine)
Separating the three new civilizations from the standard balance pool has allowed us to develop fun and creative mechanics, a fresh take on the standard technology tree, and overhaul certain parts of the game such as naval gameplay.
and
We’ve worked with our partners at CaptureAge who have a deep understanding and interest in the competitive scene – they’ve been supporting it since before the Definitive Editions released!
Now, of course, you can argue that the “we”/“us” here is World’s Edge, not Forgotten Empires, and that is probably true – but the post is by the very vaguely named “Age DE Team”, and it’s about AoE2, so it’s reasonable to assume it refers to the usual AoE2 development team, i.e. Forgotten Empires. World’s Edge isn’t mentioned explicitly until quite far through the article.
So TLDR, stop assuming that people who disagree with you are stupid.
So the key question is, will AOE2 always have to share development resources with AOM?
The player group of AOE2 is obviously not the same as AOM. If Forgotten Empires wants to operate both AOE2 and AOM simultaneously in the future, they will either increase manpower or hand over the operation of AOM to someone else. Otherwise, it is very reasonable for AOE2 players to be dissatisfied and disappointed.
Really saddened how they treated Age of Noob just for voicing his honest opinion.
They haven’t changed much. They have deleted all the negative posts on sub-reddit.
Let me rephrase it for you - there wouldn’t be any DLC because of the Microsoft bad management. I’m not interested in the classic era at all, so I’m not buying this and have to wait another six months for the next DLC pack. It’s exactly like no new content being added for me and it’s the publishers fault (Microsoft) for not handling the AoM developement better.
Given Viper shared his disappointment about AoE Mobile on stream and his video is still online, I doubt AoN was sanctioned for voicing his honest opinion.
The sub-reddit is not operated by the devs. Yes, Cysion is a mod there but he said he only removes spam there when it gets reported:
It changes a lot because the Insider Program is something anyone can sign up for. You sign a NDA and gain a higher level of trust.
The most likely case is that AoN accidentally shared information covered by his NDA.
It was Microsoft/Words Edges mistake to think otherwise.
They should have put it in the title of the news.
“Capture Age presets this new DLC” kinda headline. And then start of with something like “While Forgotten Empires was busy working on Age of Mythology Retold …”
There was a lot of valid criticism because of the quality, quantity and the price of the DLC and most criticism was voiced after the release.
I assume that people that say things like they were “betrayed” or something like that are stupid.
You are free to not like the DLC but you can’t claim that this DLC is the reason why there is no Medieval DLC this year.
Yes.
It is also sharing development resources with AoE4 and AoE3DE.
But after Immortal Pillars it will likely take another full year until the next AoMR DLC so there is enough time to work on AoE2DE DLC.
Also I assume that Capture Age will help them out with Medieval DLCs too.
But maybe I’m wrong on that one.
They moderate Reddit more then here?
Is bad management for you making developers work on something you don’t like?
What is the issue with AoMR development?
From the looks of it it went very well. The release went much better then AoE1DE, AoE2DE, AoE3DE and even AoE4.
Small amount of bugs, little complains about changed game mechanics, pretty solid balance at release and so on.
Do you remember how many bugs the 4K pack for AoE2DE had on release?
Seems to me like they’re getting stretched too thin, they’re practically working on 3 separate games or maybe even 4 (idk about AoE3). If they can bring the CaptureAge guys for more Chronicles then great, but this might impact the more normal DLCs going forward, unless some other team gets to work on Retold. But then again I don’t know much about game development…
Oh, you can assume whoever you like is stupid. I can’t stop you. I was only making a suggestion.
What makes you think I don’t like the DLC? I don’t know if I like it yet, since I haven’t played it.
I agree that’s not a great claim. But I think one could reasonably claim that, if World’s Edge (or whoever makes these decisions) had allocated their staff, resources and funding differently, there could have been a medieval DLC this year instead of BFG. I guess you’ll say that it’s not possible because the AoE2 devs were busy with AoMR instead – but again, I expect staff, resources and funding could have been allocated differently on that as well. I don’t know of any particular reason that the AoE2 devs had to be the ones to work on AoMR.
Of course, I don’t have much insight into the inner workings of Microsoft/World’s Edge/Forgotten Empires/whatever, so maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps you do have that insight – you certainly speak like you work for them sometimes, but I don’t think you actually do.
Don’t think anyone is upset because they felt the devs are going in this direction and assumed that means no more future civ DLCs. Most people including myself are upset that content like this DLC is following Victors and Vanquished, implying no new content for the multiplayer community for a very long time. Moreover this is not even aoe 2 content. Its something experimental and resembles Ror/aoe 1 more than aoe 2.
For 2 months, so many people were hyped about the steamdb changes, discussing potential civs, units etc and in the end it turns out its nothing like that. Would have been perfectly fine if it was a regular DLC with 2 or 3 ranked civs and a bunch of campaigns in November for the 5th anniversary and then followed by Battle of Greece announced for release in Feb or March. No one would have questioned or criticized this DLC.
For those who play multiplayer, this DLC and V&V are as good as having no new DLC.
The V&V idea was not bad by itself, the execution that was really bad.
Getting mods and custom scenarios and turning them into official content is a good idea, but doing so needs a good level of polish and redesign to match the game.
I never played any of his custom scenarios, so I was one of the primary targets of this DLC, but people that played it said that they where all the same, nothing was changed or improved, it even had the same bugs.
And my god, there were so many bugs on these missions. From bad design, clunky mechanics, bug everywhere and all kinds of lack of polish made this DLC very low quality.
Hope they learned that there is a minimal threshold of quality the content must have. (looks like BfG learned from it)
