Enchanted Grove Removal

Age of Empires IV IV - Discussion
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I was very sad today to see that the Enchanted Grove was removed. I first hoped that it was a fools day joke, but it seems like this is real. I was sooo sad to see the enchanted grove picture with the message “The enchanted stag bids farwell” and in the background there was this majestic creature giving a sad look.

I loooooooved that Biome. It was my favorite by far. I was so happy to see that it was added and that was easily the most exciting thing for the season 4 update.

Plus I didn’t get the enchanted stag kill achievement somehow even though I killed him multiple times, but somehow it didn’t register, so I never got that beautiful stag statue…

I understand that some people don’t like it for ranked games. Fine, I’ll accept that, maybe remove it from ranked games then. I feel like long term that’s anyway a good feature to have: More gimmicky/fun biomes should be excluded from ranked.

Please give us enchanged grove fans the option to get it back!

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what the heck is wrong with u man

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Good riddance.

Next time add more diverse gaia everywhere instead of a stupid magical biome that has no business being in an AoE game.

If the plan was always to remove enchanted grove after 1 season that’s even worse. There goes all the dev LOE down the drain.

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@EricGonzalezM @OyaG0
I am going to humbly ask you to tone down the comments.

Thank you.

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It was a controversial feature. Quite a few people didn’t like it.

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at least they were humble enough to remove it.

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quite many even, to the point people would leave games just because of it 11

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it was good idea only the blue filter make the people uncomfortable next time make it without filters change the grass colour for example that exprience should be a lesson to devs what not to do.Remove the filter and change the colour of the grass instead

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they are devs, this is something they should already have figured before adding the filter.

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I’m just thankful that they removed it from the game!

I really hope the devs will introduce more GAIA, UI with images, improved unit animations and textures.

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Finally, a step in the right direction. Since they can do Enchanted grove, they should easily fix the washed out lighting and textures, return it to when they showcased us their “Alpha state”.

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Alpha Footage

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Now

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I agree on everything…

Yes, when they showed it it seemed more realistic than it ended up being (although I would have liked to see it set in the twentieth century)…

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I completely agree with you, OP. I very much miss that biome, and honestly it was probably my favorite. I don’t see any reason to remove it from custom games entirely either.

I was likewise annoyed when they removed the former hardest AI with a cheating replacement, and was very glad when they rolled that back to just add cheating AI as new, separate difficulty levels rather than removing a setting.

I really wish they would do the same here. For those who don’t like having it in the quick match pool because it’s such a different tone? Cool, makes sense. I get why people wouldn’t want it there. But I really miss the option for having it in custom games. It was so cool!

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I thought the Enchanted Biome was possible the worst waste of developer time and money that could have happened. Would have much rather of seen more maps, new civs, new customization for armies, or variations to gaia, wolves, and boars… but no - we got ENCHANTED BIOME. It literally blinded my eyes on my ultra bright, 4k monitor… just horrific.

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Captura_de_pantalla_1416
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Lets use pretier screenshots to compare promotional fotage to in game one shall we ? :slight_smile:

(btw, this is not from the campaign , its all made by me)

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I’m seeing a lot of hate in these comments, which doesn’t really make sense to me. If people hate the biome so much, why don’t they just… not play with it???

Everyone saying they wasted developer time making it - honestly, I really liked having a fantasy option for biome. If you really think it was a waste of time, then the only thing that could possibly make it more of a waste is removing it entirely.

Take it out of any rotations, and just leave it as an option for custom games. No reason to undo the work you’ve done. If people don’t like it, they don’t have to use it.

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I do miss that biome. Contrary to most of the weirdly polarized comments here I think it only became a waste of time/resources after removing it. The simplest fix was to not allow it in online games if people were that salty about an aesthetic. I only used it on custom matches anyway. People love to gatekeep and impose ridiculous standards on everyone else :man_shrugging:

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Agree 100% that was never related to AoE…

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I also liked it. It was fun, especially the black relics. It reminded me of a WoL scenario (Aoe3: Wars of Liberty MOD) where there was a headless horseman, or the from the Moon, something fun and varied among the many historical maps. Of course, by then there were already enough maps in Aoe3, and WoL added even more, some fantasy or fantastic elements weren’t bad.

On the other hand, it was an optional biome. If you didn’t want it, you didn’t use it. I think the biggest fear of some players was believing that since it was one of the first new biomes, there were no longer going to be real maps, or that magical creeps were even going to be invented as normal.

But hey, it’s been a year and a half, 5 seasons, and we’re good, new types of autogenerated maps have continued to come out and up to 2 new civs. I imagine that just like LoL did with certain special events, like URF, they want to do the same with some biomes. In fact, when it came out they announced that it was just a temporary event (February 16th - March 29th)

Enchanted Groove Limited Time
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Of course, due to the beauty of it, in the future it would be fun if they released it again. Of course, the Magical Deer could give more meat or some bonus for hunting it, I remember that they gave you an icon if you hunted one in this biome, but then, nothing more, which left much to be desired. Maybe it was a nod that you shouldn’t hunt animals just because they’re pretty, but anyway, it was also cute as Eyecandy (In fact, they could even put that in his description, “enchanted deer is an endangered species, hunting it will give you the same meat as a deer.”, it would be funny).

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In AoE Online you have thematic maps according to the event that is happening at that moment, for example, you have the headless horseman on halloween event and even missions with him…