but why do i need to get a mod for something that was a base game feature. DE is meant to be an upgrade, not a downgrade
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That’s a remainder of Forgotten Empires originally just being a mod.
Of course they could do that now but then they would have to maintain many different version of the game at the same time. Which would make every single patch more work to do. Like now they have to put in some extra work to maintain RoR with every patch.
In a perfect world the game would have all possible features, but this is not a perfect world and they don’t have infinite manpower. So would you rather them spend time on keeping multiple version fo the game and make replays compatible or rather make the one version of the game as good as possible?
It’s all a question of priorities.
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they aren’t making that “one version of the game as good as possible” though. they have actively made translations worse. things like the water reworks are subjective things. I don’t think it’s right that they are forced on everyone.
So i would rather they give me an option to play with the state of the game i was happy with, than have to deal with whatever brainfart is included in the current patch
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As I said, I’m in favour of them adding an option to download and play an older version of the game though Steam but I don’t think adding official multi version support within the game is not worth the effort.
How many versions are they supposed to support? Every DLC? Or just original game, last HD patch, last DE patch?
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Every major version like Minecraft is probably a pipe dream, but we should at least have base DE, each DLC patch, and base AoC.
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for balance updates, providing all patches shouldnt be a lot of work (ie just a change of dataset). changes to the engine (ie most bug fixes, pathing fixes, etc) I don’t expect them to provide all versions.
This way you could even play with the latest patches, but with older balance (eg with old-school chinese)
The problem is that old datasets don’t work with the newest version of the game anymore for various reasons.
The problem is that Datasets also code graphics. Like how many frames a walking animation has. So if they change the graphics it brakes older datasets.
Also other things like the “resource” values change which can have effects like you saw in your old safegame that you suddenly had the Khamer farmer bonus out of no where.
Something that wouldn’t be that hard to fix for like one extra dataset (like RoR) but if they have to maintain 10+ datasets it will increase the work load for every single patch for a feature that probably less then 1% of people will use. If more people would use it then it would start splitting the userbase.
Also how would AI work with older datasets? That means they would have to maintain even more version of the AI.
There are so many little things that add up.
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that sounds like incompetence when coding. they remade the game, but just copied all the spaghetti code from '99?
AI can play custom civs reasonably well. this is a non-issue?
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How would you define incompetence when you don’t even know how either game was written (the original or the DE)?
(“spaghetti” doesn’t mean “written a long time ago”, by the by. Old code can be spaghetti code. New code can be spaghetti. It’s a consequence of resource - usually time - compounded by how easy the tooling is, familiarity with the environment, and so on)
It’s not a complex problem the game gives you some crazy error message, how is match making done on any other game in the world that doesn’t have this issue Starcraft 2, Starcraft 1, every other game.
I’ve already proven it’s not the ISP, as I’ve been on other computers completely separate, the Poll error and the matchmaking going to 1 second after it fails is so common that everyone I play with knows all about it.
This is a bug, plain and simple.
The game still run on the same engine, they just heavily improved it over the years.
You could argue that it would likely have been less work to remake the game in a new engine. Sunk cost fallacy. Now they already invested so much in the same engine so now it’s not worth porting it to a modern engine anymore.
But in the end it’s always about priorities. Only a tiny fraction of the user base wants the ability to play with older patches. Yeah many people hate the 3 Kingdoms but they don’t hate the current balance. So they could invest a lot of time/money/effort into adding the feature for the like 10 people that would actually use it.
Almost every scenario has it’s own AI code. That’s not normal skirmish AI.
Many scenarios are also heavily scripted.
Ok go write netcode for a game and you will find out how complicated it is.
Making online play work reliably is one of the biggest challenges in making a game. You have to deal with so many things that can go wrong and then you also have to deal with random delay and package loss.
Some games also completely fall apart when your ping is too high. They apparently only tested with like 100 ping max but they are completely unplayable when your friend is on the other side of the planet. I know enough people that have to use a VPN to be able to play certain games reliable because of connection issues with their ISP.
I ran into so many different networking issues with so many different games over the years. It’s almost never as simple as there being a small bug in the code.
But anyway. I’m obviously not against them fixing bugs. I’m just saying it’s probably a lot harder to do then you imagine. It is very likely not just 1 simple error in the code. It could be as bad then 100 fixes might just reduce the issue by 10%, who knows.
See, you’re looking at this the wrong way. You are selling a product, regardless of whether it’s new, ported, or updated. I expect that the product should work; otherwise, I should be refunded all monies spent. Unfortunately customers have been treated with such distane by game developers these days it’s annoying. Releasing games pre-maturely before they are ready to be sold, and riddled with crazy amounts of bugs.(This is not directed at AOE 2 Developers just in general)
The online play “Netcode” works perfectly fine. Once you’re in a game, it’s fine; it’s the matchmaking. This is the bug. Make every excuse you want, it doesn’t excuse poor QC/development and lack action of resolution.
The fact that the bug report is a “Known” issue means that this is NOT something on my end and certainly something in the code.
What would keep customers happy is transparency, for instance what bugs are targeted to be fixed in the next release, what updaates etc.
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I didn’t want to blame you for the issues. I was trying to explain why it’s not that trivial to fix.
I fully agree with this. I think it’s a general Microsoft/Xbox policy to be very quiet about development and never to share what they are working on.
I wish Forgotten Empires/Words Edge would be more like the Paradox studios that share what they work on very early in development and they don’t shy away from showing things that will be totally reworked later. They do weekly dev diaries over a year before release and they keep updating players regularly what they are working on and what kinda bugs and issues they are focusing on.
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