Cutscenes’ drawings (not even close to one) has been quite dull since release of DE. I’m sure we all remember how well the ‘vintage’ sketches look. Below are few of them. Most campaigns have their own styles of drawing. I really love how some of them look rushing… like you suddenly have an idea, you quickly sketch it out; pencil drawing & charcoal drawing - astounding and very soulful, a little rusty but suit for age like medieval time, instead of cartoonish and comic look.
I didn’t complaint at the time, but couldn’t expected they would take to this level.
Here, you can tell how diversely compared to each other
Filthydelphia has, for years, dubbed his scenarios as campaigns… using the terms interchangeably at times. For example, in 2020, he told me in this forum that one of his “campaigns” I tried was a “... single scenario campaign.” It really doesn’t seem to me like they lied or intentionally mislead. See these two old Filthydelphia threads from years ago:
And I don’t think anyone ever asked in those old threads, "Why are you calling them campaigns? That is misleading and false" (…but I, honestly, haven’t read through them with a fine-toothed comb recently).
I guess when it comes time to pay for them, that is when the semantics of things becomes problematic. Understandably so. But I think Filthy’s own words helps show that there wasn’t any intentional malice about the DLC. Marketing probably just went along with his phrasing, because I’m guessing it probably wasn’t a problem for the 25 years preceding V&V DLC, including with ‘The Battles and Conquerors’ campaign FloosWorld mentioned above
This is fair. I’m curious, though… is it as easy to bring a “single scenario campaign” from AoE2:HD over into AoE2:DE like it is bringing a Random Map Script (.rms) file over? With .rms it is, literally, copying/pasting the file into the proper DE folder. Would be interesting to know if “single scenario campaigns” are virtually this easy to “port” to DE
If it is fairly complex or cumbersome, though, I think there is some inherent value in having his previously released scenarios ported to the DE engine, since the graphical and audio upgrades alone are pretty stark. Yes, 14(?) of the scenarios were previously released in DE for free (which I can see how it makes the DLC cost a tougher pill to s w a l l o w so i am just curious
I’m okay with it, too. Partly because it is where I’d intuitively look in the UI to reach them, but also because each scenario could be considered a neatly-wrapped campaign; a sequence of events to reach a goal. Even the dictionary definition seems to back this up:
campaign /kăm-pān′/
1. A series of military operations undertaken to achieve a large-scale objective during a war. 2. An operation or series of operations energetically pursued to accomplish a purpose.
Just because the multiple steps to reach the campaign goal happen in one scenario instead of 5 or 10 scenarios, that doesn’t disqualify it as a campaign, imo.
The more the “campaign” naming issue is discussed, it really feels like semantics. Some prefer it one way, while others prefer (or are at least okay with) the other way. And, technically, neither is probably wrong I don’t personally see why the word ‘campaigns’ couldn’t or shouldn’t be used to describe the scenarios as long as the detailed Steam description and Marketing clarifies things… which they do. But due to semantics, I know that there are probably some people who would never agree with using ‘campaign’ to describe scenarios.
True. I think I always assumed campaigns were multi-scenario endeavors, but I can see how the two varieties should/could co-exist as campaigns… mainly as long as the Marketing clarifies things. Yes, it’s not ideal that the Marketing should have to clarify, but when both are housed under the Campaigns button in the UI, and both leverage the same type of campaign map selection screen as a starting point… along with other stuff I brought up above… it makes sense to me that Filthy’s scenarios could be named ‘campaigns’… or ‘single scenario campaigns’. (I actually thing the latter is a pretty good moniker)
I’d like us all to now to start referring to “scenarios” or “single-scenario campaigns” as “cats”, and “campaigns” as tigers
V&V DLC was 19 cats, not 19 tigers
I can’t really disagree with this, especially if porting scenarios from AoE2:HD to AoE2:DE is pretty simple. If they tried and failed to sell enough widgets at the inflated price in the market economy of supply and demand we live in, though, then they will probably adjust the price/product accordingly in the future and re-think future downloadable contents (this forum filter is beyond hopeless. It seriously wouldn’t let me type “DLC” there)
They often reflect reality, though. At ESPN’s website, I would hope to not find MLB stuff in the NFL section, or basketball stuff in the the soccer area. There’s a reason for categories, buttons, menus. Plus, the V&V scenario page has the same look & feel as the regular campaign page. I just don’t see it as a huge stretch to classify them as campaigns. At least they nestled the ‘single-scenario campaigns’ nicely in the upper-left to differentiate them a bit,…
I remember porting old scenarios from AoK Heaven, and it’s as easy as putting the files in their respective folders, and you can play the old map with no issue. Thing is, all the levels included in Victors and Vanquished were already in DE, none were ported over.
Yes, he always specified they were one scenario only. But in the case of V&V and Historical Battles, I think it’s best to call them “scenario collections” rather than campaigns. A campaign is supposed to have a cohesive story, a beginning and an end. A first level, and a final level.
What is Historical Battle’s first scenario? Bukhara? Nothing points to this being the case, except that it’s chronologically the earliest. You can play them in any order, and not be confused due to their disconnectedness. Compare this to El Cid for example, where Brother against Brother is indicated as the first map, and Reconquista as the sixth and last.
I think single-scenario pack is a campaign (so I corrected it in my summary now). The first single-scenario pack was “Battle of the Conquerors” in AoC, maybe ES published it as a campaign in the “Campaign” tab, as Fandom wiki listed. That’s also appliable to “Battle of the Forgotten” and “V&V”.
(However I wanted to see Nobun4g4 as a storied campaign )
The Ghenghis Khan tiger has to be my favorite. I know I’m probably a normie lol.
Practically speaking the difference this time is that “campaign” was “teased” weeks before the reveal. Before if if campaign was used, the dlc/expansion was announced and being described in detail. if campaign was used to describe a pack of scenarios, it was made clear with a sentence. It’s one thing to fumble around and say “um it’s a cat, like 500lbs, orange, apex predator, paws as big as dinner plates”. Regardless of how you feel about a tiger being described using the word “cat”, you are correctly understanding what’s being described. You aren’t spending weeks thinking one thing has been communicated when it seems something else had been intended to be communicated.
Now I don’t suscribe to the cat/tiger analogy, I only used it to discuss someone else’s line of reasoning. I’d liken the situation more to someone trying to describe an airplane as “a bird that doesn’t flap and it’s the size of a building and is made of metal”. A plane isn’t and has never been a bird but presumably you were doing your best. And then when you set up your navigation and your two options are fruits and birds, the few airplanes you had to categorize get lumped with the birds, cause they’re definitely more similar to birds than fruits, but I wouldn’t think now that airplanes are now the same as birds. So a few weeks before the announcement we’re teased a “bird focused” dlc, but then it’s actually airplanes.
Tangent aside, what to do moving forward??? I don’t think lotw, dotd, doi were teased beforehand, tho I may be wrong. I know tmr wasnt. People did some steam sleuthing and suspected DLCs were coming prior to at least doi and tmr. RoR wasn’t teased per se. There was some confusion about exactly what it’d be early on, but it was also clear it wasn’t a “normal” dlc.
Unless I’m mistaken this is the first dlc that was teased ahead of time. Seems like a bad move in retrospect. unless you’re 110% sure what you’re teasing will give people the correct expectations, probably just best to say something super vague like “exciting announcement”.
Imagine if you will for a moment if TMR had been teased as either “Asian focused” or “European focused”.
The biggest problem I have with this dlc is that these scenarios were better off as custom, because the duration is just over the top, the difficulty is questionable, I’m a casual player who loves to play on standard difficulty, I tried the custom ones and couldn’t even follow the amount of objectives, side quests, rules, size of map etc.
I know these scenarios are complex and a lot of effort and work was put into them, I really respect that and the creator. He did an outstanding work and I thank him for sharing all that stuff with us in the first place. Everyone should and must only be constructive and respectful when giving his opinion on this work. He deserves this as a person who clearly loves this game just as we all do.
My point is that these scenarios really strive away from the original vanilla feel, the scenarios should have in AoE2De. The designs are way to complex for the engine and mechanics the game has. It tries to much to make inovations when in reality everything kinda looks out of place and feels forced. If it was a typical campaign ( I hoped for Japanese, Chinese and Korean campaigns ) I would be happy. If it was standard scenarios that are built like the historical battles we already have, I would also be really satisfied. But these ones, are not my cup of tea. I am glad that someone can enjoy. It is not something for me.
How to move on? Do not call V&V an AOE2 Expansion for starters. It should be called a scenario-pack, like the animated portraits packs and be priced accordingly.
It shouldn’t be called an AOE2 expansion as it just sets the bar for future expanions way too low.
Compare this expansion with the first AOE2 expansion The Conquerors:
4 new campaigns (each with different voice actors, unique images and music)
5 new civs
New meso-american architecture set
11 new units for multiplayer
26 new technologies for multiplayer
tons of balance changes
New game modes: King of the Hill, Defends the Wonder, Wonder Race
New maps such as Real World, Special maps, ES maps
Physical products such as CD-cases and manuals.
Historical Battles ( ← THIS IS PRETTY MUCH ALL V&V HAD TO OFFER)
It’s not a feeling, it is clearly an all-time low.
Seems the number of “illiterate, toxic, low-income, pvp-only, new-civ-only, not-the-target-audience, not-able-to-read-descriptions, do-not-care-about-the-lives-of-modders” people keeps growing.
I have never thought about that. So, Dynasties of India, Dawn of The Dukes, Lords of the West and Mountain Royals, together, offer more content than AoC for less money.
I’ve said this before, but to move on the devs have to take these simple steps:
Apologize for V&V and all the things that went wrong, from the announcement, to the recycling of content, and lack of new assets, and all that.
Add new assets: skins for heroes and mounted samurai, a proper icon instead of reusing the multiplayer one, a map different from Historical Battles, campaign slides with new drawings.
Change V&V to make the content match the price. So, pick one of these:
A) Reduce the price to something more appropriate for a 5 scenario pack.
B) Add more scenarios until the overall content is worth $13.
Depends on what precisely you mean by “teased,” but by my reckoning, Return of Rome was teased for over 6 months, although very badly. They revealed the cover art for the next DLC, that it was going to be called Return of Rome and would have AoE1 content in AoE2, but didn’t give a date or any other info. They promised to “share more details in the not too distant future, so stay tuned,” and then didn’t say anything substantial for 6 months, meanwhile suspending people for posting or talking about leaks. Skim any of the old megathreads about this, and you’ll see how annoyed everyone was with the lack of promised information. A couple weeks before release, we finally get a trailer that shows little more than the leaked stuff many of us had seen months ago. There was also a huge controversy about adding Romans generally, as well as initially being unable to play them in ranked, etc. All this hype and secrecy for an underwhelming product that, like V&V, still failed to satisfy much of its target audience.
As a reminder, most of the things that people are saying about V&V about it being a lazy cash grab, recycling of old assets/having people pay for something they thought should have been free, etc, were said as passionately and more often about RoR. Even the bit about people thinking they were misled/lied to because of the steam description, since there was no mention that the original campaigns were not ported or (IIRC) about whether crossplay was available. So many people went into it assuming it might have these features. Not saying any of this to justify V&V, but to provide perspective. Apart from 0 Assets and limited scope, V&V is far from DE’s first miss on a DLC.
People are understandably upset about V&V, but IMO nothing before or since even comes close to the communication failures of Return of Rome. Absolute disaster. V&V was communicated poorly, but at least within a compressed window. Better to wait a month and be disappointed and move on, than to wait the better part of a year and be disappointed. Here’s hoping they have something better around the corner.
They most always tease DLCs, DOI was teased and was well done, the last DLC that I was well and truly hyped for. Shows you what they can do when they care.
Again I thought previous DLCs had more ready when they were announced. For example when we first heard about LotW and DOI I recall us knowing what the civs would be, sometimes rough draft of bonuses, etc. Not necessarily EVERYTHING, but more than a vague one sentence. Tho, my recollection might not be accurate.
Reason I bring up Conquerors is because it was very well recieved, despite the price. People liked it, it brought tons of upgrades to the base game.
This thread is about how to move on. My point is just make the expansions have real content in it for everyone. V&V is priced like previous AOE2 DE expansions and is also being marketed as one (kind of), hence why people are upset. 71% of all reviews are negative on Steam currently. Conquerors has 88% positive on Meta Critic despite the price.
Comparing the pricing is quite silly anyways since it was different age with physical distribution etc. $57 is alot but it varied between stores and countries. I got mine much cheaper. And of course people took the pricing into consideration when they made reviews back then, just as they do now. The important thing is how much perceived value it had.
if you don’t like something, don’t buy it. Businesses will respond by making something people will buy.
This is the first DLC I haven’t purchased. I bought the prior civ DLC’s to support the developers: I haven’t even played a game as Rome despite owning it. I’m still a bit disappointed by the Polish cav not really living up to their reputation and instead just getting shredded by arrows. I don’t like the mass = power design of the Monaspa or the AoE3-themed big-buttons such as Flemish revolution.
There’s so many good ideas on this forum for civs, mechanics, etc. Definitely could’ve done something less disappointing.
I suppose RoR was teased, tho it was so confusing I don’t think people, after we learned what it was, thought “Hey, this isn’t what we’d been promised” but rather the reaction seemed to be “ok, I guess that’s what they meant”.
Best I can describe the difference between RoRs tease and V&Vs tease.
only porting over a fraction of the campaigns…yeah, I don’t really get it. I wasn’t enraged by that, but I really can see where people are coming from. If you’re porting over the game, you’d think you’d port over the ENTIRE game. I don’t think people being upset about that is unreasonable.
Crossplay, I honestly don’t know where people got that idea from. I think that was just wishful thinking that got dashed. “Aoe1 in Aoe2 Engine” communicates to me aoe1 content + aoe2 engine, not aoe1 content + aoe2 content + aeo2 engine. Perhaps there is some specific tease that I didn’t hear/see/recall but to the best of my knowledge and reasoning, crossplay was not promised.
I think V&V has been less competently communicated than ROR, but but I do concede the point, if you’re going to incompetently tease something, it’s better that accurate info comes out a few weeks after, and not months after. I personally dis-liked V&V’s tease more, but I concede there are some good points going the other way.
I don’t personally see why the word ‘campaigns’ couldn’t or shouldn’t be used to describe the scenarios as long as the detailed Steam description and Marketing clarifies things… which they do. But due to semantics, I know that there are probably some people who would never agree with using ‘campaign’ to describe scenarios.
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