I missed this part originally, thx @Apocalypso4826 for quoting it.
I knew there was a long period of no info, but I didn’t realize people were suspended for discussing leaks. I joined the forum right around when RoR was released.
You might be convincing me RoR’s tease was worse actually.
True, RoR also recycled content, like the Centurion and Legionary which were scenario editor units. And the new gamemode was AoE1 but with formations and gates, pretty much. But at least the DLC brought a new civ and campaigns, plus you can also play the Romans in multiple custom campaigns if you bought it. Overall, not a lot of effort, practically only worth it if you’re a campaign player.
V&V, though? Even more blatant recycling, and extreme lazyness.
So, I have to partially object to this. cramming one game into another game, even a related one, can’t have been easy.
RoR is kind of a schroedingers value proposition. Probably the most technically challenging DLC to create, and more content than conquerors, but nobody was asking for it, and it mostly already existed in aoe1de.
Low technical effort? No.
Low artistic effort?..I can see that.
Low value?..your mileage will definitely vary.
Sure, it’s a different type of frustration, so pick your poison, but the common theme is a high expectation vs. a disappointing reality. I was so annoyed with the whole RoR thing that I would frankly prefer more frequent communication that sometimes needs correcting than months of radio silence. Maybe after that debacle they thought that communicating more often - even innaccurately - would have been a step up. But YMMV, as they say. Unfortunately they seem to lean towards the worst of both worlds - infrequent communication that is also not very helpful.
In some ways this is a good comparison, although I think overly flattering to RoR. In terms of “AoE1 content existing within AoE2,” yes, that initial statement turned out to be highly accurate, but that’s such a low bar given how much possible variance there was in implementation and how RoR was aiming at multiple targets. When your precision falls below a certain level and lots of important details at play, you can’t even meaningfully be accurate.
Like even in terms of the final product being described accurately, that’s quite a stretch. You can make a very similar case that buyers of RoR were lied to, at least by omission of key statements like whether it had the original campaigns. This wasn’t in the steam description at all until after thousands of people bought it and complained, so they added it to the description later and promised to port some of the old campaigns.
I agree that this is wishful thinking - and its not something I expected. However even paying slight attention to Reddit/the Forums at the time would have shown that a lot of people were curious about this possibility and some people were specifically requesting it. Meaning that a competent comms team should have gotten ahead of the issue, if only to say that it would not be a feature. Having participated in the RoR discussions, it was kind of the Wild West in terms of how people thought or hoped it might be implemented. Uncharted territory vs. the more or less standard recipe of civs + campaigns. So additional communication was needed to set expectations, otherwise people were inevitably going to fill in the information gaps with their own desires. Then when they bought the DLC and were disappointed, the same arguments got trotted out about how “all the haters are leaving negative reviews because they can’t read.” A good company will communicate so effectively that even “dumb” people can understand. A not-so-good company will communicate so vaguely that everyone can project their desires onto that thing, and then call the buyers stupid when their expectations are inevitably subverted.
This is a nitpick, but I believe you mean “suspended,” not “banned,” given the fact that I am still around and kickin’ on this forum.
I think that’s where the difference between accuracy and precision comes in. So imprecise and you aren’t saying anything at all. Semantics aside tho, yeah. There needs to be some minimum accuracy and some minimum precision. RoR was inadequately precise, V&V inadequately accurate.
So dug into this a bit more…
As teased “We’ll be bringing AoE:DE into the AoE2:DE engine”. Seems to imply the entirety of the game to me. And per the wiki, Adam Isgreen made these comments shortly after RoR was first teased, ‘The intention is “to have all the content of Age of Empires and Age of Empires II accessible to players from the same place.”’. Now “intentions” aren’t “guarantees”. Unlike with V&V and the three-ish weeks, I can imagine RoR changed at some point in those six months the campaigns were dropped. So perhaps not a LIE but they definitely should have communicated the, what I assume to have been a change in plans, when it happened. Is it lie of omission, I guess it depends on if the intent was to deceive, but 100% not a good look anyway you slice it.
Agreed. This is different than if they’d just said “exciting news” and someone was wildly speculating. I don’t think cross-play was promised, but I don’t think it was crazy to speculate.
I kept my expectations low because of the lack of info, but I wouldn’t disagree.
I’d add I’d tried the same with V&V. I didn’t assume that there would be campaigns, only that the content would “focus” on campaigns. That did not come to pass.
you’re right. I fixed it. thx
At least a few things missing from this list:
$62.98 according to the RRP of $34.95 on Microsoft’s website, and a random inflation calculator I found.
I was hoping to find the RRP in GBP, but failed. My recollection is it was no more than £20, which with inflation is £36.39 now, equivalent to $45.86, which is way less than the $62.98 I calculated above. I guess that’s because GBP and USD have varied relative to each other in the past 24 years. (Or maybe I’m misremembering the original price.)
Either way, yes, The Conquerors was way more expensive than any of DE DLCs.
Being extremely hopeful, maybe they are secretly cooking something big for AoE2.
Clearly V&V needed 1 or 2 dev at most to make. So the rest of the devs must be doing something.
Even the DLC icon is reused from multiplayer icon in the menu
Maybe Icon DLCs and V&V were just meant for constant supply of money for paying wage while they are working on the next “actual” project.
Internally, V&V is listed as DLC6, but Mountain Royals is listed as DLC4. So likely they are working on something much more intensive, and this was intended to be smaller in scope.
That’s the hope. The complete non-involvement of the graphics department with V&V either implies that they’ve working on something else, or…that there just isn’t much of a graphics department at all. I hope it’s the first one, but the low rate of new model additions in the last 2 years makes me think that the “graphics team” is just one guy working part time.
Is DLC 5 not the Icon Packs?
True, even though they just ported assets over, it sure took them a lot of time and effort. I didn’t complain when they released it, but I still think it was pretty unnecessary. AoE1 and 2 are pretty much the same game, only the latter is way better, and the former can’t seem to be revived no matter how many times they try.
When you intend a product to simply be an easy and cheap cash-grab, it does badly.
The only thing I can think of is a DLC like the old ones, with more civs.
For what it’s worth, Temujin was a lot better. Couple odds and ends nitpicks but overall much better.
What they need to do is just update this dlc with new assets then maybe people would forgive them. The next move to get me interested is unknown or lesser known. I’m bored of the Viking/Japanese because it is akin to zombies in games and movies. I really enjoyed the Dynasties of India , African Kingdoms, Rise of Rajas because it was something new for me.
No, it’s just “missing”. People did try to check if it was the icons, but it’s not.
Also if the icon packs were DLC 5 then where does RoR fit? Short answer, it does not. Only larger DLCs seem to count.
Ah, good to know. RoR is basically a mod though; it has its own data/game files in the pompeii folder, so unlike the other DLCs it’s not purely additive to the base game apart from the Roman civ. So if I had to choose between “official mod” or “DLC” to classify it internally, I would go for the former, although it’s both.
But it’s plausible that “DLC 5” is a longer-term project that isn’t ready for primetime. If so, hopefully it’s more “community-inspired” in the sense of adding things that players have been suggesting for a long time. Would do a lot to redeem the less-than-fantastic performance of their most recent offering.
I think the most obvious reason is the simplest.
V&V obviously didn’t take long to make so it finished before whatever they want to do next.
We know they will make more DLC so that’s hardly a surprise.
V&V didn’t have any new code or assets so those teams certainly have been working on others things already for a long time, not like they got 3 months of free vacation while V&V was made.
Internally? I don’t say this confrontationally but where are you getting that from? Genuinely curious. Game files?
Seems reasonable to me.
I’m guessing it’s a more “normal” DLC, or a bigger one than that. As my guess would be that the devs think it will take a while to complete (for example, campaigns take the longest time of any part of a DLC).
I’d put money on it being something the size/scope of DoI, likely based around China given other bits of information.
I don’t know the full details, as I didn’t go digging myself. But it was either game files or steam files. Either way, it’s internal.
I’m still mad that the RoR assets are different size than AoE2DE. I was in the scenario editor and thought to myself damn these would be so cool to add to make cities more “alive”. What that means is that cities are their contemporaries but also their antiquities. If I were to see another Roman scenario, I would love to see some of the RoR buildings incorporated.