That’s literally what campaigns are.
Not a campaign, but an exception to a rule. Right now there are 40 campaigns, but only one of them breaks the mold. Now, if you mention the word “campaign”, what is more likely? That a person would think of an actual campaign, like thee 39 that exist right now? Or a random collection of scenarios like only one (1) campaign does?
No wonder this kind of DLC exists as there are ‘loyal defenders’ so ‘encouraging’. The game will die soon if other DLCs are such bad in future. Over 70% of player base is discontented with this DLC. Yeah, no one is forced to buy. But do you believe that this kind of DLC is sustainable to the game development with losing 70% of the players?
I’m not a proponent of this argument as I believe it’s untenable to even classify historical battles as “a campaign but a very exceptional one unlike any of the others”, but if we do assume that I agree with the conclusion.
If your neighbor was going on a vaca and asked you to check on up their “cat” a few times while they were away and you said sure, then come to find out their pet cat is actually an tiger, no poindexter out there is gonna be “well they weren’t being dishonest cause tigers are cats.” We all knew what was being teased and what was revealed was not what was teased. I am un-impressed with cleverly or incompetently ambiguous semantics.
Yeah, it’s not a “campaign” per se, but it’s included in the same space as other campaigns. Thus, the most I can concede to these people who defend V&V, is that Historical Battles is an exception to the rule, but not an actual campaign, and they should understand definitions instead of distorting them.
They have never explained.
Why they design the Leitis as a cavalry though even people from Lithuania think it should be an infantry.
Why they design the Organ gun for the Portuguese though people from Portugal think it is nothing to with their history.
Why they don’t rename the Japanese UTs when one is too similar to the other generic tech in the Japanese localization and the another is simply just fake without solid historical references.
Why they think the siege discount could be the solution of the Dravidians.
Why they don’t give the Dravidians useful Battle elephants though the history tells us they deserve them.
Why they make the Armenians an infantry civ and Georgians a cavalry civ though people think it should be opposite.
Why the Warrior Priests who have obvious Georgian elements are only available to the Armenians, and why the Mule Carts who were supposed to be unique to the Georgians due to the historical reason are available to the Armenians too.
Never.
In DE, they’re part of the Historic Battles as they were merged with the Forgotten scenarios. You run them from the campaign screen which makes it a campaign.
As said - both are campaigns.
I’ll just leave this here again
Why are V&V, TMR, and LOTW all more expensive than DLCs that add a lot more content? Hell, TMR is almost twice the price of base DE.
I wouldn’t grip too much on semantics to criticise this dlc because if there’s something that recent history of philosophy has shown is how it’s a bad idea to apply strict logic to language (spoiler: you can’t because language is not math and even math would have a problem in that department for those who never read Wittgenstein) unless you’re a delusional analytical philosopher still stuck at the school of Vienna if not at Frege…
To criticise the DLC you could simply say that there’s too little effort for the money they ask… No new civs, no new assets (not even a single object), no new slides, no new triggers, nothing new basically except 5 scenarios and 14 remakes of very good, in some case exceptionally good scenarios already present as mods.
The cunning move here is that you can’t say these scenarios are bad (the design may not be of your ###### ### as someone already pointed out the mechanics are original) and that they don’t offer many hours of entertainment to people who never played any mod. It would be dishonest to not recognise how good most of these filthydelphia scenarios are and the fact you need to pay them doesn’t change that.
The issue is as I’ve already wrote without being acknowledged that if you’re ready to pay for something like this there’s no reason why modders couldn’t officially have a form of economic support either patronised by Microsoft or not. I think filthydelphia accepted to do this because this was the only way for him to monetize hours, days, months, years of hard work done for free and out of passion.
Now I already stated that saying that you ought to do this out of passion is totally hypocritical and simply tries to remove the problem at the roots of this dlc. There is a hell of a lot of work behind scenario design and the fact that people are willing to do it spontaneously doesn’t mean that it’s ok to take advantage of the passion they put in it to just consume the product for free, but realistically i guess people are people and they will always try to get away with paying less to have more…
So in conclusion I repeat: this bad DLC comes from an ambiguity between official and non official content and the fact that the latter is not supported in any way will inevitably make successful creators like filthy forced to do something like this just in order to “recover the losses” for the time they put in this game without an official form of reward.
Again you could say if you’re wasting your time trying to entertain/please others it’s your business but honestly that’s an antisocial attitude to deal with the reality of people providing a source of enjoyment to you (while of course trying to do something meaningful for themselves but that’s not an excuse to dodge the issue).
It would be like if I don’t want the waiter who’s serving the meal to get payed (and respect to waiters but I think designing scenarios is arguably more creative and time consuming than that) just because it’s not “official” since he didn’t cook it himself. I’m not saying you need to pay him personally but at least you should agree that someone has to do something, either the restaurant or clients who are using a service. Maybe not even a full salary but at the very least a symbolic revenue otherwise it all end up being quite cynical and designers might need to extort it to players (and this is why V&V happens). To me it all seems reasonable.
Just this… 20 chars
Couldn’t disagree more strongly. Menus do not dictate reality.
So, is the Art of War only a campaign when I access it from the campaign screen, but it magically stops being one when I access it through the main menu? The answer is no, it is not a campaign, nor is Historical Battles. So what if they’re in the campaign screen? The tutorials are too, but they’re not campaigns either.
Now, if I load a save game to a campaign scenario from the main menu, am I not playing a campaign anymore? See, it’s not a good argument.
Microsoft has hired scenario creators before, like Filthy or Lord Basse, for example. I think it’s better to hire them to make new campaigns, instead of copying and pasting their earlier works and saying that you’re “supporting” the community.
Also, keep in mind that these map makers upload their creations knowingly, and willingly, for free. It’s good that they get paid… when they make something new. Why pay for something that already exists and is free? It’s not like I’m paying Filthy directly, but Forgotten Empires isntead. And when a games developer does this sort of thing, it’s nothing but lazy.
I’m cautious about this view. Excessive ambiguity with language and you can communicate anything, everything, or nothing at all, and simply leave it to the listener to devise. Any untoward or false thing said could be, with plausible deniability, claimed to not be the thing you actually said/meant to say.
That being said I can see the general point that is being made. It is also not desirous to have any and all communication bogged down with pedantic exactitude.
And in regards to the campaign semantics tho, while I don’t feel it changes the quality of the DLC itself, this is not some isolated occurrence of…questionable word choices.
To me these don’t seem like small differences, it seems rather at nearly every juncture words are being stretched to the absolute limit. It seems the words of the devs can’t be trusted, for they seem to repeatedly choose words that would in most instances communicate one meaning, but just in this instance were supposedly intended to communicate something else. Whether this is done with intent or with incompetence is mostly irrelevant.
All fair. I’d also add at least Fetih, is just a player swapped version of Constantine XI, which while technically a new scenario, seems a bit disingenuous, in the same way if you split Dos Pilas into two scenarios, that somehow we now would have a new scenario. Considering 3/4 of the scenarios are already upcycled, I’d think you’d want to avoid anything that would make the DLC seem cheaper, but that doesn’t seem to have been the case.
I hadn’t thought of that. But yes, exactly the point. Menus don’t dictate taxonomy.
That’s not what I’ve said. I’ve said they’re accessed from the campaign menu thus are campaigns. Wallace (and AoW since DE) always had a main menu shortcut dating back to AoK.
Speaking of those, William Wallace and Art of War are also campaigns. They’re tutorial campaigns.
If you want my opinion marketing has always played on language because it’s the nature of language to be played upon (imagine creative wordplays that unmask logical fallacies like “I’m going in a place that doesn’t exist”, there are better examples, I cannot think of them rn but I’m sure you got the point).
I don’t know how much you’re into philosophy of language but the point is that language is figurative, a matter of context and often what’s not said is as important as what is said. Focusing too much on the literal is detrimental to you in the end because that’s not how language works (think of sarcasm) and in today’s world it will be easier to fool you if you don’t get these nuances.
What is lacking in this dlc is the substance rather than the form imho. Wether you consider 19 historical battles a campaign or not (I could even argue they’re more than one campaign) it’s either subjective or an accordance between speakers but it’s not written anywhere that a rock is a rock (if you know what I mean), it’s just us deciding words make sense.
Ps: You’re the guy who said to having typed intp according to mbti right? I usually score intp myself but I actually think I’m infp also because among other things I’m not as literal as intp lol.
But you can access them outside the campaign menu. So, are they not campaigns in that instance? What about saved games? Those cannot be accessed through the campaign menu.
Anyway… I think it’s a bad idea to base the definition of “campaign” on only one of the 40 campaigns that exist. (This being only 2,5% of them.)
When talking about campaigns, it’s more logical to picture something resembling the other 97,5%
It was C on DISC but yeah probably pretty similar. Maybe I accidentally said Meyers Briggs at one point, but I’ve never done the meyers briggs test only DISC. I will admit when I have my strongest disagreements or there are people whose personality grinds against my own, they almost always end up being the I type people, who in my experience are more likely to be the salesy/marketing type people.
I don’t know if you’re explicitly making a point there but I think I agree with it based on what I’m intuiting lol.
I would agree that the problem with the DLC is not the “form”/semantics.
I have a distrust towards what the devs say now, but that is separate from the quality of the DLC itself.
I think both deserve apologies, but yes, using wrong words to market doesn’t itself make the DLC bad. We both agree on that.
I tried giving V&V a fair chance. I hoped it’d be good or at least enjoyable, but the first scenario I tried, Vortigern, it was worse than bad, it didn’t even seem finished. I’ve played a few scenarios I didn’t like, but this is the first that just doesn’t even seem like it works. Even the HD Mountain Pass scenario was pretty buggy, but when it worked it worked and you got the concept. Vortigern just seems unfinished, like it’s a first draft. IDK. I do want to try Temujin. Maybe that’ll be better, but yeah.
That’s not my point at all.
And I don’t think so because as previously mentioned - campaign means both.
Oh maybe I remember wrong. I never took the disc test but if you dislike marketing as I do (which is a heck of a lot) you need to learn that they almost never use language in a literal way (cause the point of marketing language is clearly not to tell the truth or at least half truth), so mine was more of an advice to guard yourself in the future if you want, to not take big words literally.
I played almost all filthy scenario as free mods and tbh most of them I think are very good but if you stick very much to the aoe2 build and destroy formula then yes you may not like them.
I think vortigern is actually ok, not his best but it has flavour. If you refer to it being unfinished because of the map being a bit empty yes I think that’s his feature, to design very big maps but with few details. I usually am maximalist so the opposite approach but at least you don’t have problems of space in his one.
The mechanic of hiring Saxons is very original I think and historically accurate which is always a thing I love instead of just TC, boom and attack.
While yes the map is a bit empty and i’m not a fan of that I wouldn’t go out of my way to complain about it.
I played the scenario twice. Both times the gaels and saxons only land their boats in one place each, nearly the same place as each other, so setting up towers to defend is easy, and supposedly recruiting more saxons makes them more likely to revolt, but I got those messages even when I hadn’t recruited them, so I ended up just puppy guarding them, but they didn’t do anything and I couldn’t change my stance with them to be proactive. The second time I tried invading the picts, and they resigned for me after I destroyed a random dock, even though they still had most of their buildings and at least one chief.
That’s like the entire shtick of the scenario, defend from invaders and balance recruiting saxons and them revolting against you and neither of these seems to work properly.
It’s like if Ghengis Khan 4 Khwarazm never turns enemy and there’s actually a path in the mountains connecting your two bases.
The theory of the scenario is very interesting. I’d love to play a finished version.