I am sure this Return of Rome 2 DLC will not divide the community /sarcasm off

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
1

This is not a topic where I make a rant about “new DLC bad”, plenty of people called it cringe already, and I bet there is more to come.

I am looking forward to Battle for Greece because I love classical Greece, but I also want AoE2 to survive. I spent enough time in the AoE2 community to see how poorly Return of Rome was received. So it’s not a matter of personal taste but rather “what the heck the devs are doing?”, no seriously, this is the question of the topic - why are they doing this? seems like a strange behavior.

What I find intriguing is why the devs decided to do this after Return of Rome? Am I missing something?

I’m asking this because while I personally like Battle for Greece I know many do not, and I’d hate for the development to be cut for Age of Empires 2 with the poor excuse that “the playerbase isn’t interested anymore” when nothing could be further from the truth.

764240f56a4f2313102fb96a6ff0317a
764240f56a4f2313102fb96a6ff0317a865×488 72.9 KB

votepoll

So why do you think they went for Battle for Greece when most of the community was talking either about a Balkan or an East Asian DLC?

You have a part of the community that wants the next DLC in Balkans, and a part of the community that wants the next DLC in East Asia. The devs must have believed that they should not alienate either side, which is perfectly understandable and I get it, by releasing Return of Rome 2… that more people hated than any other DLC combined.

It sounds like you had to pick between a cold or cramps and you choose cancer.

One could argue “because it was easier to make” but I bet Return of Rome and Battle for Greece were the hardest and most time consuming to make.

I mean the community was expecting at least 2 new civs + new architecture. This is so much more in terms of work.

Maybe the devs decided to go with a “safer 3rd option” because the discussions about what civs should be next in Age of Empires 2 usually look like this:
barroom_blitz_6038

But again, that’s like between a cold or cramps you pick cancer.

They could have very easily made a non-reginal DLC to please everyone if they wanted to stick to the old formula. Everyone would still have 50% reasons to buy it. Say Romanians and Tibetans + Byzantine Architecture. And the theme rather than geography could have been “resisting occupation” or something else.

Maybe as some have pointed out, they are going for Rome at War?

image
image907×402 65.4 KB

This is great, but could have easily hired the mod team and made them make a standalone AoE2 variant with all the 34 civs. So I don’t know.

So why do you think Battle for Greece will be more profitable than Lords of the West, Dawn of the Dukes or Dynasties of India?

I don’t know their internal finances, but I find it risky to do a DLC like Return of Rome after the reception of Return of Rome.

Do you think Battle for Greece will turn out profitable? or that this is more of a long-term investment?

2

Yeah but you can’t expec regular aoe2 medieval civs to be released endlessly you can’t have 60 civilizations, it was a matter of time, they will add more aoe2 civs here and there but I bet this will be the start of making a port of the Rome at war mod, they have a lot of civilizations and campaign material

3 Likes
3

they did. this is why I think the rest of Rome at war is comming as well. and I caant wait to be honest.

6 Likes
4

The Rome at War team is making this DKC because the Forgotten Empires team is/was busy with AoMR.
Simple as that.

The alternative to this DLC would have been another V&V not a normal AoE2DLC because the resources for that are allocated somewhere else.

6 Likes
5

You think too much of yourself.

Most of the community was talking about East Asia, or Africa. Only a few people were talking about Balkans (all the time).

I don’t know much about what went on behind the scene, but I do know they wouldn’t go with this just to not make “one side” angry. This was made because the main devs were busy (Likely with AoM) and not involved, so a separate team worked on it, based on the concept of a mod that already existed.

3 Likes
6

You think too much of yourself.

Just because you like the East Asia and frequent East Asia topics, doesn’t mean Balkans topics didn’t exist.

2 Likes
7

You do know there aren’t any right?

8

I think this too, if they did this this wasn’t only a one time thing, I’m betting they already have planned the Julius Caesar campaign with the Roman Empire, along with Punic wars with the Roman Republic and Carthage, there another dlc. And they have a lot of material from the Rome at war civs and campaign material

2 Likes
9

This tells me everything I need to know about how much you engaged with the community.

2 Likes
10

What on earth does that even mean?

11

If Return of Rome and Battle of Greece would be cheaper to make than a normal AoE2DLC this would make sense, but is it?

I mean how much work as need for Return of Rome to port AoE1 + Vietnamese over just adding 2 new civs to an already existing game? the only extra needed would be ideas for 2 new bonuses and unique units.

While Battle for Greece had 3 new civs from scratch (with inspiration from Rome at War of course) with new cosmetics and a huge new campaign that looks like was way harder to make than 3 campaigns in a normal AoE2DLC.

12

quite honestly we have no idea how their development process looks like

Considering how buggy there releases tend to be I have little faith the their automation. So they need to do a lot of manual testing.

so adding 3 civs like this means you need to test only a few unit interactions, for now they don’t need to care if there is something buggy happening with spartans fighting the spanish.

however if you add 2 new civs, you need to test unit interactions between them and 45 existing civs. that is a lot of work

again, this is assuming they test any of it…

14

It was divisive from the start, since online players are not the target of the DLC, but campaign players instead. People already complained about that when V&V released.

We’ll see if the campaign turns out to be good. If so, maybe then they’ll have both the usual team working on normal DLC and the Rome at War guys making some more “Chronicles”. Do they have the budget for two DLC teams? I dunno. But only time will tell what happens next.

After RoR and V&V they can’t afford more screwups.

2 Likes
15

I think you can have 60 civilizations. AoE isnt assymetric enough for it to be a huge issue

The main problem is that, devs have been having problems staying in line with the fact that AoE2 is a fairly symmetric game and not going crazy into adding civs with too many unique mechanics you need to go out of your way to use like Folwark, Georgian auras,:the Cuman boom, etc.

2 Likes
16

I will be excited if they added more AOE2 elements since this game is not loved by the AOE1 community in Vietnam that they might as well make it similiar to AOE2. Honestly as far as AOE2 I’m still holding out for a Thai civilization with Buddhist temples instead of the Hindu monastery.

1 Like
17

Okay I just seen the Spirit video and wow. Kind of wish it was added to ROR instead because now you have OG AOE 1, AOE 1 DE, ROR or AOE 1 2.0 and now this. I like what they did and would love for some of these features to be in AOE 2 DE. Just sucks that AOE 1 DE had a Street Fighter 2 thing going on.

I hope someone will add these architectures to the AOE2 DE. I want to create a Rome that shows signs of aging and not just contemporary buildings.

18

This looks much better than V&V.

2 Likes
19

You could have Rome Republic vs Rome Empire as a campaign representing Pompey and Caesars Civil war

1 Like
20

It’s not about money, it’s about developers, those are the limited resource.

We are not talking about Return of Rome that happened years ago.

Surely is, but it’s made by Capture Age, who hired the Rome at War developers.
Forgotten Empire doesn’t want another development team make new civilisations for their game.

I don’t think that the people making the 3D/2D assets are the bottleneck for DLC creation, else they wouldn’t give an AoE3DE DLC 10x as many new units as an AoE2DE DLC.

21

I know. I meant cheaper in that way.

I know. The point was that Battle of Greece is in a similar boat. Harder to develop than a standard AoE2 DLC.

So it became like Call of Duty used to be with Modern Warfare/Black Ops series. Two development teams taking turns.