The game has been out for over a year, yet it remains plagued with numerous bugs. The editor still lacks customizable AI options, forcing players to rely on default settings. The multiplayer lobby restricts flexible player/AI slot assignments in custom maps, locking them to pre-set configurations. Custom maps can only be played by hosting lobbies—unless you manually write XML configuration files to make them detectable by the game. Unlike the original version, Retold lacks direct support for loading custom scenarios, severely undermining the experience for solo players and map creators.
Every update just adds more bugs, probably because multiple studios messed up the code. Now we’ve got this ridiculous Trojan Gate bug where units can’t even pass through. When I remember the Ensemble Studios team photo after finishing the original campaign, I have to ask: How does your current work live up to the disbanded Ensemble Studios!
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The world you grew up in is gone. Dev teams don’t look like this anymore. They won’t ever make as polished of products as you were accustomed to when teams looked more like this. It might even be possible that Microsoft’s HR departments wouldn’t even let people take work team pictures in front of Christmas trees today.
What do you expect modern police to have an increasing murder solve rate with all the new tools and technology available?
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The multiplayer scenario situation is really really bad.
It seems like something the devs just don’t care about at all. It was pretty bad in AoE3DE too. Only really AoE2DE where it’s implemented in a nice way.
How do we still have to upload 10 different version of the same map just to get different player numbers?
I think the devs massively underestimate the potential that they are leaving behind there. Games like Warcraft 3 were only able to become that popular because of the powerful editor and robust multiplayer lobbies. Whole game genres were spawned in this game.
AoM has a lot of potential because of it’s setting that a normal AoE game doesn’t have. But even just getting on the level of AoE2 would be huge. Custom scenarios and stuff like diplomacy games are pretty big in AoE2 and not a small part why the game is so popular. AoM is leaving all this potential behind because of a few small UI changes that need to be done.
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This bug has ruined many custom maps created using this model.
Is this its own thread? This should really be a priority for the devs to get right.
Original AOM multiplayer scenarios was so vast and one of the reasons many people continued to play it. There was always something new to try out. From interesting skirmish maps, to a recreation of the Peloponnesian War, to even a weird strange Olympic Games style scenario where players chose what event to partake in, ranging from dodging meteors to Minotaur basketball! Now with the new editor and the ease of uploading the mods, this really is a mine they are failing to exploit.
My campaign save files from shortly after the game’s launch became completely unopenable after an update months later. These were saves right before completing several campaign stories—kept as mementos—and now they’re just corrupted. It’s so absurd it’s almost laughable. This game is literally built on Big Ball of Mud. Even the slightest tweak somewhere creates unpredictable bugs. Issues that never existed at launch are now introduced through updates, and the more recent the patch, the more inexplicable new bugs emerge—a vicious cycle of incompetence.
