I’m surely reading to much into this (what else can one do?), but I find that phrasing a bit unsettling. Overall I’m broadly optimistic about the future of AoE2, but it’s hard to imagine something that would be both extremely unpredictable and extremely popular. Their saying something akin to “we’re taking notes,” or “we’ve been working on projects inspired by community requests” would be a lot more reassuring. “You’ll never guess” half makes me think the big announcements are going to be an AoE2 port for Nintendo DS and Etch-a-Sketch (with crossplay) and a new DLC called “Return of the Jedi ™” that adds Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds as a game mode inside AoE2, (with a playable Ewok faction in the base game).
There’s always the possibility of being pleasantly surprised or coming across “that thing you never knew you needed,” but I don’t know that there’s much room left for that sort of thing in a 20+ year old game with a relatively conservative fanbase. IMO it’s just as important, if not more so, to avoid the addition of ill-fitting novelties, as it is to continue to add well-chosen content. Put another way, whenever these new projects are revealed, it’s possible that I would either think “I never saw that coming!” or “I love it,” but quite unlikely that I would think both. The most unpredictable addition in DE (to me) was the Xbox port, but it was also something I didn’t care for at all.
Now in one sense it would be a major “surprise” if the devs fulfilled a lot of fan requests that they haven’t hitherto paid much visible attention to: New assets for units, buildings and objects (either as skins or new units), some of the highly requested civs from Africa, America, and Asia, proper languages for all civs, and major fixes of a lot of longstanding bugs (including pathing). All of those would be surprises, but none are of the type that “we’d never guess”. We’ve been suggestively “guessing” them for years in hopes that the devs will take notice. So yeah, I have a bit of a hunch that many of these things will continue to be mid-low priority, and that a lot of the incoming changes will be on the eccentric and gimmicky side. Frankly it’s hard for me not to read “things nobody will ever guess” as “things nobody ever asked for.”
I hope to be hilariously wrong of course. But what are your thoughts?
End of AoE2 DE and another remake of the game with actually better pathing, better stability, less bug and hack, more architecture and unit reskin, better match making, better ranked as Hera suggested couple of months ago.
A free patch in 2024 that ‘fixes’ pathing and other bugs, but actually does so unironically. Nobody will expect patch notes saying they’ve fixed pathing actually being true.
Already a thing, sort of. Mechanically very different, but it’s medieval AoE on the DS. Look up Age of Empires: The Age of Kings. It even had an AoM sequel called Age of Empires: Mythologies.
I hope ‘‘we’re pretty sure yo’ll simply never guess’’ means they are making unique castles, regional unit skins and more architecture sets. And they just call it ‘‘unpredictable’’ because things like that are community requests for so long that everybody gave up hope and would never expect it to truly happen haha
My guess is it’s skins because they can actually make money from it. Whereas pathing is pushed down the priority because everybody just loves new stuff.
A remake of the game with all DLCs and new engine, so this issues become less frequent.
Two new DLCs with them: The [something] of America and The African [something].
SWGB DE or Remake announced for 2027 thanks to Disney getting some sense in their nonsense mind.
100k dollars from Microsoft to Deathmatch World Cup 6.
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