This game wouldn’t sell 1/100 of its revenue if it didn’t bear the title.
People won’t spend their time reporting bugs, proposing ideas, providing feedback, even self-promoting the game if they didn’t expect good contents in the future.
People won’t even buy their overpriced DLCs if they didn’t expect the money to fund the devs to work on something of quality.
Yet WE’s shill lord is hating people who had expectations
Edit: trust is a priceless resource. You need to spend years gathering it. You can burn it in one second. Yet people never cherished it and made the same mistakes again and again and then blame others for “expecting too much”.
I would be like this if the next 5 DLCs were variants. Getting mad doesn’t fix anything, never has. If this is how they want to develop the game, that’s what we get. As long as they don’t provide the tools to mod the game we’re stuck with it as it is.
It’s not about being optimistic or accepting of what we get, it’s about being realistic and developing a strategy to communicate what the people want. At the end of the day we want a game worth playing right? So let’s not burn the place down in the process!
It’s been a while since I posted, even though I’m always playing. I appreciate the thoughts and words of @MedicMaaan and @GorbMort . However, I confess I was disappointed. I was hoping for at least Spain and the Inca in this DLC. I know no one promised anything, but I imagine many were hoping for at least a Latin civ.
I also didn’t understand why they highlighted Age of Empires at Gamescon. Will it be the announcement of Age 5 or some other news for Age 2 or 4? Because the announcement of this DLC itself shouldn’t be. Don’t get me wrong, the developers did a great job with the few resources allocated to them, but the disappointment lies in the lack of investment from WE and Microsoft.
I’m confused, what are the 2 new civilizations? (not the 4 variants)
Oh, didnt read that correctly, image is from Sultans Ascend. So basically this upcomming DLC only has variants and separate missions (not campaigns), am I correct?
Even worse than that.
4 VARIANT ONLY “civilizations” and a Roguelite SINGLE PLAYER ONLY experience. No campaigns, No scenarios. No Art of War Challenges Nor Historical Battles
It’s quite disappointing. I like Age of Empires IV in itself, but the support it received isn’t very good.
Plus, with the complete lack of new scenarios and campaigns, I have no reason to play it.
When I bought Age of Empires IV: Knights of Cross and Rose, I hoped it would be the last mistake this year. But I understand that Relic doesn’t want to learn from its mistakes and continues to make Civilization Variants instead of normal new civilizations + inadequate DLC pricing. I was very happy when The Sultans Ascend was released; it’s definitely worth the money.
Genuinely, the only thing that could save AoE4 right now is if they come out with an announcement saying they aren’t done making new civilizations. If they don’t do this, then that silence speaks volumes as for their intentions in the future.
You don’t let bad PR like this linger if there is no reason to. Yet, everytime these things have blown up in the past, we critics have always pointed out what it would mean for the future and have gotten ridiculed for it despite being proven right repeatedly at every turn.
Go ahead and keep gaslighting this community out of desperation and delusion that everything is great, but it won’t change the incredibly apparent signs that Microsoft is effectively done with AoE4.
So unless they come out with an announcement that actually breathes hope back into this game, then I’m done giving feedback since Microsoft clearly doesn’t care. As for the gaslighters here, enjoy your echochamber, you “won”.
In AOE2 they had teased several times that they didn’t forget the “traditional DLC” when they were doing strange experiments like V&V, ROR, Chronicles, to stabilize the community.
Yet the definition of “traditional DLC” is still flexible and totally up to them. However concrete people’s expectations had been. Medieval civs? Campaigns? “There is no hard convention”
So the “traditional DLC”: still non-medieval civs——not even civs this time, but short-lived (60 years) succession factions——but beaten into admitting they are medieval and civs, and dumped on ranked
Traditional. No?
They are the smarter people. They can just change the definition of what “civ” means.
You want unique models? Landmarks? Dialogues? Music? Who ever promised that?
Edit:
Ironically a better way to rally faith is to simply openly admit “we know you are expecting full new civs and campaigns. But it’s hard and costly. We need to adjust strategies to balance our efforts and your expectations”.
It’s not suicide. Even Relic itself did it like “we are adjusting to make smaller independent games regarding our current situation”. Firaxis also admitted the Civ 7 DLCs were pushed later because the base game and its core mechanics need more fixing than planned.
But you know, it’s WE. It never admits mistakes. All you’ll see are waves of euphemism and gaslighting one after another and their apologists shrieking in the background
I don’t think the developers (meaning salaried and not bosses) have any kind of hatred for the game, but rather this is a decision from higher up and where the budget is going. Something doesn’t add up for me and I have 3 options in my mind:
The Sultans DLC really wasn’t the best seller in the franchise and didn’t rent much because of its affordable price, so it was a lie on the part of the Marketing team.
The DLC did rent, but they reinvested the budget towards a new AoE that they haven’t announced.
The DLC did rent, but the budget was reinvested into their most beloved franchise title or other games.
For me the least bad would be the second option, because the others are pretty bad for several obvious reasons.
Recycling civilizations as variants, as much as some feel different, if they don’t appeal to the casual gamer because they don’t have a powerful historical name (Templars were the exception) nor new architecture, voices, music (immersion) seems wrong to me. There are minimum 7-8 new civilizations they can bring out before they think of putting extra civilizations as spearheads. Moreover, I prefer fewer civilizations with higher quality and renown, which was the soul of the game at launch.
Whatever reason is behind it, the budget cut is undeniable. I just want more honest communication. Not someone sounding super excited towards really cheap and overpriced stuff
