@Chusik said:
- Balancing: Balanced maps and civilizations is a must. The resources on the maps have to be almost perfectly equal, to make it a competitive game, and therefore having a large playerbase.
Saying civilizations need to be perfectly balanced isn’t exactly useful feedback. Thats like saying water is wet - everyone knows that we want civs to be reasonably balanced. I’m also not entirely sure perfect balance should be the goal. The most interesting game experiences often have inequality in balance - with some civs or races being strong in one aspect or another and a different civ or race being very strong in completely different aspects.
I personally believe the best way to balance a game is to make the skill ceiling for that game functionally infinite, in that there is not point where being able to pull off more actions offers a diminishing return. It allows players to specialise in certain styles, and even if there is a balance difference between two races and player with better execution can over come it using mechanical skill and decision making.
The starting resources on the maps should be perfectly equal in the sense that each player has a minimum amount of resources within a certain distance of their town center, but AOE is not starcraft - the game has a lineage of some random elements and I think that the position and distance of those resources should be somewhat randomized. Perhaps your gold resource spawns 8 tiles away towards your opponent meaning you’re easier to raid whereas your opponents gold pile spawned behind their base 10 tiles away. These small fluctuations in the set up of the game board offer players the ability to distinguish themselves by read the state of the game and making decisions about how to approach a given situation. If all resources spawn in the exact same way you remove this from the game entirely - something I beleive has been part of the AoE lineage and belongs in the game.
You also don’t need to make a game competitive. Players will do that themselves, just make a really damn good game and the competitive scene will follow.
- Treasures: On the first look, treasures seem to be very interesting, but here’s the issue. Luck must not be awarded by any means.
Treasure are interesting, and they can be a decent implementation into a game. I have no strong opinion on them, I would be happier if they were left out. I strongly disagree with “Luck must not be rewarded” I think this is a very short sighted and uncreative approach to take to design.
Luck should never decide the outcome of a game, there should never be a situation where I find a treasure and win the game, but there should absolutely be situations where I can find something (An exposed resource pile placed by the map generator for example) that could be considered lucky to exploit. The key points here are that having a lucky position should require skill and knowledge to properly exploit and a lucky position should never entirely dictate the win condition.
- No Patches/Changes: AoE3 was my favourite game of all time so far. Yet it stayed the same for years and years without any changes. I want the game to be alive. Patches, balance changes, meta-shifts, etc.
This is another water is wet situation. Of course everyone wants there to be some adjustments - but too many adjustments too often can also be unhealthy for the game. Oftentimes its better to let a meta sit for a few months before taking action rather than pushing a balance patch every other week.
- Matchmaking System: in all AoE multiplayer games (as far as I know) you can choose your own opponents by deciding whether you want to play or rather kick a player out of the lobby that might be a threat to your rank/elo. STOP THAT. Hosting games and having the might over letting certain People join or not is disastrous. Of course you should be able to play with your friends, BUT MAKE THOSE GAMES UNRATED.
Matchmaking systems are one of the fastest ways to kill the community feel of your game and its killed a lot of games, especially RTS games. The lobby system may be outdated but it has its place. The only exception is if your community is built around the matchmaking system with games like Dota/LoL etc where ranked play are the highest thing ever. Age of Empires is not that sort of competitive experience. Its primarily a game about having a good time in a lobby with people playing custom games, relaxing map modes or other things. Forcing competitive play upon everyone with a matchmaking system seems like a good decision but it needs to be done deliberately, with care and in possession of a proper assessment of all the positive and negatives.
Matchmaking systems seriously negatively impact the quality of your community and you implement them blindly and your game will suffer.
I’m not saying they shouldn’t implement one. I’m saying that they should think carefully about whether it belongs in AoE because there are a lot of really difficult decisions that you have to make if you implement matchmaking and often no matter which decision you make it ends up hurting your game.
- Bugs/Pathing: If bugs exist, I hope you fix them and dont let players abuse them for 3 years before doing anything. Everyone who played AoE knows about the pathing issue, especially for melee cavalry in AoE3.
Bug and silly pathfinding are actually incredibly important for the balance of a game. Day9 has a really good video about this on Starcraft Brood war. If you fix those issues you seriously impact the balance and feel of a game often in very negative ways. Its why I’m mildly sceptical of the AOE2 DE if they plan to fix the pathfinding.
It seems like a no brainer thing to fix but it can seriously damage the game experience - even worse than having kinda poopy pathfinding.
