Well considering 3DE is receiving stellar updates and DLC with even more robust civs I reckon the devs think the game is doing just fine. By its very nature, AoE3 was never going to be as popular as AoE2 or perhaps even AoEIV but I don’t feel like that takes away from the game at all. They all have their place in the franchise.
I fear because the release of 3DE was bungled it had a more lasting impact on the number of players than anything. But hey, 3500-4000 (steam) players daily isn’t anything to sneeze at. More players can be good but not when it takes away from the integrity of the game.
Something I disagreed with heavily when AoE3 was first released was locking cards behind levels as that directly made the game unfriendly to competitive players, so again while I don’t personally care to watch tournaments or follow pro-players I do know that it gives the game exposure. Personally and I admit I’m likely biased here, I think the 3DE playerbase is one of the best out there. Highly appreciative of the devs, provide creative suggestions, and is passionate about the game. What more can you ask for?
My big issue with AoEIV is it focused too much on esports (by their admission in the artbook) and forgot what made AoE2 the golden child of the franchise- making a good game first. AoE2 nailed it in terms of providing rich single player content with a great competitive framework.
Make no mistake, what has hurt AoE4 is that it was clearly incomplete at launch. If the game was really focused solely on electronic sports, they would have fixed the water before, the rankeds and the mods would have come out (in order to be included in the competitive one) on the correct date, for example.
Of course you are being biased, almost all of you here are casual gamers and you don’t really care how the game grows or you don’t see beyond what you enjoy individually, beyond what more people might like.
Insightful remark. AoE4 civs’ military unit roster is excessively symmetric (granted, each civ has exclusive skins, that’s a significant enhancement compared to AoE2 or even AoE3 vanilla 8), truly unique units are few, and rock-scissor-paper operation is immature.
The longest post on the AoE forum ever (below) seems a big rallying cry against this very same ‘skin-fake asymmetry paradigm’, right after AoE4 was launched:
But AoE is not basic military units only. Delhi and China have somewhat different overall modus operandi in gameplay / bonus / eco managing / techs, and Mongols is the (yes, there’s only 1 in 8) true civ design breakthrough in AoE4 so far.
AoE4 URGENTLY needs to improve, expand and finally prove their claim to asymmetry and innovation. But not all is negative.
I think AOE2 did not even start with a great competitive framework. It was very imbalanced with useless units and very op civs (even with the symmetric design) and very clumsy pathfinding.
It developed a good competitive framework because it has a lot of players. Not the other way round.
If “grow” means tweaking the same 8 or 10 factions for two or three years just to get a skyrocketing number of viewers, then I really do not care. I’m not going to get a share of one cent from that but I play the game.
You have never seen me write or say that an RTS should focus exclusively on E-Sports.
But I have seen players here writting that they should focus NOTHING on competitive play and focus solely on delivering more content to campaigns, co-op/PvE, etc.
You see it as black or white, I see it as flesh and blood.
Although AoE2 is not the game that I like the most in the series, they have made it almost perfect in terms of meeting the demands of the competitive scene and giving content to the casual scene.
Neither the E-sports scene, nor the generational demand nor the competitiveness is the same now as it was more than 20 years ago. That is not the best example.
That’s the problem with AoE, that the content must include civilizations because it’s a historical content game. That is why they cannot be so asymmetric, because their balance would be unfeasible, it would be an exclusive game for casual = failure.
Not only here. The main base are casual who don’t care about streaming and E-sport. The competitive scene Is One of the reason why we don’t see the same details seen into the previous games. Developers said that they were trying to reach the competitive scene (i posted a Page from The art Book about that). From the artstyle to UI Is all to leaded by readability for the E-sport.
But It seems developers are starting to listen casual gamers and not only the professional ones and we’ll see what they prepared for us with the upcoming announcements at Gamescom.
I’m fine if Aoe4 Will be improved with more details, biomas and all of what makes AOE so beautiful for the casual players.
It’s just that I think it’s good that the casual scene is heard, but without screwing up the competitive scene.
And for the one who said about the metagame, I agree that the game must have varied strategies and that there is no fixed metagame without being able to change, but I do not agree that can have almost infinite strategies, that the game is chaos and that rewards The more you know hundreds of strategies than knowing how to manage your economy and your army correctly.
Well I played sc2 ranked and was Diamond when master was not a thing so I understand competitive because I only play coh2 1v1 and 2v2 as well, the amount of people playing casual is more. You made a game for eSports and it is doomed from launch.
The esports scene and generational demand for esports now is moba. Period.
It is basically the perfectly optimized version of RTS for esports and esports viewing. It basically removes all the non-esports elements of RTS and there is no way an RTS can get into that scene.
I repeat, the game was damaged by being incomplete (half-done) and lacking in content, on top of the idea of focusing it on E-Sports, since there were no ranked games. The game should focus on giving content (co-op, gradually more civilizations, more casual modes, campaigns…) and on the competitive scene at the same time. I hope there can be a comeback.
You are talking about esports more than 10 years ago.
In “this generation” what I saw was SC2 declined rapidly only revived with co-op. Yet they still decided to suspend support of it.
