New surprise DLC on 25th anniversary?

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
1420

Unless it’s the other way around, which I think is actually more likely. the boss (ms) has the idea to sell skins, and the devs have to really do the work of figuring out how much work each optimization strategy would require and if that/those strategies would yield sufficient performance improvements.

I suspect this hasn’t been thought thru very deeply, and not as a dig to the devs. in 2018-2019, when they were working on DE, they didn’t NEED individual civ unit skins. so anything to facilitate that would be an extra investment but yield no additional return. you couldn’t sell DE for more cause it had all the extra skins IMO. so that’s all the further you need to investigate. Nearly any substantial effort would exceed it’s value, so no need to accurately quantify that additional substantial effort.

but NOW when MS is looking for additional ways to monetize aoe2, now there is a potential to make money off of skins. so now there is potential that the effort to facilitate regional skins could be low enough relative to the potential returns. But the only way to know is to actually do the work in estimating the performance increases and the effort required.

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1421

This, very much this.

Unique castles are quite high on my personal wishlist

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1422

It looks very cool, but it doesn’t solve the original issue. Villagers alone would make the game harder to run on many computers with regional skins.

The interview where he stated that it was a problem was filmed right after the release of tMR, though it wasn’t published until recently. In any case, it was not 2018-19 anymore.

In any case, I think this discussion should be moved to another thread.

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1423

Yes however Cysion was referring to the period “when we initially started working on definitive edition”.

So in 2023 he’s relaying a story about how this determination was made during the 2018 - 2019 timeframe, which is relevant for the reasons I described above.

1424

Yes, but he was replying to a question regarding the present and future of the game. So unless it’s misdirection, the fact that the conversation happened in the past doesn’t change anything about how things evolved.

1425

I think you are fundamentally mis-understanding the point I’m making.

The cost benefit analysis was presumably, made with the assumption that there was very little benefit. If you assume you can’t monetize something, the benefit, necessarily, will be small. If you assume you can’t monetize something, today, tomorrow, yesterday, 2023, 2019, or 2030, it won’t affect the analysis one iota WHEN it happens, only what the assumptions are at the time of the analysis.

The assumption being made in 2018-2019 is important not because that is when the cost benefit analysis occurred, but that is when the assumptions were made, specifically the inability to monetize skins.

Now five years after the initial release of DE circumstances could have changed such that the original assumption, namely being unable to monetize skins, is no longer true. Pointing to cysion and saying sometime in the past he came to assume something isn’t a problem with the point i’m making, it underpins the point i’m making.

If in the future someone looks at the previous assumption, namely the inability to monetize skins, questions it, comes to a different conclusion, at that point the cost benefit analysis would have to be re-done, at which time coming to the conclusion that investing the necessary effort to update the game to be able to add and sell skins is financially advantageous, is now within the set of possible outcomes where previously it was not.

Cysion didn’t say they had come to that decision presently, but rather five years before hand. It has to occur to them to re-think their previous assumptions. that doesn’t occur automatically.

1426

@Azmac93

The “boss” in my example was intended to refer to Cysion, assuming he has the power to make that decision, but it isn’t a priority for him, although that wasn’t clear or intuitive. Referring to ms vs the devs, I agree what you’ve said is more likely. We don’t really know the power split between devs and MS when it comes to making these decisions though.

But my tl;dr caveman-brain take on this is simply that it can be done if the people in charge want it done. In some ways this discussion parallels the “civ limit” discussion, where it was once somewhat widely believed that adding more civs was technically impossible. Or that a decision was made to not add more civs, but that decision was later reconsidered. All we can do as players is make our interest clear, and see if it’s something they choose to go forward with, which brings us back to the thread topic of waiting for the reveal of new content/announcements, and what they suggest about the future direction of the game.

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1427

They must have done it already.

1428

and I wasn’t thinking of it intrinsically as a “vs” thing. I just think skins are more likely to happen if ms thinks they could sell lots of skins, and then it just comes down to asking devs how much time it’d take, rather than dev’s saying “here’s some cool thing we want to do” and hope to convince ms they can sell it.

I assume MS would say they think they can make $x selling skins, so it’d make sense if FE can optimize skins for less than $y.

But getting to your point, MS I think has 100% of the power. they own the game and they have world’s edge. If they really wanted to, they could either use that leverage to try to force FE to do what they want, or tell FE to get lost.

But presumably since FE has been making new content for the age franchise for a decade, it’s been a profitable endeavor, and I assume MS wants to keep it that way. So if FE says MS can’t sell skins cause it’d cost MS too much to optimize the game and/or the performance issues would be so bad that no one will want to play the game anymore and consequently won’t buy future content, I think MS would have to be very stupid not to listen to FE.

TLDR MS has all the power but they probably consider FE’s opinions, at least where technical matters are concerned.

There is definitely some upper limit to the amount of assets that an average pc can have in memory at one time. There will be a point where no amount of wanting is going to matter. That being said I generally agree. I think if MS and FE really wanted to there’s a decent chance some clever people could figure out some clever solutions.

What causes you to come to that conclusion?

1429

Cysion mentioned. Watch the video

1430

He actually said nothing of the sort. He said that the sprites would take up too much hard drive and ram with all the civilizations. Never once mentioned any attempt to optimize the sprites sufficiently to remediate the limitation, or even to estimate the effort required to do so.

I would suggest you re-watch the video to better understand what cysion said.

1431

Does anyone remember if AoE2 tends to announce DLCs on a specific day of the week?

1432

Sike.

20 characters.

1433

That is an excellent question! I know DLCs have always been RELEASED on tuesdays and thursdays. But the announcements, I don’t know.

V&V was announced on a Friday, tho that was during the new year new age event. IDK how much stock i’d put in it being a friday.

TMR, october 16th 2023, was a monday.

ROR was announced during the 25th annivesary of aoe event. that was a friday.

DOI, April 14th of 2022, a thursday.

DotD seems to have been announced on june 13th based on sotls video, but strangely the steam pre-order post says it was published on august 10th, which is the day it was released. June 13th was a sunday. tho DotD was…teased…announced…mentioned ruding an earlier event on april 10th fo that year, which was a saturday.

LOTW was announced on december 15th 2020, which was a tuesday.

IDK, all seems pretty random to me.

1434

All useful.

Ok, my thoughts were that since they neither update or post on their socials on weekends, it might be that we won’t see anything for RBW’s finals simply due to that. But some of these dates do contradict it. Also TMR is likely not relevant, as that was a mistake.

I’m still not 100% sure that we will see anything at/right after RBW. Although the rather frantic nature of so many updates (almost on the hour during the rest of the week) did seem to stink of “get this ready for the weekend deadline”. But that’s just a best guess.

There is the notion of “how connected are the companies to RBW?”; so would this again even be on the cards? Although they did announce something part-way the event, clearly piggy-backing on the hype generated, so there is that.

Ugh, so much partial information and best guesses is pretty infuriating. We have had nothing solid outside of the DLC’s existance, and it’s pretty annoying.

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1435

I was using the beginning of the creator preview, which seems to be the “intended” announcement date.

1436

Ah! That’s likely more realistic. Although they might have been given the go-ahead to do it early as the cat was out of the bag.

Although it’s not that important for the information, as it was a weekday.

1437

New info to drop this week. Don’t ask how I know.

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1438

With a name like Jerry Goodman, you seem like a reliable insider who would know something. I feel like people who have regular names in their handles are easier to believe than anons. I trust you.

1439

Any news would drop today in the final?