I understand all of your points of view, saying that the game is great and refreshing etc… I don’t deny that, I fell in love with the game because it’s a great opportunity, it has so much potential, but it just isn’t gonna be anything until at least 4 or 5 other patches in the good direction.
Siege is STILL completely broken because NOTHING counters it ! The devs constantly say that they want their game to be about hard counters to have mixed armies so I HOPE that they’re gonna do something about it.
I can wait, I’m a patient man.
But I simply wanted to say that for me, the game is still not playable at this stage, it’s a beta, we’re playing and beta testing, doing what the devs should’ve been doing by hiring testers, and I didn’t PAY 60€ to be a beta tester for a year !!!
Relic needs to hurry up and increase their patch frequency if they want to keep me as their customer for their next pricey 60$ expansions for america asia africa spain and everything else !! One patch per month is simply NOT FAST ENOUGH !
I’m not paying to wait ! And I’m never gonna buy any dlcs or expansions if the balance is going to be that slow to get right !!!
And it may be even worse than I imagined ! Imagine now they release their new dlcs or expansion pack, I imagine you would have to buy the dlcs to play the faction but could still be matched against despite not owning it. That would be HORRIBLE as it would break the balance of the game again ! And seeing how painfully SLOW they are at producing patches and fixing things it would just mean that many people including myself would just leave the game every time a new civ come out.
Gotta send that to the CEOs and shareholders who are actually the ones sucking our money out, in a gaming industry where it’s normal to launch half-baked games and fix them on the go. In my PoV, the devs actually want this game to properly work, fix it ASAP and are working their hearts out for that, but I can bet the executive board is refusing to hire more people so the job can be done more smoothly and faster.
It’s not a single player game, how are they going to balance the game if they can’t get feedback from a large number of players? With only a handful of playtesters?
Although the pace of balancing is a bit slow, they are still going in a good direction, so I still have confidence in the developers.
I doubt relic (the developer) care if you spend money on the game or not, Microsoft (the publisher) is who you should direct your complaint too, as they are the benefactors of sales.
If this game doesn’t make money, and MS sees it as a failure of the studio, that puts any future projects MS might throw to relic in jeopardy or even the entire studio at risk of being shut down.
This is the one game I felt sad that I had to cancel my pre-order. Just couldn’t support this practice anymore even loving Age of Empires so much. After the closed betas, the lead decision makers of the game showed themselves to be oblivious to the community feedback, on what made the previous games so engaging etc, and the writing was on the wall on how this game would launch and how bad would be post launch support.
The simple truth is that they sold a lot of copies, got their good Metacritic score so they secured their bonuses, promoted subscriptions to Xbox Game Pass and that’s it. Investors were pleased at short term, devs got paid (as they should be regardless of MC score, but that’s another discussion entirely…)
Just remains to be seen if the long term effect on the name of the franchise will be harmful or not because of how this game has been handled since conception. I’m sure there has been some sort of brand value loss in the perception of most buyers, and that makes things worse for a future Age of Empires 5.
Hey man eat a snickers and calm down, I am happy with whatever they put out you know. Be it updates or bug fixes or balance changes. I wouldn’t care much for new civs or any single player content. I understand that there are thousands of bugs and balance problems right now. But all I’m asking for is frequent fast and bulk updates from the devs. This monthly update isn’t cutting it.
Maybe there’s never enough Abbasid, Muslim, Arab culture fans to convince the devs that more work is required for an awesome middle eastern civilization. There are people constantly singing the praises of the English, French, Spanish, Chinese, the Middle East just doesn’t have a loud enough voice, aside from the Turk psycho fanboys, lol, but I’ve never seen a devoted Abbasid, Saracen, or generally Arabian culture history buff on here, online, or in life.