I seen people complaining about the missing AOE1 campaigns for Return of Rome. You are looking at it with nostalgia glasses. I recently played some of them and found them lackluster.
For example, the final scenario of the Greeks Campaign. I don’t recall in history Alexander The Great having to deal with a wonder timer (starts at beginning of the map) to defeat the Persians when he was conquering the Middle East. That’s simply lazy design. No cool triggers about Alexander taking over cities and getting auxiliary troops and stuff like that. No, just a wonder to blow up.
Let’s see, no voice overs, no triggers, no character interactions, no cut scene like scenes like the battle between the Franks and Britons in An Unlikely Messiah.
These campaigns may need to be remade from the ground up. The scenario editor of AOE1 was quite frankly awful in comparison to AOE2.
They can introduce legacy campaigns and work ground up with new ones. Want to re-adapt all old campaigns in better format.
Before that, I really wish AOE1 had better game balance such as UUs for all civs, being able to upgrade cavemans from Stone/Tool Age, etc.
Yup, better 3 good new campaigns than 10 awful ones.
There is also the question of having campaings cover an entire empire. Alexander could be done in 1 scenario in AOE2 but it would need being massive, similar to HD Honfoglalas.
they were a product of their time, but that doesn’t stop them from being the only singleplayer way to play other than skirmish mode. I can rush Cav and chariots and beat the AI hardest 1v7, it isn’t difficult, there is no garrison for them to save vils, so they just die. The campaigns at least give the AI some defences and allow me to play a game.
I don’t actually want the old AoE1 campaigns in AoE2, but…
When I was a teenager, I didn’t like the AoE1 campaigns, because they were weird and hard. Recently I replayed them, and I really enjoyed them, because they were weird and hard. You shouldn’t assume that everyone’s tastes are the same as yours, or that people share your reasons for liking things.
Given the technical limitation of not having triggers, this was a very sensible way to represent the unusual speed of Alexander’s conquests. I suppose you think not programming a trigger system was lazy, but by that logic, one could accuse all game designers of laziness, since no game has all possible features.
Triggers are a double-edged sword – the power they grant scenario designers is easily misused. The scenarios from The Forgotten were terrible (in my opinion) because of gimmicky overdesign that was only possible because of triggers.
Cutscenes are a pet hate of mine. I play computer games specifically for the interactivity. I think a game should take control away from the player as infrequently as possible, and definitely not during a scenario.
Thank you for your well-reasoned argument. Weird old-school level designs that are like silent tablets for the player to decipher, they are an art in itself.
I’d rather have a whole campaign for Alexander, though, even though the devs have chose Pyrrhus instead to represent Macedonians.
Maybe I should cheer for an Epirote civ in the future just so his campaign would be changed…
I believe the wonder in Alexander’s scenario is meant to represent how short and swift the conquest of Persia was, funnily enough that specific scenario was one of the only ones to be completely redesigned for AoE1DE.
But yeah I agree the AoE1 campaigns are ancient, no voice overs and scripts whatsoever, but I would still love to play them with AoE2 path-finding as legacy campaigns, after all this was supposed to be a port of AoE1 to AoE2.
I’m content enough that they brought 3 new campaigns at least.
Splitting the Macedonians in different civs for each successor kingdom might be tricky. What difference would there be, besides having the Lagids and Seleucids switch to the Egyptians and Persians at some point ? Each diadoque had a slice of Alexander’s army and empire and tried getting the whole cake for himself.
Well, Epirotes aren’t really a successor state, their existence predated Alexander after all. Aside from the campaign itself, it would kind of be more akin to a Greek split, which in itself would possibly be an even worse slippery slope which is why I wasn’t really saying that seriously.
Adding the actual diadochi would indeed be complicated to pull off, as several of them are just the Macedonian replacement for OG civs. I would love to have Seleucids and Lagids as separate civs if the game was roughly focused on the 4th to 1st century BC (from Alexander’s reign and Rome’s conquest of the Latium to the fall of the last Diadochi kingdom and the transition from the Roman Republic to the Empire), but since we go as far as the Stone Age and include Bronze Age civs, it doesn’t seem like a good idea.
I think they could make new campaigns by reusing the themes or parts of them from the legacy campaigns, maybe in AOE2’s character-centric format.
For example, Alexander the Great deserves a whole campaign.
Same here, can’t understand how people want them back seemingly with no changes.
I remember playing a scenario I was unable to finish for some dumb reason. Even if there was a way to win it, I was so bored that couldn’t care to solve the problem and simply quit. That was the last time I played AOE campaigns.
And there was that one you had to avoid laser shooting towers and I was just like ???
I understand the nostalgia but I see AOE campaigns (and the game’s many shortcomings) as some sort of meme. People like it almost in a ironic way.
Looked it up on AOE1 Wikipedia. I think that was a reference to Archimedes’ mirror weapon where he used the reflection of the sun to burn ships. But we don’t have any concrete evidence whether that’s true or not.
Yes, we know, but they are very classic campaigns…
I like AoE 1 campaigns, the only bad thing they had was the horrible pathfinding of the game, where units get stocked and you can’t exchange resources in the market (both things resolved in RoR)…
They are more awful because of how bad the gameplay of Age 1 is than anything else. Pathfinding, lack of formation and low pop cap, this all makes the experience of playing these campaigns terrible.
A rework for RoR was expected. But it appears they don’t want to.
I am not sure booming to 120-140 vills and spamming endless elephants is something that makes good game. This game is not balanced with 200 pop or more, things just get out of control. I am not saying 50 pop cap is good, for campaigns 125 would be just fine.