I’ve never heard of any discussion of “medieval China but not in the European definition of medieval but with this or that feature that resembles medieval Europe” before this DLC, only “China in the middle ages”
Because that’s meaningless. Medieval or middle ages IS a European concept. It didn’t even apply to Byzantine or the Middle East. You can play with the definition whatever you like.
And considering they forced it into the game just because it was “popular” and based it more on the romance not real history.
Why didn’t they do the same when they made the India DLC? Why bother researching Indian history if you could directly force Mahabharata into the game? (It’s also very “medieval”. Trust me bro)
Such carelessness is straight up insulting. Like “we think you’ll swallow anything that’s popular and have no requirement for care and quality. Come and consoom”
While The Three Kingdoms era sits on the edge of AoE II: DE traditional timeframe, Forgotten Empires was committed to delivering a product with content for everyone at all levels, styles, spheres, and preferences of the Age of Empires experience. Research and design exploration quickly showed that Three Kingdoms China was extremely advanced for its time, making it an easy fit into the AoE II: DE technology tree and design mould.
I don’t know if they used the same wording in the CN announcement, or just chatgpt-translated the same thing, but from what I’ve seen chinese players have the impression that the reason why 3K civs are in the base game and NOT separated like ror or chronicles is because FE designed them like that due to “they are at the same level as medieval civs. They are medieval so deal with it”. Which is pretty insulting if you think about it as we all know here in the west that FE only added them because RO3K is popular.
It’s like MS and FE did their thing just for money and then gave them a sh*tty excuse so they wouldn’t complain. Anyway, most complains I read on weibo are about FE gaslighting, heroes, 3K not being from the timeframe, and “western people feel superior and think they know better about us, but they are ignorant and dumb”.
On the other hand, there is even a reddit posts about 3K being medieval enough lmao.
The whole thing is just a PR disaster. Quite a few “positive” reviews raise the same concern but remain positive out of the hope that they could fix it.
WE should learn the lesson. Don’t make whacky products then justify it later. Because if it’s too whacky, there is no way you can justify it without making people angry.
I am pretty sure it came AFTER WE said it, and the “who cares about history Mongols vs Franks in Texas lalalala” folks all of a sudden realized 3K was medieval.
To be fair, Wikipedia is by far the best online site to do your research. It’s continuously edited and updated by multiple people, and most often it’s neutrally written (politics and history are so netural on wikipedia…compared to media). Definitely much better than books written by a single person, with insufficient information and no further editing possible.
But sometimes, wiki will contain mistakes, and it’s always important to follow up on sources in wikipedia, in order to be sure. Unfortunately though, the devs did not follow through with thirisadai and wrongly believed it.
Really think about that for a minute. Reviews are basically 50/50 and a lot of the “good reviews” are “yeah the haters are right but I try to like it regardless”.
Consider it a sign that at this rate the game will “die” again.
If people keep being submissive like this and putting up with things even though they don’t like it, things will fall apart sooner or later.
Wikipedia should ideally be used as a first stepping stone, if one plans of doing somewhat serious research. And even if the quality of the information varies between articles, there’s always sources at the bottom like you said, I think that’s the best part. But reading a wiki page once and not bothering to do any further research is pretty lazy.
On top of that, lying about your research (like the devs did) is embarrassing. I could forgive their laziness if they didn’t justify it, because if they didn’t double down by saying that ship is from a real manual, we could have had the Thirisadai renamed to something else that is not based on a hoax. But no, it’s “totally legit guys” and now it has to stay.
Somewhat related to this, there’s a wiki article on the military of the Champa kingdom, and I think it’s a hoax too, with made-up sources that I can’t find anywhere. I found it because the Chams were suggested many times for a new civ in these forums, and I feel like the devs will fall for another hoax if they ever want to add the Chams xd
precisely my point. Everything wiki offers is sourced, or rather, everything anyone should take seriously should be sourced. Wiki shows you all the related research, sources and links. Wiki lets you browse through even very remotely related pages via a simple click. Once you get the general picture and you want to learn more, then you can follow up using one of the sources, or some academic papers, and your general knowledge from wiki will help you search for those papers. That’s why i called it “the best site for research”. The devs should have researched more ,exactly as you said, instead of not even following up on a wiki source they apparently cited. But it’s a common thing nowadays to hire lazy uni dropouts for some serious work, i guess.
Yep. Ramayana and Mahabharata will be more popular than DOI. Kosala and Lanka will be fun civ to have on ranked. Instead of Heroes they will have god Rama and demon Ravana. It will be fun I can guarantee. Trust me everyone.
Mahabharata can be its own DLC. There can easily be 5 ranked civs each with their own hero and god, maybe even multiple.