Thanks to the devs for the experiment in aoe3 support from 2020-2024. But now that’s over and the dust has settled from the DLC cancellation announcement I feel more optimistic about aoe3 than I have in a long time.
There’s something freeing about no longer waiting every couple months to hear if there’s going to be some drastic new change to the game. As someone who casually plays multiplayer, it’s nice to know that I can take a break for a month or two and not come back to a meta thats completely shaken up. The game has so much depth that I don’t think I’ll ever learn everything about every civ, so it always feels like theres some new corner of the game to explore that I am not familiar with.
Now that support is over we can return to what sustained AoE3 from 2007-2020 after ESO and RE official support ended - the community, the volunteer tourney organizers, the modders, the map makers, the content creators. Without regular updates, all those things can thrive because new updates arent constantly breaking mods or shaking up the meta so much that players leave. Remember, for most of AoE3’s history, the game community was on its own, and it was great in its own way. It was its own little thing, it wasnt trying to prove anything to anyone else, and a whole ecosystem of decentralized, volunteer support developed to fill in the holes left by the lack of official developers.
So to people sad about the announcement of cancelled support I say:
Nope we aren’t in the Golden Age of AoE III when legacy game can’t be played anymore with official multiplayer and when AoE III DE has cards that don’t work properly in the official version.
If there is one silver lining to all of this is that players no longer have to be subjugated to WE’s bullshit. If that is what makes a golden age then so be it.
Still, I would have preferred WE hand 3DE over to a publisher like Hooded Horse since they actually care about the games under them.
Reminder that 3DE is the 5th most popular RTS on steam.
I am actually relieved now that I know I there won’t be more DLCs. We’ve had to put up with their constant
scorn for years just because we expected to get new content. Little did we know that this game had already been killed in 2022 and we’ve just been deceived since then.
At last, it’s over, I wouldn’t say we are entering a Golden Age, but at least we are leaving a Dark Age behind.
Yes, Golden Age was in 2021-2022 when we had DLC every 4 months at the same time as AoE 2 from:
April 2021: USA
August 2021: Hausa and Ethiopia
December 2021: Mexico
May 2022: Italy and Malta
Now we live in a Second Dark Age (the first was between 2007-2020) while the rest of the games continue to receive DLC…some Retold players now tell us to do as they did until now and wait 20 years to receive new content (which may never arrive)…
It was never a dark age because the industry and expectations were different. Also, there were no such blatant scams or discredits.
Also, AOM was not abandoned for 20 years. The Steam version is slightly better than the 2002 version, which came out around 2013 if I remember correctly.
Sure, I was referring to AoE 3 in particular (the AoE/AoM series did continue releasing games in the supposed “dark age” of the series: TAD Mobile and AoM DS in 2010, AoEO in 2011, 2 HD in 2013 and AoM EE and Castle Siege in 2014, World Domination in 2015 and, well, the DE games from 2018 onwards)…
If anything, the only Dark Age has been from 2022 to 2025, when the only thing we were given were false promises in exchange for constant spite from World’s Edge.
