The unfinished nature of the DLC gets worse

What toxicity?? Like l, we are criticizing it for it many flaws. We are not making desth threats, insulting devs etc. You seem to have no clue what toxicity is.

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Apparently any criticism is toxic. Obviously we shouldn’t ask for silly things like historically accurate or thematically-consistent portrayals in our history based game. We all just need to consume the content and be thankful that the divinely-inspired studio executives continue to bestow slop up on us.

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We have AoE4 for the multiplayer focused medieval game too

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Many of us play campaigns only, and now the new campaigns have wizards in them, heroes with Wacraft-esque abilities, superhuman strenght, and the story is so rushed it’s basically like the designers are saying “look guys, it’s a reference to the novel! Now clap”.

There is no story to get invested into, because it’s rushed to hell. No memorable characters because they lack personality. No immersion because a wizard can now summon storms I guess, how very historically accurate! And all of this is despite the DLC announcement praising the “riveting story” and character development endlessly, and the result is not at all what was promised.

What reason is there to buy this DLC? It doesn’t appeal to me. In fact it’s the opposite of appeal, I find it repulsive.

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They don’t have to bother. In fact, it looks like they are already not doing it.

As delusional as I am believing aoe2de won’t go down the path of many other games typical of the games industry – witnessed by my friends like runescape etc (whereas I only play a few games including aoe2de), I don’t think they make business decisions based off forum comments or mine.

Just expressing this is unfortunate for me and players who consume this game in the way I did.

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Sadly that’s me too. It’s not that I can get away by not buying the DLC.

It’s intrusive with no way to opt out. You will see non-sensical 3K civs in the lobby and in rank play, so even if I don’t have the DLC I would still have to learn about their bonuses – something I can’t do for 3K without barfing.

Battle for Greece? Not for me. But you can opt out by not playing in lobbies with Civilization Set = All.
V&V? (Arguably) misleading advertisement with poor value for the buck, even though the scenarios are fine. So buy it at a generous discount.

I’m not even that uptight (some are way more mad about V&V than me) and they somehow managed to turn me off.

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In the end, the only ones happy with this DLC are the ones that simply don’t care and would buy anything.

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They could have at least added some new assets.

I don’t know if the unit appearances are stolen from other games but I haven’t seen most of the new units in the several custom campaigns I’ve played and some custom mods I’ve tried. If at all its stolen from those and recycled, I agree that’s lazy. But still the RTS components - civ bonuses, unique unit stats and tech tree are solid efforts.

Just trying to say that there’s always going to be some people who have a problem when new content is added. Every new content is not well received by atleast a few people and you can see that in steam reviews. There are even a few people who still play legacy AOC on voobly since they don’t like new civs at all.

No. But creating several threads advocating people to not buy the DLC repeatedly is toxicity.

Civ bonuses aren’t always like that OG Dravidians is a good example. We can have some civ but not a good playable one without adequate efforts.

Game’s core varies for different types of players. Obviously for campaign and history based players, it might be the history, medieval warfare, campaign voices etc. For ranked players, the core is the mechanics, unit stats, costs, resource collection rate, map generation, resource availability and how they shape the gameplay.

In the podcast he also said he doesn’t personally care about the historical inaccuracies and is excited to play the new civs but he understands the controversy and agrees that the devs could have taken better care of historical accuracy while crafting the civs. This is something I also agree. If the devs had taken care of that, all of you would also be buying the DLC and the game’s player numbers could have exploded. I’m sad that its a missed opportunity but don’t regret the release of this DLC or want it to become a part of Chronicles.

Don’t know about reddit since I don’t follow there but here in discussion forums, there weren’t even half as many threads opposing Chronicles as there are opposing 3K. And 0 threads requesting the cancellation of Chronicles DLC or advocating others to not buy it. Obviously immature responses are going to be there from some audience as a reaction to certain posts especially if those posts themselves are toxic.

Status quo could also be kept by not adding an ancient game mode, single player civs etc. In the first thread that opposed this DLC, I just mentioned its sad that a part of community is against it and it was a missed opportunity. I’ve also responded positively to threads created by people like @Tyranno13 who want to keep the 5 new civs but make modifications so that they are not Shu, Wu and Wei but some other Chinese factions. However, some people want this DLC to be retracted, civs to be removed or moved to Chronicles or the DLC to suffer economic losses and keep spreading that hatred. That’s toxic. And obviously opposing such toxicity could be perceived as toxic itself, which is fine by me.

To sum up, I agree with most of you that its a big mistake from the devs to have missed out on this historical accuracy part. The DLC could have been a lot more successful had they done that. That being said, I suggest for all those unhappy with this DLC, to provide feedback and mention a list of things devs should watch out when they do future civ DLCs instead of hate mongering.

Its not my personal opinion, just stating facts. Georgians, Chinese had an insane play rate. After a balance patch that partially weakens them, their play rate drops. Likewise Japanese, Celts see a sharp increase. If “history” is such a major factor, you wouldn’t see such trends.

Never said to remove matchmaking.

So what’s this comment below - constructive criticism? There were also people in a different thread titled “Join me in not buying this DLC” with so many comments like this.

I don’t recall any one person making several threads. Different people can do what they want. People that don’t like the DLC are not a hive-mind. They can do as they please.

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There’s a difference between expressing views and concerns and threads like “join me in not buying this DLC” with so much hate comments. I liked your thread where you came up with suggestions to what can be done now instead of trying to gang up and shut it down. And in this thread, there was a post about GL podcast talking about positive sales numbers which many people didn’t like. If you don’t like the DLC don’t buy but why would you wish the DLC doesn’t do well.

We did plenty of that. In short, to not destroy the identity of the game (or non-gameplay related identity), going forward all civilizations must follow the same principles all civs previous to this DLC have followed: must be within the timeframe, based on an ethnic/cultural/people group, and based in real history and not ficticious stories. Wei, Wu and Shu fail in those three regards.

Also, a civilization’s unique elements (units, techs, building sprites) should be based only on it’s own history and not of other peoples, especially if those have the potential of being their own civs. Khitans and Wei have Tangut and Xianbei elements respectively, and that’s pretty bad.

Thirdly, no more made-up units and weapons. The Shu war chariot is a ridiculous fabrication. As a gameplay concept you could argue that it’s great for X or Y reason, but thematically it’s just terrible.

Four, gameplay and historical inspiration should go hand in hand. This refers more to what happened with the Armenians. If it’s history was respected, it would be a cavalry, archer and/or defensive civ. Instead it’s an infantry and naval civ. Gameplay good? Yeah okay, thematically it’s bad.

Fifth, no more copy-pasting maps for campaigns. I thought they already got the memo with V&V.

Lastly, no supernatural elements in the campaigns. Having wizards is cringe. Liu Bei dual wielding gigantic swords bigger than himself and doing spin attacks is not believable, thus it doesn’t belong with the rest of the more grounded campaigns.

A few of these points can be ignored should they do spin-offs like Chronicles. Speaking of Chronicles, maybe they should hire historians like with they did with Chronicles. Or do better research because I feel sometimes they just skim a Wikipedia page once and add things from there. It’s not difficult to find good info online, or even PDFs about military history. Some websites offer them for free, others for sale, and you can find many pirated ones too, I don’t care about the means, just make an attempt to research.

I think all of this is pretty easy to do, but 3K is the DLC with the most mistakes on the “thematic” aspect of the game (so far)

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Many of us believe this is the wrong direction for aoe2. It would only be natural we don’t want this dlc not to do well so MS is not incentivized to further ruin aoe2.

Should we hope that aoe2 gets worse? What are you expecting from us?

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Do you expect any changes to the DLC upon release today?

Not really. We can hope but I’m not holding my breath.

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Bug fixes and balance changes mostly.
Still hoping for voice lines being added.

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I definitely wouldn’t hold my breath for voice lines being added.

What irks me other than the nature of the dlc is no OG Chinese, Jurchen or Khitangut campaign.

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This is exactly what I’ve been telling - The DLC failed to meet your standards. Given a massive number of people have shared this feedback they’re likely to take that into account. There’s no need to indulge in negative advertisement. Its a small community and many times feedback has been well received. Civs are closer to being balanced than being extreme.

Perfect summary and I hope they take care of these points while doing future civ DLCs.

That you don’t buy the DLC, express your concerns but not go to the extent of advertising others to not buy it. Given a substantial section of the community hates the DLC for these facts, the sales might fall below their expectations and that should be enough.

Since they have done nothing about them. We need more noise and negativity, not less.

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That isn’t what you said though. You said you thought we shouldn’t want the dlc to do poorly. Now you simply don’t want us to give advice to like-minded individuals how to have their voice most effectively be heard. Sounds like you’re just trying to disenfranchise those who disagree with you and resort to moving the goal posts when logically necessary.

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