Empire Wars is an additional game mode to accompany Supremacy , Treaty and Deathmatch and its available now…
i think this is a joke to the aoe4 players… aoe3de is by far better in modes, maps, civs, ships, etc etc ETC…
i cant understand why they keep giving aoe3de soo much attention… while aoe4 is losing momentum (and players) every day… couldn’t they just do the same with aoe4???
Edit: I have just realized that none of the actual aoe4 modes is any of those 4… which makes my disappointment bigger
Aoe3 DE and aoe4 are run by different companies. Also aoe3 DE has been out for more than a year, the original aoe3 was out for over 15 years while aoe4 is out for like 5 months only and is soon getting the spring update.
I agree that DE on the first few months was updating the game much faster though, but if you compare both games at launch aoe3 de was a disaster, it had so many bugs, you couldn’t even scroll down the screen on multiplayer lobby, units got stuck on TPs and buildings for months, attack move was bugged, shift click was bugged, you couldn’t even invite friends to join your games or direct message them in game. The game is amazing now but it took looong to get there. Even aoe2 de took a while to get good if i am not mistaken as many people even chose to continue playing aoe2 hd edition.
aoe3 was originally written by ensemble studios. The code quality is excellent which is another reason it was possible to turn it into the definitive masterpiece it is now. Those days devs used to care about the games and games would launch in a finished state with proper testing.
aoe4 was written by relic who had no attachments to the age series and no history as well. Microsoft just gave them the contract and they just did what they could so that they would get paid and would be able to continue building other games like CoH3 for which they care about. For relic aoe4 was just a project which would make them enough money to support their other project. There was no innovation or new game design, it’s a copy of aoe2 with a newer engine. If you look at the bugs from a software developes perspective you would realise that the kind of bugs we have seen thus far are only possible if the code is messed up. Other people have also said the same (some streamers who are also software engineers).
The reason why aoe4 is a much more successful game right now is because Microsoft spared no expense in marketing it. As soon as the marketing and the tournaments stop, gamers especially the professional gamers will find something new, something else to play. The game isn’t balanced and refined enough to be a esports title. It lacks depth in its campaigns. I mean have you tried the aoe3 and aoe2 campaigns, they have such engaging and beautiful story lines with in game cut scenes. All of ensemble studios games were miles ahead of its time which is another big reason they are still being played now. Once ensemble studios was shut down, Microsoft released aoeo which was shelved prematurely. Then they made definite editions which were quite successful. Then they took a gamble and made aoe4.
At this point I hate to critisize aoe4 because I know that these are the only games I will ever play. Used to play aoe3de exclusively before and now I am on aoe4. It sucks to see the community lose interest and heart of the state of the game, but atleast there are people complaining instead of abandoning the game. I would prefer an engaged community rather than an empty forum.
If you have followed the games development so far you would have understood by far that aoe4 is not going to be in a finished state for atleast a few years. Maybe by the end of 2023 you would have something which would have all features of other previous age games. Bear in mind their priorities are different than us. They maybe be focussed more on CoH3 or expansion packs for aoe4. Whatever be the case, keep your expectations low and enjoy the game while you still can and hope it doesn’t get shelved like aoeo.
The Public Update Preview coming today will have Royal Rumble as a new game mode. As of now, it seems like it will be an example of what you can do with the modding tools since it’s listed as an in-house mod.
Royal Rumble
TYPE: Game Mode
DESCRIPTION: Be the last king standing! Achieve victory by eliminating all enemy Kings while defending your own. Based on the classic Age of Empires II game mode “Regicide.”
Well, yes. But also no. It wasn’t much different back then, is what I’m trying to say. Most, if not all, games had bugs. Some had severe bugs. The thing is survivor bias. We don’t remember the unpopular ones. We only remember the popular ones.
And even popular games had bugs. Let’s take Half-Life. One of the most popular FPS games to exist. Do you think it didn’t have bugs? Severe ones? Do you think it wasn’t possible to break the entire game?
What about HL2? Bunnyhopping ring a bell?
And that’s just two high-profile examples.
Now I don’t say this to say “bugs are fine”. It’d be fantastic if they were fixed. I’m just trying to counter these rose-tinted views of the past. Don’t you remember how much of a hassle it used to be keeping games working? Googling audio codecs manually? Graphics drivers? Heck, official game patches? Back when all we had was FileFront and guessing which mirror site would actually work?
The grass looks greener when we look back at it. But it wasn’t as green as we think it was. You can even ignore patches (at your peril), drivers, etc. I can drag up so many games that had glaring issues on release. The AoE franchise has a bunch.
So true.
I remember vanilla aoe3 back in the day when people couldnt play water maps unless they had a last gen pc otherwise the game would crash. Also the infamous alt+D bug to revive the explorer only got fixed on DE.
There may never be another game like AOE3 that has the budget and programmer love and time put into it. It is a work of art (literally legacy had hand painted textures), and still ahead of its time as far as depth in RTS is concerned (deck system for dynamic strategic growth). It is great it keeps getting enhanced (well some of the graphic changes were actually a down grade in readability but it has some appeal, I didn’t need to see the whiskers on the tigers, it was timeless as was) there is still so much potential for growth.
There are nearly countless units and small details of wild life, terrain, units, mercs, natives etc… Its a bar that would just cost too much time and money to try to set these days. It could be done, but would have to be a work of passion and not financially driven. AOE3 was Ensemble’ Opus magnus, as the creators of their own work were free to innovate and raise the bar and try new things. When a company takes over someone else’s work, they have to lock into the old essence or face the criticism of butchering the original. This seems to be why most reboots of movies and other genres fail to meet expectations because they lack the central creative authorship, in favor of market tested think tanks.
Building on that success AOE3 has many advantages to updates and additions that seem to be working out great and I really hope for a bright future for it. Though I like AOE4’s walls and a few other things, really Moders just need to rework the buildings and units of AOE3 into a medieval and ancient time setting and would be much better.
