Ok, then tell me the corresponding version/build numbers. Devs are patching the patch all the time, but i’m sure they never went back to an old build.
- Was reverted and later released as Hotfix 78757.
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Yeah, I’m not a fan of either decision. They both kind of feel like making horcruxes from the soul of AoE2 - they have the apparent allure of expanding the life or reach of the game, but do so in a way that seems shallow and has hidden costs.
In theory you might justify these types of decisions if (1) they were significantly more profitable than the same effort applied to quality improvements and standard DLCs and (2) enough of the additional revenue from them was re-invested in the game to fully cover their own maintenance and development on top of funding the next (standard AoE2) project. I don’t know whether (1) is true, but I’m fairly certain that (2) is not true. At least I don’t have any evidence to believe that the resources allocated to quality control and testing, for example, have kept pace with the burdens imposed by the Xbox port and now RoR, much less that they’ve improved from the prior baseline which left much to be desired. And there’s no question that both projects have, at best, significantly delayed new AoE2 content. Obviously, objecting to those additions at this point is futile, but I’ll take any opportunity to emphasize my desire for maintenance and development of “AoE2” (as someone would have understood that a year or more ago) over more attempts at platform outreach or ports of other games.
Anyway, trying to be optimistic about the situation. And it can be made to work, but there really ought to be a conscious and thorough re-emphasis on AoE2 content and quality.
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Lol
“I hate how buggy this game is. WHAT?! Reporting to devs so they can fix it? No way, I just wanted to seethe in my own anger!”
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“The patch was reverted in 8 hours, due to severe performance issues. The planned changes were reinstated with update 78174.”
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IMO the xbox version could become one of the best thing ever happened to AoE2, a lot of new players and attention from Xbox pass world. It could mean the back of RTS games pushing to MS to keep supporting the game along with FE
About the RoR it seems to me a whim on the devs side but not sure, it could be something from World Edge or even MS trying to get the Vietnamese fan base
At the end, this games has survived for 20 years, it will be fine. But understand that this DLC didn’t deliver anything for the AoE2 players but bugs so far
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I just see that the base game lost his rating of ‘overwhelmingly positive’ as well.
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This is a distinct possibility, but it does require both of the things I mentioned earlier (high profitability and significant re-investment into the game). I do think the Xbox port is more likely than RoR to boost the game, but I have no metrics to gage how successful it’s been so far. Definitely seen the bugs it’s caused, so hoping there will be a visible upside to that decision in the near future as well.
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I don’t care about xbow or age 1 integration or whatever, the game is just f###ed or users like me, at least 10% of all the time. I consider myself a power user by the time i spend with the game, and number of multiplayer games played, and things are even worse for occasional players (they don’t know about bugs/sources of crash, game is lagging on high graphics out of the box, multiplayer ladder i don’t wonna even talk about)
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AoE1 uses an older version of the same Engine as AoE2 so using the same engine for both is a good idea.
That’s why AoMR will use the AoE3DE engine.
Yeah I did realize this. It would be good if they use the same engine BUT keep being different standalone games, and more importantly, each have their own dedicated team.
Look at the patch notes now, 2/3 is RoR or Xbox. Where is the fix to units not following move command, not walking straight, and drifting in the air? That’s absurd prioritization.
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Yeah, same with the bug report forum. Aside from pathing, crashes, multiplayer bugs, etc in the base game, I once again have to put my scenario design stuff on hold, probably for months, as none of the latest updates or hotfixes have tackled the relevant issues (despite them having been around for longer).
And on the development side (independent of bugfixes), it seems the priority right now is to pump out more RoR content in an effort to salvage some of the terrible reviews. Whether you bought the DLC or not, seems that we will be subjects of the Tax Romana for a while as we bear the quality costs of troubleshooting and expanding Rome’s return.
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How do you know what they are prioritising.
You only know which bugs they have already fixed, not what bugs they are working on.
Some bugs take a lot more time to fix. Path finding is complex so there are many possible things that can brake it.
They need to first analyse when the bugs happen, then how they happen and then how to fix it. And after that they have to test it again and potentially redo the whole cycle.
Changing a value in the dataset (like removing the Unique Unit armour class on Dromons or changing the Legionary HP from 160 to 140) can be done in seconds.
So 20 stat changes in the Dataset often take less time then fixing one bug.
That is also true for the Xbox release and even for AoE4 content.
The Forgotten Empires team works on many different things and they are not always what you or I want.
Yeah not only do I know what bugs they fixed, but I also know what bugs they created. Can you imagine introducing new bugs every patch? Can you imagine nerfing xbows because why not, fixing knights pathing is too much work. Can you imagine introducing Ctrl click to replace the intended right click attack behavior? These never happen in pre-DE era. And these are the new norms for DE.
Yeah every time I report a bug, it feels like this game is not developed by them, and it feels like they never play the game. With a little gating / testing, most bugs won’t be shipped in the first place.
They probably think the same? 24, they don’t even need to fix, just reverting would do the job.
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You don’t know if reverting the code doesn’t introduce a lot of new bugs.
Yes they could completely unpublish RoR and the Xbox version and roll back to the state of December but imagine how many people would get upset over that.
Have you ever worked with 25 year old code that someone else wrote? It’s not that easy.
Every fix can introduce new bugs.
You can keep fixing bugs forever and never release a patch because there will always be something that is broken.
Maybe people are having fun with the game as it is now and they are happy that the developers don’t wait until they fixed every little bug. Or else we wouldn’t have any new features in the game and it would still be in the state it was on release.
As a developer and publisher you have to decide when the product is good enough to ship. You can’t wait forever.
We all know that this calculation goes wrong sometimes, but I think in this case it’s better to ship the game with a few bugs then let people wait many months for the smallest new content because it has to be perfectly bug free.
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Do you know what revert means? It means going back to the version before we introduced this bug. In software engineering it’s pretty common, once a code change breaks some test we revert that particular change. I’m not talking about reverting everything. I’m talking about pathing specifically. If they have good test coverage they would know what to revert.
If UserPatch from community could exist, which does a better job than a corporate dev team (in terms of bugs), I would expect the code to be OK to work with.
As I said, balance changes and new content are independent from gameplay changes, which could still release regularly.
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It’s not necessarily easy to just revert one part of the code.
Modern software might be written in a modular war that allows to work on separate parts independently but this is 25 years old code that they slowly have to rebuild to modern standards.
They have been doing lots of ground work that is invisible to players.
I don’t know what the amount of changes were that they did compared to AoE2DE but it’s probably no were near the complexity of the Xbox port.
A lot of new content requires new code.
You can’t just add things like ignoring bonus damage, dodging projectiles, charged attacks etc. without changing the code, which then can introduce bugs.
I know many conservative AoE2 players hate those things but they have everything that is new. The majority of players don’t want new civilisations that are just a remix of some stat bonuses.
Would be nice if the new civs were A: Playable in Ranked and B: Not balanced like an April Fools joke and C: Made a lick of historical sense
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Well, we play this game since release, and we sure know what they don’t prioritize.
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Please keep the software quality up. Test new patches, try to fix old stuff before adding new features.
Thanks you very much.
Couldn’t agree more.
The Devs historically have been doing much better using the Public Preview Update (PUP) effectively to weed out major bugs before publishing. However, for some reason, the Xbox and RoR DLC appeared to skip PUP entirely and we are stuck with this mess.
Why would you ever publish code into the wild without testing it?
I believe that the Xbox update was the worst thing to happen to the game.
We did not ask for this.
We are PC players who are playing a Real Time Strategy Game that is designed to be played with mouse and keyboard.
If there was a group of people that wanted to play this on Xbox, that’s fine, make a separate fork of the code that does not break the completely unrelated PC version of the game.
Microsoft is adding complexity to an already dated engine that was already being pushed to its limits.
Furthermore, Microsoft is adding Xbox support and attempting to add a whole other game into this one, when in reality, the community never asked for this.
We just want to play Age of Empires II without bugs.
If you want to build a game within a game, and add console support, that is what Age of Empires IV is for. Experiment with a new game and a new engine.
Age of Empires II is lightning in a bottle. Devs, please stop attempting to break the bottle.
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