Too many things break on new patches -> 42% Steam rating

Actually, the Xbox port might turn out to be one of the best things to ever happen to this game
I know you’re mad about all the bugs RoR brought, but this could open the door for a lot of support and attention from MS (Xbox) to game development
It already brought an AoE1 port to the AoE2 engine, in my opinion it will bring more DLCs to AoE2 and the entire franchise
I also want the main support to be AoE2 only, but FE has a lot of work supporting/developing AoM, AoE3, Xbox and now RoR
IMO MS sees AoE as a brand that includes all versions (even AoE4). You want the money and the attention, you got it but it will be for all the games
We can only hope for a hotfix to arrive sooner rather than later, and we can only hope for new incoming content in the short and long term
AoE2 DE brought this game to life, it will be even better now

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The developers said that they are in the process of rewriting large parts of the games code.
That is not an easy thing and will take them a lot of time where we will see little improvements but it will be better in the long run.
If they would just listen to people shouting in the forums they would only be busy fixing surface level bugs instead of being able to tackle bigger issues.

Have you seen the patch notes from the RoR update.
So many things that used to be hardcoded in the game engine can now be changed via mods. They removed a lot of bad code with new code that can change more fundamental things in run time.
They also started to change the code so it can accept bigger ID numbers that means they don’t run into engine limitations for adding new content to the game. Which is obviously very important for future support.

The Xbox port and RoR opened some very big doors for AoE2(DE).
Many new players mean a lot more money which means a more budget from the publisher.

Even if you don’t personally benefit from the Xbox release or RoR you will indirectly benefit from the increased budget.

And no it wouldn’t have been possible to make the Xbox version completely separate or else there would be no crossplay and they would have twice the work for adding future. They have to keep the code of the Xbox version as close as possible to the PC version to reduce their work in the future.

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Link to the source? 20 char

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https://www.ageofempires.com/news/age-of-empires-ii-definitive-edition-update-83607/

Scroll down to the very end of the page.

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Age II:DE is built on code that was written 20 years ago, much of which isn’t particularly modern and has been complicated by all of the work we’ve done in the past three years supporting it. So this year we’re absorbing the cost of some housekeeping which is intended to help us move towards more frequent updates, deliver better stability and improve overall performance in several areas.’

xD

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They basically announced that they will make less new features this year so they can do more things more efficiently in the future.

Maybe the will make a new DLC that only has campaigns or something that doesn’t require much code changes.
Level and graphic designers gotta do something, right?

Wow is this the first time they share about improving code quality?

I hope they are more transparent and tell us about what areas they are focusing on now. Like what algorithm they are adopting for pathfinding. If it was communicated like the roadmap last year, it is better off not mentioned.

Yes. And yes, it’s not that easy, but nor is it an undecipherable mess that necessitates the breaking of existing features every time you want to change something. You just have to approach it in a way that respects the constraints (and do a lot of testing).

There needs to be some reconciliation between the “20+ year old spaghetti code” as an excuse for all possible bugs, and the decision to go ahead to use that code base for massively transformative projects like the Xbox port and RoR without laying a proper foundation. Ideally you should either allocate sufficient resources (including time) to do the job properly, or you should constrain the ambition of some projects in lieu of opening Pandora’s box of horrors. Or I guess you do can neither and plan to pick up the pieces later, but you might just end up with a 42% rating. (Yes, I know there’s more than that contributing to the bad reviews, but the quality of the product and the quality of communication seem to be the biggest factors).

Um, this is one possible outcome, but treating it as a fait accompli already is massively premature. Furthermore, some of us would “benefit” much more from having a more robustly functioning game now than some marginal net budget increase at some nebulous future date which may or may not be put towards things we care about. My interest in the game’s further development is not so grandiose as to require extraordinary funding beyond what could be supplied by a standard DLC.

Even under ideal circumstances, I don’t see this hypothetical windfall manifesting any sooner than a couple years from now. In the meantime, it’s far more likely that any excess budget allocated due to these projects will be entirely absorbed by the costs of their own upkeep and development. We’re nowhere near the break-even point where these projects don’t obviously detract from the quality of the base game. The cost of borrowing quality from the game now is assured, the fruitfulness of this investment at some point in the future is not. The way you’re presenting this is as a best-case scenario that doesn’t map well onto past events. Even so, I would love nothing more than to be wrong about this.

If you have unlimited faith in the game’s management and are willing to wait indefinitely for things that used to work to start working again, good for you. I envy that kind of childlike optimism, but can’t seem to summon much of it for myself. Statements about improving the code base are encouraging, possibly even the highlight of a year that has otherwise been relatively starved of standard AoE2 content (the other obvious contender is the major balance patch, which by and large, was excellent). But they really should have done this pre-Xbox/RoR, or at least deal with the most gamebreaking issues ASAP (fix pathing, triggers, lobbies, aura bugs, etc). Anyway, as someone who’s not much of a fan of the latest offerings, I’m confident that they can be made to work, but really hope to see more work put into the standard AoE2 side of things.

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permanent music plays from the main menu. cannot play

Why is there always someone defending the devs, i mean stop smurfing on forums if you work for any of the companies involved in aoe2, we are consumers and our demands are pure we want a playable game without game breaking bugs every single patch.

Forgotten empires was not responsible for the changes in the code, that was another company the one who added the QoL improvements, that is a different team that has nothing to do with forgotten empires (modders and graphic/civ designers) if that team is in charge they will do a good job, but if they are using a different company then we can only expect more bugs.

The guys who developed User patch said several years ago how complicated was aoe2 under genie engine, any slight change will break something else completely unrelated, knowing it’s weakness several mechanics shouldn’t have been added to guarantee stability.

Newcomers do not tolerate bugs as the hardcore aoe2 community, if they find crashes or bugs like the current ones they are most likely not coming back, i hope you guys finally understand where the priorities should be, aoe is never going to grow with more dlcs that each one of them has been selling less and less, you guys as users of this forums should accept it, not all your nationalities or ancestors can be included, aoe2 is not a historical game it is a RTS.

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annnnd the result is anything but stability.

hotkey broken… check
pathing re-broken for the 4th time… check
features for mod fail to work… check
crashing randomly… check
no PUP pre release… check
and at least 2-3 more bugs per patch… check

100/100 passing with flying color

The timing of the release of a new patch or new DLC is always a trade off.
You have to balance how much you want to polish the release and how long you can make people wait.
Every single AoE post in social media was full of people asking for an Xbox release all the time until they finally did it.

Similar with people were asking for an engine port of AoE1. That was a less vocal group then the first one but still a popular request.

Xbox players and AoE1 players would still be waiting for the game if the team would have decided to delay the release until it’s polished enough.
People that had fun with the game for many months/weeks of their life would not have had that experience if they would have waited for all the bugs to be fixed.

So they have to make a decision. What is more important, releasing the new thing earlier or having less bugs.
It’s not an easy decision, it’s hard to tell how much certain bugs will impact the playability of a game and how many people will benefit from the new content.
For ranked players both the Xbox version and RoR (for now) have offered nothing new so of course it’s only a downside for them.
For AoE1 players and Xbox players it’s only an upside. They have something they didn’t have before, even if it has bugs. I rather have a bugged game then no game.
Impossible to calculate the overall happiness generated or lost because of those updates.

The big question I have:
When did they decide to do a major rework of the code base?
Was it because they struggled so hard with the Xbox and RoR releases or did they decide on doing that before?

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This cuts both ways. Some existing players took breaks from the game, some left entirely, and those that stayed plodded through a lower quality experience as they were waiting for bugs to be fixed. Yes, there are tradeoffs, but screwing over existing hardcore fans to cater to some casuals because they can now play AoE2 along with 300 other games on gamepass honestly feels like selling out. The kind of thing I would take great pains to avoid if I were involved with this. RoR is a bit of a different animal, but (apart from it being better off as a totally separate game using the AoE2 engine) IMO they should have waited on it. Releasing it before it was ready for primetime hurt the experience of existing players and (as this thread is partially about) led to an unnecessarily negative reception of RoR even for many who were fans of the concept.

The biggest annoyance for me though is the state of the Scenario Editor. I enjoy Multiplayer as well, but I’ve come to terms with writing off a percentage of those games to crashes or the other bugs du jour - and the enjoyment there is self-contained within the short span of the game, or the frustration of a crash short-lived. But the Editor is literally about building things than can last, be replayed, shared, etc, so when you pour a ton of work into something only to have a key feature break on some update and almost always take months to fix, and almost always be replaced with something equally bad, or worse, and to have this happen predictably with almost every update…holy shit, that’s orders of magnitude more frustrating than bugs in any other context. I’ve asked for this to become a greater priority for years now, but it always seems to find its way to the back of the line (which is now a much longer line with the Xbox/RoR stuff).

The Scenario Editor is what kept my interest in the game alive during the awkward era between ES/The Zone and HD, and while it was more limited back then, it was also a lot more stable. Never had to worry about spontaneous loss of function, put projects on hold for months due to not being able to test properly, have to tell friends not to play Scenarios X, Y and Z I made because they no longer work properly after the latest “update,” etc. All staples of the DE era. And while I appreciate the new additions (the DE Editor is pretty powerful when it works), it’s tainted by the fact of some important feature almost always being broken. Incredibly frustrating if you make very extensive use of triggers as I do. Until they fix this stuff (and other bugs) and keep them fixed, I’d prefer that they not add any more content, or honestly, do anything else.

My guess is after Xbox/RoR. Surely the thought occurred to them before (and Xbox/RoR would have been easier if they had cleaned up the code beforehand), but I’m guessing they were on some pretty hard deadlines for those deliverables, and probably took some shortcuts that had to be ironed out later.

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There hasn’t been any noticeably decrees in Steam player numbers.
I have no idea what the Xbox numbers are.

If it was a separate game they would have sold less copies of it and it would have stopped getting support.
Only by adding it to the same game it’s guaranteed that it will keep getting all technical improvements.

If they have forked the engine for RoR then they would now have to maintain 2 different versions forever. By joining them they need to invest less work in the future.

I think most of the negative reviews are because of bad communication or because they only want AoE2 content.
Having to pay 50% more then for previous DLCs to get only get one civilisation is not a good deal.
Many had the expectation that there was some kinda of Crossplay, they expected to have 16 new civilisations in AoE2.

There are obviously negative reviews because of bugs too.

As someone who spends more time in the Editor then anywhere else I know how frustrating those bugs can be.
It’s always hard to make content for a changing platform.
In the past AoE2 was pretty static because they didn’t change the core engine of the game.

But I know that we are a minority. Most people play Skirmish, Multiplayer or Campaigns.
Most of those people want new campaigns, new civilisations, new units, new game features etc.
They don’t make money fixing bugs, they make money making new content.
This is a main issue with any software (other then enterprise stuff), you can’t monetise what costs the most amount of work.

RoR brought a massive improvement in modability with it. So many things that used to be hard coded can be changed via mods now. They made the whole game of AoE1 into a mod for AoE2 after all.
So I think some of those reworks probably already have been done to enable RoR in the first place.

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i think the devs are trolling now, but at least they reverted the hotfix bc it was broken as well LUL

Hmmm i think that first of all ( aside from bugs and poor balance) the main idea of giving for game about Middle Ages ( Age of Empires 2 DE : The Age of Kings) a acient content to sell the same again is bad. This is the result of the fact that Age of Empires 1 DE is selling poorly than Age of Empires 2 (mainly because ,1" is worse remaster in gameplay aspects and they (Devs) dont give updates to this game and especially new content - no (even one) Dlc came out). Pity.

Basically all Editor bugs are relevant to campaigns though, and there’s a huge playerbase for that, and tons of demand for new campaigns. And some of the new stuff I use in the Editor (auras) is bugged in SP/MP as well. So you’d think there would be higher prioritization based on that. Granted, I’m significantly more sensitive to Editor bugs than casual players and notice when almost anything is newly broken within a day or so of playing, whereas many people wouldn’t notice until they play the affected custom or official (e.g. Rajendra Chola, Hautevilles…) campaigns.

But mensch!, to say nothing of the mess that was much of last year, the latest big SE bugs have survived several patches and hotfixes already, and there’s no mention of them among the planned fixes for the next couple months. Really disheartening. Probably will be taking a more complete break from this stuff for a while, but best of luck to those who choose to stay invested in this.

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Is this the reason that my game started crashing recently?

I’ve been having to delete saved games and restart the console in order to start any new game. I can’t continue campaigns because of it.

I am not sure, you can try to find someone else in the bug subforum with the same problem.
Probably it’s worth waiting a patch and see if the problem persists.
Also if you have another computer, you can try if it works there.

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It seems to work ok on my housemate’s Xbox.