Upon rereading the sneak peak, I realized many of us probably got a bit too excited and thought the DLC will be coming out in Mid-April. In reality…
It seems mid-April is when we’ll hear from the Devs about this again, as in when more news drops.
While speculation has died down now, I’d say not to expect any news anytime soon. Even I was wrong in thinking we’d get news around the 18th-20th of this month.
So hold on tight and keep waiting, that’s all that can be said really.
Oh right. Yeah that means we will likely not get the DLC until May.
Why are devs slow tondrip feed these sorts of thingns? Just tell us everything and release it and be done with it!
You’re a billion dollar company, Microsoft.
Because they’re intentionally, and IMO effectively, building hype. This is the re-purposed 5th anniversary DLC, after BfG was delayed and V&V had to upcycled to take the 3/24 release slot, and BfG had to take the anniversary release slot.
And frankly, since V&V, I’ve been extremely critical of WE comms, but I have to say, IDK if someone new is at the helm, or they’ve just got their excrement together now, but this has been well very done IMO.
Give a screenshot that clearly shows off two civs. Ok nothing unusual about that. We usually get a two civ dlc. Ho Hum. Still interesting to see what’s new and theorize.
However, it’s odd if the dlc only contains two civs, then you’ve spoiled pretty much everything there’s to know beyond the campaign protagonists, in teaser screenshots. It implies there’s actually a good deal more, but doesn’t confirm anything.
Then a month later, BAM sneak peak of arguably biggest update in aoe2 history, with lots of hints about the upcoming DLC, and oh BTW, DLC will be tied for most civs in an expansion ever.
If I had to guess, mid april they’ll drop the trailer for the new DLC, that’ll release 2-4 weeks after that. Based on what we’ve seen so far, my guess is there’s another surprise or two up their sleeve. they confirmed the next DLC will have 5 civs, weeks before they officially announce the DLC. Seems to me they’re confident saying that won’t spoil the announcement.
If I had to guess, this DLC will contain 7 or 8 campaigns (one for each new civ, one for chinese, one for koreans, and maybe one for japanese), and have 1, maybe 2, architecture sets (maybe a steppe/nomadic and tibetan), and probably one other neat thing, like maybe a new soundtrack.
" Important: The patch notes below are a preview of work in progress for an update planned to release in mid-April."
“We don’t have an exact date to share for this update just yet, but you can save the date for mid-April!”
“While there are plenty of notable things to look forward to in the notes below, here’s some of the big highlights coming with the next update in mid-April:”
I’m honestly doubtful if the DLC will have that much content, especially in terms of campaigns since we never got more than 5 campaigns at most when you consider historical battles.
Even the part about civs I’m a bit iffy on since back during African Kingdoms development they said we’d get 5 Civs only to get 4. Who’s to say they won’t back peddle and say 2 of the new Civs are just the reworked Chinese and Koreans.
I do want to say I wanna give the Devs the benefit of the doubt, but their track record of communication has been horrendous and ability to keep promises somewhat questionable. That all being said I hope we do get those 5 Civs for this DLC and enough campaigns to go around for all of them.
They could make like Paradox and make a Weekly Dev Diary showcasing a Civ in each one. It would build up the hype more than radio silence for a month, news drop, and a then another silent month.
why so negativ? they never lied to us to any of the core AoE2 DLCs, this african kingdoms stuff i never heard before.
they clearly say we get 5 NEW civs, chinese and koreans aren´t new, they getting some bigger changes then others.
V&V is “campaign focused” expansion with “polished” scenarios “inspired” by filthydelphia’s custom scenarios.
Even if you don’t consider V&V a “core” DLC, hard to take them at their word.
That being said, I think there’s enough evidence of five new civs to be reasonably confident there aren’t some wordplay shenanigans going on.
We’ve seen the UUs for jurchens and tanguts, and seen two tech trees. the two tech trees don’t SEEM to fit with Jurchens and Tanguts, and there’s still the fire archer and the ghulam-ishy looking unit from the last screenshot.
Ok, so it’s mid april for the update, it’s just the sentence share by op could be misinterpreted, especially because we will obviously heard from us before that when they drop the trailer, and release a preview for testing the next patch on steam!
I could see the “patch notes” that we got being a combination to two patches, one with the cosmetic stuff that will release mid-April, and then one that comes with the DLC and applies the DLC stuff to old content a few weeks later.
Any hints in the SteamDB?
It’s super hard to tell anymore. basically aoe2 depots are private now, so before during the leadup to BfG we could see the name of the thing being updated, and infer a lot from that. now all we now is that something in aoe2 updated at this time.
the updated volume seems…a little elevate compared to normal. usually in the 8-12 updates per day. yesterday was 13 and today was 15. There was a spike in updates about a week before the “What’s coming in 2025” post, but a similar spike did not manifest prior to the “Sneak Peak” post.
TLDR, no hints ATM.
