There is a lot of cool thing in the patch.
Outside of the drama topics, of course, the update introduced tons of cool features, some eye candies for the map designers, lots of new combat mechanics, this is just crazy.
So I’m gonna pick one thing per category and say what I think awesome.
- Eye Candy : the new bridge part.
It’s not just a new bridge, the way they made it. The pieces are put together a way you can turn it into sewers, rivers, bridges, stone base, walls, but it’s just a damn bridge cutted into small parts and splitted in multiple objects. I really like the way the dev team choose to bring it to the editor, for their needs of course, but that will just let the map maker do crazy, CRAZY, things with it. I mean really crazy things.
- Game Mechanic : the charge projectile system.
So this ia crazy, for the first time in AoE2, a melee unit can have ranged attack, without any action from the player. Ratha was already a big addition to the game, with the combat style switching from ranged to melee, but this needed the player to press a button and remember to use that. It was also something that was hard to use when you’re grouping multiple unit type together, but this charged projectile system is automatically managed with the attributes linked to it. It’s awesome for modders, so many cool unit style can now become viable, like roman legionnary throwing pillumna before the ennemy come shield to shield. But as said, the bestpart is that it’s something the player can use without performing any action, it’s just a matter of timing correctly the attack to maximize effectiveness as all other charged attack in the game.
- Graphic : the elite unit skin.
A part of me thinks the game changed from what it was when I started to play it back in AoK version. But now, we can see visually if a unit is regular or elite. The look is amazing, but it’s not what makes this pretty good, it’s the fact anyone can now determine simply by eye contact when the ennemy improves the unique unit, as we could already do for every unit present in the game. So for now, except Chronicles units and few editor only units, EVERY unit in the game has a visual change occuring on “upgrading”. This can look very small, but this is very, very usefull for players at all level, new comers, veteran, esporters, mapper, etc.
- Cost : all that was free.
We received that, entierly free. Most games release those type of improvement with expansions, major dlc for mmos, etc, but we had that for free. The content we’ll have to pay for is only the campaign story and new civ access, everything else is there, available, without any fee. This is crazy, like really crazy. This is not just meaning old players received it for free, but also that new players won’t have to pay an extra to obtain it, and this keeps the price of the game unchanged.