I think that this idea is just a really weird way to present the actual problem which can be put quite simply as a gut feeling: AoE 1 DE kinda sucks as a remaster. As a huge fan of the first AoE (and somebody who doesn’t want too much AoE 2 stuff like formations in the remaster) the Definitive Edition is just very disappointing in a few aspects:
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It’s just so ■■■■■■■ buggy, I can’t believe that I still get notifications about a bug I reported more than 2 years ago because other people encounter it and keep referring to it yet MS didn’t bother to fix it. How can a game have pathfinding that sometimes makes units stuck permanently, like how does that get through testing and then not get fixed for 4 years?
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Horrible performance, it’s kind of inexcusable how badly the game can perform even on competent machines.
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I still don’t get why the zoom detail setting exists instead of high res graphics being handled the way they are in AoE 2 DE. The assets should be repackaged that way.
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A bunch of really badly animated models, the animations are actually worse and stiffer than what we had in the more than two decade old original. Just look at villagers carrying stuff and cry yourself to sleep when comparing it to the original animations. And what happened to composite bowmen because those mutant, Toxic Avenger looking creatures that are in the game are surely not composite bowmen.
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The “lighting” is really bad, it washes out the colors of the game too much and as a result the game just doesn’t feel like AoE 1. Lighting should absolutely be handled the same way as it is in AoE 2 DE, that’s how classic AoE actually looks like.
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The presentation is just weak and weird, I have never seen a more boring looking campaign menu for example.
These flaws are quite serious and bring the game down a lot. The music is fantastic (better than AoE 2 DE in my opinion), the campaigns got reworked in a really nice way, the gameplay is smoother and smarter yet still faithful to the original etc. but these strenghts shine a lot less when they are put into a very mixed bag.
So what the game actually needs is not some Frankenstein monster AoE 2 DLC or “port” but a serious rework that makes use of what the team learned from remastering AoE 2. Yep, that would most likely include bringing the game over to the much better AoE 2 engine on a technical level but let’s call that a “rework” instead.
Keeping the two games separate would I think benefit both since if you look at AoE 2 DE without rose tinted glasses then it’s quite clear to see that it has its own issues too. That’s a lot less than what AoE 1 DE has to deal with but hey, we just had 2 months with broken pathfinding and the game still suffers from just dumb things like a freshly introduced fps lock that’s buggy. It’s evident that they can barely keep AoE DE 2 together so mixing that with AoE 1 DE stuff would surely end in disaster and I don’t like waiting months for patches to fix my 22 year old game, thank you.
