What if this is it? What if there are no more updates, EVER, what then?
Give it a thought, developers and producers DIDN’T make a blood oath to keep making content for this game, and with tanking sales of it, would make sense not to invest in it anymore, to just break the “promises” and not release anything before or after 2025
So what if they decided to give no more DLCs, updates, or even patches? what if the January update is the last update we ever got?
One thing is for certain, this “aoe3 discussion” forum would be deserted, since most of discussions are about new content and re-balancing. Nearly everything would go to the “ask for help” and “modding” areas of the forum.
Pretty bleak picture for the THOUSANDS of people who love and play it every day, ending abandoned.
So, what can we do about it?
Modding is one thing, though I wish there were more videos online explaining the process for the noobs like meself (I’d give everyone the updates ye want on a mothly basis, If only I knew how to mod more than basic unit stats).
Other than that, promoting the game ourselves would trickle a small number of new players to keep the community from disappearing (Sharing screenshots on social media, making videos about it, getting friends to play along…).
Other than that, we are kinda scre###.
I love the game, but the last update was pretty disorganized, not “neatly tied in a bow”, so if this is it, we’ll have to be our own developers…
Given the current attitude from the company and the community of the other games, I believe even if they straight up break the “promise” of the upcoming Baltic DLC, it would not incite any backlash among their “main audience”.
Any backlash will be confined to AOE3 players, which will also be heavily censored and totally ignored. When the AOE3 players all die out, they will finally get rid of this annoyance.
It won’t affect the players of the other games at all. It won’t affect the sales of their future products because the “series” is doing well overall and who cares whether they ditch a “failed” product or not. Players of the other games of the series would not care, if they don’t celebrate and come to mock us.
Just look at social media. You can find content creators, forums and channels about “all the other age games” and then those about AOE3. You seldom find overlaps between them. Any “age series” community is mainly about all games except AOE3. Most articles and videos summarizing the series or RTS overall would skip AOE3.
The majority of AOE3 players though not a small amount is very disconnected from the other games in the series and thus also disconnected from the main focus of WE. It is very obvious——any release or update of a new age game has NOT impacted the player number of AOE3. It means the playerbase is stable but also means ignoring these people would not impact their future products, and catering to them would not result in any bigger growth (than constant DLC sales) either.
That’s why WE has the courage to treat the game and us like this.
The only question left is: who created this situation?
One detail to mention is that if AOM RTD is having quite a success and uses the same graphics engine as AOE III DE, it means that there is still hope for fans of the franchise, the developers must have new plans for the game because both can have collaborations with each other, so if this is the case the game will continue to have follow-up in the life time that co-exists with AOM RTD, we must be positive, let’s not forget that in a few months the new DLC of Poland and Denmark will be released which can be a watershed to raise the name of the AOE III franchise again
The day that AoE 3 DE loses support, it is going to be the day that bigger mods will rise.
We have big mods like age of the world who is adding a lot of civilizations.
AoE 3 DE losing dev support will be sad because no more official content, but on the bright side, it will open doors for those mods to do civs that currently those mod devs are afraid to do because of the chances for those civs to be added as official ones today.
AoE 3 DE lossing support will not be the end of the game and the game will not die thanks to the community the game has.
Basically the same will happen with 2005 AoE 3, and basically the same with every other AoE game, it will be taking over by the community with mods like “Wars of liberty” and such.
Yes, although I still think they will continue making DLC for AoE 3 next year, there will come a time when the devs will not release more content and the modders will take care of it (as happened with AoE 2 with the Age of Hegemony mod that later mutated into The Forgotten and Forgotten Empires)…
Nothing would happen, life goes on, and even if the game is abandoned by Microsoft and the developers it is not the end of the world, we can still play it and we will always have the modders to generate new content and keep the community alive.
If no further developments gonna happen, then it will be back like it was before DE released. The community may create the balance patch that may even be the standard way to play like the Esoc patches, some may made a mod that adds interesting aspect to the game like the Improvements mods, or even go all the way to put the whole globe into the game just like the Wars of Liberty mods.
Well, if it happened to aoe1, it can happen to aoe3 as well. It doesn’t seem like the developers are interested in supporting a game that no longer brings in a lot of income.
As long as it gives opportunities for more campaigns, I wouldn’t mind if they port a lite lite lite lite version of AOE3 to the other games.
I’ll still stick to AOE3 for the skirmish but I really need good campaigns about this period. Like the only reason I’d open AOE2 now is for the campaigns.
I mean I’d love it because Isometric 2D is insanely better for RTS games compared to 3D.
That said this is an absolutely insane statement, you’d have to bend the Genie engine so bad to accomplish this lmao, might as well rewrite it entirely.
