Like it or not, we have with the three kingdoms. If Microsoft gets rid of them, they will have to deal with legal problems. What they can do though is change the civs to be more true to the game. Thus a few things that can be done to improve the player base dissatisfaction with the 3 DLC (and feel free to add on to this) are:
Remove heroes
Add regular trebuchets
Make new 3k civs less gimmicky, I.e, Wei have weird UU and
weird bonuses. 1 gimmick per civ is fine but too much is too much. On top of this, your treb comes from Siege Workshop
Lastly, I know what is wanted by the player base, remove the civs, but again legal reasons so all we can do now is mitigate the problem.
I don’t mind the traction trebs, but please use the Chronicles reskin for civs knocked out before counterweight trebs were a thing (Romans Goths Huns).
At the bare minimum heroes should be renamed to a generic “commander” or “warlord” whatever, not being named characters.
Would be short changing those who bought the DLC with promise of 3k civs. Kinda like if I say I will give you 5 chocolate bars for 20 dollars and then I take 3 of those chocolate bars back after you pay me. It’s a breach of contract.
Having 5 civs usable in multiplayer is what was advertised, but there doesn’t seem to be a limit on how you rework them over time (Koreans and Chinese recently), even rename them (Indians => Hindustani).
So banishing the 3K civs to another module (where they’d still stay as is, and can still be used as is against regular civs) and over time modifying the base game version into proper medieval civs would be an option.
That’s a possibility and I would love Tibetans added(as would most players) but devs are unlikely to do this as they would basically have to make 3 brand new civs for free.
They can always sell them again in a new DLC that will also unlock them (if you don’t own 3K) + give them a campaign. It can be done, worst case scenario throw in a discount for players who already own 3K, but they’ll still make profits from that.
Overall when you compare to what other companies do…
Creative Assembly for example, TW Pharaoh was very poorly received. Their response was amazing :
cut the planned 3rd Bronze Age game (which would be focused on Mesopotamia) as the plan was to milk the whole period.
include the planned content of that game + the content from TW Troy directly in a new version of TW Pharaoh (free if you owned Pharaoh), more than doubling the map (which itself was a big technical challenge as they had to allow negative coordinates to expand the map westward to the Aegean)
throw in some bonuses for good figure (minor factions, heavily reworked gameplay…)
All as a free update to salvage their game. They went from a very underwhelming game to a full Bronze Age game covering pretty much everything that was expected (and I bought the game when I saw they were planning that)
Compared to all that, reworking 3 civs for AOE2 would be minor.
Ok, so first, there are no legal problems. There’s small text covering them with the DLC. They can modify the contents.
Secondly, putting the 3K civs into a Chronicles-like mode and replacing them with actual civs would still give as-advertised the 5 ranked civs. If anything, civs take less time to do than other parts of the DLC (like campaigns). As my experience has taught me with the mod. The only time-consuming part is model-making, and if the devs just announce they will be doing it beforehand, then all will be fine. They can also recycle elements from the Khitan-Tangut mess as well to save time.
It’s not like they need to worry about balance problems anyway Looks at Khitans win-rate.
Unless they planned to go to China again, these are not really “free”, as if people hadn’t complained we wouldn’t have gotten them. Plus more people would buy the 3K DLC if it actually included 5 Middle Ages civs, so these hypothetical civs would still pay for the effort to make them.
If anything, they can make money from this by making a later DLC(s) with campaigns for all 5 at various points.
100% correct. They basically gave what were likely many planned DLCs away for free to apologise for what happened. THIS is how you deal with a situation, and this is far easier to fix.
But poorly received according to steam reviews. The only ones who did worse are V&V and RoR.
And if their community manager does his job properly, they’ll notice that even in the target market that is China, there are similar complaints (such as going after the low-hanging fruit of the 3K instead of proper medieval history)
I think at this stage WE is no longer a company that worries about its reputation. Otherwise they’d learn from V&V already instead of making a worse version of it.
It’s not a “worse version of V&V”, V&V only had new scenarios, many recycled from free available versions, that were quite bugged, and with zero new assets.
Mb, though even legal stuff being nonexistent, I doubt they’ll fix things as it’s too much work for too little reward. Ofc, I may be wrong here but there’s already many people who got DLC so I’m not sure if they would increase profits much by switching civs.
I’m not so sure. Pre-orders went well, but there are two follow-up issues.
1: Poor post pre-order sales. The DLC was one of the worst selling in its first week of any AoE2 DLC.
2: We don’t know what the refund rate was. I’ve never seen so many angry reviews stating they are doing so. So I’d put money on there being quite a few this time.
Funnily I got some games set up with friends recently and mentioned the DLC. All of them said they had noticed it for sale, but given the reviews were so low, they refused to touch it.
Keep in mind these are pretty casual players, not more invested ones like us. So potentially rescuing the poor reviews of this DLC would be a worthwhile pursuit financially. Not to mention people like myself, who are boycotting all future DLCs until these three civs are “fixed”.
They have also tried to fix DLCs in post before. V&V has been adjusted to try and fix the problems outside of a complete overhaul. So it is possible.
Sarcasm aside, I think the current data should be alarming:
V&V got a poor review because it was low effort cashgrab
ROR and TMR because their contents didn’t justify the price
3K however was neither low effort, nor short in contents. Yet it got only a barely better review. Then it must be a core design problem
Not to mention many “positive” reviews express the very same criticism.
