I’m liking what I’m seeing. But I don’t particularly care which new civs get added to the game (mainly that new civs/content is added). And I don’t really care about the hero units (neither particularly positive nor negative - just a new mechanic to me which is a light positive). I do think Khitans and Jurchens should get a campaign as well, but as I don’t play the campaigns, I myself don’t actually care about that.
The DLC doesn’t really seem like a Chinese split to me. Chinese are still called Chinese (which may be what he meant by saying its not a Chinese split). and still represents the exact same thing it did previously (without any real diminishment).
A communicated message has multiple parts to it: there’s what the speaker thinks they said, what was actually said, what the hearer thinks they heard, and maybe also what the hearer actually heard. (And then there are more parts once you add in feedback.) The thing is, it’s entirely possible for all of these parts to be different from each other. Which is likely a good explanation for why people think that the devs “lied” - its not that they intentionally led people astray, its that what the dev thought he said is not the same as what people thought they heard.
I mean in isolation I agree, but in context of the other things communicated there is an inescapably obvious and consistent pattern of intentional mis-direction.
V&V. Campaign focused expansion. no campaigns. Ok well maybe they have some alternative definition of campaign. Polished scenarios. Contains the same bugs that the mod versions have. Inspired by filthydelphia’s custom scenarios. most of them were copy paste. And then, after we’d learned that V&V contains no campaigns, suddenly the word campaign was never used again. All the prepped marketing material used the term “single player” content. This wasn’t a reaction to fans. They PLANNED on using the word “campaign” before V&V was announced, and then use far less descriptive term of “single player” when it was clear as day there were no campaigns.
V&V2. They show the screenshots that can ONLY be interpreted to show Jurchens and Tanguts. They saw the civ for that tanguts in “Into China” is changing. THEN when they tell us there’s actually no tangut civilzation, after who knows how many players they’ve updated in scenarios to use new civs, literally the only thing walked back from the first posts patch notes, the tangut civ in “Into China” isn’t changing after all. You show the Jurchens and Tanguts, to tease a DLC where those two civs are NOT representative of 60% of the civs, and 100% of the single player content. You have your lead dev, the guy who is most responsible for having created the indian civ and the DLC that added them, watch as they’re split into four civs, somehow mis-understand or mis-explain that chinese aren’t similarly getting split.
I’d also like to add, not that it’s the worst thing by far, but Cysion also said the reason they needed 5 civs was to be able to tell the stories they wanted to tell. I can’t fathom why Jurchens and Khitans were necessary for 3k campaigns. I reserve final judgement until we see the campaigns themselves, but this to me at this moment looking in retrospect is but another bewildering statement.
These enormous coincidences, the mind boggling word choices from people who should better than most know what these words mean, over and over and over again.
It’s why I don’t get bent out of shape about Isgreen saying all the campaigns were coming to RoR. Maybe he mispoke. Maybe plans changed. Maybe possibly I suppose, he flat out lied. But it wasn’t representative of a larger and repeated pattern of deceit. I agree they should have clarified or sent an update when things changed, but I’m not angry over it. It was incompetent, but not so mind bogglingly so that I don’t assume the worst.
With V&V and V&V2 however… It’s vanishingly unlikely they somehow accidentally with all the best intentions communicated just the wrong information in just the wrong way, and all these other things just accidentally happened just so unfortunately, as it only APPEARS they’re intent was to lie, just considering V&V. But supposedly now, the exact same thing happened AGAIN. TWICE. TWO times supposedly they were the unluckiest people in the universe. A victim of tragically unlikely mis-understandings.
Either these people are so unlucky they shouldn’t go within 100 miles of a deck of cards or a pack of dice, or they’re liars, who lie, by telling lies, to lie to people.
Yeah, i’m annoyed by them misleading the public on purpose.
Telling they are making a campaign focused expansion that had zero campaigns. AoE1 content to AoE2… but without the campaigns.
And now that they are not spliting the chinese and they have the largest expansion with 5 civs… and it end up with the chinese split and only 3 campaigns of 5 scenarios…
Really, is the Battle for Greece the most honest and best produced expansion of the last years…?
I don’t think TMR is anything amazing. I have a tin foil hat theory that RoR underperforming led to content being cut from TMR. And having the armenians based moreso on Cilician armenia was…a choice. But it was fine. But Generally yeah.
None of LK, LotW, DotD, and DoI were perfect but bread and butter DLCs that really tried, mostly succeeded, and the roughest parts have been patched over time. No major complaints.
RoR was confused mess, IDK who it was made for, but it was harmless content.
TMR was bare bones but still another bread and butter DLC, in the vein of the other non-RoR DLCs that had come before.
V&V was a lie and lowest effort conceivable.
BfG from everything I’ve seen and heard was a highly ambitious project. Only criticisms are that perhaps CA is a bit green behind the ears with scenario design, and having what is functionally and official version of the Rome at War mod be your 5th anniversary DLC is…a choice. but yes, generally well received.
V&V2. More lies to abandon your core fanbase for chinese mobile game players, I presume. The heroes seem like a desperate plea to get mobile game players. Real “notice me senpai” energy.
Yeah we have not gotten consistently good DLCs since DoI. That was 3 years ago and five DLCs ago.
What is interesting is they did seem to try to fix V&V afterwards with it creating such a mess via a lot of patches. And the new Xie An level is REALLY good.
This gives me a little bit of hope that the devs will listen this time as well…
He said chinese wouldn’t be split. Chinese were split.
I’m so sick of devs, whose literal job it is to work on aoe2, to understand aoe2, to communicate aoe2 with their co-workers, can’t be held responsible to communicate very basic info to the fans.
They lie about very basic stuff, and then fan boys come and act like the devs can’t be expected to understand what they’re saying. The devs aren’t 3 years old hearing a strange word from their parents for the first time, innocently copying whatever they hear. Treating them as such is only giving them cover to continue their deceit.
They know better, we know better, some of us know they know better, and they don’t care.
I did read your “explanation”. That’s why I argued against the fundamental flaw of you position, namely our lines of critique are mutually exclusive, which they aren’t. Something I could only have done by having read your “explanation”.
Because I already said something if you disagree with you’re wrong.
2+2=5. If you disagree, I already told you you’re wrong, therefore any future argument you make is intrinsically invalid.
Also I addressed this as I explained above. But unlike I, it is you actually who is un-interested with engaging with what the other had to say. You aren’t obliged to agree with what I say, but don’t gaslight me or the good people of the forums reading this suggesting I didn’t address your “argument”. If you need to lie about what I said to attempt to argue your point, perhaps you should use that as cause to re-examine your arguments.
I find it truly regrettable that I am unable to believe in facts and agree with you at the same time.
Why is me wanting people to agree with me, and presenting arguments in favor of my views, a waste of your time? Is your time intrinsically more valuable than mine? Is the fact I disagree with you make my time less valuable? There are some deeply disturbing moral implications of that sentence.
Says who? this is “If we don’t call it a split it’s not a split line” of reasoning i’ve seen from quite a few people and I find it categorically mystifying. If we changed the name of hindustanis back to indians, would the indians be un-split?
I’m not sure how to respond to that. There was 1 chinese civ. Now there are four. The old chinese civ would have represented 3k. 3k shouldn’t ever be in the game to begin with tho. and now there are three 3k civs. please, what am I missing?
so if burmese had also been released with DoI, then indians would have not been split?
I’m cool with the new DLC and patch, and look forward to (hope for) more AoE2:DE nuggets coming our way in the future.
For those who don’t dig them, look on the bright side: the game or dev work hasn’t been shuttered yet like AoE3:DE and AoE1:DE pretty much have been.
But if that’s not a bright side for you and you’d prefer AoE2:DE development just shut down, too, can you maybe instead work on a mod and a MP platform that splits the game off so you don’t get any future updates, so that the rest of us can keep enjoying future updates with glee and in peace? Or at least enjoying to the extent at which we don’t feel the need to take the whole franchise down? I really don’t want to go 1, 2, 3, 4, or more decades with zero Microsoft support on AoE2 like I’m sure some of you would love… since they keep striking out with what you’d, ideally, like to see in patches – combined with purported lies and deceit that, apparently, keep happening to make things worse in your mind
Personally I like this DLC… The zhu ge nu UU doesnt do China justice. They needed a lot of new UU. And shoving all of them in one Chinese civ was too much. Now we have 3 new chinese cavalry, 1 chinese spearman, 1 chinese sword man, 1 chinese archer, 1 chinese crossbowman, 1 Chinese war cart, 1 Chinese horse archer, 2 chinese ships… if you ask me thats a lot . Forget about 3 kingdoms and you find this DLC a good addition
I think these two statements are contradictory: if the 3k civs don’t belong in the game, then they didn’t belong as part of the Chinese civilization either. And if that’s the case, then how were the Chinese split? They were reworked, but what the Chinese civ represented doesn’t seem to have changed to me. Unless you consider Jurchens and Khitans to be part of what the Chinese civ represented.
Either the 3k civs were already in the game as represented by the Chinese, or the Chinese civ wasn’t split when the 3k civs were added in.