There’s quite a difference compared to other games. Most singleplayer games get released - patched to remove bugs and then devs move on to a new project(or a paid dlc) or a new iteration of a similar game replaces the old one(COD for instance). Here we should get multiple balance patches/bug fixes, civ adjustments and gameplay changes for years to come next to dlc content for years aswell. You can’t compare those 2 things. This is not a done and dusted product - you pay once for “lifetime” updates and support.
Really? How long does it take to create open world games? Also people demand better sound, graphics, more content,… It takes more time to create a complex 3D model compared to a 2D sprite. Furthermore additional optimizations and new technologies demand more work.
The term AA is mostly dependent on the size of the developer team. This has nothing to do with game quality. I think we can agree that this game is not an indie title, so what else would you call this game? Its rather common that AA games from big publishers have 50-60€ prices - for the last 10 years. What people dont want to understand is that price has mostly nothing to do with the quality. Did cyberpunk and GTA5 had the same quality at their release with the same price? There are games out there which cost 10 bucks that are by a wide margin better than AAA games.
I don’t know, because I don’t have an encyclopaedic knowledge of all games and their post-release support. All I can say is “I don’t think eight months is that short”. I’m not saying “the game shouldn’t have had more”, for example. You can disagree with my opinion, but that doesn’t make it misdirection.
Regardless, I definitely think I’m closer to the facts of the support DoW III had. Do you even know what they added? Or are you too invested in supporting your claims that you don’t care?
I go on the words of the developers as stated on the community forums in some rather candid Q&As, after they announced the official end of support.
They had DLC plans. The campaign had a teaser for a new faction. The reception the game had at launch made them sit down and reconsider. They weren’t trying to abandon it - they were trying to give the community what it wanted so they could retain a stable playerbase. This didn’t work out.
We can definitely discuss what if scenarios where they approached this problem differently. But your only options here are: believe the words of the developers, and not the screenshot of the PR statement. If you can’t do that, and believe whatever they’re saying is a lie, then there really is nothing to discuss.
Importance is relative. I think it’s pretty evident we find different things important. At the moment, mine is poor comparisons with DoW III to attack a different game.
If you want to chat about DoW II, drop me a PM. Sorry, it’s not that I don’t want to, but it’s a real tangent (even more than DoW III) and I’m pretty busy today (RL stuff with the kids) so I don’t want to stop the thread from moving.
The OP needs to apply for that Extreme Cheapskates reality TV show. You cannot possibly think about the money when purchasing a game that was 15 years in the waiting, unless it would be like 1,000 USD or more, which is not the case. Unless you live in a third world country, EUR 60 is an incredibly low price for the level of long-term entertainment you receive by purchasing this game.
The fact of the matter is that this is still a triple A game in terms of how much resources went in to make this game. It doesn’t matter if you like the game or not that’s your own opinion but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s a triple A game.
People need to learn to the difference between personal opinions and production costs are two separate things.
Edit: Also, for Sweden at least paying 60 Euro for standard triple A games is normal and has been for a decade or more for us so this isn’t something new that started to happen now?
Your lack of encyclopedic knowledge coupled with your willingness to ascribe altruistic motives to companies (expect for when it doesn’t suit you and then it’s all about the damn shareholders) when they drop candid meticulously constructed PR notices on official forums make this an uninteresting discussion to have. It’s not that I don’t believe developers, it’s that I believe everything they share with us is PR nonsense.
AoE4 is a good example, there is not a single thing we heard from the developers that wasn’t PR nonsense. “ah, yeah, for DLC plans we want to release everything for everyone, so everyone has something and they don’t have to wait a long time for it.”. Yeah, OK, can’t wait for that magical DLC plan that includes everything to come to fruition.
It’s not that I don’t think there are extremely passionate and hard working developers working extremely hard on making AoE4 a great game (in fact, I automatically assume that whether they tell us about it or not), just that I don’t plan on judging what the future holds by reading public relation press releases, and that’s what they are, whether they are giving interviews or posting on forums.
I do remember what they added to DoW3, they added what should have been there from the beginning which was a non moba version of online play. Of course by then it was already too late, which is the problem with releasing games as WIP.
I am a 30 years old man in Eastern Europe with his own career going on and have been playing Age of games since I was a child. I agree that EUR 60 might be too much for people who never played Age of games before and just want to try it for 1-2 hours, but that’s not the kind of people that kept this franchise alive until 2021 and quite frankly I don’t care about them.
I spent about EUR 40 on Age of Mythology about 15 years and have played this game for thousands of hours, it’s by far the most efficient bunch of euros I ever spent on entertainment.
I am certain that the developers have a pricing department who established the current price on a very well researched market study and that they have countless promotions in various territories coming on in the near future - because that’s what such companies do.
Keep in mind that games like Age of Empires, built on a so called waterfall model (i.e. they spend a bunch of years developing a product and then they launch it, investing millions and millions in the meantime) is becoming more scarce with every year that passes because they are pressured by the new development model, Agile, which caters mostly to mobile games and other such cash cows, which strip players of much more money in the longer run.
Last, but not least, the reality is that people in the gaming industry don’t make too much money compared to their peers in other industries (I’m talking about programmers, artists, QA, etc.). If they charged less for this game, I doubt they could keep a profit.
Like, there’s a lot that could be discussed, and sure, PR is real. Consumers can absolutely be mislead. To assume it’s always “PR nonsense”, though, is a non-starter. But that if that’s how you want to be, nobody posting here is going to change that.
In the future, if you want to make digs about encyclopaedic knowledge, maybe provide some of your own. “this is PR nonsense because I believe everything developers post online is PR nonsense” isn’t an argument. It’s shallow and reductive.
Your understanding of DoW III is similarly shallow (people were accurately counterpointing the “MOBA” argument on release, it just became the nonsense rallying cry of certain folk, doomed to be repeated for eternity).
I’d hoped there was more. There’s nothing wrong with being a critic. But you constantly refuse to expand on the points you make - they’re just meant to be true because you say they are.
Doesn’t inspire me to talk about DoW II either, to be honest. You like vDoW. You’re allowed to! You think it’s the best one in the franchise. You’re allowed to! No shame on you for that at all. But the impression I get is “and this means the other things are factually bad”, and, nah. I’ve got no time for that. Have a great day regardless, without me bogging it up further.
this is a very interesting post. I don’t agree with all of it, but I agree with many ideas. It would sidetrack too much if I answered this extensively, but you are right in general that a game should be paid fairly, what I question mostly is your statement of “marketing department pricing the game fairly”, if you want to dumb it down to the core, there are 2 pricing strategies: the one that applies a markup to the unit cost, and the one that aims to “ask as much as possible as long as the demand curve is “flat””. The former is “fair business”, the latter is a business model that places like, for example, French restaurants use, and preys largely on information asymmetry (customers are unable to accurately assess the true price of the product and/or are unable/unwilling to find a substitute for a similar price), or some degree of false promises, always.
People that go on forums for products as a consumer generally go to complain.
So you’ll see a deluge of complaints on forums, because people who aren’t dissatisfied, just continue with their lives.
Rarely do you see people go to a forum to compliment a product.
You don’t seem to understand how much it costs to make games.
Most game devs are underpaid for the amount of work they do. Most of the money a game studio makes generally goes into the CEO, Upper Management, and Marketing.
As inflation creeps up and people ask for better wages, the cost of producing a game goes up. and in turn the price of games also goes up. [The CEO’s, Upper Management of a studio will NEVER reduce their wages to balance out their spreadsheets, so the only way to maintain profit is to increase the price of the game]
You should honestly be complaining to the CEO’s, upper management of game studios for the cost of games as most of that money rarely actually goes to devs who actually make the games.
Like you do have a point. This game doesn’t really feel like a 60$ release. A fair evaluation of the game imho would be 35-45$, not 60. It’s primarily 60$ because
it’s microsoft
and
That’s the standard price of a game made by a larger studio nowadays.
The price has no real correlation to the actual product. Only the Studio Executives, profit margins, and the Market price.
Relic games usually aren’t games you can mod to the same extent as other Age titles. You might want to refund if that’s your wish and wait to see what their engine supports.
Assuming it stands up to the test of time. I am pessimistic that it will not.
Aoe is one of the few games thats actually worht the price tag. MOst games have such low replayability value. Like skyrim or assassins creed. So you play 30 hours and complete it and then you’re done. For aoe I played more than that in the stress test weekend alone.
I’m so tired of people spamming about the price. If you’re this poor, maybe you should get a job instead of gaming.
Well, most of the reviews in steam are complaints but they still liked it, which is weird tbh. Idk why you complain so much then just give it a like instead of dislike -____-
But even me who really got fun playing it, found it lackluster and missed so many visual and UI features that could not deal with it.
I feel exactly same when I play AoE 1, fun game with great visuals but lacks a lot of features that makes it just a fun game to play once in a while. After the Xbox pass month I wont play it anymore.
It seems people recommend it despite their complaints. I take that as a very good sign. Assuming support is good the game has amazing potential.
That’s where I’m at. I have a list of fixes/improvements I think are necessary, but I am already enjoying the game a lot so I’d definitely recommend it even as is.
ok so, I bought the game at a discount, and what I wrote in the OP stands, but additions:
the game is definitely not finished. For example, unit balancing, and clear major issues like Mongol TC drop.
the campaign seems cute. I played only 2-3 scenarios, but so far it seems the best part of the game and actually the only one I enjoyed so far (I also played a few skirmishes vs easy AI and a ladder game and both were relatively boring)
the lack of ability to micro units in those 5v5 engagements early on, along with lack of ability to wall (maybe it’s too early to have a wall meta) means it’s basically 1 unit spam vs 1 unit spam… that gets boring VERY fast. You pick Franks, and if they make enough spearmen vs your early Knights you lose, else you win.
Especially point 3, I don’t see this game becoming good, microing units is extremely difficult and combat overall feels needlessly complex (if you played AoE2, you know that combat feels by comparison smooth). All sorts of problems like difficulty of clicking units (both friendly and enemy), unresponsive units, units taking weird pathing after being given an instruction, also I am glad that it seems that in this game, archer spam is not a must (unlike AoE2) in 1v1, but it feels that archers do too little damage to enemy armored units.
Also, they should bring back the distinction between a “power” gold-based unit and trash units, archers only costing trash resources doesn’t feel great.
Also, Skirmisher missing removes depth of gameplay, already Mangonels and Monks are weak af in this game (sorry, the idea of holding a relic and mass converting sounds good on paper, but the time is just too long, try to adapt it and maybe make it a targetable AoE x tiles from the monk), so basically the best composition until Imp always seems to be some form of cavalry + archers since again, no effective Monks and no Skirmishers. AoE2, generally Knights civs would go cav + skirms (because 2x gold unit is hard to justify), while archer civs archer + pike. What I’m trying to say I guess is that AoE2 has far more composition depth than AoE4.
I don’t get this argument at all. AoE4 does a better job than Aoe2 at encouraging diversified army compositions. I like some things better about each game, but this is one thing that is definitely a point in Aoe4’s favor.