World's Edge Communication Problem

Age of Empires III: DE III - Discussion
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I don’t have any complaints about the plan for the new dlc and it’s 2 civs (in fact I predicted they would be the new civs due to team constraints and the ease of making Euro civs), What I do have a problem with is the fact that there was a false lead up to the New Year New Age event.

we were told,

“Age Of Empires 3: After giving our players a new way to play for free in 2023, we are excited to reveal a new DLC with new civilizations.”

An we didn’t get a reveal, we got two flags, no names, no DLC title, no art piece for the DLC or screenshots, no trailer. while all the other games got exactly what was advertised.

I’m a little bit upset about the lack of material and I’m trying to figure out what the heck happened. That either,

1.This was the intended reveal and the announcement team made false expectations for us. They should have instead lead with “Age Of Empires 3: After giving our players a new way to play for free in 2023, we are excited to reveal new upcoming plans for the game in 2024.” a bit bland but more accurate.

  1. They planned to reveal more but the team fell behind and couldn’t get the DLC details ready in time for the event and so just revealed the 2 civs planned for it.

I’m just hoping for some sort of blog post with the other expected information within the next couple of months if not a DLC trailer because otherwise I am concerned World’s Edge team needs a better community communications team or is leaving the AOE3 fans purposely in the dark and need to improve themselves over the next year.

I do not want this AOE3 community absence or lack of Social Media representation to go on without better transparency from the developers to us in the community.

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Let’s assume the most cynical case: They really haven’t got anything new to show. Not a single unit model or screenshot. And have not decided the name of the DLC, or even have not decided whether to call the civ Poles or Polish or Polish-Lithuanian. But they are supposed to announce something to make the livestream look like “this year’s plan for the series”.
It is STILL possible to make an interesting livestream with some build-up of hype, with maybe some quick teaser images from the scenario editor because there are already Danish and Polish units in the game (and maybe berry bushes), and a few hints, giving the viewers around 2 minutes to guess and speculate, then reveal the flags. These might take 30 mins of off-stage work.

AND remember to mention it in the recap tweet.

I’ve seen enough companies or developers trying to build up hypes and fake excitements for something dull or trivial, even for underdog products pushed by bad business decisions from higher-ups that even themselves know would not succeed (like Total War Pharaoh).

WE does not even care to do that. We get a very reluctant and awkward 30s mention of the first major DLC in two years with two flags likely just googled out. I spent more efforts adding last minute slides to my presentations.

Sometimes I really feel they hate some of their products selling a little better.

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iPhone wasn’t known by the public until it was announced and it did pretty well :smiley:

I take it you haven’t ventured into AoE2:DE forum land recently? There are some who say they were lied to because the word “campaign” was used instead of “scenario” for some upcoming DLC marketing… and it has made several unhappy AoE2 fans. Personally, I think it’s a little unwarranted and I’m looking forward to the DLC, but I can see the issue…

Sometimes it seems like game studios should just go into radio silence until release :slight_smile: … take one out of Steve Jobs’ playbook

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Hello @Darkness01101

First time I’ve been in the aoe3 forums.

Yeah, it really seems like they knew the community wanted campaigns but they hadn’t any to sell us (or figured this up-cycling approach would be cheaper) so they tried a semantic slight of hand to pass off a collection standalone scenarios as campaign content to hype the fan base.

It’s the first time I can recall those shepherding aoe2 to have chosen the pursuit of money over being honest with the community. If they’ve crossed that ethical rubicon what else will they be willing to compromise on?

What will be the next deceitful ploy they’ll try? If being dishonest makes money, why stop? That’s what I’m afraid about.

Sorry to hear you guys are having problems too.

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Honestly I think alot of it boils down to WE not being malicious but just not getting us. They do fine by aoe4 and 2, and look im happy we are getting content. Truly, i am posting with good intent because i dont think the issue is they dont care, its that they just dont get aoe3.

From cannon galleons to flags their presenters are clearly a bit unaware of aoe3. Maybe next time let one of the devs present. Like sure, we dont know the whole pic. Maybe something fell through last minute or they have a bigger reveal later or just stuff didnt make it. But in all of those, i see one of the devs or community members who i know are passionate being able to handle that situation in a way that leaves fans a bit better.

Ofc we aoe3 fans are often mercurial, and prehaps out of self preservation they play it safe. But I just feel like if one person who was familiar with aoe3 was there to say “berries. At least berries and a building pic and we buy a month of breathing room/hype.” They do that and the hype builds without needing too much commital. Thats my feedback fwiw.

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Lets be honest it was all about the X-box versions and Mobile game.

Even AOE2 got single player only content.

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At least there is one youtuber who agrees with us.

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We got news for AoE3

:palms_up_together::triangular_flag_on_post::triangular_flag_on_post:

Now we go to AoE4

Peak communication

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It is totally acceptable as far as I am concerned. They want as much flexibility as possible: whatever information they post, they are ‘stuck’ with it and it makes it difficult to change things later on. People throw a fit when they post just two flags, imagine the fits people will throw if they post something and then that something isn’t in the final product?

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If they are planning to release two civs “late 2024” and still haven’t got any concept to talk about for maybe 5min, that would be a worse sign.

And it’s totally possible to show something even if they have only just decided on Poland and Denmark and have literally nothing else. Here is what I come up with in 1min:

  1. Show a few representative, but not obvious, cultural icons of Poland and Denmark.
  2. Briefly talk about some historical events around those two nations.
  3. Show a fragment of screenshot with winged hussars and royal hunters, then slowly reveal the whole image.
  4. Flag reveal.

All of the above do not require any additional substantial in-game work, and are more than sufficient for a 5min section.

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For example, a screenshot depicting some late 18th century involving hussars.
Because surprise surprise there is actually a game in the series that covers that exact time period and has those exact models. Maybe use that game’s scenario editor with the proper models instead of knights and East Asian arrow ships.

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Actually, 2DE players are also not satisfied at all. And it seems that some AoM fans felt that there was not enough information given the long wait.

3DE players have often criticized WE’s unfriendly communication style here, and it feels like that flaw has been exposed in a negative way, as seen so often here. This may be the first time that almost any game titles’ customer base has been dissatisfied.

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@Lamplighter072 hey, I’m an aoe2 player.

So I’m pretty sure forgotten empires has been the leading studio for all our DLCs. I’m not aware of any consistent problems we’ve had with FE, except new civs being OP at release which even that they’ve gotten better at.

But for this newest DLC Worlds edge seems to be the lead studio. Probably cause most of the scenarios were up cycled mods and MS owns mod content due to the TOS when uploading a mod. So they didn’t need FE, an external studio, to take lead.

Regardless, this is our first dlc with worlds edge taking the lead and yeah it’s already a dumpster fire.

I say all this because I’m curious what specifically your experience has been with worlds edge? Reading your comment was the first I’d heard of there being a recurring communication problem with them. Id like to know what I should expect from worlds edge with any future DLCs they may create.

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Yes, the people at World Edge don’t know how to sell their games… the 2 hour live stream, 20 mins is the start time so it doesn’t count, it takes 1 hour and 40 for the live stream and that hour and 40 they use it for an AoE 2 scenario and just when the live is about to end and all the AoE 3 and AoM players who were interested in the game have already left, they just show the Steam photos of the game… they could have announced the dlc of AoE 2 for half an hour like they did, then when they announce the civs of AoE 3, say “the new civs are Poles and Danes” and give a little historical context with images taken from Wikipedia and thus hype people up and with that the AoE 3 part took you half an hour and when you got to the AoM part you showed images and comparisons with the original game, that took you another half hour and with what you had left of time, you showed gameplay of the AoE 2 scenario the last half hour and everyone happy…

Sometimes they don’t announce patches or anything or they make it so that AoE 3 DE doesn’t exist using, as they say above, AoE 2 DE for events from the 18th century (which in addition to being anachronistic, AoE 3 covers it better)…

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FE are just the developers.

World’s Edge is the boss. They pull all the strings and call all the shots.

WE allowed AoE3DE to be FE’s project, and it was going good. Till WE decided to reassign devs to ‘other games’ and completely give up communication with us.

FE still works on AoE2. But the decisions are made by WE. What content is going to be added or not is not their call, as far as we know.

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I never suspected they had something specifically against aoe3, and now this stream pretty much confirmed it - the strategy they are using is just wrong for the audience. The thing they don’t realize is that most of us are adults in their early 30s or more, most of us have families, full time jobs, many also working in IT.

Instead they pretty much treat us like 14 years olds.
And no, this has nothing to do with aoe3. Let’s do a recap of what happened here:

aoe2: campaign based DLC with no campaigns, essentially a pack of custom maps that anyone can produce. People are pissed and that forum is on fire, rightfully so.

aoe3: you will get a DLC with 2 civs. We sort of already knew which civs they were, now they are confirmed. Again, lots of false adverts, but hey, at least it is an actual DLC, not a map pack.

aoe4: this was just mind blowing. A generic “pls login and buy the DLC we released a few months back more pls”. They could have just added the “trollolololo” song afterwards IMO.

aom: clearly lots of dev effort goes into this, but the way to show it was weird. Yeah, it was interesting to see some of the new model, but too many monitors with code. Nice Visual Studio Code windows you have there.

aoe mobile: ok, this was the real start of the show. This is what the stream should have been about.

What should have been done:
Stream about “new developments”: dedicate this to AoM and AoeM.
Simply add some cringe-free update mentions for the existing game (2, 3 and 4).

IMHO, AOE3 was handled the best out of the “legacy” games. You only have some flags to show? great, just show them and move on.

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Yep. World’s Edge doesn’t understand these games or its playerbase. As long as that continues the cringe and frustrations will continue. 3DE was always the one game getting the short end of the stick and it felt like we were the ones screaming into the void but now it has extended to the other games.

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Yes, I agree with everything…

Yes, they are taking the bad tricks of AoE 3 in the other games…

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We need to start collecting 1000f 1000w and 1000c.

Unless you’re Mexican.

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I personally think we should just spam them with communication requests and curses for propper communication until they meet our demands for propper communication.

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