I know, I mentioned that before, I played those games. They have no excuse to not do the same for AoE.
I understand how your opinion was formed, and 20 years ago, I would have agreed with it.
My observation, meanwhile, is that by games you don’t sell goods like burgers or soft drinks.
You sell a vibe, an art, a very special feeling. And that needs a different approach.
Activision is motivated by profits. Blizzard was another story; it was customer- and product-motivated.
Till the famous line “Don’t you have phones”. And in my opinion,
the old way of Blizzard, especially for today’s market, is the better approach to making money.
The question of how to make something as cheap as possible, shouldn’t forget what people want to buy. Like a can of tuna, sure you can remove the fish to make it cheaper, but why would people buy empty cans?
Or another example: chicken eggs. You could buy eggs cheaper from sad chickens that are held in small cages, but people do buy way more expensive eggs from happy chickens who are outside on the grass and have a lot of room to run around.
Modern-day Activision-Xbox games simply do have bad vibes. All the in-house loot boxes, free2play, e-sports, skin shops, season passes have damaged AAA gaming reputation beyond repair. A profit-oriented game is in the minds of too many customers, like a chicken in a cage or an empty can of tuna.
On these, we agree for sure 
Finally, we found common ground.
So Xbox and AAA gaming in general need to improve the image of their products?
. If Starcraft 3 or Warcraft 4 were viable, why haven’t they made them already?
I think it’s because Blizzard doesn’t exist anymore and Activision can’t sell good vibes with their products.
If they could make 5 RTS games for the price of 1 FPS / TPS game, the studio would then also need to support those five games. Even if you spread it out across five studios
Over years of support and patches, they got a bad vibe.
It would be nice to have a game ready at launch.
And it’s important not to make too many at once.
A good vibe is job security and having full access to your game, so hire Relic for 5 RTS for the next 12-15 years, with a clear roadmap for each game, and each game to be offline playable + be on Steam and GoG too would not only stand out but also be the beacon of hope gaming needs right now.
Having each 3 years a new AAA RTS sounds feasible. You don’t have to worry about competition, and it’s long enough to get things done. And motivate people to buy a new one.
-1- Wacraft 4 and later Starcraft 3 sounds too logical.
-2- More games for the AoE Series.
-3- A Fallout in Company of Heroes/DOW2 Style would be cool.
A lot of people would like to have a tactical RPG/RTS.
It would be cool to combine the COH3 campaign map, to give the feeling from the first 2 games.
And this gameplay would be a great transition for story mode from 1 guy to a full scale army.
-4- Then it could have crossover with *Gears of -War, a standalone RTS.
-5- A new Starwars RTS on Age of Empires 4 engine
There are a lot of possibilities. But to make it happen,
Xbox really needs to snap out of whatever problem they have now.
but then Stellaris, Europa Universalis, Hearts of Iron do NOT share the business model with aoe2DE. As none of those games force their massive changes on the entire playerbase. that’s a key difference
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So what you’re saying we really need, is the Steam beta builds system?
Cuz I’m honestly surprised DE already doesn’t have that.
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ideally we would get the option to switch datasets in-game + the option to enable/disable each of the other changes (QoL, castle skins, UU skins, monk skins, etc) as was promised when aoe2 was promoted:
I am not asking for something extraordinary here, just that they do the bare minimum of what they said they would do when promoting the game.
Steam beta builds would be an acceptable temporary solution though, as it at least allows me to play with Koreans, Chinese, Vikings etc again, not these modern abarrations. It would still be less than what they promised
the fact that they haven’t done this is a scandal and a disgrace
Perhaps to you, but most people don’t really ask for this not even the pros.
This may be your opinion, but you can potentially rally enough support behind it and make it happen.
Personally it doesn’t really affect me since I barely play multiplayer.
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I mean as a Bengali person and as someone who knows other South Asian that disliked that civ.
I’d rather it just remain gone, if you wanna play them go play HD, if you wanna accuse them of fraud get a lawyer because complaining about it here won’t do much.
Welp, getting into legal fisticuffs with MS probably won’t do much. But again, if you really want to at least try to change things, gather others who have similar opinions as yours and try to petition it.
Otherwise you’re just wasting your time imo.
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This forum is to talk about the game, it is not meant as a hub for feedback.
You are not speaking to the Devs when you come here, you are interacting with the community.
Futhermore the Devs don’t even interact with the community here, they do that occasionally on Reddit as Cysion and other members of FE makes comments here.
This place is just a general discussion hub for the game, if you want to give them feedback… I just realized they have no formal channels for feedback lol.
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Unfortunately I have a feedback to the development team and it is posiioned correctly here.
It looks like the very untimely change in management HAS affected the development. We need a hotfix and it should have had come last week already. And I’m positive we would have seen it without the management changes.
So you are saying it’s totally different only because AoE2DE doesn’t allow us to play older versions?
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I think you don’t understand what a business model is. From a business perspective that makes no difference.
I said multiple times that I’m in favour of them providing us with older versions, but that doesn’t fundamentally change anything about the game. In games like Stellaris that is mostly for technical reasons. Playing one match can take many many hours and big patches brake your save games. So you need to be able to stay on an older version to be able to finish your game. It would be a much bigger issue there if this feature didn’t exist.
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The economics unfortunately just don’t work out that way. Even if it was somehow legally guaranteed, new leadership could find a way to lawyer themselves out of the contract. Or it will be written in the first place that they can dismiss the developer for poor performance, where MS / Activision define what poor performance is (using different metrics to what you or I would reasonably think counts).
I do not trust big corporations enough to commit to this kind of development plan, and follow through with it. Happy to be wrong on that though.
I think ten years ago, a three year turnaround time might have worked. And it still might for smaller projects (see: Definitive Editions for DoW and CoH that Relic have been working on). But for a full, new RTS (even if the engine is re-used)? You’re looking more at five years for full development (for a reasonable product on launch).
I think AoE IV took at least four (but I could be misremembering), and that was mostly the other side of the Covid-19 pandemic. A lot has changed in the industry since then (and imo not for the better).
Nah, it isn’t.
Plenty of games don’t offer rollback. It’s becoming more common, but it’s not standard practise yet. And it’s nothing to do with consent. It’s something that simply wasn’t a thing (because of the significant download / upload costs for both devs and consumers, cloud storage, etc).
I appreciate you wanting something. I don’t think framing it as a betrayal of gamers helps your point. In fact, I think it does the opposite.
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Yes, I would see Warcraft 4 made in the WC3 Reforged engine… Starcraft 3 made in the AoE 4 engine wouldn’t be bad either, although it would be very similar to DoW 4…
Ufff…I like it a lot…Fallout and Gears of War are sagas that could work very well as RTS games (Fallout would be a post-apocalyptic RTS like Tiberian Sun or CNC 3 TW and Gears like Halo Wars but it would only be Humans vs Locust)
Galactic Battlegrounds 2…
Yes, AoE 4 had 4 years of development, from 2017 (when DoW 3 came out and AoE 4 and the DE trilogy were announced) to 2021…
Sure, there are a lot of challenges; I don’t see Xbox mastering them.
Today’s market suffers from extreme live service saturation.
A good example is:
Right now, Gears of War: E-Day, which was released this week,
has fewer people playing it than Age of Empires 4, which was released 5 years ago.
So even if making today a new RTS would be 2 times more expensive,
it still sounds like the better solution.
In this context, having fewer people who can make something other than a shooter and make more shooters with live service doesn’t sound like the right way to go.
In my opinion, Xbox’s current market and future strategy don’t just fail to solve their problems,
it actively amplifies them. Which harms in the long term our beloved Age of Empires RTS series.
The problem is that new RTS struggle to find players. AoE4 was probably the biggest RTS release since Starcraft 2 and it’s from a known franchise copying a lot form AoE2.
An entirely new RTS or an RTS in a franchise that never did RTS before like Gears of War would likely find little to no new customers. Other genres like turn based strategy or grand strategy seem to be a lot more healthy nowadays. Total War is still pretty popular.
Though other old genres are struggling too, name me a successful casual racing/driving game other then Forza Horizon.
Not sure why that is.
AAA is managed in wrong direction, too overpriced and watered down.
In my opinion, indie gaming just satisfies the needs AAA gaming no longer provides.
Racing/driving game? what about BeamNG.drive, a game from small studio with 32,512 people play it.
Or Euro Truck Simulator 2 , there are 56,130 people play it
Ironically, RTS is one of the most profitable genres for indie developers to pick up
People invested at least 6 times into no name RTS from no name companies on KickStarter
Like Sanctuary: Shattered Sun, Stormgate, Planetary Annihilation, Iron Harvest, ZeroSpace or D.O.R.F.
Games are not struggling, todays AAA managment simply applies the wrong financial model.
The audience for these genres never left; corporate leadership simply broke the financial math.
AoE is neither indie now AAA, it’s AA. Many of the games you mentioned are AA and not indie. Though not sure what the budget of AoE4 was, some might consider it indie.
AA games are often overlooked by publishers and games but they are often the type of games that are the most fun. Indie games often can’t have much content or polish while AAA games have to appeal to the mainstream.
The difference between AA and AAA is just the size of the budget, at least on paper. But in practice you get very different kinds of games. You could argue that GTA6 is a AAAA game considering it’s budget is bigger then any other game ever.
The RTS market is pretty empty. Planetary Annihilation came out in 2013 with the Titans DLC in 2015, that’s over 10 years ago. Iron Harvest is rom 2020. Stormgate flopped massively. It’s not looking that good for RTS currently. I don’t have high hopes for any of the unreleased or earl access RTS games tbh.
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