A devs replied to my review of Three Kingdoms DLC on Steam, in which I expressed my disappoinment about the Three Kingdoms civs, the lack of campaigns for Khitans and Jurchens, as well as about the campaign that I don’t feel as good or impactful as previous DE campaigns, like in DotD and TMR.
I would say the gameplay isn’t as good overall, as well as I don’t feel the stakes are high. Fighting 3 times the same battle isn’t very good too.
EDIT: I also simply hate the Wu, Shu, Wei.
I’m curious about hearing your thoughts about the 3 campaigns.
2 Likes
So, I like them. They’re not the best (like Jadwiga), but they’re not the worst either. If I had to rank them, I’d give them a B tier, leaning toward an A tier.
I enjoyed the individual missions, although they could have been a little more varied, but I had fun nonetheless. I thought it was cool that the side missions could have an impact on the next missions. It was a bit of a shame that most of them were triggered by completing the side missions (since I do them anyway, I always get the bonus). It would have been better if there had been real decisions with positive, neutral, and / or negative consequences. But overall, it was much better than in BfG.
And as for the last mission, I have to say that it was something different (unique*) to play a battle from three perspectives, and because the setup and missions changed with each variant, it didn’t feel too repetitive. So I didn’t find it too bad. What bothers me a little in retrospect is that the Battle of the Red Cliffs was only a high point and not the end, ther was more until the Three Kingdoms were founded. This makes it feel a little bit incomplete. At the same time, I have to say that it was only through the DLC that I became interesteda liitte bit in the Three Kingdoms Era at all (I watched documentaries on YouTube).
So my conclusion is that these are three solid campaigns.
*I know that V&V did something similar with Fetih and Constantine, but I also like it there too or better It doesn’t bother me.
2 Likes
I played them recently and honestly, they are decent, but not great (yes, I caved in and bought it for the campaigns, Kitanguts and Jurchens, left my negative review tho).
I pretty much agree with Ornlu’s reviews, the narrative asks too much from the players in terms of remembering names, and the simultaneous campaign makes it feel very disjointed, also I’m not the biggest fan of them having you change history (I forgive William Wallace and Montezuma because they are classics, but I don’t like those on paper either). Also not taking place on the actual Three Kingdoms period and not highlighting what makes each warlord’s army different that warranted them being different civs are big negatives.
Half the scenarios are alright (a bit meh, but decent) and half are actually good, but I’m not sure there’s any great ones, having the Battle of Red Cliffs be the ending one for all three was a terrible decision, I mean, yes, they technically changed the secondary objectives, but its still boring to use the same map…
The Red Cliff’s thing wasn’t great in the senese that you still have the same objective in all three, for example, in V&V both Fetih and Constantine have roughly the same map and depict the same event, but they feel entirely different because one is a full on attack and the other a full on defense, in this one all three are straight up build and destroy, so they feel exactly the same.
To say a few good things, the new units are fun to use, I don’t mind these heroes with activated abilities for campaigns (tho I would limit them to one per scenario personally), the art on the slides is really cool, there are a few funny lines here or there and I thought the characterization of Liu Bei and especially Cao Cao was good, even if the story wasn’t great.
Overall 6.5/10, decent
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The campaigns give me hope that even with the Chronicles level design folks being let go, Chronicles campaign levels done by the main crew should still be solid, i’ll put it that way. The writing wasn’t amazing, and some of the decisions like 3 Battle of Red Cliff-s were suspect, but the level design itself seemed fine, from watching Ornlu’s playthroughs (I have not bought the DLC, I probably will once there is a decent sale on it though).
It also gives me hope that once the main crew gives us DLC content that fits the game’s theme with campaigns, those campaigns should be solid enough as well (I do think a lot of the writing decisions that I don’t like were due to the 3k setting, the afformentioned repeated level, magic stuff, hero abilities, and the large number of named characters that are hard to keep track of)
3 Likes
Gameplay-wise, I thought the campaigns were ok – quite fun early on, but becoming quite samey and monotonous as they went on. I like that the scenarios are generally in a classic build-and-destroy style rather than being heavy on the one-off mechanics like the BFG campaigns. I dislike the new civ designs and found they give quite one-dimensional gameplay. Also the heroes are overpowered to the extent that they sometimes trivialise the gameplay.
I thought the quality of storytelling was exceptionally poor, even by AoE2 standards which I think are generally not that good. The story feels rushed and poorly explained, and as a westerner who is largely unfamiliar with the Three Kingdoms, it’s impossible to sympathise with any of the protagonists. Liu Bei is trying to restore a corrupt and oppressive state, Cao Cao is a paranoid psychopath with no meaningful motive, and the Sun Clan are deluded into thinking they should be emperors because they found an artefact in a well. The narration sounds awkward and disjointed too, thanks to a questionable decision to (presumably) pronounce and annunciate all Chinese names as they would be in Mandarin.
Overall, though, this DLC has highlighted to me how much of a mess AoE2 has become. Due to the way the game has grown, there’s a huge variation in the design philosophy between different civs – generally with older civs having simpler, more elegant designs, and newer civs being overloaded with special features and one-off mechanics. The distribution of regional units is pretty incoherent, especially with the recent addition of the East Asian ones. This is mostly not relevant to the campaigns, but there are a couple of times when Chinese and (I think) Huns turn up, and the juxtaposition feels quite weird.
5 Likes
And it ended before the Three Kingdoms were even formed…long before Liu Bei captured the Shu domain and became…”Shu”.
It’s TW3K again. But at least in TW3K, you can continue the campaign and form the Three Kingdoms by yourself.
There is no long-term plan. Everyone worked on the game came up different things every year trying to meet growth demands, deadlines, or a sudden need in appealing to certain demographics. In the end you have holes and inconsistencies all over the place. A lot of one-time “experiments”, “events” that only happened once, mechanisms that should be universal but limited to one unit, huge imbalance of contents, etc…
I look at other games I’m familiar with and rarely see anything like this:
- Total War: Warhammer has been developed for 10 years with 3 different games (which I’d call one game with two DLCs). It remained consistent most of the time throughout the progression. There were also recurring DLCs with free updates that spice up old factions
- Civ 6: yes there were weird “experiments” like persona…but it persisted, and has a theme. In the AOE scenario, it would be like one leader got a persona then period, or one leader got an “another aspect” personal while another got a “what-if” persona. There are also unfitting modes like heroes and zombies, for example, but they are togglable options, instead of forced into the base game (imagine one civ with hero or zombie in the roster)
- Paradox games: they already started as a hodgepodge of mechanics so anything added doesn’t feel out of place (and most of the time still maintained consistency). And AOE is far from such a game.
In the case of AOE, I fear the management had no insight or care about the consistency or the legacy the games will leave behind. They just branch out for whatever that give short time gains, then abandon them if they didn’t work.
Edit: ES left us with a series of clean, elegant and thematically coherent games that WE could easily pick up and expand on. I’m not sure WE would too.
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And Return of Rome campaigns were still not completely ported, just a reminder.
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If you just treat AOE2 as a game,and ignore historical inaccuracies，then 3k is a great DLC.
Even under those conditions, it’s not. Unfinished civs. Shortest campaigns. Repeated final mission.
4 Likes
I don’t like auras, I don’t like bleed attacks, I don’t like attack dodging, I don’t like lingering burn damage, I don’t like units improving when they kill, I don’t like mode switching, I don’t like snare attacks
this DLC is awful
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Obviously WE didn’t think the same. They wrote a whole paragraph of mental gymnasium trying to picture 3K as “historical”.
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One of the things that annoys me the most about the storytelling is that there’s never any explanation of what Shu, Wei and Wu are. I think Shu is mentioned in passing at the end of their campaign, and that’s it.
I don’t know the history of the Three Kingdoms at all, so what I wrote does ignore historical inaccuracies. I would not describe it as a great DLC. What aspects of it do you think are great?
1 Like