Comments on: Thoughts: Age Of Empires 2 Definitive Edition

By: Mitch

Mitch — Fri, 12 Jun 2020 10:19:05 +0000

I played a bunch of this recently with my best friend, because we both played it a bit in high school back in the 2000s and COVID means we can’t hang out in person. And it was fun and oddly addictive in some ways. But he’s the kind of person who reads up on it online and, as you talk about, enjoys mastering that kind of “economy efficiency.” To me that feels more like being a mathematical engineer than playing a game. I understand why it appeals to some people, but I could never get a handle on it and wasn’t particularly inclined to learn.

We did have one game I felt smug about because it was one of the real-world maps, Spain, and I realised from early exploration that it must include a bit of Africa, which was where I’d spawned. So I just poured everything into a huge and powerful Navy, bottled up the ocean, built a wonder, and won. That was satisfying. Much more so than the games when his knights would regularly roll into town while I was still fumbling around with farms and villagers.

By: Oli Hutt

Oli Hutt — Mon, 08 Jun 2020 08:39:56 +0000

I’ve never seen you say such nice things about a game and I did love AoE2 so I have bought this. All because of you.

By: ilitarist

ilitarist — Wed, 03 Jun 2020 15:11:54 +0000

I too was disappointed by AoE2HD. I have 4K screen some time ago and I’m not surprised that a game released a few years back dind’t support 4K (or rather UI scaling), but the whole point of that game was making it playable on modern PCs. And it worked terribly on PC that was too modern, especially problematic with the game not having resolution selector and always using desktop resolution.

I too liked Rise of Nations EE (it didn’t have UI scaling too but at least there was resolution selection) and couldn’t stomach Age of Mythology EE. Wish they’d gave RoN Definitive Edition treatment cause it’s still a great game and some improvements and new content would make it even better.

I was too surprised how well AoE2DE plays. It also made me question my thoughts about nostalgia. In many genres people praise some old games (Master of Orion 2, Baldur’s Gate etc) and I find many of them surpassed by later less visible titles. However with games like AoE2 (or, say, Heroes 3) I see that they are indeed genius, genre has somehow lost the magic that held it together.

I think strong (or rather reactive and intelligent) AI, amount of campaigns and even those Art of War tutorials are to blame. Those tutorials have medals and encourage you to replay till you get it, so they are an interesting gameplay challenge in itself, it’s great. For once I feel that RTS promises me fun here and now, not in 200 hours when I watch enough build order guides and play enough multiplayer to at least understand why exactly I was obliterated by some pro player.

I haven’t played a lot of campaigns yet, but I see that they have nice difficulty variation – as in difficulty selection does not just affect AI behavior and resources but also campaign events, enemy defences placement etc. One of the “campaigns” is a set of standalone heavily scripted historical battles which looks interesting to me too. I haven’t gone deep into campaigns but so far Attila (it’s an old campaign but still) was OK. There are plenty of standard map modes too. For once daily “challenges” are good cause they encourage you to try standard maps in some specific way.