JoonasTo
Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
What if Elvin was female?
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posted September 23, 2020 11:38 AM |
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blob2 said:
JoonasTo said:
Age of Empires DEs are not great remasters. They are plagued with bugs, broken AI and server problems caused by handing over the work to incompetent newbies and badly managed resourcing. They deserved better.
This does not mean they aren’t still good games, the originals were and they have aged really well. But great remasters they are not.
Whaa? The reception is overwhelmingly positive... didn't know it was that bad. I mean they add new stuff, regular patches, communicate with the fanbase. This is new to me...
Adding new stuff is what modders are good at.
They literally hired their (active) community managers a couple months back. Before that communication was non-existent for years.
Regular patches are also a recent thing. It’s clear that they oversold their own capacity and couldn’t manage all the work.
It’s just a shame they aren’t proficient enough in their work to actually fix the age old bugs in the patches so the same persistent bugs have been there since beta before release.
Common consensus would agree with raising it to modern standard of quality while staying true to the original. So we have to look at the game from a modern standpoint while evaluating the gameplay in comparison to the old one.
-Modern graphics? The redrawn sprites look pretty good...until you realise they cut out content to do so. Originals had multiple attack animations depending on the angle of attack, remakes don’t. I’d say cutting out content clearly fails this point. Otherwise they did quite good in my opinion. There’s also the fact that in search of beauty they muddle the graphics so it’s hard to tell what unit is what and whom it belongs to sometimes. Originals had a clear point of prioritising gameplay over looks, which is why graphics are sometimes oversimplified to avoid this issue. That’s a tradeoff you make, but it’s a tradeoff 95% of modern RTSes make. So they didn’t quite get that.
-Modern sounds/music? New orchestral soundtrack. But that’s a trap, it shouldn’t be new, it should be remastered. Originals also had more songs, but they were simpler so that’s a 50/50 I guess.
So how about the sounds then? This is a 100% fail for me. Go play the originals and everything sounds like you are there in the middle of it. The new ones are really bland. The originals were clearly over the top but when we are talking accurate information, over the top is good. It’s clear and crisp. Not confusing or unclear. Speaking of accurate information, there isn’t surround so you cannot tell where something is happening.
-Modern gameplay? Obviously hardest since you should not mess with the gameplay itself. So this means modern AI, UI, Accessability, Storytelling, Multiplayer, Responsibility, Pathfinding, etc. Things that make the game feel like it was made today, not 25 years ago.
AI? Has been broken since release of AgeDe, now less so but still broken. Fail.
UI? Lots of good stuff here, global queue, scalable, generally added a good amount of information to the player so it just feels better. Some problems like minimap warning on attack being almost impossible to see that combined with no surround sound become a lot bigger than they should be, reminding us that small things combine into bigger problems. Generally a good ingame UI now after all the patches.
Menu UI? It’s not great. Why are hotkeys not accessible from settings? Why do we need to have multiple submenus when 90% of my screen is the background image? The multiplayer lobby is awful. It softlocks you to places, it hides things from view, generally it’s a lobby from the 2000s not 2010s, not to mention 2020. A stark contrast to the pretty good ingame menu.
Accessability? A large part of this is outlined in the topics above but there are specific issues to be mentioned. Colours that look very similar. Friend foe colours being Red/Green(what kind of idiot thought this was a good idea?). These two come to mind first.
Storytelling? Original had video intros and outros into campaigns. These were both cut. The original had more elaborate campaign scenario intro screens that were simplified. I didn’t actually check if they corrected the historical information that is wrong in modern light of new archeology and research but the original texts are no longer correct according to modern understanding and do need updating. Textboxes are also so 90s.
Multiplayer? Currently there is a pretty good server coverage and they have implemented a centralised netcode around them. It works, most of the time. Sometimes there are random DCs. Some servers don’t work at all but are still shown. They purposefully broke the balance in the second at launch and even admitted it in interviews. They do this every time they add content in expansions and DLCs too as it’s their MO so expect that to continue. Server based solution is still a massive improvement to original in cross continent play.
General playability? Pathfinding has been a problem since the first release and it while better, it still is. Units do not understand fog of war, formations take priority over movement commands, random shuffling is still a thing in the second. Units do not refresh their orders properly. There are a bunch of bugs and unsolved issues from the 90s left and they have introduced new ones. Multiqueue still bugs out and so on.
Are these games better today than the originals were in the 90s? No, they are not. Are they still good game? Yes they are. The originals were some of the best games of their time so the hurdle is pretty high but we are also now evaluating the remasters a longn time after release. Make no mistake, they are some of the better remakes around. But they still aren’t great remasters. They are largely carried by their excellent originals that still have great value today.
You can argue for the extra content but that would be for an expansion, not a remaster.
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