84 replies to this topic

[Chakakhan]

Silver, on 10 August 2011 - 03:50 AM, said:

The farm quest in particular was annoying - I could finish the first 3-4 (I forget how many there were) but I had to do it OVER AND OVER - I couldn't cash in for the rewards of all 3-4 at the same time.

I thought that this quest series was actually very useful, it taught you how manage worker production and farms production to maximize resource output. Once you get the hang of it you can actually do those quests fairly easily. I would just do it until it got hard, then play some other quests and come back to it later and was usually able to get the next level or two. I never did any one level more than a few times. I thought all the resource gathering quests were helpful to teach you balance.

I thought some of the quests were very hard, but if I came back to them later with better gear and more practice they were easier to complete.

I loved the game, my favorite of the Age series! The pathing and movement sets the bar for what I would like to see us do in 0AD.

I quit playing because working on 0AD was more fun!

Cheers,
Kenny

[Android_]

Chakakhan, on 13 August 2011 - 08:58 PM, said:

The pathing and movement sets the bar for what I would like to see us do in 0AD.

Definitely! Although I'm disappointed with how the game mechanics have not evolved at all since aok or maybe aom (e.g. after 10 years, why can we still not have walkable ships/bridges/walls/anything??), at least this time they really got the pathfinding right!! I also love their smooth fog of war... the game is so much more immersive just by that and when it comes to fow all other rts games look so outdated in comparison haha I couldn't resist from making a ticket out of it

Edited by Android GRRR, 18 August 2011 - 10:07 PM.

[Chakakhan]

Android GRRR, on 18 August 2011 - 09:12 PM, said:

Definitely! Although I'm disappointed with how the game mechanics have not evolved at all since aok or maybe aom (e.g. after 10 years, why can we still not have walkable ships/bridges/walls/anything??), at least this time they really got the pathfinding right!! I also love their smooth fog of war... the game is so much more immersive just by that and when it comes to fow all other rts games look so outdated in comparison haha I couldn't resist from making a ticket out of it

This is true! I expected some new game play elements and there really aren't any. The leveling up concept doesn't really add anything new and exciting gameplay wise.

But still, compare it to Starcraft II, that game still has simple tiered maps (mostly just 2 levels) with ramps leading up and down. There are some cool gameplay elements with the different races though and the game can still be fun to play with friends. It takes the easy way out on a lot of the technical issues that AoEo solved this time around. Hopefully there are some new features coming down the pipe.

[Android_]

it's really disappointing if you consider the home city/rpg stuff from aoe3/aoeo as nothing more than some sort of advanced techtree. from that point of view the age series has not introduced any new gameplay elements since aom in 2002 (god powers, myth unit special attacks). and as if they wanted to make up for that they radically cut down user map/mod support at the same time haha. well handled. (0ad has a good chance to shine here with all its nice features .)

Quote

Hopefully there are some new features coming down the pipe.

what do you mean? for aoeo or 0ad? frankly for aoeo i don't think so... given their astonishing record of innovation that i have just pointed out

Edited by Android GRRR, 19 August 2011 - 09:34 AM.

[Jeru]

Ouch: A scathing review of AoEO.

[Mythos_Ruler]

Jeru, on 19 August 2011 - 11:38 AM, said:

Ouch: A scathing review of AoEO.

I pretty much agree with the review. The things you are forced to unlock, like buildings and ships and units, etc. were things that came without this requirement in past games. The only "innovation" in the game is in the way you are forced to unlock everything. Want to play with powerful heavy cavalry? Too bad, you have to grind through 15 hours of missions first. Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! I liked the customizable tech tree at first, but really? I have to grind through 50 missions first before I get the ability to build a castle? Screw that. If you are forced to unlock things, they should be special things, not items you should be able to build normally (a watch tower, really?),

[Shield Bearer]

Really stupid. I got bored within the first 2 hours.

[Ykkrosh]

It sounds kind of like they took a decent (albeit old-fashioned) RTS design, and then stripped out most of the features so they could gradually feed them back to players as a reward for playing; the result is that you spend a long time playing an incomplete RTS game (which is less fun and less well balanced because of what's missing) and all you end up with is a complete RTS game that you could have bought from a shop ten years ago and played without all this levelling-up hassle.

Presumably it would be better if players started with access to a complete RTS game, which was properly fun by itself (so it wouldn't be perceived as grinding), and then the persistent online features were built on top of that instead of subtracting from it (though I don't know exactly what that would entail). (Or at least 'better' from the perspective of experienced RTS gamers - presumably Microsoft's money-counters and (they hope) hordes of semi-casual gamers will have a different perspective.)

[Android_]

Quote

It sounds kind of like they took a decent (albeit old-fashioned) RTS design, and then stripped out most of the features so they could gradually feed them back to players as a reward for playing

haha well said. by the way apart from the lack of gameplay innovation i think there has been a clear and significant decrease in the quality of the scenarios and campaigns since aom, with aoeo being the end of the line... the missions are ridiculous. i'm surprised by this because there are probably some guys left with them who made the aom campaign and so they should know a scenario does not always have to follow a standard you-start-off-with-a-TC-now-go-and-kill-things pattern.

[Chakakhan]

Ykkrosh, on 19 August 2011 - 04:00 PM, said:

Presumably it would be better if players started with access to a complete RTS game, which was properly fun by itself (so it wouldn't be perceived as grinding), and then the persistent online features were built on top of that instead of subtracting from it (though I don't know exactly what that would entail). (Or at least 'better' from the perspective of experienced RTS gamers - presumably Microsoft's money-counters and (they hope) hordes of semi-casual gamers will have a different perspective.)

They have "Pro Packs" that let you start with an already leveled up Civilization. I agree that they did mostly strip things away just so they could add the leveling up concept.

I thought the game was fun, leveling up took a bit too long though. The AI is really good and the pathing is really good, so that was entertaining for me from a technical perspective.

The biggest problems are:

• Leveling up is tedious and takes too long.
• Online competitive play can potentially be very unbalanced. Advisers and gear can modify your stats pretty dramatically and you have to find these items to unlock them. So the fact that everyone has different stuff makes competitive play unbalanced.

[Android_]

well yeah the gameplay as such is pretty much like that of AoM without myth units and god powers, and with stone as a new resource instead. i do agree with you on the levelling and balance issues as well. (one of the few games i played was vs. an egypt player when i was greek, and he was lvl 10 while i was lvl 8, which meant he could age up to age 3 and build elephants. the result was ridiculous: although my economy was way better than his and i could crank out 200+ spearmen amongst other units, he would beat me with a total of 30 elephants, of which i killed about 10. it was so preposterous i actually had to smile haha.)

but then again, is this the RTS market of the future?? refurbishing 10 year old games and adding some 'facebook generation' widgets (while cutting all support for user made content)?

i think 0ad is a good way to show where rts games could have gone instead: less dumbification, more user-made content! (that's what all this '2.0' stuff is about right? ('web 2.0' etc.) so why shouldn't it work for games too?)

[Chakakhan]

Android GRRR, on 19 August 2011 - 07:29 PM, said:

but then again, is this the RTS market of the future??

Great point! You have to be on the internet to play a lot of games now. I think this is one way the game studios get around pirating. Starcraft II has a hosted model as well (although it is modable). More people play Starcraft II mods than the actual game now.

This is why I got so interested in 0AD. It has the potential to be all the things I imagined AoE might have become.

[Android_]

hehe. i really like the spirit of you guys here. makes me wish i could contribute, now if i only knew c/javascript . maybe i'll try to get into it once i have time.

[Jeru]

Android GRRR, on 19 August 2011 - 07:29 PM, said:

i think 0ad is a good way to show where rts games could have gone instead: less dumbification, more user-made content! (that's what all this '2.0' stuff is about right? ('web 2.0' etc.) so why shouldn't it work for games too?)

Web 2.0 and cloud computing and all that stuff would have never been possible without free and open technologies and standards: HTTP, Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, (X)HTML/CSS, JavaScript, RSS/Atom, open browsers, ...

Perhaps 0 A.D., and particularly the 0 A.D. game engine, can bring forth a similar movement among computer games.

[Jeru]

Gamespy was pretty happy with it.

[Mythos_Ruler]

Jeru, on 27 August 2011 - 07:53 AM, said:

Gamespy was pretty happy with it.

I really don't trust mainstream reviews anymore. I've been burned too many times and there is review creep, where more and more games are being reviewed at higher and higher scores, while ultimate satisfaction from gamers continues to go down. It seems like this guy, despite what he says about being jaded, was not very critical in his thinking at all. He himself said he had a budget of $40 AUS... but he then goes on to actually pay $50 AUS and he still only has a small percentage of the game's content and can only "equip" his 1st tier items. Sounds like a huge money sink, while before with AOE1/AOE2/AOM/AOE3 $50 would get you the whole game, and then a year later $30 would get you a nice hefty expansion pack. It sounds like with AOEO you're looking at $200 to access all of the content. I'll stick with 0 A.D.

[Ykkrosh]

Mythos_Ruler, on 27 August 2011 - 04:26 PM, said:

It sounds like with AOEO you're looking at $200 to access all of the content.

They have "Season Pass" bundles which give you all the content over a six month period for $100 (USD), so it won't be $200 unless you like the game enough to spend a year playing it, in which case surely $0.50 per day isn't such a bad deal, compared to spending $50 for a standard game that's probably ten hours long and that you probably won't play all the way through anyway

(I guess they realised the terrible situation that people are still playing AoK after a decade without giving any more money to Microsoft, and are making sure to fix that this time...)

Quote

I'll stick with 0 A.D.

That costs hundreds of thousands (or maybe millions) of dollars worth of man-hours, so I think AoEO is a relative bargain at any price

[JuliusColtranePille]

"This is why I got so interested in 0AD. It has the potential to be all the things I imagined AoE might have become. "
word. already when AoE III came out, i couldn't wait to get a finely refurbished AoE IV which would have taken place in the ancient world. as a player who grew up with AoE and AoK (as there should be a lot of around here) you def can imagine what a budding surprise 0 a.d. was for me (as i learned about the game only before 3 weeks). besides, the kind of user generated content which is displayed by the work around 0 a.d. retrieves a certain feeling of the old internet aura in which there was the utopia of creating an antithesis to the industries (think this development gets quite a cynical peak with AoE Online in comparison to 0 a.d.)maybe it's not the best thread to do so, but as this is my first post: you guys made me really happy!looking forward to alpha 7.

[Jeru]

Any thread is the right thread for kind words like these. Thanks so much, Julius.

How did you find out about 0 A.D.?

[JuliusColtranePille]

on some AoE III online-community

wasn't really into "modders-sphere" before