Yeah I’m not really sure either. I get the sense that either it got better over its lifetime or over time people came around to it à la the Star Wars prequels. But I don’t really remember it. I played it a little early in its life but don’t remember anything about it.
But a real Age of Empires game? Hells yes. This was announced not long after the AoE2 and AoE4 ports to console & controller had shown to be successful (at least critically—no idea how they’re doing commercially). So I thought that they had cracked a way to do satisfying RTS gameplay on a mobile device. It’d be great to be able to play a quick Skirmish on the bus, or while spending time away from home without my computer.
So when a few aoe creators showed previews of the game back in February this year, I was rather surprised and very disappointed to see that the game has absolutely zero resemblance to an Age game. That the worst fears of it being a shitty rip-off were completely true. Thanks to those previews, I was not surprised on release this week—though the extent of just how bad even the narrative side of this is was still overwhelming.
I can’t think of any video game that fits that description. But I wish I got into RPGs earlier. My first role playing experience was near the end of my first year of uni. I wish I could have played D&D or other RPGs from when I was in high school. They’re such a blast.
They’d have very little chance in a copyright suit and they know it. Because you can’t copyright game mechanics or general concepts, and those are the things Palworld pretty obviously copies.
I doubt it. Other forms of AI could be useful, but generative AI? I doubt it.
And tbh even deep learning through neural networks doesn’t seem to be making the leaps we’d hoped for. AoE4 promised, prior to release, a machine learning–based AI would be delivered down the line. It’s now almost 3 years since release and we haven’t heard a thing about it.
Maybe eventually we’ll be able to easily train a machine learning algorithm to play any game at a wide variety of skill levels (or at a very high level, if not at customisable levels), but it doesn’t seem like it’s any time soon.
never build in forced server components to begin with
patch out the need for the server as part of the last update before support ends
give buyers access to run their own servers with an officially-provided executable and set the client to connect to that executable
open source the whole thing
And maybe others. It’s about making sure that a product you have paid for actually works as it was sold to you. It’s honestly a really basic consumer protection concept. You sell me a television and it stops working within a reasonable lifetime due to your own failure, and you’re obligated to repair or replace it. The same should be true of software.
Ah, that explains why the auto-suggested title didn’t work here when it did work in !nebula. My damn mouse has a habit of double-clicking when I use the button I have set to paste.
The Extended Edition was like the HD Edition of Age of Empires 2 (now called “Age of Empires II (2013)” on Steam). This is more like the Definitive Edition. Significant graphics improvements (as opposed to just taking the existing graphics and upscaling them), as well as new content and probably QoL improvements.