Zagorath

Zagorath, 24 days ago

I lived in Busan at the time this project was done, and visited Seoul only a few weeks after it opened. I didn’t know anything about urbanism at the time, I just knew it was such an incredibly nice place to be.

Zagorath, 24 days ago

It’s called Cheonggyecheon, 청계천. Google Maps in Korea is really, really poor (for legal reasons). The satellite quality doesn’t even come close to capturing this (you can barely even tell it’s there), and Street View is just from the road (as of 2018 at the most recent) where you can see that it’s there, but not get much of a sense of it. There are a very small number of those individual non-path Street View photos.

Zagorath, 20 days ago

Sponsorship? This is the Nebula version, there wouldn’t be any sponsorship. Did he accidentally leave it in and I just blanked that out?

Zagorath, 1 month ago

Out of interest, how does that site classify Age of Empires Definitive Edition (and aoe2:DE and aoe3:DE) and Age of Mythology: Retold?

Zagorath, 1 month ago

And they updated some of the levelling to work more like Skyrim, because the Oblivion system sucked in comparison

Updated how exactly? Oblivion and Skyrim both have pretty serious flaws. I believe there are popular mods to fix the Oblivion system in a way that still feels like Oblivion, though it’s been a long time since I’ve read in to any of it.

Zagorath, 1 month ago

I managed to find aoe3 and aom on the site by using a site-filtered Google search. Couldn’t find 1 or 2, but with both of those that I found being “remake”, I suspect the two I didn’t find would be the same.

It’s interesting, and perhaps highlights how vague the line is between remake and remaster. AoM I can see being called a remake (at a bit of a stretch), but 2 & 3 are pretty solidly remasters in my mind, due to being entirely in the original engine with just a bit of new QoL features and improved graphics added.

Zagorath, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Yes I think so. He also runs his own Mastodon instance at notjustbikes@notjustbikes.com.

Zagorath, 1 month ago

You mean the omafiets of OSes, surely.

Zagorath, 4 months ago

I’m very nervous about the game’s future, given the AoE3 remake was just officially mothballed last week and AoM has fewer active players on Steam.

But for the game in its current state, I’d say that yes, it’s really, really good. It made a fair few changes from the old version, nearly all of which are excellent improvements. They said their goal was to make this game the game you remember playing through nostalgia goggles, rather than being strictly faithful to the original, and I think they did that really well. You can build bigger armies and reuse god powers. Better quality of life features, etc.

The Chinese expansion releases next month, and they’ve committed to at least one more expansion after that (by preselling the Premium Edition with the first 2 expansions). Aztects or something else from the Americas is likely. If it turns out those expansions are going to be cheap and rushed and crap just to meet their contractual obligations, that’s really unfortunate. I really hope that won’t happen. But in the worst case…the game with what they’ve released already is really good.

Feel free to head over to !aom if you want to discuss more.

Zagorath, 4 months ago

I’m not aware of any allegations relating to Age of Mythology or any of the Forgotten Empires–lead Age games. It would strike me as unlikely, given the nature of these games as remasters of ancient code by a group formed initially as modders for AoE2.

A different situation from aoe4, which was developed primarily by Relic, which is a much more conventional game development company, and was developed from scratch.

Zagorath, 4 months ago

I don’t play a lot of big budget games where this kind of thing tends to happen. Probably the worst experience I’ve had has been thanks to confusion caused by multiple remasters.

Age of Empires 2 released in 1999 with an expansion in 2000. It was rereleased in 2013 as the HD Edition on Steam.

Then it was rereleased again as the Definitive Edition in 2019.

And I have seen people get confused and buy the HD version when they meant to get DE. Not quite the same as the OP because it’s not caused by malicious anti-consumer bullshit. But that’s the closest I’ve been.

Zagorath, 4 months ago

Oh, so they have. I dunno what that means precisely. I think I saw they stopped selling the old AoE3 version, but last I checked AoM EE and AoE2HD were still for sale, but deliberately greyed out and renamed to make it clearer that they’re the old versions. Not sure if they’re still for sale or not as of now.

Zagorath, 4 months ago

Mobile is undoubtedly the worst. It’s unbearable. Hardly even a game.

I’ve never played the DS game. I might put Age of Empires Online in this spot instead.

It’s unfortunate, to me, that 3 ended up this low. It’s not my favourite, by a long shot, but it’s functional and fun. Which is more than can be said for the DE version of 1. I love the bones of 1, but the DE was terrible. So terrible that they tried releasing it again in the Return to Rome DLC for 2.

Which leaves us with the 3 good games. Being the mod of !aom, nobody should be surprised that my favourite is Myth. 4 is actually my second favourite, and 2 is only in 3rd place. But Myth still has too many bugs and missing polish features. Even though it’s my #1 favourite, if I was asked to list which I think is the best, I’d put it in 3rd.

Zagorath, 4 months ago

It’s a huge improvement over the original. They’ve made a bunch of balance improvements without infringing on the unique identities of each civ (which is unfortunately what happened when they tried to do balance changes to the 2013 Extended Edition). The graphics are all new and now look how the game is in your nostalgia, rather than…how it actually looked. You can build bigger armies, and reuse god powers (for a cost). There’s improvement in quality-of-life features, like modern hotkeys, as well as tools to assist with scouting and eco management, if you’re a lower-skilled player who gets overwhelmed by all the multitasking.

Zagorath, 4 months ago

Different, unrelated franchise. Age of Empires is real-time strategy. Civ is turn-based.

Civ V is my most-played civ though. It was a great game.

Zagorath, 4 months ago

I’ve heard that Online is actually a pretty good game, once stripped of its monetisation strategy. It seems to have a decent community of loyal followers with Project Celeste.

Zagorath, 4 months ago

I genuinely do love AoE2 and would rate it among my favourite games of all time, but yeah I think it gets a little overrated.

4 is better, IMO, and Myth is just great.

The AoE2 community gets pretty damn toxic if you dare suggest that, though. Or even if they get a whiff that you might be saying good things about other Age games at all.

Zagorath, 5 months ago

Of any game? Codenames. Was playing with family when the clock struck midnight.

Of computer games, it was probably Kerbal Space Program, which I’ve just started to get into again over Christmas for the first time in years.

Zagorath, 5 months ago

This back and forth from the comments on the article is interesting:

What the article ommits: The youtuber in question has a long history of threatening smaller channels with various actions against them, from brigading to lawyers to copyright strikes, if they do something he doesn’t like and don’t bow to his will. So I’m not surprised to see someone was fed up with him eventually.

Two wrongs don’t make a right as my nan used to say. This YouTuber being a bit of a grunt does not negate the fact YouTube itself is happy taking a hands off approach to a fundamental part of their business model because the ones it affects are not the ones that give them most of the money.

Of course it’s a problem, I just feel 0 sympathy in this case and I find it ironic that it’s him especially that got hit with the same treatment he threatens others with.

Zagorath, 5 months ago

Platforms actually do get more leeway than is usually thought with DMCA takedown requests. If they believe it to be fraudulent, they have every right to disregard it. That’s a fact they conveniently try to downplay because they want people to think they have no responsibility for their actions.

Zagorath, 5 months ago

Age of Mythology: Retold. By far. It only came out in September and already it’s my 7th most-played Steam game of all time.

It was never in contention for the goty, by frankly I’m disappointed that it didn’t win its own category at least, because it is just so good. It delivers so perfectly on what it promised. It’s a remake that feels like how your nostalgia remembers the OG game, adding in excellent modern polish and exciting gameplay while keeping the core of what made the 2002 game so great.

Zagorath, 6 months ago

The expression is actually “hear, hear!” A shortening of “hear him, hear him”, an instruction saying “listen to what this guy’s saying. It’s good shit.”

Zagorath, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

• Bard - College of Glamour
• Barbarian - Path of Giants
• Cleric - Death Domain
• Druid - Circle of Stars
• Paladin - Oath of the Crown
• Fighter - Arcane Archer
• Monk - Drunken Master
• Ranger - Swarmkeeper
• Rogue - Swashbuckler
• Sorcerer - Shadow Magic
• Warlock - Hexblade
• Wizard - Bladesinging

Zagorath, 7 months ago

It is genuinely hard to describe just how bad this is. I did the best job I could of my own review over on the official Age of Empires forums. Its worst sin is probably the simple fact that it barely even feels like a game where you make choices. You just click what it tells you to do.

It’s telling that they don’t have an official subforum for this game, although there is one for AoE1, 2, 3, and 4, and Age of Mythology.

Zagorath, 7 months ago

I don’t think so, why? I only played it very briefly, but I thought it had a small but happy fanbase still playing on third-party servers.

Zagorath, 7 months ago

This kind of stuff? None. It’s shockingly bad.

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.

Zagorath, 7 months ago

I had a read over the rest of that review. Damn it was a good read. And sadly very, painfully accurate to my experience.

Zagorath, 7 months ago

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.

Zagorath, 7 months ago

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.

Zagorath, 8 months ago

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.

Zagorath, 8 months ago

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.

Zagorath, 9 months ago

See also: Born Sexy Yesterday

Zagorath, 9 months ago

They’ve got options.

• 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.

Zagorath, 4 months ago

fwiw in my experience, most Age of Mythology: Retold games last about 10–15 minutes. So you could usually get 2 games in if you’ve got half an hour free.

Zagorath, 4 months ago

I should say, this is when I play ranked games at a slightly-above-average Elo. RTS games have a reputation for trending to go much longer at very low Elos because players aren’t good at doing aggressive strategies. I dunno how much this would apply in AoM though, compared to AoE2 (which is my main source for this point) because defensive buildings are much stronger in AoE2 than AoM.