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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.