While I do have qualms with that part of the review, I can KINDA understand how an ultra-skilled player like SOTL would want an ultra-skilled AI to play against.
I'm actually really impressed what they did with the technical options they had. Well, or maybe they changed those options. As far as Bot-Scripting goes, the new Ai seems to be way above anything thought possible even 5 years ago with this technical base (Just trying to create a bot in old AoE that could place proper walls ...).
@@annaairahala9462 they are still quite weak to early archer and tower rush, i wish they can address that in extreme AI atleast. You can easily defeat two of them actually if you know how to do feudal rush. But yeah they are better than before.
Not my comment, saw it elsewhere but it made me chuckle; "Age of Empires 2: DE - Got the old version? Here's a discount! Warcraft 3 Reforged - Got the old version? Not any more"
@Hiro Takkan Star Craft 2 was pretty good though. But I guess it's getting pretty old now, Blizard has probably swapped out their entire team twice since, maybe everyone that knows how to make an RTS is long gone.
@Hiro Takkan Wow I feel bad for you. I hope you are not mad at me for having spent several hundreds of hours experiencing huge fun on Lan-parties with my friends with such a cancerous game.
This game, being 20 years old - is going to be "new" to a lot of young players out there. If you're young and love RTS games - this is a literal STEAL at $20. Go grab it !
AoE II Definitive Edition is everything Warcraft III: Reforged should've been... I am happy to see one of my favorite RTSs is getting so much love. Thank you to all the developers!
The Definitive Editions of the AoE series and the Command & Conquer remaster are all prime examples of how to remaster a classic RTS game. Something modern Blizzard clearly doesn't understand.
Let’s not forget about the amazing civ theme music. They could totally get away with not remaking those but damn, that seems like a lot of work. Edit: Thanks for the support :)
Remember, if you haven't done it already, DON'T turn on Warcraft III when you have internet access or it will get BRICKED to the reforged state. ALWAYS unplug the internet before launching Warcraft 3.
@@Progeusz that my cracked hard copy on a 15 years old CD is actually better than the legal version because I don't need to turn my Internet off to play it is kind of a yikes.
Developing an AI for AoE2 in the scope of AlphaStar probably blows the overall costs for the game completely out of the water and is unlikely to be done by the game developers, but by a team of computer scientists. Unless they do it for research, as the google Team did, it's unlikely that even someone with the resources like Microsoft will do it for fun :(
Yeah. I agree with SOTL on most stuff here but that criticism is frankly ridiculous. As someone who works with ML professionally and works on games in my spare time, the technology is nowhere near the point where it is cost effective to produce AI for video games using it right now. Those projects that exist are prestige projects and for the time being not something real games can expect to use. The AI my company owns has enough trouble working on tasks far, far simpler than playing a videogame at a high level. Furthermore, good video game AI doesn't just win; it both wins and looks human (enough) while it does it. That heavily complicates using ML to develop an AI for the average joe to play against. It's just not a realistic criticism in 2020. Maybe in 2030.
@@drunkflamingo8519 With regards to the Starcraft 2 AI, didn't they have to artificially cripple its APM and simultaneous skill usage in order to make it not completely godlike? Perfect micro of 50+ units at the same time while macroing and whatnot. Making an AI that can win a computer game isn't that "difficult" (relatively speaking), making one that acts as a human, is. If that makes sense.
@@tsjeriAu Yes the DeepMind team did have to do this because in earlier versions AlphaStar would just resort to using mass blink stalkers coupled with insane micro
AoE2 > WC3 It just took people too long to realize that, as with all Blizzard games. SC2, Overwatch, Diablo 3 all are games which effectively tricked people into thinking they were good. Only for them to wake up and realize they weren't fun to begin with. The time it took varied, of course, but this always happened. Worst of all was Star Craft 2 which effectively killed RTS games for the sake of muh e-sports. WC3 was saved by its fantastic editor which massively distracted people from the mediocre gameplay. I am just so glad AoE 2 HD and DE have helped this awesome game to regain its old glory. If only we had a time machine to save Westwood from EA and all would be right in the world of RTS.
@@Wolf_Larsen WC3's power and popularity was always with the editor. No body really played WC3 for the online pvp, the played for DoTA, Tree Tag, Pimp my Peon, Legion T.D. AoE2 was always better in terms of the actual game.
It seems my eyes have laid bare on a person of the category that belongs to those who obtain XY chromosome when they're born, possessing a certain amount of cognitive brain cells in order to recognize the truth, I say! (I see you're a man of culture, as well!)
Opposite of Reforged would be 9.5/10 since Reforged got the metacritic user score of 0.5. Heh, that's actually fairly accurate. Tough DE got only 8.9, but close enough.
I noticed the swords, but didn't know the difference. I played the campaigns I wanted to play :derp: I went back to check on how many of the 3 Sword campaigns I completed, and I got Alaric, Sforza and Bari knocked out. I haven't touched the rest yet. But those 3 didn't seem that rough. I guess I had to restart in one or two because I messed up the early start. Funnily enough, in the Prithviraj campaign (2 swords) I actually lost one scenario (4 The Fate of India) because I restricted myself to camels and never pushed for Halberds, running out of gold and not being able to push the last monastery.
just booted up HD edition last night for a game to see if I'll drop the cash for DE when my xbox game pass expires....it's really a no brainer. so many little things add up and it's hard to justify going back. thanks for the vid, and all your great videos!
A funny thing about the Starcraft 2 Deepmind AI is that it 'discovered' that SC2 pro players were doing their economy wrong by letting their HQ buildings idle after building certain numbers of harvesters. Instead, it continuously produced harvesters. The logic being that if you have a bunch of extra ones you are more resistant to raiding and you can get new bases up to speed much much faster. I doubt the AI would be able to figure out something that fundamental about the AOE 2 meta.
@@borismartin1462 in SC2 each 'mineral' can only be mined by X number of harvestors. There is some travel time but the thought was that getting over X+1 or X+2 was a waste of because it's not efficient. then Deepmind proceeded to curb stomp. th-cam.com/video/cUTMhmVh1qs/w-d-xo.html in this particular game on top of the economy not being something the players or casters seem to understand they also aren't getting why the AI is luring him into the ramp choke point even after it's clear what it is going for. i have no idea what's up with SC2 pro players.
Unlike aoe2 starcraft has a harvester limit indicator. For example if you want to harvest gas, the most optimal number is 3 workers, anymore is just wasted workers not working. Also having more doesn't nessesary mean good since if you have too much workers and not so much bases you'll be over saturated and have less army. Remember starcraft is a game where people can max out in 10minutes. The only thing deep mind AI has showed us is the unlimited potential of certain unit micro that is impossible for a human to do.
I replayed the William Wallace tutorial campaign for nostalgic reasons back when I was kid. Man, they really downplayed the voices. The old voice actors were so full of character and charisma; I loved the thick accents for each one too. Now, they just feel bland and boring. Either way, the whole game is still amazing for $20.
The new voice actors have more accurate accents (based on the accents I'm familiar with), but I completely agree with you in that they lack the emotion the old ones had. The old "Wallace's own sword is a five-and-a-half foot *beast,* FORGED of course IN SCOTLAND!" was so beautifully delivered, and the new one just falls short.
Hearing that they remade that campaign made me question buying DE for a second lol. Def gonna buy it for all the other upgrades, but when it comes time to play the first 2 campaigns, I'm going back to HD
@1234 Haha damn. Yeah I swear it was just me at first but it's nice to know dumb shit is happening to everyone although I wish it wasn't. Really hope they fix that
I find it because perhaps now when you right clicked the opponent’s unit it’s auto attacking the nearest enemy in front of them instead of going directly to that enemy unit ignoring other units, which is friendly to beginners. I hope they add an option for us to select our old preference soon.
I can't wait for the Atheism Expansion to Age of Mythology. :-) Slime becoming frankenslime is a dream we can witness only in fantasy games, but it had to have happened or else there's a God who will send me to hell.
Just picked up DE, and what I was the most impressed by was how they have, as you say, gone through the original campaigns and given them a solid overhaul, including new civs (the Burgundians in the Joan of Arc campaign are actually Burgundians now :p) even apparently recording new voice lines!
I also enjoy death. Check out my realistic maps in my channel including: - EVROPA - Eurasia - The Spanish lake (The Pacific Ocean) - The world - The Far East
About the campaigns: they try to show the pros and cons of the different civs now (mainly in the hint and scout section in the briefing) which also helps players learn the right way to play them. The goth campaign kept telling me to spam huskarls for instance.
0:22 - Overview 0:27 - 5/5 Graphics & Audio 2:03 - 5/5 Quality of Life Improvements 2:55 - 4/5 New Civs & Balance 4:03 - 4/5 Multiplayer Experience 5:18 - 3/5 Spectator System 6:03 - 4/5 Mods & Scenario Editor 7:11 - 4/5 AI 8:30 - 5/5 Campaigns I like the revew, but I must be a harsh critic because I'd remove 1 star out of most/all your categories. 1 - Actually i'm fine with 5/5 for Graphics & Audio 2 - I think they got 95% of it correct, but there's a few missing things IMO 4/5 3 - If you make your playerbase ban a new civ you deserve a 3/5 IMO 4 - Multiplayer needs a TON of work; I figured it'd atleast compete with voobly...right now it can't at all. Heck it looses to decade old games like CnC and SC. It needs: ELO, NoG, Multiple server/filter select, remember settings, more ways to sort, etc. The only thing it improved upon was server issues and that is still not resolved completely. 2/5 5 - Spectator System...yeah listen to T90 and Capture Age. This a 1/5 for me and I'm just a pleeb who enjoys watching content. The fact that they have it gets it on the list...nothing more. I figured it would atleast compete with CA 6 - I agree with you 4/5 7 - 3/5 Insane AI should be able to beat top 10 players, similar to barbarian. Machine learning AI is a great idea and will insure it never loses even with limited APM. 8 - I wholeheartedly agree. Campaigns are awesome!
@@bigdiccmarty9335 It gives itself extra ressources out of nothing. The new AoE devs made it clear that they don't want to resort to that from now on with their AI. However, the learning AI they mentioned is the perfect solution for this, although it's understandable if they felt that it's pretty costly to develop one for a 20$ remake.
There are three things that you didn't mention and are, in my opinion, REALLY important: - First is the fact that we lose sound after a game has gone for quite some time, I cast FFA games and that is a problem with long games, the sound just dissapears. - Second, when someone disconnects from a game, the recorded file just stops as if the game had just ended there. - Finally, the lack of chat in the spectator mode, which is really important when spectating diplomacy games. I have put this on the official forum but haven't recieved an answer yet. Thank you for your work Sotl!!!!
XavierTenka Requires **Windows 10 Spyware** Melee pathfinding Multiplayer connection issues _Ignoring the problems doesn't magically make them go away_
Man after the fucking disaster that was the Warcraft III: Reforged fiasco, it feels good to remember that not every remaster is not complete and utter shit.
One thing that has always stuck out to me about DE is the fact that trebuchet projectiles actually explode now. I'm surprised every time it happens cause I'm so used to trebuchet shots just disappearing into the castle
Çaykaralı Vak'a-Nüvis now a $500 budget i5 pc with 8gb ram without graphics card can run this game smoothly, at least 2v2 200pops, I play with my father everyday.
0:30 the Audio in the original (old) game is way better! I wish they would make an Update where you have the original (old) Audio or At least an Update to have the old music. You could change it then in the settings if you like more the New Audio/ music
But I still hope they’ll add back the hd bombard cannon, bombard tower, and hand cannoneers/Janissary explosive firing sound effects. Now I’m not aware if not because of the under attack prompt instead of the cannonball firing sounds
Hey dude What about a long video about the scenarioeditor? Really wanna learn stuff but its very hard and you can do that stuff so well :) Thx for the vid
I really love this channel I’ve seen almost every video and feels like a home online. Thanks spirit for all the knowledge and actually perfect content!
I miss some of the old audio effects like when you capture all the relics and have 100 years left there was a monk type noise but now it’s just some generic knock noise. Also for wonders. The indicators are not as engaging.
The main issue with DE is that they changed how units picks targets. Earlier if you told your units to attack a unit they first killed that unit and then started killing everything else. Now they just switch targets if they get hitted... Forcing you to have your units on stand ground if you want to siege or kill a villager :(
esjb 11 the DE for the first game is the opposite. They will stay focused on a building and not respond to any other units, even if they are attacking them.
I don't particularly blame the team for not going down the machine learning path(yet?) with AoE2 considering just how expensive it would be to actually go ahead with that. In its current state its just not cheap enough yet. Some conservative estimates that i've seen for operating deepmind AI in Starcraft 2 was for $3.2 million dollars. This cost included 384 TPU machines operating for 44 days to get the darned thing going. This is the video I watched if you're interested. th-cam.com/video/84VVFxHAdSY/w-d-xo.html
One thing i'm not happy about DE is that i cant change colors in ranked game?. I'm mentally obsessed with my yellow and orange so I haven't played any multiplayer match yet. Hope they will make it possible soon. It's a very minor thing but still impossible
I agree I dont like the fact Im stuck with red or blue, I mean even if you werent allowed to choose color at all, having them all as possible random options in 1v1 would be pretty damn neat
I love DE, but the defensive stance gets broken every other patch they issue... that's extremely annoying. The bug single-handed made me go back to the HD version. Not to mention units ignoring the target you designed and attacking a (closer) different one. That's already covered by the attack/move option, I don't know why they implemented such a behavior. I'll check back if they fix these issues, but till then I'll be on HD :\
One quality of life update that I would love to see is that if a building has units queued, followed by a tech, and then suddenly the pop cap is hit, then the tech starts researching instead of stopping building activity altogether
I’ve noticed the AI is some what adaptive to you play style. If you use mostly archers - they start training skirmishers. If you rely of cavalry - they’ll start training pikemen. It was a real surprise for the AI to drastically change tactics after 2hrs of gameplay
As a player who plays primarily the campaigns/relatively easy AI, uses a couple of scenario mods, and doesn't play online, this game is a 10/10. It refilled my love for this game and I can't think of a single critique (other than units sometimes get buggy when clumped by buildings). Great job, Devs.
There's one thing I might be the only one interested in, but I love how the Definitive Edition has so many language localizations, some with full audio support. Chinese! Indonesian! Hindi! Turkish! It's really cool stuff imo.
Its mind boggling how little people mentions the disconnections problem that has been there since release. its on the main page of known issues and has been worse since the pre last update. there is like tons of people on the issue page both on Steam and AOE.com ..... multiplayer should get like 2 out of 5 for its current state.
Great review SOTL! I'd love to see a quick update video in a year to see how much has changed since this review, considering the devs update the game frequently with the big monthly patches. The for one this month is already sounding very interesting with auto-scouting!
Hey spirit! At first I want to say thank you for your great AoE vids. You helped me out a lot with your videos about the mechanics of the game. This really helped me becoming a better player. So a big thanks for that. But I think I speak for the community as well when I say: we need more AeO2 commentaries!
I miss the way the William Wallace announcer search for the William Wallace campaign said men at arms. He shouted it with a powerful force like men at arms where the best unit even though they where pretty low on the pole of power. At least That's how I felt.
Multiplayer had alot of issues (havent played recently). - couldn't play with friends as someone would crash after 20 minutes every single time - no way to reconnect to a game in 2020, espexially with all those crashes - a lot of problems playing with people from windows game from steam
giangole elaborate. I play with my father 2v2ai can continue every saved game, just the shown civ a bit off always showing Britons but in game the units are correct
Crashes have been dropping lately. I myself have only ever dropped once, and I once had a bug after an update where all of my building turned invisible, but for the most part the game keeps getting more and more stable.
I’ve been watching your videos or a while now, and loving them! Yesterday me and 7 friends got together and played this game. My skill level is pretty low, but I used some of your techniques and I won :) We did 3vs5 and our team 3 won. I just wanted to say, thank you 🙏
The campaigns are awesome. The new Forgotten campaigns feel so good (especially since the original ones were a buggy piece of thrash) and some little improvements in all of the other campaigns make them worth replaying. The new voice acting is good and it doesn't hurt the overall quality of the campaigns, but the old one feels a little more epic to me. Probably just a nostalgia thing.
well done for the richest company to just reskin a game and remake it, its pathetic . where was a new entire game with all aspects improved. no reason why lot more content can be added such as new buildings/technology and units. change up walls and allow more forms of gameplay without removing ones that are there. this is what they should do to win my, Good job vote. btw i did game dev
Haha - imagine telling a person from 20 years ago when it released that the game will once use 39 *Gigabytes* of hard drive space when installed. What did the really high end HDDs have back then? 4 or 8GB? Especially considering it originally launched worth a couple hundreds of megabytes.
i think old age of kings was like 300mb? i remember back in the early 2000s i had to beg my dad to let me install Blitzkrieg which was a 2 gb game since we only had a 20gb hard drive, lol
Sorry if it's a bit off-topic, but I'd like to comment two things regarding machine learning: First of all, AlphaStar is a bit of a mixed bag given that it has no restrictions on it to make it play in a human-like manner. In the showmatch that was uploaded to TH-cam, it simply outperformed the human opponents by 1) being able to have the whole map on one 'screen' (it did have fog of war IIRC, but it did not need to control the camera at all, since it was just zoomed out way beyond the maximum zoom level the players had access to) and 2) being able to micro them to death because the way they capped the AI's APM was basically meaningless and did nothing to enforce a fair playing ground. I mainly bring this up because I think there is another team that had their machine learning AI perform way better while under restrictions like having a minimum 'reaction time' to new events and a proper maximum amount of commands per second: the team around OpenAI Five working on an AI for DOTA 2. Secondly, a machine learning approach has a LOT of overhead in terms of both money and time, and while it might work for StarCraft to write an API that allows you to simulate matches at a vastly higher speed than normal, that only works if your hardware can actually perform all the gameplay-relevant calculations a lot faster than during a normal game. I suspect that AoE II, even when you rip out the whole graphics rendering and sound part, is simply more complicated and slower than Starcraft and therefore requires more computations and longer runtimes per game, and thus cannot be sped up as much. This would mean that your training phase would be anywhere from 3 to 10 times as long as StarCraft's AI, and as I already stated above, that one isn't exactly stellar right now, either. So TL:DR: while it would probably be a really nice from a research standpoint, there are good reasons why Microsoft doesn't simply want to sink large amounts of money into hiring talent, buying hardware and paying bills to maintain a project that is very likely simply going to lag behind whatever AlphaStar is doing because of the different nature of AoE2 when compared to StarCraft.
The campaigns are mostly there to introduce you to each civ. All campaigns have both eco and military focused scenarios and then some special scenario or two that usually relates to the unique tech or civ playstyle or is just like pseudo-arena type conquest. This is done by the abundance of map resources, military objective types, achievements and more.
Can you suggest graphics settings for people with not so good pc and woth good pc.? Coz i hv a decent enough pc but dont know waht to keep and what to turn off. I am having hard time trying to correct everything.
Gaurav Bhandari if that’s the case I feel turn off everything in graphics but max texture quality and water ripple and reflection max to get the most out of it since other stuffs to me are not eye catching. Seeing the seas water reflection is so relaxing 😌
the only thing that this expansion needed to grasp me was the multiplayeer tutorial, absolutely amazing, i wish i had that help back when i first knew the game
Bought this a few days ago. This is only an hour-old video so maybe I should've waited to see your review. But I don't regret the purchase at all. Childhood memories all came flooding back.
I feel like if you compare to HD on every category, you will get 5/5 on everything. Compare rather to voobly. Spectating should get a 2/5 and multiplayer experience should get a 3/5 despite of the matchmaking feature.
This review sounded like Spirit either hasn't been paying attention or is shilling for some reason. Spectating and multiplayer launched outright broken and have seen only moderate improvement, still not even to the level of Voobly. The AI is better than HD, but hobby scripters had made OPEN SOURCE AIs for Voobly which predate it and wreck it. The animations and sounds fall short of the original in many instances, some units are difficult to distinguish, and half of the color schemes don't display properly. Pathing is still worse than HD, and every patch seems to introduce new bugs. I sincerely hope they improve it, but being dishonest isn't helping anyone.
i disagree on multiplayer... sure, the lobby system is a lot better from HD, but its lacking a few features rn. 1. Ability for ranked rematch on ranked games with the same player. (edit: clarifying that both players have to agree for the rematch.. like after the game ends i can click rematch and it will prompt the other player that opp wants a rematch and opp can either accept if or reject it.) 2. making it so that when an unranked lobby game ends, people return to the lobby instead of main menu. this is exceptionally useful people like me playing multiple games with a lot of players. it just saves soo much time because u wouldnt need to create another lobby and then invite everyone manually specially because many times people can't see lobbies at all and u have go invite them. 3. ability to organise ranked games on lobbies like HD and be able to see ratings ingame! (they don't need to remove matchmaking, but this can be added so people from both worlds are happy) It has improved yes, but there is still room for improvement. 2/5 for me
I doubt they are going to do anything to your 1st suggestion at all, since the point of the current mm is to make it completely impossible to abuse for easy points.
@@hardnrg8000 sorry that i didnt make it clear enough, I've editied it now but what i meant is that both players should agree to the rematch. of course if u could rematch when only one player wanted to, it would be free puntos
@@rituchandra6325 no, I meant people could take advantage of it even if at first they wouldnt know each other or if by chance theu knew each other, they could repetitively spam rematch and the other one could sell their losses to the other guy 🤷♂️
@@hardnrg8000 why would anyone willingly take losses from another player? if u say "selling losses" using real money then even an entire account can be bought/sold for real money... that changes nothing i don't think this feature can be abused in any other way. Also remember that in HD u could do this anyway because the lobby system allowed u to pick whom u fought with in a ranked game but the elos never got abused so... i dont think it can be abused
My biggest complaint is the ranked multiplayer. 2v2 is broken at the moment, making me completely crush my opponent every time,giving me +0 elo. Haven’t tried custom games, but since elo is not shown it sounds like a big pain in the ass. The UI is also like super yanky compared to other multiplayer menus. Other than that, graphics and audio is like 4/5, good but not excellent, good quality of life improvements (4/5), new civs and stuff also quite good and they seem to patch ok except for the last blunder. I am pretty sure machine learning AI would be way more complicated than Star Crafts AI considering how much the map can be changed. One chopped tree that’s overlooked and the game might be over. Sure, they could’ve tried. But AoE DE has a lot of value for 20 or 15$ for HD owners anyway. A no brainer, and there are still NO MICRO TRANSACTIONS, rejoice!
ᴆᴀʀɢᴀṣ I’m so sorry 😂 yeah it’s no fun to dominate new players who try to make their way into AoE ranked games. Try 3v3 instead, it works way better for some reason.
They say familiarity breeds contempt, so I was surprised you were very forgiving with the game but I understood why from the viewpoint of grading on the curve of how each category stacks against the base HD experience, so it makes sense. I'm convinced. lol.
So is the game now making use of multi core processing? I dont think so, it gets quiet stuttery once you have some units out. Other games are handling multi thousend of units and AoE2 stutters with a few hunderts running on hardware 20 years later... Also the game editor worked without stutters 20 years earlier, nowadays it gets quiet laggy Runniny a 8 core ryzen and 1080ti...
I for one am glad they didn't use machine learning AI. That kind of AI tends to act in a non human kind of way. While that is certainly true now, it's in a way that humans COULD do it.
The original AOE was the first real computer game I ever played. I fell IN LOVE with it. Probably logged 5,000 hours on that game. Just got a gaming laptop and I’m downloading it again right now. Can’t find the original version. Hopefully this version gives me the nostalgia the old one always did.
"the new expansions always had great music" rise of rajas is the only expansion that added new music and it was two tracks..... unless you count conquerors i guess
Graphics and Audio: 3/5. I like the audio remaster and graphics looks good, but it loses out on recognizability and massive file size and associated RAM-usage without option to reduce quality settings to make it playable on lower tier computers. Quality of Life improvements: 5/5. a good balance is struck between making life easier and keeping the high-skill requirements for a classic RTS, well done. New civs & Balance: 4/5. The frequent balance patches are very promising. Introduction of new civs is cool as well. Balancing for competitive multiplayer is still lackluster on some points (map generation, laming potential) but overall the civ-balance is in a better shape than ever before. Multiplayer experience: 2/5. The server based multiplayer is great, and the main improvement of AOE. However, on all other fronts the multiplayer is lacking. Yes the matchmaking allows quick games, but at the cost of social interaction and loss of control on picking balanced opponents. Especially in teamgames it is very likely to have unfair matchups. There is no option to have a rematch after a good game. Games crash frequently, and restoring a game is nearly impossible. The unranked lobby is actually worse than on HD or other platforms, with a lack of rating display and interaction with players. Multiplayer stats are not tracked (or atleast not displayed) and the mappool and ability to select civilizations should be reconsidered. Spectator system: 1/5. yes, it is great that you can watch a game. but today's standards (with AOE becoming very popular on streaming platforms and youtube) I expect much more. The spectating system lacks important features, is unstable, and it is not easy to find the match you are looking for. Replaying matches also hasnt been improved at all, logical improvements should be skipping and rewinding while spectating a replay, easy navigation to statistics and/or advanced statistics in a spectator-overlay. Mods: 2/5. The mod workshop is integrated. That sounds nice but in reality it is quiet unintuitive to upload and download mods. As a modcreator I struggle immensely to upload new mods, and the limitations are severe. I also agree with the way mods are presented (lacking weekly-popular) Furthermore, the modding possibilities are lower than we saw in Userpatch. The scenario editor still looks the same as it was in 1999 and lacks basic functionality like a undo button. AI: 3/5. the AI has improved significantly compared to the AI on HD. However, custom AI's are not yet fully supported, and those custom AI's (Barbarians being the most well-known) are much better than the new DE AI. The ability to communicate with AI is great, but they often do not follow your commands very well. Furthermore I am dissapointed to see a lack of machine learning and a lack of promoting the creation of custom AIs Campaigns: 5/5. This really is the strongest point of AOE. DE added new campaigns and reworked a lot of the old ones. I also like how the campaigns are displayed BONUS: HUD/UI: 1/5. Some things were changed compared to the original game or the HD version, but it still looks bad to me. Ingame the HUD is often not that clear (mainly unit icons being hard to differentiate) The minimap can also be clearer. The lobbies and the gamemenu appearance looks like something a kid can make for a schoolproject. BONUS: Performance: 2/5. Servers are great. However, the game is extremely taxing for RAM and CPU usage, as well as requiring a lot of diskspace. In my opinion that is quite bad, especailly when you consider how popular AOE2 was amongst gamers that don't use high end computers. Eventhough devs are very active improving performance, there is no excuse for releasing the game in a terrible state where players would have up to 50% of their multiplayer games crash, or simply can't get the game to work on their low-end gaming machine.
I'm glad that AoE2: Definitive Edition is a good remake for an already great game! The Art of War campaign was especially nice for newcomers, and the quality of life changes help make this game even better! ^^
You forgot to mention that the Shift+Ctrl Keys when ungarrisoning do not work properly. Among many other issues that have gone unfixed for months as seen on the bug reports in AoE2 forums and Steam.
@@Cra3ier True, but I can't imagine playing any modern RTS without it. Many games implement it nowadays... It makes managing stuff around your base so much easier. Even more in AOE as your base can get quite big
Thank you so much for bringing the cutscenes, voice-acting from the old campaign. I loved the old Henry The Lion, and the teller of Joan's story... Now it just seems to be so automatic... Try an accent, then read. I would really love for a mod that put the old ones back, at least the voices... some images do repeat themselves which is distracting. But i would have given a 9.5/10. Not perfect but SENSATIONAL.
I hate the new music. I want the same classic soundtrack available as I remember hearing it when I played this game in my childhood. New music is cool and all but I want to live that same experience when I play. The 'classic' option in the soundtrack select doesn't actually have the classic soundtrack in it, instead it's a new version of the classic soundtrack. Sad.
we had disconnects, then crashes, then desynch and crashes now for me, well made game, and they made thousands of hotfix that didn't help at all and mostly made it worse
The problem with the AlphaStar AI is, that it took a lot of special developement and money to make work. AlphaStar is really impressive but training it up required a lot of replays for one and a decent amount of time in Googles AI cloud (their training runs on specialized hardware) with a few problems resulting from it. One: Whilst it would have worked very well once properly trained, all would have been for nothing if for some reason the meta changed. Machine learning AIs can't be adjusted like standard AI systems and would have to be retrained after every single meta change - and they'd again need tons of replays for training before it could go live. Two: As i said, it'd need retraining over and over again, which is expensive, but there is another problem with AoE that Starcaft doesn't have: Randomness in the maps. It's a shame but once these systems are trained it is very hard to understand *why* they do stuff so adjusting them is costly and randomness would cause mayhem. Though these systems are really cool. The final test version achieved grand master rank. The youtube channel AI and Games recently put up a few videos about AlphaStar which i can only recommend to any one who is interested in the subject.
I think it’s also about the ecosystem having a machine learning AI (aka real AI) would be to AoE II: DE, as well as providing PR interest in the game from computer scientists, nerds and fans alike. Whatever they end up doing with the code, Microsoft’s Azure team could surely learn a lot and it would help drive more sales of the game and interest in Azure AI.
@@jamesaltonfilms It would be cool and interesting to see it done and there'd be definitely lots to learn, it's just that it's not viable as an alternative to regular bots. You could however definitely train it up and have it try and play against humans in the way AlphaStar did - without humans knowing what they are up against.
I loved the advanced vill queuing that was in aoe 3 as well as being able to see how many you had on each resource. Best change in aoe2 DE imo. Can't live without it now
![[TH]FFWS SEA 2024 Fall - Knockout Stage Day 5](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/N2tl9xkQyyU/mqdefault.jpg)
"The A.I. is ok, but i really want to fight Skynet" -SOTL, 2020, Colorized
A little harsh to say a 4/5 for just that
While I do have qualms with that part of the review, I can KINDA understand how an ultra-skilled player like SOTL would want an ultra-skilled AI to play against.
I'm actually really impressed what they did with the technical options they had. Well, or maybe they changed those options.
As far as Bot-Scripting goes, the new Ai seems to be way above anything thought possible even 5 years ago with this technical base (Just trying to create a bot in old AoE that could place proper walls ...).
@@TheToxicwildhog we're looking for something like alphazero for AI
@@annaairahala9462 they are still quite weak to early archer and tower rush, i wish they can address that in extreme AI atleast. You can easily defeat two of them actually if you know how to do feudal rush. But yeah they are better than before.
Not my comment, saw it elsewhere but it made me chuckle;
"Age of Empires 2: DE - Got the old version? Here's a discount!
Warcraft 3 Reforged - Got the old version? Not any more"
@Hiro Takkan wew lad
@Hiro Takkan It is a fine game, just not as a RTS.
@Hiro Takkan Star Craft 2 was pretty good though. But I guess it's getting pretty old now, Blizard has probably swapped out their entire team twice since, maybe everyone that knows how to make an RTS is long gone.
@Hiro Takkan Wow I feel bad for you. I hope you are not mad at me for having spent several hundreds of hours experiencing huge fun on Lan-parties with my friends with such a cancerous game.
@Hiro Takkan fuck off
This game, being 20 years old - is going to be "new" to a lot of young players out there. If you're young and love RTS games - this is a literal STEAL at $20. Go grab it !
Agreed! I haven’t even touched it much yet but this was an instant grab when I saw it for sale. Loved the original
It's the complete opposite direction that Warcraft 3 Reforged went. Definitely support AoE2DE
its definitely not a literal steal
$20 .... steal ... $20 ... steal ... does. not. compute.
Great to see fellow based patriots playing AoE.
AoE II Definitive Edition is everything Warcraft III: Reforged should've been... I am happy to see one of my favorite RTSs is getting so much love. Thank you to all the developers!
The Definitive Editions of the AoE series and the Command & Conquer remaster are all prime examples of how to remaster a classic RTS game. Something modern Blizzard clearly doesn't understand.
Comparing warcraft reforged to this is like comparing a tiny bump to the Alps .
Really well done MS .
Let’s not forget about the amazing civ theme music. They could totally get away with not remaking those but damn, that seems like a lot of work.
Edit: Thanks for the support :)
@666LaVey666 I hope you cleaned that mess up afterwards.
@666LaVey666 that's purely your opinion, everyone else I have talked to say it's mostly an upgrade
@666LaVey666 I dont like the new soundtrack either but I'm pretty sure you can turn it off
I love the teutonic, spanish and italian themes
@666LaVey666 I dont think that makes me ignorant it just makes u look like a total brain dead you can fuck off now plz
Watching this makes me so sad for what Warcraft III Reforged could've been.
Finally, someone who understand between Age and Reforged. This is how you make a Remaster of the game.
AoE 2 DE had everything that I wanted for Reforged
Remember, if you haven't done it already, DON'T turn on Warcraft III when you have internet access or it will get BRICKED to the reforged state. ALWAYS unplug the internet before launching Warcraft 3.
@@Progeusz Thank you, will keep that in mind.
@@Progeusz that my cracked hard copy on a 15 years old CD is actually better than the legal version because I don't need to turn my Internet off to play it is kind of a yikes.
Developing an AI for AoE2 in the scope of AlphaStar probably blows the overall costs for the game completely out of the water and is unlikely to be done by the game developers, but by a team of computer scientists. Unless they do it for research, as the google Team did, it's unlikely that even someone with the resources like Microsoft will do it for fun :(
Yeah. I agree with SOTL on most stuff here but that criticism is frankly ridiculous. As someone who works with ML professionally and works on games in my spare time, the technology is nowhere near the point where it is cost effective to produce AI for video games using it right now. Those projects that exist are prestige projects and for the time being not something real games can expect to use.
The AI my company owns has enough trouble working on tasks far, far simpler than playing a videogame at a high level. Furthermore, good video game AI doesn't just win; it both wins and looks human (enough) while it does it. That heavily complicates using ML to develop an AI for the average joe to play against.
It's just not a realistic criticism in 2020. Maybe in 2030.
And thus, humanity was saved from Skynet...
SunSh4dow yeah just can hope the AlphaStar team wants to do more research on different RTS games and chooses aoe2 de as their next 😆
@@drunkflamingo8519
With regards to the Starcraft 2 AI, didn't they have to artificially cripple its APM and simultaneous skill usage in order to make it not completely godlike? Perfect micro of 50+ units at the same time while macroing and whatnot.
Making an AI that can win a computer game isn't that "difficult" (relatively speaking), making one that acts as a human, is. If that makes sense.
@@tsjeriAu Yes the DeepMind team did have to do this because in earlier versions AlphaStar would just resort to using mass blink stalkers coupled with insane micro
You forgot the most important downgrade.
No yyyaaee for the spanish.
Ayeeee ya heyyyy patapat
One of my top civ tunes along with the Teutons beat.
Tbh, it doesn't fit to much for the time.
That's litterally the one reason I will still play to HD edition
Ee hilla he
BLIZZARD, THAT'S HOW A REMASTER HAS TO BE!!!
Facts
There is a video JUST ABOUT THAT! AOE2 DE vs WC3R
AoE2 > WC3
It just took people too long to realize that, as with all Blizzard games.
SC2, Overwatch, Diablo 3 all are games which effectively tricked people into thinking they were good. Only for them to wake up and realize they weren't fun to begin with.
The time it took varied, of course, but this always happened.
Worst of all was Star Craft 2 which effectively killed RTS games for the sake of muh e-sports.
WC3 was saved by its fantastic editor which massively distracted people from the mediocre gameplay.
I am just so glad AoE 2 HD and DE have helped this awesome game to regain its old glory.
If only we had a time machine to save Westwood from EA and all would be right in the world of RTS.
@@Wolf_Larsen WC3's power and popularity was always with the editor. No body really played WC3 for the online pvp, the played for DoTA, Tree Tag, Pimp my Peon, Legion T.D. AoE2 was always better in terms of the actual game.
@@Wolf_Larsen Who's going to save Supreme commander 1 from its sequel?
To be fair there should be a mod for the intros in the old campaigns. Im from Chile and i loved the spanish voice acting from the scenarios.
HA LLEGADO WALLACE
SANTIAGO
No tenemos un líder. El rey de Escocia ha muerto y no tiene herederos....
Saladino, adonde vas con ese gran ejército?
Dame madera
My rating is "Opposite of reforged /10"
It seems my eyes have laid bare on a person of the category that belongs to those who obtain XY chromosome when they're born, possessing a certain amount of cognitive brain cells in order to recognize the truth, I say!
(I see you're a man of culture, as well!)
Opposite of Reforged would be 9.5/10 since Reforged got the metacritic user score of 0.5. Heh, that's actually fairly accurate.
Tough DE got only 8.9, but close enough.
@@MALEMization Wait - only XY as opposed to XX chromosome? I don't thumbs-down a lot of comments, but for a sexist one I'll make an exception.
@@robglenn4844 That's because the meme literally specifies MAN of culture!
@@robglenn4844 'tis a joke, friend
“Difficulty shown by these swords”
How have I never known this WHAT
Because it's a relatively new feature of a recent patch.
I noticed the swords, but didn't know the difference. I played the campaigns I wanted to play :derp:
I went back to check on how many of the 3 Sword campaigns I completed, and I got Alaric, Sforza and Bari knocked out. I haven't touched the rest yet. But those 3 didn't seem that rough. I guess I had to restart in one or two because I messed up the early start. Funnily enough, in the Prithviraj campaign (2 swords) I actually lost one scenario (4 The Fate of India) because I restricted myself to camels and never pushed for Halberds, running out of gold and not being able to push the last monastery.
just booted up HD edition last night for a game to see if I'll drop the cash for DE when my xbox game pass expires....it's really a no brainer. so many little things add up and it's hard to justify going back. thanks for the vid, and all your great videos!
Big Pilgrim as soon as my father saw the castle collapsed in slow-mo during beta he told me to get him this game straight away lmao 😂
@@Cra3ier can imagine the happiness on old man's face.
Good that you waited with the review and took everything into account - and also tried it out fully. Days aren't enough for that.
Aoe2: gets a remaster
Warcraft 3: *sweats profusely*
A funny thing about the Starcraft 2 Deepmind AI is that it 'discovered' that SC2 pro players were doing their economy wrong by letting their HQ buildings idle after building certain numbers of harvesters. Instead, it continuously produced harvesters. The logic being that if you have a bunch of extra ones you are more resistant to raiding and you can get new bases up to speed much much faster.
I doubt the AI would be able to figure out something that fundamental about the AOE 2 meta.
Never played Starcraft, bus as an AOE player, isn't it obvious that you should never idle your HQ ?
@@borismartin1462 in SC2 each 'mineral' can only be mined by X number of harvestors. There is some travel time but the thought was that getting over X+1 or X+2 was a waste of because it's not efficient.
then Deepmind proceeded to curb stomp.
th-cam.com/video/cUTMhmVh1qs/w-d-xo.html
in this particular game on top of the economy not being something the players or casters seem to understand they also aren't getting why the AI is luring him into the ramp choke point even after it's clear what it is going for. i have no idea what's up with SC2 pro players.
@@mrmistmonster Oh, looks like I should study this in depth. Thank you !
Unlike aoe2 starcraft has a harvester limit indicator. For example if you want to harvest gas, the most optimal number is 3 workers, anymore is just wasted workers not working. Also having more doesn't nessesary mean good since if you have too much workers and not so much bases you'll be over saturated and have less army. Remember starcraft is a game where people can max out in 10minutes. The only thing deep mind AI has showed us is the unlimited potential of certain unit micro that is impossible for a human to do.
I replayed the William Wallace tutorial campaign for nostalgic reasons back when I was kid.
Man, they really downplayed the voices. The old voice actors were so full of character and charisma; I loved the thick accents for each one too.
Now, they just feel bland and boring.
Either way, the whole game is still amazing for $20.
The new voice actors have more accurate accents (based on the accents I'm familiar with), but I completely agree with you in that they lack the emotion the old ones had. The old "Wallace's own sword is a five-and-a-half foot *beast,* FORGED of course IN SCOTLAND!" was so beautifully delivered, and the new one just falls short.
I will miss "La Hire wishes to KEEEEEEL something!"
Hearing that they remade that campaign made me question buying DE for a second lol. Def gonna buy it for all the other upgrades, but when it comes time to play the first 2 campaigns, I'm going back to HD
Don' forget.
Keep explorin' tha mahp.
We arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr'
without a leader
the dead king of SCUTLAND has no 'eirrrrrrrrr
SoTL you missed the biggest complain on DE.... melee pathfinding :(
Why they didn't add machine learning
That is technically part of the AI section and it is something they have been working very hard to address
Oh fuck yes this kills me.
Having my knights ignore a treb to fight an archer standing next to them and losing a castle. The worst
@1234
Haha damn. Yeah I swear it was just me at first but it's nice to know dumb shit is happening to everyone although I wish it wasn't.
Really hope they fix that
I find it because perhaps now when you right clicked the opponent’s unit it’s auto attacking the nearest enemy in front of them instead of going directly to that enemy unit ignoring other units, which is friendly to beginners. I hope they add an option for us to select our old preference soon.
I really hope they remake age of mythology. That would be awesome.
I can't wait for the Atheism Expansion to Age of Mythology. :-) Slime becoming frankenslime is a dream we can witness only in fantasy games, but it had to have happened or else there's a God who will send me to hell.
@@scintillam_dei the fuck?
Just picked up DE, and what I was the most impressed by was how they have, as you say, gone through the original campaigns and given them a solid overhaul, including new civs (the Burgundians in the Joan of Arc campaign are actually Burgundians now :p) even apparently recording new voice lines!
I dont like how the bodies disappear in 5 seconds. They used to stick around and turn into skeletons.
I also enjoy death. Check out my realistic maps in my channel including:
- EVROPA
- Eurasia
- The Spanish lake (The Pacific Ocean)
- The world
- The Far East
About the campaigns: they try to show the pros and cons of the different civs now (mainly in the hint and scout section in the briefing) which also helps players learn the right way to play them. The goth campaign kept telling me to spam huskarls for instance.
0:22 - Overview
0:27 - 5/5 Graphics & Audio
2:03 - 5/5 Quality of Life Improvements
2:55 - 4/5 New Civs & Balance
4:03 - 4/5 Multiplayer Experience
5:18 - 3/5 Spectator System
6:03 - 4/5 Mods & Scenario Editor
7:11 - 4/5 AI
8:30 - 5/5 Campaigns
I like the revew, but I must be a harsh critic because I'd remove 1 star out of most/all your categories.
1 - Actually i'm fine with 5/5 for Graphics & Audio
2 - I think they got 95% of it correct, but there's a few missing things IMO 4/5
3 - If you make your playerbase ban a new civ you deserve a 3/5 IMO
4 - Multiplayer needs a TON of work; I figured it'd atleast compete with voobly...right now it can't at all. Heck it looses to decade old games like CnC and SC. It needs: ELO, NoG, Multiple server/filter select, remember settings, more ways to sort, etc. The only thing it improved upon was server issues and that is still not resolved completely. 2/5
5 - Spectator System...yeah listen to T90 and Capture Age. This a 1/5 for me and I'm just a pleeb who enjoys watching content. The fact that they have it gets it on the list...nothing more. I figured it would atleast compete with CA
6 - I agree with you 4/5
7 - 3/5 Insane AI should be able to beat top 10 players, similar to barbarian. Machine learning AI is a great idea and will insure it never loses even with limited APM.
8 - I wholeheartedly agree. Campaigns are awesome!
lightingman117 Thanks
How did you see the video 3 hours before the rest of us?
@bandwidthzero how does it cheat?
lemme push this comment
@@bigdiccmarty9335 It gives itself extra ressources out of nothing. The new AoE devs made it clear that they don't want to resort to that from now on with their AI.
However, the learning AI they mentioned is the perfect solution for this, although it's understandable if they felt that it's pretty costly to develop one for a 20$ remake.
There are three things that you didn't mention and are, in my opinion, REALLY important:
- First is the fact that we lose sound after a game has gone for quite some time, I cast FFA games and that is a problem with long games, the sound just dissapears.
- Second, when someone disconnects from a game, the recorded file just stops as if the game had just ended there.
- Finally, the lack of chat in the spectator mode, which is really important when spectating diplomacy games.
I have put this on the official forum but haven't recieved an answer yet. Thank you for your work Sotl!!!!
XavierTenka Requires **Windows 10 Spyware**
Melee pathfinding
Multiplayer connection issues
_Ignoring the problems doesn't magically make them go away_
I adore The Art of War.
Straight from SCII Practice range, it has helped me a lot to prepare for PvP, beign myself mainly a PvE in general.
Man after the fucking disaster that was the Warcraft III: Reforged fiasco, it feels good to remember that not every remaster is not complete and utter shit.
One thing that has always stuck out to me about DE is the fact that trebuchet projectiles actually explode now. I'm surprised every time it happens cause I'm so used to trebuchet shots just disappearing into the castle
I don’t even own a pc but I love aoe
sorry?
Yeah same here. I used to play AoE maybe years ago.
I have a pc but it can't open age2 de):
@@ensarunal901 Can't open? What's the issue?
Çaykaralı Vak'a-Nüvis now a $500 budget i5 pc with 8gb ram without graphics card can run this game smoothly, at least 2v2 200pops, I play with my father everyday.
*Does all scores from 1 to 5*
*Except the last one that is a 1 to 10*
''Triggered'' doesn't even start to describe what I feel right now.
Somehow 4.25/5 feels odd compared to 8.5/10.
I CAME FOR THAT COMENT!!! Glad I am not the ony one annoyed by this
@@eliasbosshard1713 woah dude have a spare change of underwear?
0:30 the Audio in the original (old) game is way better! I wish they would make an Update where you have the original (old) Audio or At least an Update to have the old music. You could change it then in the settings if you like more the New Audio/ music
100% agree with you
it is absolutely not. you're being completely clouded by familiarity bias
To have the option to switch would be very nice!
I literally haven't played AOE in years, but I simply love every SOTL upload. This channel is so wholesome and entertaining. Keep it up, bro!
DE is a great addition. I love the building collapse effects, especially when you take out an enemy castle.
paterson90 and with they’ve boosted the treb’s volley hit the buildings sound effect BOOM, so satisfying 😂
Yeah, but something odd occurs, when they take out your castle it isnt nearly as satisfying. Dont know why
Definitely true lol
Jorge Ruesta definitely not satisfying if it’s our own castle 😝
But I still hope they’ll add back the hd bombard cannon, bombard tower, and hand cannoneers/Janissary explosive firing sound effects. Now I’m not aware if not because of the under attack prompt instead of the cannonball firing sounds
Hey dude
What about a long video about the scenarioeditor? Really wanna learn stuff but its very hard and you can do that stuff so well :)
Thx for the vid
And i mean the triggers :) a video where (theoretically) anybody afterwards can create an own towerdefense as an example :)
yes please! some scenario editing basics would much appreciated
I really love this channel I’ve seen almost every video and feels like a home online. Thanks spirit for all the knowledge and actually perfect content!
Hey Spirit of the Law, thanks for what you do for the community :)
I miss some of the old audio effects like when you capture all the relics and have 100 years left there was a monk type noise but now it’s just some generic knock noise. Also for wonders. The indicators are not as engaging.
Facts
Agreed
There is the official Original Sounds mod in the workshop by the devs. Check it out!
@@harooooo1 that's awesome to hear!!!
@@harooooo1 holy shit you save my life mate
The main issue with DE is that they changed how units picks targets. Earlier if you told your units to attack a unit they first killed that unit and then started killing everything else. Now they just switch targets if they get hitted... Forcing you to have your units on stand ground if you want to siege or kill a villager :(
esjb 11 the DE for the first game is the opposite. They will stay focused on a building and not respond to any other units, even if they are attacking them.
@@RafaSheep Buildings perhaps but not units
This game will be great even after 20 more years...a true gem...
I don't particularly blame the team for not going down the machine learning path(yet?) with AoE2 considering just how expensive it would be to actually go ahead with that. In its current state its just not cheap enough yet. Some conservative estimates that i've seen for operating deepmind AI in Starcraft 2 was for $3.2 million dollars. This cost included 384 TPU machines operating for 44 days to get the darned thing going. This is the video I watched if you're interested. th-cam.com/video/84VVFxHAdSY/w-d-xo.html
One thing i'm not happy about DE is that i cant change colors in ranked game?. I'm mentally obsessed with my yellow and orange so I haven't played any multiplayer match yet. Hope they will make it possible soon. It's a very minor thing but still impossible
I agree I dont like the fact Im stuck with red or blue, I mean even if you werent allowed to choose color at all, having them all as possible random options in 1v1 would be pretty damn neat
Viper confirmed
I love DE, but the defensive stance gets broken every other patch they issue... that's extremely annoying. The bug single-handed made me go back to the HD version.
Not to mention units ignoring the target you designed and attacking a (closer) different one. That's already covered by the attack/move option, I don't know why they implemented such a behavior.
I'll check back if they fix these issues, but till then I'll be on HD :\
One quality of life update that I would love to see is that if a building has units queued, followed by a tech, and then suddenly the pop cap is hit, then the tech starts researching instead of stopping building activity altogether
I’ve noticed the AI is some what adaptive to you play style. If you use mostly archers - they start training skirmishers. If you rely of cavalry - they’ll start training pikemen. It was a real surprise for the AI to drastically change tactics after 2hrs of gameplay
If it's SOTL, I thought he would make a whole category for Japanese
The original aoe 2 tutorial voice is nostalgia... "The English arr terrorizing our land...."
As a player who plays primarily the campaigns/relatively easy AI, uses a couple of scenario mods, and doesn't play online, this game is a 10/10. It refilled my love for this game and I can't think of a single critique (other than units sometimes get buggy when clumped by buildings). Great job, Devs.
There's one thing I might be the only one interested in, but I love how the Definitive Edition has so many language localizations, some with full audio support. Chinese! Indonesian! Hindi! Turkish! It's really cool stuff imo.
Very nice, thanks Spirit! =)
And now, just for fun, do the same with warcraft 3 reforged ^^'
I think Blizzard is getting Microsoft to to fix their Warcraft 3 mess, Microsoft knows how to do Definitive Editions right, eh? /s
Its mind boggling how little people mentions the disconnections problem that has been there since release. its on the main page of known issues and has been worse since the pre last update. there is like tons of people on the issue page both on Steam and AOE.com ..... multiplayer should get like 2 out of 5 for its current state.
Thank you! I don't understand how this isn't mention in the video. By buying the game you take the risk of not being able to play multiplayer at all
Great review SOTL! I'd love to see a quick update video in a year to see how much has changed since this review, considering the devs update the game frequently with the big monthly patches. The for one this month is already sounding very interesting with auto-scouting!
Hey spirit! At first I want to say thank you for your great AoE vids.
You helped me out a lot with your videos about the mechanics of the game. This really helped me becoming a better player. So a big thanks for that.
But I think I speak for the community as well when I say: we need more AeO2 commentaries!
I miss the way the William Wallace announcer search for the William Wallace campaign said men at arms. He shouted it with a powerful force like men at arms where the best unit even though they where pretty low on the pole of power. At least That's how I felt.
Politicians are manipulators and voice nuances are a means to that end.
Multiplayer had alot of issues (havent played recently).
- couldn't play with friends as someone would crash after 20 minutes every single time
- no way to reconnect to a game in 2020, espexially with all those crashes
- a lot of problems playing with people from windows game from steam
This Tool fixed my crash bugs. There is a bug with ram. Propably it will held you too
www.wagnardsoft.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1256
Same here. A lot of my friends and myself get dropped time and time again. Seemingly for no reason
giangole elaborate. I play with my father 2v2ai can continue every saved game, just the shown civ a bit off always showing Britons but in game the units are correct
Crashes have been dropping lately. I myself have only ever dropped once, and I once had a bug after an update where all of my building turned invisible, but for the most part the game keeps getting more and more stable.
I’ve been watching your videos or a while now, and loving them! Yesterday me and 7 friends got together and played this game. My skill level is pretty low, but I used some of your techniques and I won :) We did 3vs5 and our team 3 won. I just wanted to say, thank you 🙏
The campaigns are awesome. The new Forgotten campaigns feel so good (especially since the original ones were a buggy piece of thrash) and some little improvements in all of the other campaigns make them worth replaying. The new voice acting is good and it doesn't hurt the overall quality of the campaigns, but the old one feels a little more epic to me. Probably just a nostalgia thing.
The graphics and animations upgrade alone are so much better than before. Really feels like a 2020 game... well done microsoft.
well done for the richest company to just reskin a game and remake it, its pathetic . where was a new entire game with all aspects improved. no reason why lot more content can be added such as new buildings/technology and units. change up walls and allow more forms of gameplay without removing ones that are there. this is what they should do to win my, Good job vote.
btw i did game dev
Haha - imagine telling a person from 20 years ago when it released that the game will once use 39 *Gigabytes* of hard drive space when installed. What did the really high end HDDs have back then? 4 or 8GB? Especially considering it originally launched worth a couple hundreds of megabytes.
i think old age of kings was like 300mb? i remember back in the early 2000s i had to beg my dad to let me install Blitzkrieg which was a 2 gb game since we only had a 20gb hard drive, lol
Sorry if it's a bit off-topic, but I'd like to comment two things regarding machine learning:
First of all, AlphaStar is a bit of a mixed bag given that it has no restrictions on it to make it play in a human-like manner. In the showmatch that was uploaded to TH-cam, it simply outperformed the human opponents by 1) being able to have the whole map on one 'screen' (it did have fog of war IIRC, but it did not need to control the camera at all, since it was just zoomed out way beyond the maximum zoom level the players had access to) and 2) being able to micro them to death because the way they capped the AI's APM was basically meaningless and did nothing to enforce a fair playing ground.
I mainly bring this up because I think there is another team that had their machine learning AI perform way better while under restrictions like having a minimum 'reaction time' to new events and a proper maximum amount of commands per second: the team around OpenAI Five working on an AI for DOTA 2.
Secondly, a machine learning approach has a LOT of overhead in terms of both money and time, and while it might work for StarCraft to write an API that allows you to simulate matches at a vastly higher speed than normal, that only works if your hardware can actually perform all the gameplay-relevant calculations a lot faster than during a normal game. I suspect that AoE II, even when you rip out the whole graphics rendering and sound part, is simply more complicated and slower than Starcraft and therefore requires more computations and longer runtimes per game, and thus cannot be sped up as much. This would mean that your training phase would be anywhere from 3 to 10 times as long as StarCraft's AI, and as I already stated above, that one isn't exactly stellar right now, either.
So TL:DR: while it would probably be a really nice from a research standpoint, there are good reasons why Microsoft doesn't simply want to sink large amounts of money into hiring talent, buying hardware and paying bills to maintain a project that is very likely simply going to lag behind whatever AlphaStar is doing because of the different nature of AoE2 when compared to StarCraft.
The campaigns are mostly there to introduce you to each civ. All campaigns have both eco and military focused scenarios and then some special scenario or two that usually relates to the unique tech or civ playstyle or is just like pseudo-arena type conquest. This is done by the abundance of map resources, military objective types, achievements and more.
Can you suggest graphics settings for people with not so good pc and woth good pc.? Coz i hv a decent enough pc but dont know waht to keep and what to turn off. I am having hard time trying to correct everything.
Gaurav Bhandari why do you want to turn off?
Milo Openg Because there are many things and graphics which are over done using on uktra settings. Just want to balance perfectly the SOTL way. 😜
Gaurav Bhandari if that’s the case I feel turn off everything in graphics but max texture quality and water ripple and reflection max to get the most out of it since other stuffs to me are not eye catching. Seeing the seas water reflection is so relaxing 😌
"4/5 not enough machine learning AI" bro you are so harsh
the only thing that this expansion needed to grasp me was the multiplayeer tutorial, absolutely amazing, i wish i had that help back when i first knew the game
Bought this a few days ago. This is only an hour-old video so maybe I should've waited to see your review. But I don't regret the purchase at all. Childhood memories all came flooding back.
please make a tutorial on how to use the scenario editor!
Well that's actually an interesting idea
Does the Definitively Eye Candy Edition have a bigger map size than the biggest in HD?
I feel like if you compare to HD on every category, you will get 5/5 on everything. Compare rather to voobly. Spectating should get a 2/5 and multiplayer experience should get a 3/5 despite of the matchmaking feature.
This review sounded like Spirit either hasn't been paying attention or is shilling for some reason.
Spectating and multiplayer launched outright broken and have seen only moderate improvement, still not even to the level of Voobly. The AI is better than HD, but hobby scripters had made OPEN SOURCE AIs for Voobly which predate it and wreck it. The animations and sounds fall short of the original in many instances, some units are difficult to distinguish, and half of the color schemes don't display properly. Pathing is still worse than HD, and every patch seems to introduce new bugs.
I sincerely hope they improve it, but being dishonest isn't helping anyone.
Really nice review but the fact that there's no x256 tech mod working at the moment still upsets me to this day.
i disagree on multiplayer... sure, the lobby system is a lot better from HD, but its lacking a few features rn.
1. Ability for ranked rematch on ranked games with the same player. (edit: clarifying that both players have to agree for the rematch.. like after the game ends i can click rematch and it will prompt the other player that opp wants a rematch and opp can either accept if or reject it.)
2. making it so that when an unranked lobby game ends, people return to the lobby instead of main menu. this is exceptionally useful people like me playing multiple games with a lot of players. it just saves soo much time because u wouldnt need to create another lobby and then invite everyone manually specially because many times people can't see lobbies at all and u have go invite them.
3. ability to organise ranked games on lobbies like HD and be able to see ratings ingame! (they don't need to remove matchmaking, but this can be added so people from both worlds are happy)
It has improved yes, but there is still room for improvement. 2/5 for me
I doubt they are going to do anything to your 1st suggestion at all, since the point of the current mm is to make it completely impossible to abuse for easy points.
@@hardnrg8000 sorry that i didnt make it clear enough, I've editied it now but what i meant is that both players should agree to the rematch. of course if u could rematch when only one player wanted to, it would be free puntos
@@rituchandra6325 no, I meant people could take advantage of it even if at first they wouldnt know each other or if by chance theu knew each other, they could repetitively spam rematch and the other one could sell their losses to the other guy 🤷♂️
@@hardnrg8000 why would anyone willingly take losses from another player? if u say "selling losses" using real money then even an entire account can be bought/sold for real money... that changes nothing
i don't think this feature can be abused in any other way.
Also remember that in HD u could do this anyway because the lobby system allowed u to pick whom u fought with in a ranked game but the elos never got abused so... i dont think it can be abused
I find the saracens team bonus a bit op...
My biggest complaint is the ranked multiplayer. 2v2 is broken at the moment, making me completely crush my opponent every time,giving me +0 elo. Haven’t tried custom games, but since elo is not shown it sounds like a big pain in the ass. The UI is also like super yanky compared to other multiplayer menus.
Other than that, graphics and audio is like 4/5, good but not excellent, good quality of life improvements (4/5), new civs and stuff also quite good and they seem to patch ok except for the last blunder.
I am pretty sure machine learning AI would be way more complicated than Star Crafts AI considering how much the map can be changed. One chopped tree that’s overlooked and the game might be over. Sure, they could’ve tried. But AoE DE has a lot of value for 20 or 15$ for HD owners anyway. A no brainer, and there are still NO MICRO TRANSACTIONS, rejoice!
i'm 11+ we get matched vs 18-19+ ratings when queuing with someone who play his first ranked games, fun
ᴆᴀʀɢᴀṣ I’m so sorry 😂 yeah it’s no fun to dominate new players who try to make their way into AoE ranked games. Try 3v3 instead, it works way better for some reason.
They say familiarity breeds contempt, so I was surprised you were very forgiving with the game but I understood why from the viewpoint of grading on the curve of how each category stacks against the base HD experience, so it makes sense. I'm convinced. lol.
Does this take an arm and a leg's worth megabuild of a PC to run at high settings now?
Good question. May your quest find destiny.
So is the game now making use of multi core processing?
I dont think so, it gets quiet stuttery once you have some units out.
Other games are handling multi thousend of units and AoE2 stutters with a few hunderts running on hardware 20 years later...
Also the game editor worked without stutters 20 years earlier, nowadays it gets quiet laggy
Runniny a 8 core ryzen and 1080ti...
I for one am glad they didn't use machine learning AI. That kind of AI tends to act in a non human kind of way. While that is certainly true now, it's in a way that humans COULD do it.
It would most likely rush horse archers and just harass while massing ranged units as it would have infinite APM.
He gives it an 8.5 because he wants to get the game improved even more. He is the best guy!
I pity him that he is in Blackface Turdeau land, the 51st state of denial, the place of the dying leaf.
The original AOE was the first real computer game I ever played. I fell IN LOVE with it. Probably logged 5,000 hours on that game. Just got a gaming laptop and I’m downloading it again right now. Can’t find the original version. Hopefully this version gives me the nostalgia the old one always did.
"the new expansions always had great music"
rise of rajas is the only expansion that added new music and it was two tracks.....
unless you count conquerors i guess
Graphics and Audio: 3/5. I like the audio remaster and graphics looks good, but it loses out on recognizability and massive file size and associated RAM-usage without option to reduce quality settings to make it playable on lower tier computers.
Quality of Life improvements: 5/5. a good balance is struck between making life easier and keeping the high-skill requirements for a classic RTS, well done.
New civs & Balance: 4/5. The frequent balance patches are very promising. Introduction of new civs is cool as well. Balancing for competitive multiplayer is still lackluster on some points (map generation, laming potential) but overall the civ-balance is in a better shape than ever before.
Multiplayer experience: 2/5. The server based multiplayer is great, and the main improvement of AOE. However, on all other fronts the multiplayer is lacking. Yes the matchmaking allows quick games, but at the cost of social interaction and loss of control on picking balanced opponents. Especially in teamgames it is very likely to have unfair matchups. There is no option to have a rematch after a good game. Games crash frequently, and restoring a game is nearly impossible. The unranked lobby is actually worse than on HD or other platforms, with a lack of rating display and interaction with players. Multiplayer stats are not tracked (or atleast not displayed) and the mappool and ability to select civilizations should be reconsidered.
Spectator system: 1/5. yes, it is great that you can watch a game. but today's standards (with AOE becoming very popular on streaming platforms and youtube) I expect much more. The spectating system lacks important features, is unstable, and it is not easy to find the match you are looking for. Replaying matches also hasnt been improved at all, logical improvements should be skipping and rewinding while spectating a replay, easy navigation to statistics and/or advanced statistics in a spectator-overlay.
Mods: 2/5. The mod workshop is integrated. That sounds nice but in reality it is quiet unintuitive to upload and download mods. As a modcreator I struggle immensely to upload new mods, and the limitations are severe. I also agree with the way mods are presented (lacking weekly-popular) Furthermore, the modding possibilities are lower than we saw in Userpatch. The scenario editor still looks the same as it was in 1999 and lacks basic functionality like a undo button.
AI: 3/5. the AI has improved significantly compared to the AI on HD. However, custom AI's are not yet fully supported, and those custom AI's (Barbarians being the most well-known) are much better than the new DE AI. The ability to communicate with AI is great, but they often do not follow your commands very well. Furthermore I am dissapointed to see a lack of machine learning and a lack of promoting the creation of custom AIs
Campaigns: 5/5. This really is the strongest point of AOE. DE added new campaigns and reworked a lot of the old ones. I also like how the campaigns are displayed
BONUS: HUD/UI: 1/5. Some things were changed compared to the original game or the HD version, but it still looks bad to me. Ingame the HUD is often not that clear (mainly unit icons being hard to differentiate) The minimap can also be clearer. The lobbies and the gamemenu appearance looks like something a kid can make for a schoolproject.
BONUS: Performance: 2/5. Servers are great. However, the game is extremely taxing for RAM and CPU usage, as well as requiring a lot of diskspace. In my opinion that is quite bad, especailly when you consider how popular AOE2 was amongst gamers that don't use high end computers. Eventhough devs are very active improving performance, there is no excuse for releasing the game in a terrible state where players would have up to 50% of their multiplayer games crash, or simply can't get the game to work on their low-end gaming machine.
Completely agree Henk. I'm sticking to Voobly until (unless?) most of these issues are ironed out.
Higher quality? Have you even listened to some of the new voice acting they replaced it with? It sounds monotone and without any effort put into it.
Great review spot on. Hope you remake your civ reviews for DE!
I'm glad that AoE2: Definitive Edition is a good remake for an already great game! The Art of War campaign was especially nice for newcomers, and the quality of life changes help make this game even better! ^^
Microsoft can make the A.I. hold his family IRL in hostage negotiation and he'll still give them 4.5/5 for unrealistic shit-talking.
I must say i have played alot of AOE2 since coming back at the end of December. I did not play for 17 years!!
You forgot to mention that the Shift+Ctrl Keys when ungarrisoning do not work properly. Among many other issues that have gone unfixed for months as seen on the bug reports in AoE2 forums and Steam.
Is this your definitive review of Definitive Edition?
Camera location binds still missing though...
ZulacecekStarcraft that’s sc2’s speciality, even war3 doesn’t have it
@@Cra3ier True, but I can't imagine playing any modern RTS without it. Many games implement it nowadays... It makes managing stuff around your base so much easier. Even more in AOE as your base can get quite big
ZulacecekStarcraft yes it’s a good feature, I certainly do hope it gets added in soon, since F1-F4 buttons are not in use in aoe2 than in war3.
Thank you Spirit! You should put date on the title and make reviews every months after patches realese =D
Thank you so much for bringing the cutscenes, voice-acting from the old campaign.
I loved the old Henry The Lion, and the teller of Joan's story... Now it just seems to be so automatic... Try an accent, then read.
I would really love for a mod that put the old ones back, at least the voices... some images do repeat themselves which is distracting.
But i would have given a 9.5/10. Not perfect but SENSATIONAL.
I hate the new music. I want the same classic soundtrack available as I remember hearing it when I played this game in my childhood. New music is cool and all but I want to live that same experience when I play.
The 'classic' option in the soundtrack select doesn't actually have the classic soundtrack in it, instead it's a new version of the classic soundtrack. Sad.
Does he sound exactly like Lockpicking Lawyer to anyone else?
What!!!? So he isn't?
They could fix the multiple multiplayer issues, including the disconnect one that has been reported for over 4 months now and still is there.
we had disconnects, then crashes, then desynch and crashes now for me, well made game, and they made thousands of hotfix that didn't help at all and mostly made it worse
SOTL's approach to reviewing is more analytical and thorough than any other I've seen. I like it.
Gave the video a like even before hearing "Hey guys"
Farm tile size is still not equal to or a multiple of its gathering building for symmetrical and concentric farming. 0/10
You can make rings if you offset it slightly. The mill in this video has an example of how to do it, and you can do the same for town centres.
The problem with the AlphaStar AI is, that it took a lot of special developement and money to make work. AlphaStar is really impressive but training it up required a lot of replays for one and a decent amount of time in Googles AI cloud (their training runs on specialized hardware) with a few problems resulting from it.
One: Whilst it would have worked very well once properly trained, all would have been for nothing if for some reason the meta changed. Machine learning AIs can't be adjusted like standard AI systems and would have to be retrained after every single meta change - and they'd again need tons of replays for training before it could go live.
Two: As i said, it'd need retraining over and over again, which is expensive, but there is another problem with AoE that Starcaft doesn't have: Randomness in the maps.
It's a shame but once these systems are trained it is very hard to understand *why* they do stuff so adjusting them is costly and randomness would cause mayhem. Though these systems are really cool. The final test version achieved grand master rank. The youtube channel AI and Games recently put up a few videos about AlphaStar which i can only recommend to any one who is interested in the subject.
I think it’s also about the ecosystem having a machine learning AI (aka real AI) would be to AoE II: DE, as well as providing PR interest in the game from computer scientists, nerds and fans alike. Whatever they end up doing with the code, Microsoft’s Azure team could surely learn a lot and it would help drive more sales of the game and interest in Azure AI.
@@jamesaltonfilms It would be cool and interesting to see it done and there'd be definitely lots to learn, it's just that it's not viable as an alternative to regular bots.
You could however definitely train it up and have it try and play against humans in the way AlphaStar did - without humans knowing what they are up against.
I loved the advanced vill queuing that was in aoe 3 as well as being able to see how many you had on each resource. Best change in aoe2 DE imo. Can't live without it now
How about reviewing the awful optimization and performance, especially in lower end machines?
I actually refund this game because no reconnect feature, gg
There more to the game then online play m8.
Can u still play with AoE2 HD people?
Can you do a video that compares classic AOC pathing to DE pathing? Will be nice to see how far we are from a good pathing