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I know a guy whose only game is Age of Empires 2. He’s been playing it for about 25 years. He doesn’t have a gaming PC, doesn’t have a wider interest in gaming, and when I once mentioned Age of Empires 3 he said “oh yeah I heard they made another one” and that was the end of the conversation.
AoE 2 fans do be like that: Why bother with another videogame when perfection has already been achieved? And the venerable 26 year-old strategy title continues to have an incredible afterlife, enabled in part by 2019’s Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition, and things are certainly not slowing down.
The latest patch notes for AoE 2: DE are among the most gargantuan I’ve ever seen. The developers themselves admit they’re “legendarily long”, but the “cherry on top” is that they’ll soon be “releasing one of the biggest updates Age 2: DE has ever had!”
How long? They just keep going, and the only way I could think of to summarise was to highlight the whole thing and do a word count: 8229 words. So let’s roll. The next update will arrive “mid-April,” and the headline features are as follows:
- Bug fixes based on your feedback!
- New Visuals for Castles, Elite Unique Units, Monks and Monasteries!
- Technology Tree UI updates!
- Balance changes!
- New Maps!
- New features and content to support:
- Random Map Scripting
- Scenario Editor
- Modding
We then go into a whole host of bug fixes and settings tweaks. The visual overhauls introduce 25 new castle visuals across civilisations, and every elite unique unit now has different visuals compared to their non-upgraded counterparts: “With Teutonic Knight helmet crests, Samurai banners, or Janissary hats, defeat your opponents with more style than ever.”
There’s a bunch of animation improvements across all units, including improved syncing of the animations and attacks themselves, along with new attack animations for infantry that will be randomly shuffled with the existing ones. The technology tree layout has been reorganised “for better readability and more efficient use of space,” with updated wording and better descriptions, and there’s new options from the main menu to go straight into the editor and other features.
Pathfinding tweaks and new attributes jostle for attention among unit fixes, including the amusing “Sheep and Turkeys can no longer receive unintentional speed boost after ungarrisoning from gurjara Mills.”
There’s an absolutely massive list of balance changes to individual units, which for everyone’s sanity I’m just going to link rather than reproducing, and then we return to the big theme of these patch notes, which is China.
A new scenario, “Xie An”, is free for all owners of the Victors and Vanquished expansion, in which “the Xie clan defends the Fei River from the northern warlord Fu Jian who has designs to conquer all of China.” This will let you infiltrate enemy camps with spies, bribe enemy generals, fund a rebellion, “and even misdirect the enemy army” with your cunning ways.
“The Chinese are now listed as an Archer and Gunpowder civilization and are receiving a massive update to their units and bonuses” say the notes, followed by a list of new additions and civilisation bonuses. Developer World’s Edge is in tease mode about the game’s next expansion and, given the focus here, betting on ancient China would be wise.
There are then literally hundreds of words on changes to herdable animals (please don’t ask), and huntable animals, while in the Northern Isles the devs have “fixed boars sometimes failing to generate.” Forest spacing and the amount of water on maps now scales more appropriately, relics are distributed more evenly, there are less inaccessible areas, and oysters will no longer block shore fish from spawning, which was apparently a thing.
There are a whole bunch of new trees, among which Sinophiles may note the Lush Bamboo,
Asian Pine, Peach Blossom, and Asian Maple. There’s also a “Panda Rock” which is a rock that pandas like to climb on. There’s also a new bird, the Red Crowned Crane, which is sometimes called the Manchurian crane. And a new map: Great Wall.
“It’s been a minute since we’ve provided some thoughts and teasers toward everything that’s happening with Age 2: DE, and the last time we did we were in the middle of launching Chronicles: Battle for Greece,” writes World’s Edge.
“But let’s not bury the lede… For anyone that was wondering when we’d be back with something new for our competitive players, this is our love letter to you. We wanted to give you some time to digest it all and get hyped while we finish up the work on one of our biggest updates ever!
“We also mentioned that there’s an exciting new expansion coming to Age 2: DE! We even provided a couple of images to give you an opportunity to sleuth and debate what we’re cooking up. It’s been fun for us to see what everybody is guessing at! We’re not yet ready to share the full details, so keep your eyes peeled for a future announcement with a complete breakdown of everything included in the new expansion.”
China. It’s China.
“The next expansion for Age 2: DE will include FIVE brand NEW Civs, all playable in Ranked Multiplayer. Yes, you read that correctly. Five! Is that all the DLC includes? Nope. We’ll be following up soon with more details […] it’s our absolute privilege and joy to be able to develop this game and franchise for you! We love it as much as you do, and we’re glad you’re here!”
Needless to say the dev team signs off in the only way you’re legally allowed to end AoE 2 patch notes: “Wololo!”
Suffice to say that AoE 2 fans are cock-a-hoop about this update, with some declaring it “the best update ever” and others reaching for the phrase “absolute cinema.” Developers Forgotten Empires and World’s Edge have set a rip-roaring pace of expansions for the Definitive Edition, with six released so far (including 2023’s Return of Rome, which brought over every civilization from the original AoE).
PCG’s strategy king Fraser Brown says that though the Definitive Edition “wavers between remaster and remake” it’s “the best version of the best Age of Empires game by a wide margin.” And an incredible 26 years after the original release, it just somehow keeps getting better.
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Kurt Indovina
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