Any duders out there in the Beta that can give us their thoughts? I've been looking forward to this for a while but wasn't able to get into the closed beta.A lot of you may have noticed that forums you've previously had access too, the beta forums, have disappeared today. Not to worry! This is on purpose! As of today, April 19th, we are lifting the NDA! You are free to talk about your experiences in the beta, take pictures, and post video of it.
Age of Empires Online
Game » consists of 1 releases. Released Aug 16, 2011
One of the best-selling real time strategy franchises returns with Age of Empires Online, Microsoft's first title to utilize a free-to-play model. The game is no longer playable, as its servers were shut down in July 2014.
Age of Empires Online Beta NDA has been lifted.
The game was very good. I didn't do too much of the PVP stuff, so I'm not sure how balanced everything is.. and I'm not sure how restrictive the free version of the game is going to be, both of those could be pretty big issues.
But there's certainly no issues with it being "dumbed down" or anything like that. It plays great and is very reminiscent of Aoe2 and has a lot of focus on the city building aspects, rather than just sheer combat. The social features add a nice aspect to the game, hanging around in the cities chatting and trading stuff is fine, but can be completely ignored, as far as I could tell there was no downside to totally soloing the game. It at least doesn't feel like they've just tacked on the online features.
It's a little hard to believe the game is out next week, there's literally no hype for it, but I'd definitely recommend everyone gives it a go, it's free after all.
@CptBedlam said:Can't go wrong with that, love that game so mucht, AOE online is a perfectly decent rts though, it just sucks that its free to play and not an actual game." Don't care, will play AoE2 again. "The Age of Empires that was actually fun to play. I'LL JOIN YOU.
It's terrible. Go play an ensemble studios game like AOE2, AOM, or AOE3, all of which are leagues and bounds more enjoyable. I was in the aoe online alpha and beta phase since it was codenamed, ''SPARTAN''. The game doesn't even attempt any form of balance and is clearly made for a much more casual audience.
As someone who had never played an Age of Empires game prior to this beta I felt it was fairly enjoyable to play early on. They do a decent job of introducing the mechanics of the gameplay both in your hub city and on missions. In particular the challenges force you to discover the best and fastest way to gather resources which aids in improving player skill. I did, however, feel that as the game moved forward and the higher in level you became that it became super repetitive and that the AI had very rubber band like behavior. This made some of the later missions super difficult early on if you couldn't establish a strong army and economy quick enough.
I never tried the PvP, but from what I heard it was the feature that fans of the series had the most issues with. In particular a lack of vanilla PvP. When you start a new empire you level up giving you points to spend on upgrades to units and tech, which means that lower level players who get into a game with higher level players will be at a disadvantage. You could also produce, find or buy armor for your troops so a player with better armor and weapons was further advantaged over another player. Considering most of the better items were random drops I can see how this would make the PvP imbalanced and unfair, relying a bit on a players items as well as their skill at the game.
Overall I felt it was a fun game to play and I would suggest everyone give it a try as it is Free to play, but just know that if your expecting the game to be like the previous games in the series that you may be a bit disappointed at the changes.
Please Log In to post.
This edit will also create new pages on Giant Bomb for:
Beware, you are proposing to add brand new pages to the wiki along with your edits. Make sure this is what you intended. This will likely increase the time it takes for your changes to go live.Comment and Save
Until you earn 1000 points all your submissions need to be vetted by other Giant Bomb users. This process takes no more than a few hours and we'll send you an email once approved.
Log in to comment