Age of Empires Online Beta NDA has been lifted.

#1 Posted by Grimluck343 (1073 posts) - 2 years, 1 month ago

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.

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.

#2 Posted by Max_Antrax (102 posts) - 2 years, 1 month ago

its way too weird game, the balance is just not there to work.

#3 Posted by CptBedlam (3988 posts) - 2 years, 1 month ago

Don't care, will play AoE2 again.

#4 Posted by Red12b (8819 posts) - 2 years, 1 month ago

@CptBedlam said:

" Don't care, will play AoE2 again. "

fuck yea!

#5 Posted by Jimi (1117 posts) - 2 years, 1 month ago

@CptBedlam said:

" Don't care, will play AoE2 again. "

Wololo

#6 Posted by Hitchenson (4586 posts) - 2 years, 1 month ago

Oh shit, the beta. I forgot I had it.

#7 Posted by OtakuGamer (1078 posts) - 2 years, 1 month ago

@CptBedlam said:

" Don't care, will play AoE2 again. "

The Age of Empires that was actually fun to play. I'LL JOIN YOU.

#8 Posted by WinterSnowblind (7379 posts) - 1 year, 9 months ago

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.

#9 Posted by Mikemcn (6791 posts) - 1 year, 9 months ago

@OtakuGamer

@CptBedlam said:
" Don't care, will play AoE2 again. "
The Age of Empires that was actually fun to play. I'LL JOIN YOU.

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.

#10 Edited by endless_void (706 posts) - 1 year, 9 months ago

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.

#11 Posted by Tennmuerti (6823 posts) - 1 year, 9 months ago

I'm getting mixed signals here :/

#12 Posted by Goboard (100 posts) - 1 year, 9 months ago

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.

Age of Empires Online

One of the best-selling real time strategy franchises of all time returns with Age of Empires Online, Microsoft's first title to utilize a free-to-play model.

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