I don’t like that wording. Its almost as bad as when people say something is “made for a modern audience.”
All I think is what systems have you removed and what have you changed about a game that was already very good? Best case is the changes are good and it doesn’t really effect the game too much, but worst case is they literally kill the game and ruin its legacy. A lot of risk for not a lot of gain.
I went from AoE1 to OG AoM years and years ago and didn’t think there was a huge jump in feel or quality, but I’m just a filthy casual that plays these on toddler difficulty because I want to relax when I’m gaming. If you’re on my level then you really can’t go wrong, it’s a fun game that can be played in a very simple manner if that’s how you wanna go about it.
It’s a bit slower paced than AoE2, every civilization is very unique, there is a specific resource called Favour. There are mythical creatures and heroes.
I guess it’s a bit more complex but most of us played the campaign as kids and if you’re used to AoE, you’ll be at home and might find it a bit refreshing.
And the original voicing made the whole game: Voulome !
It’s a simpler game for sure. There were only 4 civilizations (Norse, Egyptian, Greek, Atlantian) and they were all very different from one another compared to AoE. Each civilization had multiple deities to choose from for some more specific buffs and abilities. Every type had unique mythical units as well, and these units are quite large so maps felt a bit smaller in comparison. Overall the maps were smaller than AoE anyway, but not in a bad way.
Then instead of stone there was favor, a resource like the rest (food, wood, gold), acquired by putting townies at your temple to pray. All in all it was pretty similar to AoE but it felt a lot less serious. I played a lot at LAN parties and we always had a blast though!
It’s largely the same system. You can play as the Greeks, Norse, or Egyptians. Each civilization has the choice of 3 major gods (is Zeus, Hades, or Poseidon) that choice is kinda like choosing your civilization in AoE. Instead of going feudal age to castle age, you choose a different minor god to worship. Each god gives you a different god power and mythological unit (Cyclops, trolls, anubites, etc). The final civilization upgrade allows you to build a building that unleashes a titan on the map.
There is a new currency called favor that is used to research some improvements unlocked by worshiping specific gods and to train mythological units.
The types of games are largely the same as AoE, with different maps. The campaigns are a lot of fun. It’s a great game, especially if you like mythology. The stories are original and not based on the original myths, but you can learn some of the myths of heroes, mythical creatures, and the gods by right-clicking on them. The campaigns walk you through how to play and through the features that are different from AoE.
You can choose varying difficulty for the scenarios and can choose the difficulty of the computer players when playing a random map. This makes it about as complex as Age of Empires. However, just as with online AoE, the player vs player can have a steep learning curve if you’re matched against people that have been playing a long time.
Age of Empires and Age of Mythology play similarly, where it’s easy to cross from one to the other with many similar human units shared between the games. I think it’s definitely worth a look into! Even the remake that’s already on steam is worth it in my opinion.
Maybe they could make an action game like Devil May Cry but with something like a rhythm game element to it. Do they have any existing IP that that could fit? Or a team that could make it?
The article says that the “new” group is just mostly King (the developers of Candy Crush Saga) employees, and they will basically be working on Activision/Blizzard IP, it doesn’t say anything about them working on general Microsoft IP. It is likely Activitions massive back catalogue may finally have some games make a comeback.
Make StarCraft 1 again…but like the same thing but different ya know? Kinda like just give me a pill to forget about StarCraft so I can replay it and disassociate for a while.
This… is actually kind of exciting. Two massive studios (potentially) showing they also feel that the current AAA space is saturated with boring, soulless, samey games, year after year.
It’s a brand new, highly competitive technology and ChatGPT has first mover status with a trailer load of capital behind it. They are going to burn a lot of resources right now to innovate quickly and reduce latency etc If they reach a successful product-market-fit getting costs down will eventually be critical to it actually being a viable product. I imagine they will pipe this back into ChatGPT for some sort of AI-driven scaling solution for their infrastructure.
TL;DR - It’s kind of like how a car uses most of it’s resources going from 0-60 and then efficiencies kick-in at highway speeds.
Regardless I don’t think they will have to worry about being profitable for a while. With the competition heating up I don’t think there is any way they don’t secure another round of funding.
Facebook is trying to burn the forest around OpenAI and other closed models by removing the market for “models” by themselves, by releasing their own freely to the community. A lot of money is already pivoting away towards companies trying to find products that use the AI instead of the AI itself. Unless OpenAI pivots to something more substantial than just providing multimodal prompt completion they’re gonna find themselves without a lot of runway left.
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