Age of Empires II HD arriving April 9


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The problem with updating the controls and mechanics etc is you risk alienating fans. They aren't buying this game for modern things, they're buying it for Nostalgia, if everything feels like AoE2, it'll go down better.

Well, that's a double-edged sword. Try to please existing fans too much and you'll alienate new players with different expectations. Personally I feel like if you're going to enhance an existing game, you might as well improve everything you can and do away with what wasn't working. If the nostalgic crowd finds it too different, they can always play the original after all.

This looks like Age of Conquerors + a new renderer + some redone sprites + steam integration. It remains to be seen if there's any significant gameplay improvements; the controls are quite dated by today's (and by that I mean Starcraft 2)'s standards: there's no attack-move, no multi-building smart queuing, no unit order queuing, no queuing of researches with units, no camera hotkeys, etc. All these things would be relatively easy to add but it'd take the right vision. I can't wait to see more details.

I agree, new price will only work if gameplay is improved, but not changed dramatically !

I'm am looking forward to this so much you wouldn't believe. I sunk so many hours into this game after getting for free with an old computer we used to have and my list of saved games was huge...I played a multiplayer game on it a couple of months ago through GameRanger but it's a bit buggy, so this will be absolutely brilliant.

I don't really see why so many people are complaining either, sure it hasn't had a big visual makeover but if I'm honest I think it's better that way. It's not a remake, and they're not charging ?30 for it, it's just a 1080p version with some new textures and features. Steam Workshop and proper multiplayer lobbies is reason enough for me to get this!

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?11 is overpriced? Didn't you buy SimCity...

It's actually ?15, discounted to ?13.50 if you preorder (which is always a dubious prospect without reviews). That's pretty steep when it's essentially just a tweaked version of the game I played fifteen years ago, especially when for a similar price you can usually pick up AAA titles within 6 months of release. And no, I didn't buy SimCity but even if I had that's a modern game that's just been released.

  • 4 weeks later...

Remake reaction thus far:

Terrible. Completely unplayable. The framerate issues are horrendous and multiplayer simply doesn't work. And there are so many other little bugs it's simply unbelievable.

And, if you're running on XP, you won't even be able to play the game because it calls for API's that apparently don't exist!

Sigh.

Remake reaction thus far:

Terrible. Completely unplayable. The framerate issues are horrendous and multiplayer simply doesn't work. And there are so many other little bugs it's simply unbelievable.

And, if you're running on XP, you won't even be able to play the game because it calls for API's that apparently don't exist!

Sigh.

It came out early?

Played it for 4 hours today with no issues at all. The workshop support for Steam is pretty nice as well. Haven't tried multiplayer yet though.

Still one of my favorite games of all time. :D

Played it for 4 hours today with no issues at all. The workshop support for Steam is pretty nice as well. Haven't tried multiplayer yet though.

Still one of my favorite games of all time. :D

You're one of the lucky few. Can't even play on single player for over half an hour or it starts to lag like hell :/

Hopefully they patch it soon.

If people are getting this running perfectly, I am not sure how... the forums and everyone around seems to be having trouble - and the devs acknowledged some that they are already working on (which means they are launching with the known bugs, sheesh).

The HD in this is laughable, and some textures look worse, believe it or not.

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    • With the current hardware prices Microsoft should lift the restriction. Then if you have the correct TPM then allow you to use X feature, if you don't have the correct TPM then don't but still actually let you run windows. 11. With a disclaimer during install that X features would be unavailable.
    • It's good for recycling of course. But commence inflation of a second hand RAM bubble and price gouging on DDR 4 inventory in 3... 2... 1...
    • Bypassed Windows 11 shows surprising stability on ancient, completely unsupported hardware by Sayan Sen When Windows 11 was first released, one of the most complained-about issues with the new desktop Microsoft OS was its higher system requirements, which pushed many relatively modern and powerful processors and devices onto the officially unsupported list. Thankfully, they have not been updated again for the base OS, though systems require four times the memory and storage if they want to run AI-powered apps and features. As such, Windows 11 technically runs on 4GB of memory, and there is no imposed restriction on the generation of memory it supports. Speaking of memory, prices are extremely high nowadays for hardware, especially DDR5 and DDR4 kits due to the current silicon shortage, and there are also reports of it affecting DDR2 as well, and it might only be a matter of time before even DDR1 gets affected. Before that could happen, an enthusiast took an ancient DDR1-based system and decided to try out Windows 11 on it to see how well the modern OS would fare on such hardware. The system runs an outdated graphics card interface standard based on AGP, or Advanced Graphics Port, called AGP 3.0 or AGP8x. AGP was essentially succeeded by the modern PCI Express (PCIe) bus standard. The user behind the experiment is retro hardware enthusiast Omores, who built the system around an ASRock ConRoe865PE motherboard based on Intel's i865PE chipset from way back in 2003, around the time when AGP was still in fashion. What made this board special back in the day was its unusual support for newer Core 2 Duo and even Core 2 Quad processors while still retaining older DDR1 memory support and an AGP8X graphics slot, making it an ideal bridge or link between two vastly different generations. Powering the machine was Intel's Core 2 Quad Q6600 alongside 3GB of DDR1 RAM and an ATI Radeon HD 4650 AGP graphics card, one of the final and most capable GPUs released for the aging AGP interface. While installing Windows 11 itself was relatively easy by bypassing Microsoft's hardware checks, getting the graphics card fully functional proved to be some challenge. Microsoft had quietly dropped native AGP support after the earliest releases of Windows 10, meaning newer versions of Windows no longer include the necessary Graphics Address Remapping Table (GART) drivers required for proper AGP acceleration. Without them, AGP graphics cards typically boot up, though with limited functionality, and can often throw a Code 43 error in Device Manager. To work around the limitation, Omores extracted Intel's legacy AGP440 SYS driver from an early Windows 10 release and paired it with a modified INF file so Windows 11 would correctly recognize the chipset. Following this and combined with AMD's final 64-bit Catalyst AGP drivers from 2012, the Radeon HD 4650 was able to operate with full AGP 8X acceleration intact. The result was said to be surprisingly usable for hardware that is over two decades old. Hardware-accelerated H.264 video playback worked correctly and benefited apps like Firefox, while legacy applications and games ran without major graphical issues. The system also successfully completed the 3DMark 2001 benchmark, although performance naturally lagged behind what the same hardware achieves under Windows 7, which is significantly lighter than Windows 11. There was, however, one unavoidable limitation as Microsoft's Windows 11 version 24H2 introduces a mandatory SSE4.2 CPU instruction requirement that cannot be bypassed through installer modifications or registry tweaks. Since no AGP-era processor supports SSE4.2, Windows 11 version 23H2 effectively becomes the final release capable of running on such systems. Regardless, it is still a very cool feat and quite fascinating to see just how stable Windows 11 turned out to be on such unfamiliar hardware. Source: Omores (Patreon) via O_MORES (Reddit)
    • That will only really help other players that are also responsible for creating the problem.
    • Well, it's good to know that they have found a workaround to a problem that they helped create, I guess...
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