asm987 legutóbbi értékelései

Enhanced edition is not at all "enhanced" in any sense. Buggy, laggy, low performance while needing much beefier machine than the legacy one.

They used to plan on making enhanced edition better and integrating all players into that enhanced game. Now, only handful of people play that version and with recent launcher update, Klabater apparently decided just let the legacy go on as separate, superior version of the "Enhanced" one.

Used to have a real choppers with real names, Klabater one day brought out the copyright thingy and changed all the chopper names other than bell/sikorsky ones into some silly bootlegged ones. It was only for the EE tho, so I could keep my immersion by playing legacy. but with that launcher update, they applied the silly name to the legacy as well. Oh this, I can't stand.

If they are going to make legacy not legacy, why not integrate EE and legacy into one game? Why fool legacy players by even making legacy feel worse than before?

Don't buy it. it's not worth it.

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PS.

OK. Some of you told me that it's right behavior for the devs to change the chopper name and I shouldn't fault them. I'll elaborate more if you don't mind. I know copyrights and I know they can be applied to military vehicles. It's a commendable thing that Klabater respects it. But how they did it is not. There were plenty of loopholes they could have used to keep the authenticity while avoiding any lawsuits.

The "Activision VS AM General" case verdict in 2020 shows that you can't call it copyright infringement for using designs and nicknames of military vehicle in games since it is an "artistic rendition". So anything the company can go against the devs would have been if the game use its sales name without consents. But military designations and nicknames go differ by nations. For example, AH-64 in US version is called Apache AH Mk.1 in British version. F-18 is called CF-188 in Canada. They could have used such methods like this to keep the authenticity.

And while I don't know the details, it seems that Klabater is the one who contacted the bell-sikorsky company, not the other way around. Since it's a niche game, the big military industrial complexes could have not known the existence of this game forever. And also even if they know many of them just decide to leave them alone, since it's a free marketing for them. Not to mention the generosity of Russian companies. Did you see any of the names and logos of OKB Sukhoi, Mil or Mikoyan in games like Ace Combat and DCS? No, right? Because they don't ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ care. So they could have just kept all the Russian helis as the same way it was. And also, what copyright infringement for earlier choppers that were built like 50-60 years ago and stopped producing since?

And even if it all goes south, they did have the excuse of saying "yeah. but it's on legacy only. it'll go away if we finalize the enhanced edition and integrate it for good." You see, the fake name was first introduced in EE and stayed there before "THE update" happened. Hell they even removed one server out of two the legacy had before all these things happened.

When your game is bought by someone else and that someone else say we will make it better, you have your expectations. It doesn't go by the low performance, poor visuals, worse optimization, more bugs and so on. While we did enjoy legacy anyway we did know it would go away someday. But now, they decided to keep it with EE and call it the equivalent version of the game. That's where the all the problem starts with. They didn't keep the promise while making legacy worse even. How can I not fault them?

I love RTS games and AOE series are one of the many RTS series including command & conquer where my nostalgia belongs. It’s the first game I bought by myself and loved playing for a long time. I also loved AOE 3 very much. While for some reason it was considered as a black sheep for many fans, I had zero problem with this game. It was great gaming experience for me. That’s why I have to write this review to show how disappointed I am with this so-called definitive edition which is not definitive at all.

Stability and bugs: This game is unstable as hell. Game crashing, game not starting, game not turning off, continuous flickering, I’ve been through all of them. There was a serious frame rate issue even for high-end machines for a time being, but luckily recent update fixed most of it. And with recent update, I experienced a mid-game crash, which resulted in my whole campaign save, personalized settings and progression data wiped clean. I’m ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ furious right now. And man, bugs, bugs, bugs. Units climbing unclimbable terrains and unable to come back down. Civilians often not building/gathering resources as they were instructed. Building carriages not building their respective buildings. Tooltips for “not working civilians” not appearing even though there are not working civilians (This often happens when civilians are not working while they are directly next to resources or resource gathering buildings). Is this even a finished game or am I playing a closed beta of the game?

UI: What is this blank thing? AOE3 used to have a nice and cozy wooden UI panel that holds all the information and buttons I needed. But now, everything is just floating in the air with no background for the UI even if I set the UI preset as “Original” one. This is not original at all. and I have to manually extend one to see my unit list and so on. Only thing worth looking is a shape that mocks up AOE 2’s UI but it doesn’t give that original AOE3 feelings. Camera movement is still tricky as well. Although you can rotate it by pressing shift and rolling mouse scroll, it’s still not quite intuitive as other modern RTS games.

Key-mapping: So called definitive keymapping is useless as well. Who would press Ctrl+Shift+z to order your units to attack-move when the original keymap was only z? All the keymaps became more complicated and unintuitive. Many of the keys are wasted to map half useless “order” buttons.

Graphics: While unit model saw huge improvement, it’s quite unnoticeable with current zoom-in range. Unit animations are still uncanny as well with some crazy moves sometimes. Building edges are polished but I can’t say it’s really improved. Some buildings are more cartoony that others with no actual brick and wood feeling. This could be fixed with some more ambient occlusion and depth of field tweak but there’s none in this game. Another thing that dims all the changed models and terrain effects is lighting. In all terrains, lighting became dimmer than original game. Weather/cloud effect has toned down as well. With no intense lighting and bloom the original game had, sometimes, in rare occasions, definitive graphics seems actually worse than original ones. To make it worse, sometimes all the graphics go blurry.

Sound: Did you remastered music? There were recomposed/new music for previous definitive editions but this one has none. Well, crisp remastered soundtrack still worth it since original soundtrack is beautiful enough. If I can listen it, damn it. Soundtrack volume go up and down constantly in game without any adjustment by me. It’s annoying and immersion breaking. Recent update did fix most of that problem but sometimes it does that again. Thanks for making updates to give my deprived victory music back, too. I was furious because of that post-game silence. In-game sound fx is fine. Guns and cannons done right. But the problem is in-game dialogue for campaigns. Sometimes they repeat over and over again, which is pretty annoying.

AI: While all the previous definitive editions included original AIs and more enhanced definitive AIs for Skirmish/Coop battle, this one doesn’t have any. AI is still not competitive and cunning enough for actual human challenge. Pathfinding is still a mess. They choose not closest or unblocked path to target but go somewhere else. Unit column constantly try to ram some random cliffs and blocking terrains if there’re some in their path, making them even slower. If there’s some random not friendly walls near the path (doesn’t need to actually block the path. Just near moving unit column), the column just stops there and do nothing if they were ordered ‘attack-move’

Multiplayer: What kind of idiot thought of random instant match only for ranked match? AOE is about civilization mixture and various game modes. If there’s only random match, there’s no joy of experiencing different modes and mix-matching civilization. This cause huge balance issue as well since some civs can’t win against certain mixture of civs without other civ mixture that supplements them. And also, who need server connection for LAN game?

Campaign: Campaign cutscenes are remastered pretty well if we don’t mention some of them done in in-game graphics and unit/building models have some weird unit motions. Historic battle is a nice addition, but it lacks in numbers. Only 6 missions? There are many historical events in your timeline. Napoleonic War, 30-year War, fall of Ming China and even American Civil War. I hope you don’t waste all those themes.

Home city system: You made all the cards usable without leveling up. Well this can be seen as both bad and good since it balances available roasters of each users while lessening the intrigue of leveling up your city. What I’m mostly disappointed is the décor system. I always was frustrated how original game didn’t include home city décor function for nations other than European ones. I hoped you would fix that. But now, even Sweden, a European empire, doesn’t have any décor. Why would I have to level up my city if I can’t unlock new cards nor I can decorate my city?

Localization: Now this wouldn’t be an important factor for many English users and other language users. For me, a South Korean gamer, I’m highly disappointed with this implementation of localization. AOE 3 used to have a high-quality localization with all the campaign voice lines dubbed by professional voice actors. Now, it’s all gone, unlike AOE 1 and 2 DEs that re-recorded them. Now, only English voice with Korean subtitles and translations. Although the original implementation did mistranslate some of the unit names and so on, it didn’t break the immersion of the game. But now, it’s bad. Although it fixed some names of units, now even cutscene translations contain some mistranslations and many other things including game setting page and UIs contain mistranslations. What is this? This kind of problems also happened in those forementioned definitive editions. Man, those typos and mistranslations are immersion breaking as hell. If you don’t want to dub everything at least fix your translation.

I won’t say this is a bad game. It’s rather a fun game. AOE was never a bad game in anyway. However badly you remaster it, you can’t hide its charm. But I can say this is the worst remaster that have ever made on AOE series. If you don’t have patience and love for the genre/series that makes you bear all the bad things I listed, buy this and have fun with it. If you can’t, just wait for another months or buy/play the original one. The catch for newcomers would be that on steam, for some strange reason, the original version of this game is twice as more expensive than the definitive edition.

P.S. Censor ‘colony’, ‘exploitation’ and ‘plantation’ from a game that deals with the era of colonialism? What kind of thing do you smoke? And that measure is inconsistent since you didn’t censor "imperial age" that goes with imperialism. Missed that, dummies?

It's a turn-based space 4x game. The thing is, there's no management or sort in this game. The only thing you manage is constantly upgrading your ship and not forgetting to put harvester every 2 turns. You can do nothing about ever diminishing limited main resource unless you use some precious strategic weapon to create new resource pool out of nothing.

When it comes to replayability, it is devastating. There's only one faction or rather ship design set. Devs might have planned to include more factions through DLC, but there's none for 2 years so I think it's only a pipe dream. There's only one victory condition - science, through stacking research point which is stockpiled by not your management of research tree but some randomly generated point through expansion.

Speaking of expansion, the only thing you can do, and need to do in this game is expansion. If you don't expand constantly, you lose. The thing is, you can move only one fleet per turn so if you are not lucky enough to have points of interest everytime you move, you are screwed. One mistaken fleet move means losing constant flow of certain resources.

Tactical battle is hex based and it's the only not bad thing in this game. There's no action point or anything so you can use every action your ship can do. Watch your line of sight, since your ship can't attack every direction, shot's get blocked by destroyed ship wrecks and even your own ship. Enemy AIs are really advanced. You will have a challenging battle every time you get involved in battles. If it feels tedious, there's option for automatic resolution. But unless you attack first, you always get dragged into tactical battle.Even when you attack enemy in your turn, sometimes game doesn't allow you to use auto resolve. There's no retreat when defending. The only option other than battle is "surrender fleet". Yeah surrender. No auto resolve. You just lose all the forces.

When it comes to war however, it's frustrating as hell. There's no diplomacy, only war. AI cheats even in the easiest difficulty with continuously steamrolling big ass capital ships that normally can't produce often due to resource constraint. Again, you can move only one fleet, once a turn, meaning you can't replenish fresh troops to the frontline fast enough nor chase enemy forces that penetrated behind your frontline. Even if you manage to get your fleet close to your enemy, AI would just yeet your whole fleet with space nuke that blows up entire solar system.

If you want good space 4x game with much replayability and nice tactical battle, just go play the Sins of the Solar Empire, Starwars Empire at War, Stellaris or just any other 4x space game. Just avoid this.

Cats..... Cats everywhere.

SOOOO CUUUTE!

enough said.

Uhh..... WTF am I playing?

uh... yeah... what a horatioful boyfriends

Shame it's not actual "game". But still, nice interactive concept art.
Also it's a nice touch you added languages other than English(Especially Russian) to the radio chatter.
You know you guys have to go to actual mars and make this concept real. Right, JPL?

Stop using plastic bag you piece of junk earthlings!

With all these shenanigan going on right now, I now doubt if they have any intention of offering a decent gaming experience.

First, we had PC port that was so un-QA-ed.
- HOTAS support ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ttery
- FOV issue
- Not optimized well
- No 4K
- blank shortcut key, making some of the menu option essentially blocked(like 360 degree rotation on aircraft skin preview)
- etc.
And they took soooooooooooo long to fix these issues.
(HOTAS is known to have fixed only yesterday or so and some of them like FOV still not fixed)

Second, We have hackers. Hackers everywhere
Even I once got ♥♥♥♥ed by one hacker who used invincible hack. and that was what, 2 months ago. This game was released on PC on FEBRUARY 2019!
And now they are openly spamming specials, flares and missiles, use invincibility to easily steal MVP title while making others like me feel WTF.
Seriously, no anti cheat on modern PC video game multiplayer mode? Are they bunch of cavemen?
And BAMCO did what? Cracking down on any hackers, such as infamous frank castle and arsenal bird? NO.
This just makes multiplayer, not a very popular play mode of project ACE series, not favorable even more.

Third, DLCs are actually ULCs that are already in your original game file and so carelessly packed so that it can be data-mined with no hardship.
Did you think BAMCO would drop DLCs on the very date they were expected to be dropped?
No. They were already in your game with update you don't know of.
And they are packed so loose.
Literally it only took a simple dll tool and a simple ini command to unlock all the contents it has.
I ran a test run with this very tool to confirm the problem first mentioned by other steam users, reddit and my friends.
AND BAAM! You get all the emblems, skins, planes and weaponry even with localized descriptions.
They were all ready and BAMCO was just keeping it away from players who legitimately bought season pass just like me.
(For a short note, I have strangereal edition)
To make things worse, only with this tool you could use unreleased contents on MULTIPLAYER!
Out of conscience and feeling no need to test that far, I didn't actually ride falken or morgan on multiplayer. But I confirmed this by checking if I can make a plane set that can be used on multiplayer. I CAN. (Of course I didn't even saved the set)
To make things worse, I heard that even players who DIDN'T buy any DLC can unlock every contents even pre-order bonuses with this tool without paying for any.

Now we got what? Some invincible ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥s who didn't buy DLCs but show off falken and morgan even season-pass holders like me are prevented from riding them legitimately by BAMCO and spam infinite UAVs and MPBMs on multiplayer.

You know what? Shame on you BAMCO.

This thing should have originally been in game, not as some ULC that can be exploited.

Good ol' RTS game that never dies.