Age of Empires Online Ending Production of New Content
Age of Empires Online's lifespan has been quite the roller-coaster ride. Upon release it was marred by bad balance and Pay-to-Win practices. Gas Powered Games, the studio behind the MMORTS, stepped up and began re-balancing all aspects of the game in order to improve the experience of F2P users. Throughout this whole process, the developers have also been steadily adding new content including brand new civilizations, each complete with unique looking units.
This as you can imagine, is a very time consuming and expensive process and according to a blog entry posted today on the official website, something the developers can no longer keep doing. The blog very plainly laid out the reason for the cut in content stating: “we can no longer afford to keep creating it”.The blog post goes on to say that the games community will still see Gas Powered Games full support with tickets, forums, and everything else remaining the same.
No one can necessarily fault the developers. The predecessors to AOEO, Age of Empires 1, 2 and 3, all halted further development at some point, with the key difference being that those titles were obviously not F2P. Which brings to question if it was the game that should be faulted for failing or rather the decision to pair a game series such as Age of Empires with the F2P model. What do you think?
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Michael Dunaway has been part of the MMOBomb team for years and has covered practically every major Free-to-Play MMO title since 2009.
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Though their FB page asked yesterday (day before?) what version of AoE we liked and why. I would love to see the game play of 2 (plus expansion pack) revamp to match today's GPUs and that seemed to be the general consensus of the others that answered. So let's hope they are thinking retail AoE4 in the future!!
Before the balancing was done, almost all decent items, advance features and commanders were only available via payed membership.
We are already past the phase for f2p that companies to just say, hey dont worry about the production quality, dont worry about graphics grammar or gameplay. Its f2p its fine you cant complain. We are WAY past that stage, just look at games like Planetside 2, LOTRO, Aion, to some extent Tera plus all the other very high quality games coming out. Of course this includes broken cashshops, like early Allods and many other games. Its alot harder to get away with any of that anymore.
Game developers need to step it up if they want to produce games that can compete in the f2p market period. And game publishers cant just host crap games and think they can milk it enough for it to matter.
down :(
A lot of MMOs are biting the dust because there's way too many mediocre titles out there. I mean damn, why would I play this game when I can just pick up the actual Age of Empire games?