



2nd Lieutenant





Group: Members

Posts: 460

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Joined: 29-January 04



From: ?

Member No.: 3,223





2nd LieutenantGroup: MembersPosts: 460AOM Replays: 13 Submissions:Joined: 29-January 04From: ?Member No.: 3,223









So I attended PAX on Sunday and got to speak with several members of the AOM:EE team who were all happy to listen to my concerns/feedback. John the dev lead was even nice enough to get lunch with me while we discussed things.



Below are my takeaways based on our discussions. Again NOTHING is/was officially confirmed so take what I say as speculation until then.[I]



- Competitive scene/aspect of the game is viewed highly by the team. Everyone I talked to knew the importance of the esports and the potential that AOM has. I think there is a lot hope that AOM does well in this aspect as it could significantly impact the future direction of the franchise.



- Expectation is to provide ongoing support/improvements for AOM going forward. There is recognition of the need for balance/defect/mechanic improvements that likely won't make it in with release but the team will gladly listen to suggestions on how to improve things going forward.



- Want to eventually make balance changes but plan on taking things slow as they are afraid of people getting upset. Guessing this is largely due to the concern of people who will freak out about any changes to the original game.



- Learned a lot of lessons from past releases (AOE Online and AOE2 HD). The AOM:EE release should go smoother than AOE2 HD as the code is more modern and easier to port to steam. Seem to be completely against the pay-to-win model in respective to AOM (from what I heard this model had been used in AOE Online so some people were concerned).



- Still no chat rooms due to complexities/limitations of the existing steam chat functionality.



- Doesn't sound like Microsoft will be able to financially support any kind of tournaments due to legal complexities a company of that size has. That said I'm sure the community team would like to do whatever they can to support the scene. IamPREZSTEVE mentioned they are looking for people to stream AOM on their AOE twitch channel.



- Open to listening to any defect fix or mechanical fix requests. I have a list of items I raised that I will post here tomorrow so I can get feedback and add anything else people want before passing it along to the devs.



- I told them to be more active on RTS sanc and post so we'll see how that turns out.



I think there will be a lot of improvements/features that we would all like to see that won't end up making it in with the initial release. However, hopefully the launch goes smoothly and sales do well so we'll get the ongoing support needed. From what I can tell, now that AOE3, AOE2 and AOM are all on steam the focus of the dev team may be on making improvements to AOM going forward.



Finally I failed horribly at the demo scenario and was only able to claim the 2nd highest score of the weekend. Sorry for bringing shame to the community :(

