Age of Empires: Campaigns and Controversy
Feeling burnt out on the online game grind after a few months of playing WoW and The First Descendant, I’ve returned to my first love, RTS games, with a special emphasis on the Age of Empires franchise.
The crash bug in Age of Mythology: Retold finally got fixed, so I managed to finish the Immortal Pillars campaign at last. It was a pretty anticlimactic ending, made only worse by how long I waited to see it, but I do remain a big fan of the Chinese civilization, even if the campaign disappointed.
I then moved on to Ol’ Reliable, AKA Age of Empires II. My habit since the Definitive Edition’s release has more or less been to come back every few months, knock out a campaign or two, and then play something else, but even after five years and around 150 hours logged on Steam, I was still nowhere near close to finishing them all.
I decided it was time to finally admit to myself that maybe I don’t want to finish all of them. The DE DLCs have focused too much on Europe for my taste, and there’s a lot of very niche “civilizations” that I don’t think the game really needed. My enthusiasm for playing their campaigns is minimal.
So I decided to give myself permission to consider the game “finished” once I had played all the non-European campaigns,* which felt much more achievable.
*(That I currently own — I still haven’t bought the Mountain Royals DLC, though I may yet at some point.)
As of this writing I have technically completed that goal, though I may go back and play Prithviraj again. The first time I played it, it was still using the umbrella Indian civilization from before Dynasties of India, and I kind of want to play it again now that it uses the Gurjaras.
The last fully new (to me) campaign I played was Le Loi (Vietnamese), and I may have saved the best for last. It became one of my favourite Age of Empires campaigns to date. It feels like everything I want from Age of Empires on every level. A bit of history I knew nothing about, a fun underdog story about triumphing over an invading force, long missions full of multiple enemies to defeat, challenging but not unfair.
The second to last mission, A Three Pronged Attack, in particular really stood out. You get multiple bases to manage and several different objectives you can tackle in any order, so there’s a lot of freedom in how to approach the mission. It was quite challenging, and I was brought to the brink of defeat several times, but I managed to hold on. By the end I’d mined out most of the map, but I pushed through in the end. Just epic.
The Vietnamese civilization itself isn’t my new favourite or anything, but it was enjoyable enough. Using an army composition of the new fire lancer unit combined with rattan archers made for an interestingly different economic equation, since neither costs food.
“Finishing” the campaigns doesn’t mean I’m not going to play the game anymore, of course. I’m sure I will continue to pick it back up periodically. I may still get to those remaining European campaigns, or pick up Mountain Royals. I think it might be fun to replay some of the original campaigns, too. Many of them I haven’t played in over twenty years. And of course there will be more DLCs in the future.
On that note, there’s been a lot of rustled jimmies in the community lately over the recent Three Kingdoms DLC. I’m not as enraged by it as some, but I’m probably never going to buy it, and I do tend to agree it’s a step in the wrong direction.
I’m getting really tired of “variant” civilizations. I hated them in AoE4, and I’m not happy to see the concept now creeping in to AoE2. This franchise is supposed to be about empires and civilizations, not individual armies. The world is full of so many rich and diverse cultures that could be added, but it feels like these days the developers are focused on finding new and creative ways to keep rehashing what we already have, and honestly it’s getting hard not to see it is a bit racist.
I don’t mean this in a “the developers are secretly MAGA” sort of way. I don’t imagine there’s any conscious malice at play. But unconscious bias exists, and it’s clear that a lot of people in our society think civilization is something that has mostly only existed in Eurasia, in part due to failings of our education systems.
Like, it’s just wrong that we now have twice as many civilizations representing the Han Chinese as we do the entire continent of Africa. We have as many civilizations from the Italian peninsula as we do all of the Americas. People regularly argue that the reason we can’t have North American native civilizations like the Haudenosaunee is because they don’t fit the game’s time frame, but we can break the game’s time frame to add three new flavours of Chinese?
Playing through the Le Loi campaign really got me thinking about how that’s more what I want to see out of these games. I’m pretty sure most of the people playing AoE2 had never even heard the name Le Loi before this campaign, but it’s a really compelling piece of history and a story worth telling.
That’s where I want to see the developers putting their resources. Exploring elements of the world’s cultures and history that haven’t already been done to death in this and other games. I want to expand my horizons.
I also dislike that the Three Kingdoms campaign is apparently an adaptation of the fictionalized Romance of the Three Kingdoms rather than actual history, and I agree that hero units have no place in AoE2 outside the campaign (and barely even there).
So yes, Three Kingdoms is probably going to remain a no buy for me. On the plus side, since I don’t play multiplayer, I can pretty much ignore its existence entirely.
On a final and tangentially related note, I also did some looking into player made campaigns, mainly for the AoE games other than 2, which don’t have as much official single-player support.
Unfortunately, I didn’t find that much that looked interesting. I was especially hoping to find some player made AoE4 campaigns, but there don’t seem to be any, not even a single standalone scenario. I could have sworn I heard people were making such things, but apparently not. Very disappointing.
The only thing I found that looked appealing was a Swedish campaign for AoE3 that looked decently high quality for unofficial content. 3 may be my least favourite AoE game, but I may get around to trying this campaign at some point. I did always like the Swedes; they don’t feel nearly as overcomplicated as most AoE3 civilizations. Plus the sod roof houses are cute.
