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AoEII HD


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You may, or may not, know that M$ are going to be re-releasing AoEII and The Conquerer's Expansion on Steam with HD graphics.

Now, you might be thinking that this is amazing and what we have all been waiting for, I know that's what I was thinking. But then I saw a video explaining what is actually being done.

It turns out this "HD remastering" will essentially only be a patch - or rather, only include features that can be added in a patch - but sold as a brand new game.

What you will find is that they have inlcuded higher resolution options, higher resolution textures, and steam support.

Not only are higher resolutions already available for free (via mods), but all these features could simply be add into the already existing AoEII with a patch. And done so for FREE.

If you already have a copy of AoEII, please don't let yourselves be ripped off by this. Don't get me wrong, I'm all in favour of supporting the games industry - I never pirate or buy used games - But, people who buy these sorts of things are having a detrimental effect on the gaming industry. It's worse than buying yearly releases that offer very little amount of new things - in this case, it offers NOTHNG new. Don't support this type of behavious in the games industry.

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Two comments: I'm afraid it will be a steam exclusive, so it won't be available on gog.com :(

And most importantly, what if it isn't compatible with existing user created content (scenarios, campaigns...)? You play AOK for that. Anyone who has played campaigns like 'Tamerlane' will agree.

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Steam is a no-go IMO. It breaks the law in many countries especially the right of usage of bought software (that with steam depends on the settings of the steam servers, not the setup of your system).

That seems unlikely. What you are buying is access to a service, not the software itself.
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That seems unlikely. What you are buying is access to a service, not the software itself.

In Germany e.g. you buy the right to use the software - as long as you like. You have no right to change/distribute the code or to get support for an eternity - but you have the right to use it (and so it must work at least theoretically). If you can't use it any more because steam decides not to support it any longer this right is not granted and thus the sale is not consistent with the law.

Additionally you are free to decide what support you accept and what you don't. But steam only supports the version up to date.

Edited by FeXoR
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I don't know what all the excitement is about. It's just Microsoft reckons that AoE II is still been played by millions of people, and they just not making anything out of it.

So what a better way than just to inject HD textures with a $20 price tag and sell that, which seriously is nothing to have a [please watch your language Burzum - Pureon]

AoE II original

AoE2-SD-610x457.jpg

AoE II HD...

AoE2-HD2-610x343.jpg

Heh...

Are they that lazy they couldn't just do a remake? lolz

Edited by Pureon
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From what I've seen, the HD "effect" doesn't seem impressive at all. I agree with Khopesh that this making money with nothing new. AOK is still a great game and should be still played and respected. It's just that this new edition would make more sense being free and Linux-friendly. This would be fresh.

Oh, and actually, I don't know if you heard about, but there's an open-source game that is HD too (but better), and also full 3D, and it's awesome and it grows better and better all the time. It's called 0 A.D. People say it's clearly as good as Age of Kings! And it's free ! You should try it ! :P

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I do completely understand the reason for this game to be re-released. It has been the most succesful AoE game and is still played by many.

The old game does indeed conflict with current day hard and software, both in graphics and audio. Many simply don't want to go through the trouble of modding it just to make it work, and have been asking for a remake of AoK for quite a while now. However, since Ensemble Studios is no longer here, it would have been given to a new developer. And the outcome could have gone either way. This HD release however does almost the same, for less and without risk of a failure. Good call Microsoft.

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Oh, and actually, I don't know if you heard about, but there's an open-source game that is HD too (but better), and also full 3D, and it's awesome and it grows better and better all the time. It's called 0 A.D. People say it's clearly as good as Age of Kings! And it's free ! You should try it ! :P

You're lying! It can't be true! 0 A.D. can't possibly be free! It looks much too good for that! xD

Many simply don't want to go through the trouble of modding it just to make it work

AoE II still works just fine on my Ubunut 12.10 newly bought System76 without any modding.

I must agree that a HD version is nice, but I'm not paying 17€ for that!

Edited by idanwin
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Have you heard about windows blue already? Ha ha! Here they come again.

But i must agree with Enrique, for i still play AoK from time to time.

No I haven't, thanks for pointing it out. I just hope such an update would do what Stardock and many other technology people have already recognized needed to be done and bring back the Start menu and make those bloody apps windowed. I have no interest in getting Windows 8 anytime soon, since, as a programmer, I must have a windowed environment, not the hybrid environment, in order to be productive on a PC. By all means improve support for tablets and other touch devices, but not at the expense of the windowed environment.

I strongly dislike Steam, so this just won't work for me, and so do I.

I wonder how Germany handled non-Steam versions of Supreme Commander Gold being changed to Steam versions about a year ago.

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I don't know what all the excitement is about. It's just Microsoft reckons that AoE II is still been played by millions of people, and they just not making anything out of it.

So what a better way than just to inject HD textures with a $20 price tag and sell that, which seriously is nothing to have a orgasm over...

AoE II original

AoE2-SD-610x457.jpg

AoE II HD...

AoE2-HD2-610x343.jpg

Heh...

Are they that lazy they couldn't just do a remake? lolz

Not a fair comparison. Must view in full resolution.
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Nope, I think you misunderstood me a little:

OS:Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8 Pro+

What I'm talking about is that the annoying graphical glitches are gone then as well. And it really uses the whole screen. When I played the old original version on a regular screen on Windows 7 (utterly to get it running but anyway) a lot of the place was used for the bar at the bottom, apart from the weird resolution. The resolution should be dynamically configurable anyway, imho. The highest resolution in AoE II was something like 1280x1024 (4:3) which is weird on a widescreen display with 16:9.

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Nope, I think you misunderstood me a little:

OS:Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8 Pro+

What I'm talking about is that the annoying graphical glitches are gone then as well. And it really uses the whole screen. When I played the old original version on a regular screen on Windows 7 (utterly to get it running but anyway) a lot of the place was used for the bar at the bottom, apart from the weird resolution. The resolution should be dynamically configurable anyway, imho. The highest resolution in AoE II was something like 1280x1024 (4:3) which is weird on a widescreen display with 16:9.

There are already free patches that allow the game to run in 1920x1080 (it uses the whole screen) and to get rid of the graphical glitches. They are not even hard to install... ^^

Edited by kosmo
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I seriously don't mind the lil' stretching of my widescreen and the graphic glitches i solved by simply using a .cmd file with this written:


taskkill /F /IM Explorer.exe
age2_x1.exe
Start explorer.exe

Well, not sure if by only terminating the explorer solves every glitch, but at least i didn't notice any.

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The problem I've had with AoK is that I can't host a multiplayer game on Windows 7, and in fact I don't think I can even reliably connect to a host using XP. My friend and I use the free GameRanger service if we want to get around this. I never found a working solution for that problem, is there one? (other than going through some sort of proxy like GameRanger which is perhaps what the new HD version does as well)

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I think they should have made it available for free for people who already own the original Age of Empires 2.

That way all fans would have been happy and they still earned money because new players can buy it from steam.

Just recently I've red an article that making old successful games compatible with Windows 7/8 and selling them on steam is generally quite successful and profitable.

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