posted 03 November 2002 06:02 PM EDT (US)
There are many more improovements that came with the editor, sutch as the immense number of units. Half of them are what you'd call "beta units". In AOK the beta units that were extracted became frequently used in scenarios. ES didn't hide these "raw" animations but left them in the editor for our own use.
I think,however, that they cannot quite grasp what is most important to us. The most important thing to have in a scenario/map editor is The concept of scenario designing is to create something new, something inovative, something that'll catch people's attention. After a while, the same things start to show up again, it's no longer new or inovative. Thats why people want freedom in scenario designing, and thats why people rely on a powerful scenario editor. ES has done a good job of doing this, but like i said, they can't quite grasp exactly what we want. The ability to change names and edit unit statistics was a very anticipated feature in The Conquerors Expantion. It was used in 90% of all scenarios submited to Age of Kings Heaven. This was expected to be in Age of Mythology as well, since many of our favorite features and factors from Age2 and it's expantion were already in the game. To put it bluntly, we want the Units editor back into the game. It was there in the first place, and taking it out at the last minute bewilders us more. Yes we understand that this is a scam by microsoft to make more money by putting the taken out features into an expantion - making us go buy it, but you've picked the wrong thing to withhold. Heres some numbers to set it straight. Whether it be multiplayer or not, someone else will then download it, and open up this whole chain of events once more, thus attracting more and more people to scenario design. I don't know how long many of you have been here, but almost 3 years back there were only about 50 people playing multiplayer scenarios at a time on the zone. This number has now grown to 35% of all the people who play AOK on the zone, so mutch so that the zone administrators added 4 more Scenario Design rooms for the 700+ people that play them. Now like i said before, 90% of all AOC scenarios used the Change Object name/attribute effect. So you see, just that small thing increased the "freedom" of scenario designing by quite abit, and since people still are constantly designing scenario for AOC, it has increased the longevity of the game by quite some time as well ES if you look at the More numbers: There are Now each of those average 500-600 Downloads. Others however go over 22,000 downloads. That's at AOKH alone, there are other websites out there that also have scenarios for download/upload. There are evan Design Teams, which design the major expert scenarios and campaigns. Through the publicity of their projects and their expertize with the editor, a few of th design teams have moved on to design actual games. Examples are So you see, ES, we take the scenario editor very seriously. When i say that, i speak for the people who take the time designing scenarios, and the people who saved up their money to buy Age of Mythology to expirament with it's scenario editor. I don't know if anyone at Ensemble Studios has played the single player campaign in Warcraft3. That is truly how campaigns should be made. It's fun, has a story, and teaches you to play the game while you play it. But back to the point. It's not like it's any extra work, you've just taken it out when it was already in. From the looks of it, you've spent more time tweaking Deathmatch in AOM than polishing the editor. The irony is that the scenario design community is nearly 4 times larger than the Deathmatch community Don't get me wrong though, Age of Mythology is definatly a candidate for being Game of the Year, the single player and multiplayer aspects have been balanced and polished to heck, it is perfect, superb, adictave, and you can't get enough of the action-packed innovative gameplay. I haven't had so mutch fun playing a game since i first got ahold of AOE. ES you've done the best job anyone could balancing gameplay, however theres one growing aspect of the game that's not getting enough attention as the rest. Sorry for this increadibly long post, but i've voiced my opinion (which is the same as many others) as best i could with as mutch detail as i can. I hope i've let ES see just what exactly the scenario design community expects of them. Thank you - CheeZy [This message has been edited by CheeZy_monkey0 (edited 11-03-2002 @ 06:13 PM).]
The unit editor would've been perhaps the most used feature besides triggers in an AOM scenario - just like it was in AOK.
I haven't bothered to estimate a sum, or count all the downloads, but i expect that the total scenario-releated downloads at AOKH will reach nearly
I say that ES can never grasp what exactly we want because they themselves are not big on scenario designing. The AOM single Player campaign sure is more elaborate and better built than AOK's but it's still the same gameplay, accept with a cheesy story added. Not to insult scout and everyone else that worked on it, but had you let 4 designers from the scenario design community work on it, it would be a completely different product.
We do value the editor, and the features in it. Already it is looking confusing and rather rushed, taking more features out will make people not evan bother to check it out anymore.
