hey guys spirit of the law here in this video we're going to talk about the age of empires 2
road map that was released yesterday this was initially promised last fall and i know some
people were getting a little antsy about when it was coming and what was going to be in it now the
idea of a road map locking in future commitments is when we haven't typically seen from the age of
empires 2 developers and the idea is they give a heads up of what players can expect over the next
six months to a year or so the reason for even doing this if you think about when it was promised
was to address the very real concern people had last november that support for age of empires 2
might be stopping remember when aoe 2 definitive edition came out to replace hd or the 2013 version
support for that abruptly ended the message was this is the new version so everyone should play
this and that's all we're going to focus on moving forward of course then the concern when aoe4 came
out is the same thing would happen and it was easy to think that maybe definitive edition existed
solely to build hype and then to push everyone over to the new game last fall this seemed like
a legitimate possibility and everyone from casual players to professionals and content creators were
concerned about what support for aw2 would look like going forward obviously no one knew ab2 would
have the larger player base six months down the road and get arguably more new content over the
same period than aoe4 the point is that's why this is coming out for a bit of context so now we'll
take a look at the roadmap which despite being a little light on specifics and being somewhat
ambiguous gives a couple of pretty big suggestions including another dlc with even more civilizations
potentially in the cards jumping into the road map starting in summer which basically covers the next
three months the first upcoming feature is rematch shortcuts personally i'm excited for this one if
you have a match and it feels really competitive especially have a group of four more players and
don't want to go through the re-cue process again it seems you can just rematch as soon as the game
is over with all the same players likewise with 1v1 maybe the game ended really early and you
want to rematch then previously there wasn't a good way to do that at least in ranked i'm hoping
this feature is for both ranked and unranked as they do suggest shortcuts plural so that seems to
be the case next they're adding in-game ranked map pool voting so you theoretically will just
see a notification in the main menu that there's a new round of voting for maps in the map pool
and it's all done in game previously voting was only done on the official age of empire's website
and had relatively low engagement so this is a nice addition remember there's always a few
maps the developers can lock in so they can guarantee a certain amount of variety and i'm
not worried it'll just be the same maps over and over since they can easily push in some
alternate maps whenever they want of course they mention balance changes which i assume include
some things for the new civilizations which were close to getting things right balance wise though
i think bengalis could probably use a buff of some sort and gurjaras and hindustanis are probably a
little too strong at the moment next up for fall the first item is popular mods as in game settings
the most obvious one here is small trees mod which is an incredibly popular mod and yet not
an in-game option they've already done a similar thing with the in-game grid and could easily add
other things like the no snow mod or it could even go farther and add different game modes
like triple tech mod and things of that nature now here things get a little nebulous we have
something different and unknown and a reference to a birthday to me that's probably the 23rd birthday
of age of kings coming on september 30th they seem to like to put out patches at the end of the
month so i'm expecting the september patch to be a little bigger than usual that said basically all
of the age vampire series games were originally released in fall so it could even refer to the
20th birthday of ancient mythology who knows but if nothing too special comes on september 30th
then that starts to look like a more reasonable conspiracy theory now the different and unknown
could refer to something as small as an event theme or as radical as a new game mode so i'm
not going to get too worked up over that though it is sort of implied to be more than just an event
as new events are listed separately obviously they mention more balance changes again with the
pattern recently being one big balance change per season and monthly bug fixes in between i should
mention as well this roadmap comes as part of a small patch that touches on a few common issues
which i think goes a little under the radar how good of a job they're doing actually addressing
issues quickly when they come up finally in 2023 this is what i'm personally most excited for as
they're promising more updates again going back to the very point of the road map confirming away to
support is not being shut down despite aoe4 again they get quite mysterious at this point though
and we have a reference to inviting some ancient friends and maybe related to that they say they're
taking notes on how much people like dynasties of india it's not immediately clear to me if these
two things are related but it seems the only way to read this in my opinion is they're planning
another dlc whether that's going to be the same concept of breaking up an existing civ like china
into three new civilizations i think you could read it that way but they're not really giving
enough to make any bold predictions i also think that's how they should do it as i don't see any
benefit to hyping something over six months away that may still be in the early planning stages
i think this may also tell us why the roadmap took a while to arrive as it's very possible
they didn't even know a few months ago if there would be a dlc after dynasties of india
if that had been received poorly and the sales numbers were disappointing it may have been the
last dlc we got i assume it's a situation where as long as they're successful they keep coming
out and those keep funding ongoing support so like i said earlier to me the big issue was
whether or not ab2 was going to continue to have new content and updates which this just confirms
though arguably the last six months have already basically confirmed that anyway i'm excited for
the upcoming rematch shortcut and looking forward to the other things in the pipeline
let me know what you guys think and as always thanks for watching and i'll see you next time