I’m going to tally up my AoE purchases here. AOE DE on from the MIcrosoft store (which didn’t work at all), AOE DE on Steam (which kind of works), AOE II on steam, and AOE II DE. I purchased AOE III (non DE) but refunded it because it was too buggy to play.

If you purchased this game then you were misled and played by Microsoft, and you should be upset. This game is a buggy mess. Campaign maps that stall and prevent the player from finishing the campaign indefinitely. Miserably poor pathing that gets units stuck all over the place. Units will bug out and cease attacking until they die or the match ends. It’s a pile of poo.

With all of these frequent issues that can easily be replicated, this game has been abandoned. Alright, pretty frustrating, but not the end of the world, right? Well, this game is now being resold as a DLC for Age of Empires II DE with full support and planned content updates.

In other words, this game should be completely removed from existence, but here it sits in a buggy mess for suckers to get conned into buying because Microshaft is objectively greedy. This was a deliberate maneuver to confuse consumers, or a massive blunder that should leave even die hard fans cursing this studio.

We should have seen AOE DE – pulled from the store. AOE II DE replaced by a title like “AOE collection”, because in it’s current state AOE II DE is two different games. AOE DE, as it exists independently of AOE II DE, should then be compensated to anyone who owns the currently abandoned AOE DE. Problem solved. If you ask me, they shot themselves in the foot with this one. There is no way I spend another dime on AOE. I know there are die hard fans that will continue to buy DLC for these games anyways, but this studio is milking their consumers by selling content they plan to abandon.