

- HOTKEYS AGE OF EMPIRES 2 DEFINITIVE EDITION HOW TO
- HOTKEYS AGE OF EMPIRES 2 DEFINITIVE EDITION PATCH
- HOTKEYS AGE OF EMPIRES 2 DEFINITIVE EDITION PC
- HOTKEYS AGE OF EMPIRES 2 DEFINITIVE EDITION PS2
'What would you like to see on PC? What would you like to be implemented differently? Please share your opinions with us!'”įor now, at least, AoE2 controller support will remain on Xbox, as Liu and his team “currently have no plan to integrate controller support or console-specific features and changes into the PC version.” Perhaps this is for the best, as the AI automation radically changes the flow of the game, and it’s hard to imagine competitive parity between controller and keyboard-and-mouse players. “We would like to gather feedback from our community first. “We are very interested in feedback from our players on how our console controls stack up to PC at the highest competitive level,” Liu said. We would like to gather feedback from our community first." Alex Liu, Design Director on AoE2

“We are very interested in feedback from our players on how our console controls stack up to PC at the highest competitive level. But that doesn’t really account for high-level multiplayer, which is something that the team will need players’ help to refine. To address this issue, Liu’s team added a “Story” difficulty setting to the campaign mode, which should let players complete most of the missions at a more relaxed pace. “Ultimately, our team felt that cursor-driven gameplay fundamentally does not feel native on controllers.” Another solution? Difficulty scaling One of our earliest prototypes was very similar to that game,” Liu said. “ Age of Kings on PS2, while playable, relied heavily on use of the cursor, just like the PC version.
HOTKEYS AGE OF EMPIRES 2 DEFINITIVE EDITION PS2
And we already know that doesn’t work, courtesy of the PS2 port of Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings. It's worth noting, however, that if the team didn’t overhaul the controls from scratch, its only alternative would have been to simply treat the controller like a mouse, letting a single cursor do most of the work. As far as I can tell, both sides are correct. Another viewpoint holds that automation bypasses an important part of the game, and could make new players too reliant on the computer’s decisions. One argument states that automation lowers the barrier of entry for new players, and makes console play feasible in the first place.

With AI handling villager micromanagement, players can focus much more on the “macro” levels of the game - technological research, base layout, military strategies and so forth.ĪoE2 players on Reddit seem split about the move. It’s difficult to overstate just how much this small tweak changes the overall flow of AoE2.

“Our many console-exclusive features, such as new shortcuts and new AI automation, were specifically designed to lower the barrier-of-entry for play and to reduce the APM (actions per minute) required for expert play,” Liu told Tom’s Guide. Likewise, the game will automatically assign villagers to construct buildings, and send them back to gathering when they’re done. As such, AoE2 on Xbox lets you simply select your desired breakdown of resources, and automatically allocates each new villager appropriately. However, that would be a tremendous pain to manage with a controller. "Our many console-exclusive features, such as new shortcuts and new AI automation, were specifically designed to lower the barrier-of-entry for play and to reduce the APM (actions per minute) required for expert play." Alex Liu, Design Director on AoE2 Manually assigning villagers to gather resources, as well as pulling them aside to construct or repair buildings, is a vital part of learning the game’s flow and strategy. The type of resources you need most over the course of a game varies tremendously, from food and wood in the early stages, to gold and stone later on.
HOTKEYS AGE OF EMPIRES 2 DEFINITIVE EDITION HOW TO
One of the biggest challenges that players face is how to allocate their villagers. What does is the AI automation that Liu discussed - and that’s easily the most controversial part of the game’s controller support. But Liu is correct that these enhancements, by themselves, don’t really make the game playable. The minimap even expands so that players can scroll across it quickly.
HOTKEYS AGE OF EMPIRES 2 DEFINITIVE EDITION PATCH
You can construct buildings by selecting a patch of empty ground, or a nearby resource. AoE2 lets players select multiple units by holding down a button to increase the cursor size, or using a hotkey to select similar units (villagers, soldiers, livestock, etc.). In practice, the results are respectable, albeit imperfect. We also needed to create a new set of features, including AI automation, to fundamentally alleviate the need of repetitive unit selection in the first place.” We tuned the crosshair movements, added magnetism, and created new button shortcuts for common selection commands. “Solving this required a combination of efforts across many areas. “Unit selection has always been the most difficult area to adapt to controllers, as the analog sticks lack the speed and precision of a mouse,” said Liu.
