The port seems solid, and all DLC is supported—but there's no cross-play, sadly.
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A respectable port of Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition invades macOS
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The gates are opening but actually it was just because I sent a villager to repair the danged things and he decided inexplicably to do it from the outside.
The gates are opening, no they aren’t, hey teammate you can see those trebuchets setting up why don’t you let my halberds out.
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Odd that crossplay isnt supported. The console versions have it. There must be a fundamental difference in the ARM build vs the x86 builds that prevents the clients from accurately syncing their commands.
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solarbonite
Smack-Fu Master, in training
I'm not sure what sort of nasty shenanigans they needed to do to get the port working, but... If they ported the state machine tech from the main game over, there shouldn't be any specific reason cross play doesn't work.
AOEII (at least in its original pre-Definitive Edition form) has some of the silliest accidental anti-cheat implemented: to save bandwidth the individual sides each model the game using a state machine. If one side attempts to cheat via increasing resources or spawning units, the machines get out of sync and the match disconnects. You could still cheat via revealing the fog of war, but the best players... aren't affected by this as much because they've gotten to the point of predicting opponents' moves.
AOEII (at least in its original pre-Definitive Edition form) has some of the silliest accidental anti-cheat implemented: to save bandwidth the individual sides each model the game using a state machine. If one side attempts to cheat via increasing resources or spawning units, the machines get out of sync and the match disconnects. You could still cheat via revealing the fog of war, but the best players... aren't affected by this as much because they've gotten to the point of predicting opponents' moves.
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It could be they just didn't feel like having to debug any (potential) issues with big vs little-endian numbers. Would be interesting to see if the functionality is still there, but hidden.
(Had to deal with that in somebody's quick-and-dirty port of an app to PowerPC Mac way back when. I understand things can be different now.)
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I just finally bought this a week ago, after sitting on the non-definitive edition for ages (pun intended?). This is a very exciting way to get more mouse & keyboard play time without having to be at my desk; I actually checked to see if it had Mac support.
And, while I realize that in modern times it'd feel like a raw deal not to get the Mac version after owning the PC version, I want to take a second to appreciate that porting takes time, money, and effort, and I'm grateful to have support on another platform.
And, while I realize that in modern times it'd feel like a raw deal not to get the Mac version after owning the PC version, I want to take a second to appreciate that porting takes time, money, and effort, and I'm grateful to have support on another platform.
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Apple Silicon is running little-endian, same as Intel and AMD x86-64.
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When these things happen it's usually the lack of a given third party library for the target platform.
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I haven't spoken with them, so this is informed speculation just from covering the industry, but I would guess it's not a technical limitation but a practical one. Feral is a porting studio, their model is to pitch other studios that have already released successful games, and say, "Let us port your game to the Mac, and we'll give you X% of the revenue." Feral is a project-based studio, not a live service one. They do release patches for ports they developed sometimes, but they are not in the business of treating their games as a live, day-to-day service.
Age of Empires II DE is a live, day-to-day service on PC and console, as developed by Microsoft's in-house studio. It's actively supported as a live multiplayer game. Updates to one platform that put it out of sync with another one likely make it so they can't play multiplayer together.
So the practical limitation, I would guess, is that Feral does not have the capacity or the model to keep up with the update cadence that World's Edge/Xbox Game Studios do with the primary platforms, and no deal was made to ensure they do, likely because the Mac audience is too small to justify that kind of intense and long-term commitment. Likewise, the Mac audience was likely deemed too small for World's Edge to hire full-time people to do the port and maintain it themselves rather than work with Feral.
Even if Feral did have the capacity, the structure of it would be them getting the updated build from World's Edge, then porting it, right? The patches and content updates wouldn't be developed concurrently. So, best case scenario is that happens, but it delays every update to the WIndows or console versions by days or weeks while Feral ports and tests the changes/additions on the macOS version.
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I will pick it up. But I will also show my age here. Because when I have time for games, the last thing I want to deal with is other people in my gaming session. So multiplayer has absolutely no appeal to me.
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This makes most sense to me. I don't understand any of the technical challenges, but I've been playing games on the ranked ladder without a hitch from my M2 macbook pro thanks to Crossover.
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There are 7 DLCs ranging from $12.99 to $19.99.
The Ultimate Bundle includes the game and 6 DLCs for $117.49 ($127.93 value, plus $9.99 soundtrack and $8.97 collection of icons). So not much of a discount and it is missing the latest The Last Chieftains DLC.
So a question: any one of these DLCs worth it?
The Ultimate Bundle includes the game and 6 DLCs for $117.49 ($127.93 value, plus $9.99 soundtrack and $8.97 collection of icons). So not much of a discount and it is missing the latest The Last Chieftains DLC.
So a question: any one of these DLCs worth it?
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Id say wait for any kind of sale - wishlist it if u wanna be notified cause some are more interesting, some are meh, but sometimes discounts go deep and you can get if 50-75% off of the price
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scortiusthecharioteer
Ars Centurion
I'd love to get back into AoK, I got the new version about 7 years ago but there are just too many civs now. Please eliminate 3. /old Ager yells at cloud.
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As a massive LOTRO addict, Crossover is also my answer. I also do Steam content via it.
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I think you mean The Conquerors Expansion.
Age of Empires II was originally called Age of Empires II: Age of Kings, and there was an expansion called The Conquerors, which the DE version has included.
Age of Empires II - Wikipedia
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TIL there is another AoEII remake. I've been playing the "HD Edition" on Steam for >10 years now, it supports multiplayer too and I've been perfectly happy with it. It runs great on the Steam Deck and even some 10+ year old computers I've got.
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Doubt it has anything to do with endianess. Apple Silicon, like most* Arm processors these days, are little endian, same as AMD64. Big endian systems have been a dying breed outside of IBM keeping them alive.
*most - many can do either/or, but practically they're almost always booted in LE mode.
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Will definitely pick this up the instant it appears on App Store. I have purchased other Mac ports from Feral in the past, Colin McRae Rally Mac is the first that comes to mind, and they generally do a good job. Particularly considering Apple switched from PowerPC to x86 while they porting Colin McRae.
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Teams like this have been pitching for decades, I know because I was on the receiving end after the HD edition release over a decade ago. (Different vendor).
I am glad the economics must have made sense to do so, which I am thrilled to see, despite not having been involved for a long time.
I have no recent insight either, but it would have been out of the question if I had done it for the older versions.... it'd have been a nightmare both technical and practical.
We ran into some really... fun... quirks with HD that stemmed from idiosyncrasies around decisions made due to cpu architecture in the late 90s.
Said idiosyncrasies also caused this in addition to cheating. So yeah, pretty high likelihood of multiplayer sync issues cross-architecture.
DE puts them on a more modern footing quite a bit afaik but build alignment practical challenges certainly still exist. It would be a pain and an ongoing cost. I can see why MP is isolated.
I'm glad to hear! That one was mine (also put aoe3 on steam, and did the first AOM remake there). Couldnt have predicted steam deck at the time, but kinda nifty it runs well on the hardware.
I wasnt involved in DE, but it is admittedly a pretty big improvement in a lot of ways, including more content. Worth checking out esp if a sale rolls around.
I started at msft with AOE3 - without having put that on Steam and doing well, idk if the franchise would have survived. AOEII expansions are a large part of its durability to today too. All I can do is join in the getting old party now
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The only thing I can think of off the top of my head is that when writing multithreaded code ARM's memory ordering is not guaranteed unlike x86. I didn't think this game was multithreaded though. IEE 754 floating point should be the same assuming no weird compiler tricks.
Maybe there is some kind of anticheat issue here?
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Thank you thank you for thousands of hours of AOE2 HD play on Steam!!! I binge played the original AOE2 on Mac back when it came out, but Apple's constant architecture changes eventually put paid to that. So when HD came out, I went out and bought a dedicated Windows machine for it -- it's the only Windows machine that's ever been allowed in my house. Thank you!
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There goes some of my free time. I've had AoE2 definitive for ages but didn't really bother to remote into the windows box for it. Now I'll be able to play it on my main desktop...
The sad part is, I've tried AoE 4 and ... i felt like in kindergarten. Dumbed down like Apple is trying to dumb down Mac OS. 27 years old game worth playing, 5 years old game in the same franchise - waste of money (eve if i did buy it on a sale).
The sad part is, I've tried AoE 4 and ... i felt like in kindergarten. Dumbed down like Apple is trying to dumb down Mac OS. 27 years old game worth playing, 5 years old game in the same franchise - waste of money (eve if i did buy it on a sale).
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It must be something with Feral Interactive's ports. It's the same issue with the Total War games as well. I would be curious to see if the Windows version of the game works with Crossover and how the performance compares.
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I am very tempted to pick this up. I probably put over 500 hours into the original on my old PowerMac back in the day without ever touching the campaign (just doing custom games online with friends). Sadly I fear that much like the HD version and the Warcraft and StarCraft remasters it would just sit there on my drive and never get much play.
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AoE2 HD is still the best version of the game to me, with upscaled sprites based directly on the source files used to create the original game. AoE2DE replaced the entire thing with a 3D engine that, frankly, has none of the charm of the original.
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