This Titan Looks Much Weaker! Age of Mythology, Titan Difficulty pt 2

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Let's Play! > This Titan Looks Much Weaker! Age of Mythology, Titan Difficulty pt 2

cuc: Nov 25, 2013

Sadly, the Chinese word plastered on the DLC logo reads like a placeholder-turned-prophecy: 玩笑 wanxiao "joke".

quote:

No direct link to the Atlantis story

It wasn't so in the leaked pitch, which described a story concept that would, let's say, require more unique models.

Forgotten Empires posted:

The Chinese campaign continues the story of the Age of Mythology. The Titans have shattered yin and yang and the balance of power is threatened. With hopes dwindling and brave men few and far between, a mysterious Chinese heroine rises from the shadows and summons an ancient creature to her aid, a creature not seen for centuries, a creature only loyal to her � a mighty dragon. With its help she embarks on a mission to fight for the restoration of the balance.
The campaign consists of six unique and challenging scenarios with an increased focus on the variety of gameplay. An example is a mission in which the player has to defend the base using nothing but god powers.

Some other choice quotes from the pitch:

Forgotten Empires posted:

Unique Selling Points:
... * High quality content that reaches and surpasses the quality level of The Titans.

If the devs had fully hoped to keep up to the official expansion for quality, what stopped them from achieving the palest shadow of that goal? They helpfully answered it themselves in an interview:

RPS posted:

Several months after The Forgotten's release, they petitioned Microsoft for approval to do an expansion for the then-new Age of Mythology Extended Edition. The answer was initially no, but Forgotten Empires kept asking. "Finally they said, 'What do you think about making another expansion for Age of Empires,'" "Then we kind of came back with, 'Why don't we do both?' And then apparently one guy at Microsoft agreed with that."

You probably can immediately see where this is going: Microsoft kept allotting resources to the AoE2 expansion, which turned out excellent, while the AoM DLC was starved. This was corrobated by Nakamura, an AoM diehard who joined FE to work on the DLC, immediately quit after release, then spent five years petitioning for a patch when AoM EE was abandoned.

cuc fucked around with this message at 20:48 on Dec 15, 2022

# ¿ Dec 15, 2022 17:39

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# ¿ May 18, 2024 02:34

cuc: Nov 25, 2013

Sorry for double post, previous one is getting a bit long with quotes.

Cythereal posted:

Honestly, I'm wondering if the giant salamander is from Japanese folklore by accident. I know Japan has its giant salamanders, and while I know gently caress all about Japanese mythology I wouldn't be surprised if the salamanders feature in at least one or two myths.

Other than the North American hellbender and Andrias japonicus, all surviving giant salamanders were from China. Due to being conflated into one species for the longest time, It's a mystery how many of them lived until recent centuries, and how many of them are left. The conflated Chinese giant salamander was considered the largest living amphibian, which should be why they made the choice.

The very recent discovery of one such species

Giant salamanders in Japanese culture: they weren't very important - there's no rich vein of iconography or anything. But according to what I found, they were considered immortal animals due to their ability to heal. They were hunted for meat that helps longevity, and charms worn by the wounded to improve healing. No idea what era these were from, because like everywhere else, beliefs in Japan changed a lot over history.

Melth posted:

Some are novel characters.

This opens up a highly nuanced question: What is Chinese myth? If you are the editor to a collection of Chinese myths, what do you include? (And let's keep the query to Han Chinese culture, not the other definition of "Chinese", which is everything within modern Chinese borders.)

For many other cultures, the answer is relatively straightforward: their societies have a more or less shared belief system in the supernatural, and they have stories about the supernatural characters, some held as true and significant (myths), some as fun tales (legends), the line between two often blurry or nonexistent.

But the elite "high culture" of China developed very early into a pragmatic, highly rationalist worldview that no longer sought justification and legitimacy from personified gods. This attitude is exemplified by Confucius quotes like "If we don't know life, how can we know death?" and "The Master never talked of: [the preternatural]; violence; disorders; [gods and spirits]", but far from confined to this single thinker whose philosophy was made the official ideology of China in Han dynasty.

Due to this, plus the intensely violent competitions that birthed the unified China, no sources have been left from the official belief systems of Bronze Age China that's as neatly systematic and readily digestible as the Twelve Olympians or the Pantheon of Thebes. The beliefs of the Shang can only be gleamed from their oracle bones and inscriptions; the myths of Zhou have to be pieced together painstakingly from sources in all their fragmentary glory. And you know what happened in Han? Euhemerism (reading myths as disguised history) and baldfaced invention, which further added layers of complication.

And what you commonly read as Chinese myth is largely the work of a Yuan Ke, who did the piecing in 20th century - because "what is Chinese myth" is a problem that would never occur to the traditional Chinese intelligentsia, without getting in contact with the West and realizing "other ancient civilizations like Greece and India have beautiful mythologies, we must have had one too".

But if the official ideology had left the supernatural world a big gaping hole, what did people fill the hole with?

- First of all, the most central, bona fide religion-level Chinese belief is ancestor worship, which includes honoring ancestors with your own achievements, and maintaining the bloodline, so that when you join the ancestors' ranks, you can together receive worship from future generations.

- Organized religions - foreign ones, local ones, gave people intricate scriptures to balm the soul (or scar the soul, in the case of hell, a concept imported from India).

- But similar to Japan, folk-level Chinese culture is pragmatic and extremely unpicky about what to worship. Everything can be gods, especially dead humans. It is the most unstrange sight to see a bodhisattva, a historical hero, a local folk god, and a fictional character enshrined in the same hall, and people have worshipped far worse things.

And obviously, over the 2000 years, people never stopped telling tales of the supernatural. Today we may know Sun Wukong as from the novel Journey to the West, but the novel was itself built on folklore and theater that came before. If you look to times before the novel, he was a theater character, perhaps with some local monkey gods mixed in; if you look to times after the novel became hugely influential, of course he would be worshipped like every beloved hero.

(If there's one 100% novel character in the TotD choices, that's actually Ao Kuang, the Dragon King of East Sea. That waterbodies are governed by dragon kings is a concept imported from the Indian naga, another of the thousands of ways Buddhism influenced China. But Ao Kuang in particular seems wholly invented by Journey to the West.)

As you can see, we are getting into the second part of the question: if after the Bronze Age, myths and supernatural tales continued to be invented and believed in, at least by "low society", how late do we draw the line for inclusion?

Case in point: the modern image of the hopping jiangshi wears Qing-dynasty official uniforms, because the Hong Kong film industry was money-pinching, that's how recent that look was.

For a commercial product, I can sympathize with creators who use materials iconic to global society, regardless of period accuracy. It'd be hard to imagine a Japanese civ without famous creatures like the kappa or oni, just because they were never mentioned in the "canonical" texts of Japanese myth.

TL;DR What is myth what is fiction what is history, majority of Chinese people didn't care

cuc fucked around with this message at 20:41 on Dec 15, 2022

# ¿ Dec 15, 2022 20:20

cuc: Nov 25, 2013

The road to Age series revival was a long one with many actors, like AoE2 lead programmer Matt Pritchard, who knocked on Microsoft's doors for years petitioning for a "final official patch"; and xOmnicron a.k.a. Scripter16, who led the creation of UserPatch, bringing massive amounts of modern OS compatibilities, fixes & new features to AoE2, keeping the AoE2 scene not only alive but healthy and thriving without official support, and laying the scripting toolset foundation for AoE2DE.

The Forgotten Empires team ("FE") alone did not a revival make; they weren't even its most important contributor.

BlazetheInferno posted:

The AI included with the mod/expansion was considered to be dumbed down, and worse than the Conquerors' expansion's AI.

It was more complicated than that.

The initial development of AoE2HD in 2013 was done by Hidden Path. After its launch, its maintenance was handed over to Skybox Labs. Their first job was the version 2.0 update, which in addition to addressing some of its numerous problems, was intended to introduced ambitious AI and pathfinding improvements.

[CORRECTION: Version 2.0 might be developed by another team, and Skybox Labs only took over after that. Pending investigation.

Result: the AI is deeply messed up, and units tasked to a simple short walk almost always move backwards and take a U-turn. What's more, all future AoE2 versions are iterations on this build, meaning that even as the AI continues to be worked on over the next decade on macro and micro levels, you still see units exhibit the same trouble with simple straight movements that's not in the original game. In AoE2DE, the AI is capable of pulling a lot of tricks befitting a good player, but it nonetheless bears scars carved by HD 2.0.

This was a preview of both:
* Skybox Labs' competence as the tech team on AoE2HD, AoM Extended, and Rise of Nations Extended in the next few years; and
* The more long-term tripartite structure of Age series development.

And this structure is:
* Microsoft management, who gives ample creative freedom to dev teams on how to make new content, but keeps a tight leash on the purse, ensuring devs only work on high-priority tasks.
* FE, consisting largely of ex-modders working remotely over the world, focuses on the creative side.
* And a contract studio for further artworks & engine tech, which was Skybox in the pre-DE period, and Tantalus in the DE era.

When working on AoE2HD and Tale of the Dragon, FE had no technical capability beyond that of the modders, and everything engine-side was handled by Skybox. In the DE era, FE have recruited more engine programmers, but still does not have anything like total control over the code.

(The structure also applies to Relic's AoE4, since FE is contributing significantly to its balancing & game design.)

Of course, being modern development, lots of specific art & programming tasks are further farmed out to remote contractors, resulting in things like the same bug broken & fixed 3 times, each time fixed a different way.

This three-way separation of bureaucratic power, creative & engineering faculties and lack of unifying cohesion (let alone the original Ensemble & BHG's collective decisionmaking which empowered every member) explains a lot about the :effort:

QUALITY that washes over you if you dig slightly deeper into any official Age revival title: individual pieces may be good, but the system as a whole is set up to screw things up, repeatedly.

quote:

The Campaigns meanwhile, were attacked for a number of reasons. Most featured a strong departure from the Build and Destroy gameplay, with more of a focus on Limited Forces scenarios, or other strange, unusually gimmicky scenarios that feel like a strong departure from the official campaigns' style. Along with other issues like units getting stuck in terrain eyecandy, poorly balanced difficulty, and far too many unskippable in-map cutscenes that take far too long

This reflects the community origin of the first DLC's campaigns. The AoE2 mappers' preference was in making pretty scenery or cutscenes, and tinkering with gimmicks that stretch the engine's limited capabilities in hitherto unimagined ways. Overall sense of "playing like a RTS" and "not feeling frankensteined together" were not concerns.

Ironically, the inspiration of AoE2HD and DE has reversed the trend: a new generation of mappers had grown whose style is real history scenarios with polished RTS gameplay, and their best works have a higher quality standard than official campaigns.

quote:

and since it was a fan-mod that was picked up and given official support rather than a professionally-made product, there wasn't any voice-acting to accompany those cutscenes either, which does a lot to make longer cutscenes bearable.

In the end, it was up to Microsoft to release a mod with limited additional polish (with all the sprite edits and amateurish new models) and no voice acting as an experiment, and only ramping up the budget in later DLCs when the first experiment proved successful.

Same for the upcoming AoM Retold: in 2013, it was Microsoft managers that accepted FE's proposal to work on Tale of the Dragon and AoE2 African Kingdoms simultaneously, and demanded FE to treat the former as a side project. Today's FE is long past the days of being one mod team; it's managing multiple teams of talents scouted from the upper crust of each Age community. If Microsoft felt Retold is worth investing in, experienced AoM mappers should by all means have the skill to deliver a campaign better than Ensemble's.

But that is an if...

cuc fucked around with this message at 18:48 on Jul 10, 2023

# ¿ Apr 4, 2023 18:49

cuc: Nov 25, 2013

I started a reply to the recent episode when it came out, but never finished it!

Short version:
- China originally had no concept of "hell" or Naraka where the dead is punished for their transgressions in life, the idea was wholly imported from India via Buddhism, and Diyu meaning "earthly prison" was a new word coined to translate the concept.
- During the Han dynasty when Buddhism first arrived, the Chinese imagined dead people living ordinary, peaceful lives underground inside a bureaucracy working exactly the same as aboveground.
- Though they also imagined loose, haunting ghosts as a general-purpose monster that can do anything the story needs.

Meanwhile, Nakamura from my last post has made a new video talking about the DLC's development, some of the plans for the Chinese culture that they couldn't implement, and how he thinks the Chinese can be fixed. The entire video is from the multiplayer perspective and doesn't cover the campaign, however.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCMmvzZe52g

cuc fucked around with this message at 21:52 on Jul 30, 2023

# ¿ Jul 30, 2023 21:49

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Let's Play! > This Titan Looks Much Weaker! Age of Mythology, Titan Difficulty pt 2