I’ve had a lot of criticism for Age of Mythology: Retold so far, especially around lack of content, so a lot was riding on the recent Immortal Pillars DLC, which reintroduces the Chinese. Completely redone from their first incarnation in Tale of the Dragon with a new campaign to boot, this is all entirely new content.
The campaign is a bit mediocre. It’s fairly short at nine missions, and three of those are “dungeon crawl” style missions with little to no economy, which never works very well in this style of RTS.
As with the rest of Retold to date, the voice acting is pretty dire, and the writing isn’t very good, either. The villain has a pretty sympathetic motivation, but then they have him randomly murdering innocent people wherever he goes for no reason whatsoever.
The mission design is a bit of a mixed bag, too. The early missions feel pretty basic, and while the later ones are a lot more enjoyable, I still find myself thinking that more mechanical creativity should be possible given the near limitless possibilities offered by the mythological source material. StarCraft II really raised the bar for RTS mission design, and no one else has even come close to equaling it.
The Chinese civilization itself, though, is excellent. The art design of everything from buildings to god portraits is simply gorgeous, and their mechanics hit the right balance of feeling fresh without making you feel like you need to fully relearn the game.
The Chinese have a very strong emphasis on defensive play and turtle strategies, which have always been my preference in RTS games, so they fit me like a glove. Despite my love of Norse mythology, the Chinese may be my new favourite civilization in this game, and I ended up having a pretty good time with the campaign despite its other shortcomings purely on the strength of the Chinese civilization.
Overall, the DLC has rough edges, but it still offers a lot of fun.
So why is that headline above so negative? Because I literally can’t play it.
Things were fine for the first half of the campaign, but then the game started experiencing random crashes to desktop. A lot of random crashes.
There doesn’t seem to be any pattern to when a crash occurs. Sometimes I can go almost twenty minutes without one, sometimes they happen every thirty seconds. I’ve found they also happen in skirmishes as well as the campaign. I tried updating my graphics drivers and reinstalling the game, and neither helped.
I tried brute-forcing my way through with constant quick saves, but after a while it just got too frustrating needing to restart the game every minute or two. I’m about halfway through the second last campaign mission, and I’ve thrown in the towel. The game is unplayable while this persists.
I tried looking online, but reports of similar issues are few and far between, and no one seems to have found a solution. Given the apparent rarity of the issue, I’m not hopeful for a fix any time soon.
Between this, the abysmal voice acting, the maybe AI beta god portraits debacle, and the incredibly poor state of Arena of the Gods, I’m just stunned by the lack of quality control in AoM: Retold. The Age of X franchise is usually one you can depend on for consistent quality. I don’t know what went so wrong this time.
It’s so frustrating because Immortal Pillars did seem like it was a step in the right direction, right up until the crashes started.
Superior Realities 
Loving this game and the Chinese civ. But admittedly, never play the campaigns, in any rts games. They all bore me to sleep. So I’ve not experienced any ctd with this game. That’s not good to hear….
It’s not just the campaign, it’s happening with skirmishes too. Would probably affect multiplayer as well, but I never play that. It does seem to be an uncommon issue, though, so I’m not too surprised you haven’t encountered it.
Shut the absolute fuck up you wouldn’t know a good game even if it grabbed you by the balls an said hey. Name one game that’s been delivering consistent and awesome results an DLCs since 1997
Maybe you should name one first, considering Age of Mythology came out in 2002.
This review misses one of the core principles of the game which is multiplayer. You have put that you don’t play multiplayer (which is like saying you go to the amusement park but don’t ride roller coasters).
The majority of the RTS players (real time STRATEGY) are there for the multiplayer experience. This is the soul of the RTS genre.
My experience of multiplayer is very good. The crashes and far and few between, the custom maps (especially from nottud!) are amazing and impressive what can be accomplished in the editor. The graphics are a huge upgrade and unit glitches (such as patching) from legacy have majorly been improved. Ultimately I’m having a lot of fun in multiplayer. The game delivers well in its core principle.
The inclusion of god power mechanics on other people are an exciting addition and are very impactful making a big emphasis on strategic timings when playing.
The balance of the game is always being addressed and even some cash tournaments have been played.
It sad that these type of veneer-deep reviews only seek to alienate and dissuade people from the game, completely missing out on one of the most fun things about the game.
To sum up: this is the type of guy that plays chess for the storyline – best not to take his advice on RTS.
People really need to stop spreading this misinformation. The RTS genre is and always has been focused on single player and casual play first, with competitive players making up a vocal minority. In StarCraft II — probably the most competitively focused, esports driven RTS ever made — co-op missions were the most popular game mode (source: https://www.pcgamer.com/it-sure-sounds-like-starcraft-2s-devs-would-like-to-make-starcraft-3/), and ranked play was the least popular. Nor is it a coincidence that AoE2 puts the most effort into single player content and is also consistently the most popular of any AoE game. AoM in particular has always been about the story first, and multiplayer is generally considered to be an inferior experience compared to other AoE titles due inherent balance issues such as how game-breaking god powers can be. If you check AoM’s Steam achievements, you’ll see that less than 35% of players have ever played a multiplayer match, compared to 59% who’ve played the first mission of the campaign.
Even putting all that aside, my primary criticisms of Retold still apply even if I did play multiplayer. My biggest issues are the lack of new content compared to the original, which is just as true for multiplayer as it is for single player, and my crashing issue, which I’ve already demonstrated is persistent across game modes.
I’ll also add that it’s not a great look for the AoM community that multiple people who are not regular readers of my blog have now come out of the woodwork to leave condescending comments on this post (that I made no effort to even promote) because I made what I think are some fairly reasonable criticisms of the remaster of a game that I truly loved as a child and very much want to like. If your goal is to promote the multiplayer community for Age of Mythology: Retold, you’re doing a terrible job of it, because snide attitudes like yours are one of the biggest reasons I make sure to stay far away from competitive multiplayer in most games. Maybe if PvPers stopped treating single player fans like slow children, we might actually be encouraged to step out of our comfort zone and try things your way.
Attitudes like yours are exactly why the RTS genre is dying. Developers are being pushed towards focusing on competitive play by the vocal minority who only care about that, ignoring the casuals who are actually the core fanbase of the genre. Meanwhile the perception that RTS is only about competitive play intimidates away people who might otherwise be interested in giving the genre a try, especially when it’s accompanied by condescending attitudes like yours.
bait used to be believable
I’m leaving all these troll comments up because I want anyone who finds this post to see how toxic the AoM community apparently is. I’m pretty shocked, myself. I have a very small readership, and I almost never get comments these days, but it’s been three days in a row now of waking up to people posting nasty comments because I committed the sin of [checks notes] being disappointed that tech issues prevent me from playing a game I otherwise enjoy.
If there was ever a game I would have expected to have a wholesome and supportive community, it’s Age of Mythology, a silly low stress game about celebrating world mythology. But somehow it seems to have attracted some really unpleasant people.
The game deserves better fans than this.
Huge props on standing out and addressing proper issues with the game, despite the – apparently – completely out-of-touch fanbase.
Crashes/CTDs aren’t a feature, or something you can really assess based on quality. It’s inherently problematic and should be inherently condemned. Or maybe some people absolutely love crashes, I don’t know sometimes.
dude you are out of your mind, AoMR has been a huge success. get your head out of your ass, youre a fucking retard. oh yeah, the entire AoM community is wrong but you are right? get some perspective pleb
The player count dropped precipitously shortly after launch. Not only is it far below AoE4 and AoE2, it’s currently doing worse numbers than AoE3 DE, which is in maintenance mode, and it barely has more players than the 2013 version of AoE2: https://steamdb.info/charts/?compare=221380,813780,933110,1466860,1934680
I also checked it against AoM: Extended Edition, and as of this writing Retold only has about three times the playerbase it does, whereas AoE2 DE has about seven times the playerbase of the 2013 version of AoE2, which would seem to indicate a relatively poor conversion rate of EE players to Retold players.
I wouldn’t call that a huge success. If it seems to you like the entire community is happy with it, that may be because the people who aren’t already left. Or possibly because anyone who says otherwise gets harangued by slur-slinging weirdos like yourself, apparently.
I haven’t had any crash issues to be fair, and a lot of the people who played the original are in it for the mods, I personally think the mods and community are what make this game fun and interesting
I have no idea how this post blew up so much, but I’m still getting nasty comments from randos about it. I think this is the most hate I’ve gotten for anything I’ve posted on this blog in its ~15 years of life. Admittedly half a dozen comments or so isn’t that much in the greater scheme of things, but compared to how few comments I get normally (critical or otherwise), it feels pretty significant.
I’ve let most of the comments through because I don’t like censoring too much and because I think it’s instructive to let people see a game’s community show its true colours, but some accusations are so utterly and baselessly slanderous I just delete them. Just know that as harsh as some of the comments you see are, there was worse. Props to the one or two people who’ve managed to keep it polite.
I’m not that bothered by the criticism itself. You get pretty used to it in this line of work, even if the volume is unusual. Mostly I’m just confused as to how so many people even found this post, let alone let it get under their skin so much they needed to fly off the handle like this. I don’t know why people care so much that a virtually unknown blogger gave a lukewarm review to a DLC for a mid-tier entry in a niche game genre.
I do, however, find it depressing to realize how much toxicity there is in the Age of Mythology community. While I’ve had my issues with how Retold has been handled, AoM is still a game I have a very long and fond history with, and it had a greater influence on my life than almost any other game I’ve played, sparking a lifelong love of world mythology. Seeing this ugly underbelly of its playerbase is tarnishing the otherwise warm memories I have of the game.
On the plus side, this is now one of the most viewed posts in the blog’s history. The daily views I’ve been getting are almost equal to Retold’s average Steam concurrency.
I don’t know what the hell you’re talkin’ about, bro. It’s awesome and I haven’t seen any negative feedback…..so maybe it’s just you
wow I haven’t tried the expansion yet and I still want to but I’m sorry it keeps crashing for you
everybody seems to be super upset to hear you’re not having a good time with it 👀 hopefully they patch some stuff. I usually play skirmishes, either single or multiplayer. I also just love the soundtrack in general, I listened to it on a ferry crossing the Aegean sea 🌊
Sales times are over. Censorship is not needed. Time to admit what a flop it was. Another bad thing they knew they had to hype up and sell. Even the paid shills and lower IQs that were saying things like all critiques were from the same few people were very wrong as they were censoring just a lot of points. As an aom older player I prefer to hop into aomee or even have the original one from time to time..aomre did not get my money.. The real problem is you people finance this stuff then agree it was bad later. You likely fell for the scam. Original aom was way better.