I got to thinking about shutdown studios last night after I was thinking about how much I enjoyed and now miss Mercenaries. There have been many studios shut down over the years some due to their own missteps but many due to their parent companies’ incompetence or/and greed.
For me there are two studios that I miss the most, obviously Pandemic Studios and Westwood (later absorbed into EA LA). Although I will just speak about Pandemic Studios who made some of my favourite games of the ps2 era. I played through Mercenaries multiple times which for me, is really rare. And the amount of hours I spent in Battlefront 1 and 2, they are probably my top 2 or 3 most played ps2 games. Battlefront 1 was really good and just a year later they released Battlefront 2 which was an improvement in every aspect which made a great game so much better. Such a memorable game, that it still has an active community. They also made both Destroy All Humans, Full Spectrum Warriors and The Saboteur which …
So after the Beta of Aoe4 I watched some videos on YouTube about it. The majority of them compared it to Aoe2 and they started praising features that already existed in Aoe3. I got the feeling that most of them never played aoe3. Even some gaming channels and magazines were talking about “cool new features” even tho many of these already existed in Aoe3.
I played AoE3 before I played aoe2 just because I was a 10 year old and my dad bought me the newest Aoe. I played aoe2 a bit after the remastered came out but in my opinion aoe3 has always been superior. Especially the Asia expansion was really cool.
So since I was not really part of the gaming community yet as Aoe3 came out, what was the major reason people sticked with Aoe2 instead of picking up the newer game?