I've been playing Age of Empires: Definitive Edition for the last month or so. I'm going through the 8 or so campaigns and am almost onto the final Rise of Rome campaign. For the most part, it feels similar to the original game. The graphical update is very nice and not overdone. I actually didn't think that they updated it much until I loaded up the original and was surprised at how primitive it looked, so they managed to make the game look the way that I remember it, which is good.
A number of things annoy me, though. First, not having the menu music of the original is a crime. I had to borrow the music file from the original and copy it over the new one to get it back. Second, the rest of the music, while similar tunes, sound too different to evoke much nostalgia. Third, there are differences in the campaign missions that also take away the feeling that I'm playing the original game. I want the exact same maps, only updated graphically. I don't want to play some modern studio's "reimagining" of the original game and its missions.
Finally, the pathfinding is actually worse than in the 24-year-old game. If you send a unit to attack a moving enemy, it'll go to where the enemy was when you clicked and stand there like an idiot. It won't continually update your unit's pathfinding to account for the enemy's movement like even the original would. It's frustrating. Also frustrating is that your infantry and mounted units will periodically get stuck together in one spot and take stopping what you're doing and spending a minute to unstick them. It's a bug, but it's an infuriating, almost game-breaking bug.
Anyways, all of these things add up to the game not being quite as nostalgic as I was hoping for. The studio that Microsoft farmed this out to didn't do as good of a job as the folks who did Command & Conquer: Remastered Collection. That's how you remaster an old strategy game, by updating only what you really need to and leaving everything else as familiar as possible. So, AoE: DE is disappointing in a lot of ways, but it's still been fun enough for me to keep playing. I just hope that AoE2: DE is a little more faithful.
