N3O Age Of Empires and Starcraft 2 Clan

Oscar Santos: Do not worry. Not because we made a great patch with TAD 101 (based on the early comments of the community) means that we will not be patching anymore. Our current philosophy is to patch at least until the next version of the game. So that means that until we get an Age of Empires 4 (if any) we will keep supporting Age of Empires 3. The focus for post-ship will be on the Asian Dynasties though, so that we bring the community together and focus our time, development and testing resources in the latest expansion of the game.

Our customer service people say that in the last several months they have received over 500 email inquiries from people trying to get online with pirated copies. The strength of the Age online multiplayer experience is what saves our business and our jobs, and keeps us going so we can make more games. You can’t play Age online without a legitimate copy, and that helps the game remain in the list of top twenty best-selling PC games for the fourth year. It may be that PC games without a strong online component requiring a legitimate copy are doomed to modest success at best.

A bigger question for me is whether game piracy and its cousins (music piracy and online game cheating, for example) are becoming so socially acceptable and widespread that they are changing our culture. Will a society that finds it increasingly okay to steal and cheat online find it similarly acceptable to lie, cheat, and steal in all aspects of offline life?

A bigger question for me is whether game piracy and its cousins (music piracy and online game cheating, for example) are becoming so socially acceptable and widespread that they are changing our culture. Will a society that finds it increasingly okay to steal and cheat online find it similarly acceptable to lie, cheat, and steal in all aspects of offline life?

GameReplays: Why did ES decide to make one big patch after 4 months and not to publish a few smaller patches in a lesser amount of time?

Oscar Santos: In reality they were not 4 months. There are a set of guidelines that we use at Ensemble Studios to aid in patching and one is to wait after every release or patch 2 months for the community and for the changes to “stabilize” and reach some sort of steady state. Patching is fun and we want to do it, but at the same time we cannot react very fast and introduce unnecessary change. Chinese Disciples may be overpowered. Now. But we want to wait and see if it is really an issue or a fad. Bottom-line is that we wait 2 months after a patch releases before we start our work on it. For this patch, we started in mid-January after everyone resumed their activities after the holiday break. Smaller patches are still part of the plan and the idea is to provide quick updates. However, there are also trade-offs that you have to take where you have a set amount of playtesting, development and testing time that is budgeted. Of course, it grows with more changes, but a patch with 10 changes might be the same cost to produce as 20. So, if we really have 20 changes to try and get in, we will go for them as long as they improve the game and address community concerns. Another thing that makes this patch better is that TAD 101 is a balance-only patch whereas in the past we would make massive patches that involved balance and bug fixes that when a regression or bug was found and we needed to reset entirely our post-development processes for final patch sign-offs.