Age of Empires 2: HD Edition did not have the smoothest of launches. I know this because my flatmate has been teaching me a whole new range of swear words every time the game crashed him out of a multiplayer match.
Hidden Path have been working round the clock to release a patch that will fix the most frequent of crash bugs (including “Long Steam usernames no longer cause crash“) and it’s finally released.
While the increased resolution of this HD Edition may sound like the main grace of this new release it’s actually the Steam integration that was its most notable feature. Having Steam handle Age of Empires multiplayer meant that players would no longer have to run a jerry-rigged setup which sidestepped the now archaic server architecture of Ensemble’s original release.
Unfortunately it was the multiplayer in which most of the crash bugs lay. Thankfully this patch fixes the main offenders.
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Frame rate & performance improvements that increase frame rates up to 50% on low end machines and up to 500% on the high end systems previously experiencing frame rate issues.
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Visual fixes:
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Windows DPI scaling no longer zooms the in-game perspective
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Default scroll speed increased
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Multiplayer fixes including:
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Quitting a multiplayer game triggers a resignation instead appearing as a ‘drop’
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Private lobbies stay private
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Quick match no longer crashes
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Long Steam usernames no longer cause crash
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Hotkeys for multiplayer are correctly saved
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Lobby now enforces that you only play multiplayer with the same build version
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Visual indications of players in your lobby and in game who have low frame rate
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Better networking verification prior to entering game (prevents getting stuck on the voting screen)
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Performance warning if you have high ping to one other player who isn’t host or if your data is being relayed
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Multiplayer quick match speed defaults to normal
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Quick match has additional map size filter
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Multiplayer Lobby doesn’t lock to a region for displaying games
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Achievements fix: Single player unlocks achievements properly
Hidden Path admit that this patch won’t fix all the game’s problems nor for all players but they’re working on the other problems as we speak.