Most under-appreciated game ever?

[Shiro]

Age of Empires Online got mixed reviews from the press and never seemed to get much love from fans of the series... most people accused it of being "pay to win" instead of "free to play". Some also didn't enjoy the cartoonish art style or the lack of civilizations.

Now, I'm not a huge fan of this whole free to play model myself. I think it diminishes the notion of game ownership and often makes gamers "hostages" or the servers. Which is exactly the case here, with Age of Empires Online shutting down completely next year.

But despite these flaws, I enjoyed my brief experience with AoE:O (and I use term "brief" loosely: it was brief compared to my time with Age of Empires II and Age of Mythology). I was skeptic of the art style at first, but it grew on me, and I learned to appreciate the game for what it was. In fact, I ended up liking it more than Age of Empires III.

So it saddens me that Microsoft is pulling the plug on this one. I wish they would release a final patch to ditch Games For Windows Live and make the game available offline (they would porbably want to change the name of the game though), on LAN and peer-to-peer matches, so it could theoretically last forever.

[SpeedyVelcro]

I enjoyed the game too, but unfortunately I would imagine that this is the end of Age of Empires Online as we know it. The developers already expressed the fact that they cannot update the game in any way other than tiny bugfixes to remain profitable, and porting an MMO to an offline engine or another online architecture is no easy feat.

I just hope someone picks up again and releases another AoE game that isn't a HD version of an older game, but that's probably not very likely to happen.

[Slend]

Why not a Age of empires online 2?