I remember spending many a long night as a young boy, phone cable strung across the living room connected to my parets computer, playing the original Age of Empires and it's expansion on the MSN Gaming zone. Heck, I was even in a clan, some silly DBZ clan haha, I was Piccolo_Pax. I was always thankful to my parents for letting me stay up and play past my bedtime, and as long as I was quiet, they were cool. I thanked them like, every week anyways. When Age 2 came out, I was so excited to be able to put guys into buildings, but I was a little disappointed about how they changed siege, and didn't play it as much, and mainly played startcraft for RTS pleasures. Fast forward many years. I now have a game room where my wife and our friends play LAN party games like civ 4, heroes 5. when the girls aren't there, us guys play more serious BF 2142, SC 2, SupCom (we prefer forged alliance to supcom2), Age 3. Of course, as the owner of all four computers I pick and choose games that are most LAN friendly, or large group friendly (Heroes). Originally I was pretty excited about this AoE:O. I mean, a game I wouldn't have to buy multiples of? Wouldn't have to go through patch hell on all four comps? I know LAN has been dying out over the years, so I knew it wouldn't have LAN play **** you DRM **** and getting rid of LAN). I figured we could just all be online, no problem. I thought maybe the kinda kiddy graphics would make the ladies more likely to try it out. I also thought the more simplistic gameplay similar to the older games would be nostalgic. Turns out it... wasn't going to go so smoothly. First off, no skirmish mode? Second off, all of us would have to play and raise our home cities to level 5 just to play together, and even then, we couldn't figure out how to play 2v2's as teams. I thought, "Maybe the payed version has skirmish, I'll check that out...." Now you gotta realize we're talking 80 bucks for just each choosing 1 civ of the two if I go with this option. I did some research, turns out skirmish is going to be a booster pack. At 5 bucks, that will be 20 dollars just for skirmish mode on all the comps. Some other issues started to arise. Our wives, they are not WoW nerds. They like playing games with us and having fun. What they are not interested in is silly crafting, in collecting "awesome gear". All of us were quite disappointed in the end with this game. So in esence, what gets my goat is that they call the game free, but it would cost me almost 400 dollars for 4 season passes. That is unacceptable. All of that, for only 2 civs right now and a bunch of **** booster packs of bushes and crap. Microsoft has decided to just pass right over "micro-transactions", and see how "macro-transactions" work. I'm not sure what you kiddied the crap out of the game, either. I thought they were going to try and make it more casual and girl-friendly. It isn't. Anyways, you can see I'm quite worked up about microsoft pissing in my nostalgia cereal, and anyone worried of this game having the same effect, I would steer clear. that being said, I played up to lvl 10 single player because I was alot of comments online about there being "50+ hour campaigns" for each civ. yeah, turns out by campaigns they mean quests, and they're almost identical.