So I met carolkraine on another website discussing the new AoM game and he had the following reply when I expressed my opinion about how AoC:HD was launched:
Edited the passage a little as per his request(he was typing from his phone).
I worked on AoK:HD. You'll find me in the credits under campaigns. I did scenario design for about half of the Sforza campaign. But let me tell you about what Microsoft did here.
1. Everyone who worked on this was a volunteer.
2. We started as an expansion mod
3. We were expected to keep unreasonable deadlines for our work. I was supposed to finish the entire Sforza campaign by December 21st, 2012. I had stated prior to joining the team that it takes me at least 60-80 hours of work per scenario. They ignored this and proceeded to tell me to have it done. I proceeded to work on it when I could, but at the time I was finishing up my last year before university. I was busy IRL too. I gave them what I had after numerous Skype calls where I told them I couldn't do it by then. The end result was me completing one shoddy scenario (the first Sforza) and half of another (what became the third Sforza) I can't bring myself to play what became of the third Sforza. I have no idea how it turned out. All I know is that I was halfway through bug-testing the first serious stealth system in AoK- developed by me. You can find a walkthrough on it in the age of kings heaven university. I have successful test versions of this map that aren't broken in half developed form (turns out what broke it was telling a unit to have a speed value of over 4.5 is unstable and causes unavoidable random crashes.)
4. The mod is released Holiday 2012. My scenarios aren't included, and the finished Sforza campaign wouldn't be included until the release of the Steam HD version. I believe the mod launched with no campaigns.
5. Microsoft takes note of our 120,000 downloads.
6. Microsoft releases HD version.
7. Microsoft talks to Cysion,the mod lead developer about using Forgotten Empires as a paid expansion.
8. I should mention that Microsoft lost the source code. Every change to the original game in the HD version Was effectively hacked in. Userpatch had been doing this for a while for the vanilla game.
9. Again, ALL THE FORGOTTEN EMPIRES DEVELOPERS WERE VOLUNTEERS, even after Microsoft asked us to do the mod. Except this time we had deadlines we can't move. With the mod, it was feasible to move deadlines. But not anymore.
10. I quit in January 2013 due to schoolwork. They asked me to finish the Sforza campaign later, and to bug-test all of them before the forgotten empires release on steam. I had not looked at the game in close to for months. I ultimately was unable to help them find a broken trigger in what is effectively code that they butchered after I left.
I want to make clear that I believe in the project and I enjoy the game. I love aok. But this was shoddy mismanagement and ****ty development practices. Between Microsoft and the mod team, ultimately the result was a train wreck.
Edited the passage a little as per his request(he was typing from his phone).