izigame.me

Where to even begin...
I have hundreds of hours into this title, here are some comparisons from the original to the definitive edition.
They have sacrificed core mechanics of the game in favor of historical accuracy despite never being a historically accurate game in the first place. The native civs can no longer tame animals, which was one of their coolest features, and the North American natives can no longer mine and are required to construct an additional building to be able to acquire coin. Changing things in the game to be more accurate and considerate towards people who were presented in the game in a way that was ignorant or even disrespectful is fine, great even, such as changing the names of the civs to what they actually call themselves, but changing core mechanics and lazily introducing them is not. This is an absurd and unnecessary change that is an insult to veteran players.
A major pet peeve of mine is the change from colonial era to commerce era. Are you trying to tell me that a game, that is built around the theme of colonialism, around the era of colonialism and who's entire game play is based around building a colony can't have the colonial era in it because it is too offensive?
Was colonization an awful thing for many people, YES, absolutely, but it happened and its what the game is based around, the game isn't making it out to be some glorious thing. This change of course does nothing to the actual game play so I'm not going to give up on the game just because of that but it is extremely idiotic and useless.
Home city progression has been almost completely removed. You can still level up your home city, however, it only unlocks the customization options for the visual appearance of your home city and no longer unlocks shipment cards, as you now start with all of them. While this works great for multiplayer as you no longer have to grind of out matches to get the cards you need to stay competitive, it is awful for single player. There is no more sense of progress or goals to work towards and the main replayability of single player is simply gone. This is the change that makes me just not want to play the game, I used to love unlocking and experimenting with different makeshift shipment decks as I worked my way up to the more powerful ones, but that is no more.
The UI is a complete and utter joke. The visual design of it looks as though someone made a bunch of text boxes in Microsoft Word and copied and pasted them onto the edges of the screen. The original AoE III had a UI design that was full of character and had amazing satisfying sounds to match. The definitive edition UI is completely soulless and had ear-piercing horrendous sounds mixed in with some rehashed sounds from the original version that somehow sound worse. To add on to this, the deck editing menu is nigh unusable, its essentially just a massive blob of the possible shipments you can use with very little sorting options.
The original deck editor showed you what building the card type, what era you could get the shipments in and the progression trees all at the same time, allowing for easy location and identification of each card. In the definitive deck editor you can sort by age or by card type that's it, enjoy, and the cards are in a seemingly random order with no visual separation making it a long unsorted messy list of shipments that fit said categories.
I've heard many other people mention how poorly optimized the game is, but I have had no issues with performance as of yet, so be cautious in checking if your computer can actually run the game.
One last thing I'll mention about the censorship of history because that is what really makes me nearly down vote this game is that every time one tries to censor what happened in the past to protect the present, what you end up doing is denying the victims their right to have it known that trauma happened to them. There's that old quote that everyone knows, the one that goes "Those who forget their history are doomed to repeat it." Well...