[hulitu]

> Really terrible treatment of one of the best game series of all time, and being part of Microsoft hasn't helped. It would have been nice if Warcraft 3 got the same treatment as AoE2 or AoM.

Oh, Microsoft, the destroyers of GUIs.

I tried AoE 3 on Steam (demo). It was a total disaster. Downloading was slow and then the game: At the first start would not let me build barracks (no suitable place found).

At the second start it was hard to found the baracks again (all icons look the same - Windows style enshitification) but the peasants will not harvest berry bushes.(bugs) They made the UI much worse. The playground is round. The icons look the same so one has to look at tooltips to build a house. All in all a crappy experience. I guess i will stick with AoE 2.

[fifticon]

my child insists, reasonably, on playing minecraft, so we must endure the microsoft launcher ui stewardship for mc. what a hot mess of bloated bureaucracy-software-dungheap. It is as if even their installer has an installer and a loadscreen. Consider if you, gosh, want to continue PLAYING EXACTLY THE SAME THING AS LAST NIGHT. The launcher design response: ouh, i did NOT expect that! Please wait while we reauth and 2FA and sync your account and download and reinstall your game client.. wait a minute.. hmm, on second thought, Im not SURE we can just let you continue the game from "last night"..? oops, no wait.. WE CAN?! I swear there is more code in, and people assigned to, their crappy bloated launcher, than to the game itself. Ironically, their store features are so buggy I often dven cant manage to buy their DLC theft-as-servjce stuff.

[breakingcups]

Good news! There are alternative, unofficial launchers! Check out Prism or POLYMC for example.

[portaouflop]

Luckily with Minecraft there are lots of alternatives, you don’t need to use the MS crap.

[pjmlp]

> Microsoft, the destroyers of GUIs.

In the past I would have complained, but as someone that has foolished invested into UWP and WinRT siren song, I can't but fully agree.

[Dalewyn]

Never bet against Win32.

[pjmlp]

Kind of yes, the bigger problem is that Azure and XBox are now the money makers, so even Win32 isn't being updated that much since Windows XP, note that most Win32 APIs are now available via COM, and that is what UWP/WinRT offered, COM vNext, instead they messed up, and now we're back into COM classic with crappy tooling, even though it is the main API delivery mechanism.