I’m sorry, but denying that it’s harder to make a game that is backwards compatible with a custom game engine than it is to remake a game from scratch is in itself lunacy.
The scope of this game included the custom games. That was non-negotiable. So essentially the community of this game wouldn’t have been happy if they didn’t work, and the community of this game isn’t going to get what they want playing AoEII.
The AoEII remake is easy by comparison as well, because it doesn’t have to support anything the previous games had. At best it will just have a map editor that requires terrain conversion, no scripting.
At the end of the day, if what I wanted was to play custom maps, warcraft III reforged may be a .5 but AoE II is a 0 because it literally cannot play custom maps
It’s basically trying to advertise to the wrong playerbase entirely. I have not played a single standard map since I started playing again.