Opt in for this Age of Empires II: HD Edition patch

Having technical issues? This might help

Those of you who happily bought Age of Empires II: HD Edition for nostalgia’s sake only to encounter a slew of technical issues, heads up: a new patch for the game might do the trick. “We’ve got a giant excel sheet with threads, posts and tweets bucketed into categories, and sub sheets for various issues, including information to help us try to get the issues we’re seeing resolved,” reads a post on the official Steam forum.

To opt in for the patch, right click on the title in your Steam library, hit “Properties,” and choose “Betas.” There should be an option for “performance” on the drop-down menu. Fixes include frame-rate and performance improvements, especially for high-end machines, and a bunch of miscellaneous changes to multiplayer. Speaking of which, if you go for this, know that you can only play against other folks who also have the same build.

From the sound of it, this is only the beginning of what’s in store. The post also talks about an upcoming in-game option for full screen multimonitor and mouse-bounding. Let us know if this current patch was able to do much of anything for you, dear readers.

Patch Notes for ‘performance build’

• Frame rate & performance improvements that increase frame rates up to 50% on low end machines and up to 500% on the high end systems previously experiencing frame rate issues.
• Visual fixes:
  
  • Windows DPI scaling no longer zooms the in-game perspective 
  • Default scroll speed increased
• Multiplayer fixes including:
  
  • Quitting a multiplayer game triggers a resignation instead appearing as a ‘drop’
  • Private lobbies stay private
  • Quick match no longer crashes
  • Long Steam usernames no longer cause crash
  • Hotkeys for multiplayer are correctly saved
  • Lobby now enforces that you only play multiplayer with the same build version
  • Visual indications of players in your lobby and in game who have low frame rate
  • Better networking verification prior to entering game (prevents getting stuck on the voting screen)
  • Performance warning if you have high ping to one other player who isn’t host or if your data is being relayed
  • Multiplayer quick match speed defaults to normal
  • Quick match has additional map size filter
  • Multiplayer Lobby doesn’t lock to a region for displaying games
• Achievements fix: Single player unlocks achievements properly