When comparing Age of Empires II HD vs PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, the Slant community recommends Age of Empires II HD for most people. In the question“What are the best multiplayer games on Steam?” Age of Empires II HD is ranked 2nd while PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is ranked 60th. The most important reason people chose Age of Empires II HD is:
While the graphics are slightly outdated, they were very well done for their time. And when combined with the history behind the game and its wonderful soundtrack, the game comes across as extremely polished.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Awesome ambiance with a great finish
While the graphics are slightly outdated, they were very well done for their time. And when combined with the history behind the game and its wonderful soundtrack, the game comes across as extremely polished.
Pro Runs on very old computers
As this game is quite old, requiring only a 1.2GHZ processor and 1 Gigabyte of RAM, this title will run on older PC's and laptops alike without issue.
Pro Facilitates the user's preferred pace
This game neither gives the impression of being thrown to the wolves nor that of being left stranded on an island. Whether you want to move slowly and steadily through the game or take things at a more heightened pace, Age of Empires 2 will allow for both (given a little planning).
Pro Awesome combination of looting, survival and combat
You start the game getting dropped from a plane where you parachute into a random point of the map. You got to loot to get as good gear/weapons as you can before the game forces everyone to converge to a location for an intense firefight.
Pro Great co-op
You can play in a squad of 2-4 and the teamwork makes the game infinitely more fun.
Pro Every match feels as fresh as the first one
Even though all matches start the same (with you dropping from a plane), chances are, you will rarely have the same experience twice.
Up to 100 people can join the server which is practically a 8x8km island. The choices you (and every other player) make from the moment you touch ground onward, will alter the course of the match in unexpected ways. Items are also randomly-generated, which means you never know what you'll find.
Pro Always keeps you on the edge
Managing to survive usually means that there's a relatively great time investment going, this increases the stakes of the game and keeps you on the edge at all times.
Pro Lots of different strategies you can take
The massive map, the great array of weapons, and the amount of different choices each player can make give you a great deal of strategies to follow to win the game. Even dropping from the plane to start the match is a choice that can greatly affect your possibilities of winning. Do you drop early to gain an edge over opponents? Do you drop close to the centre of the island in order to prepare for the final stages of the battle?
Even after dropping from the plane you can choose different strategies. You can play aggressive and try to hunt and kill other players, or you can bid your time, hide inside a building and wait for other players to kill each-other. The possibilities are endless.
Cons
Con A lack of proper User Interface scaling makes a clunky UI worse
While this is a remastered edition of a classic Real-Time Strategy title, the UI was left largely unchanged. Selecting workers still prompts you to click buttons to bring up both economic and military buildings, then choosing whichever building you wish to construct. This is uninteresting design and makes the UI difficult to navigate.
On top of this, the game does not feature UI scaling. Since the game is bound to your current desktop display settings, the UI will adjust itself to match that resolution. This means if you play at 4K resolution the User Interface will be absurdly small, making it near impossible to see what buildings you wish to construct or what units you want to train. This is counter-intuitive design, for this era of modern gaming, and makes properly playing the game more of a hassle than it should ever be.
Con Age of Empires II HD is an unsuccessful remaster due to its outdated graphics
With the only notable upgrade being high resolution options, Age of Empires II HD fails at being a proper remaster. While higher resolutions give the game a slight face lift, the rest of the engine is left largely unchanged. This means the graphics we see in this remaster are nearly the same in its original 1999 release. Due to this, the game is grating to the eye and does not deliver on its high definition promise.
Con Still in early access
PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is still in early access and there might be issues and bugs that have not been fixed yet.