YMMV / Age of Empires I

• Awesome Music: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.
• Breather Level: In the Babylonian campaign, 'The Caravan' tasks you with escorting an artifact across a simple map. This comes after 'The Great Hunt', an absolutely hellish slog to retrieve the artifact.
• Broken Base: The decision to delay the Definitive Edition to 2018 got a lot of people by surprise. Some players think that it was necessary since the developers said that the game is still buggy and wanted to improve the gameplay to fit with the spirit of the original game. Others think that even if there are reasons to delay the game, one week before the original release date isn't the proper moment to announce it.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: The largely Vietnamese pro scene can be summed up as picking Assyrians or Shang, spam and micromanage Chariot Archers until one player is left standing.
• Game-Breaker: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The game is popular in Vietnam and China to this day, with both amateur and professional tournaments being held regularly. This is largely due to the fact that pirated copies of the game were often bundled with Vietnamese computers in the 90s and early 2000s, making it the first foray of many many Vietnamese gamers into Real-Time Strategy games. The top Vietnamese AOE player, Chim Sẻ Đi Nắng, is a minor celebrity and earns hundred of thousands dollars each year. The Lac Viet civilization was added to Age of Empires II: Return of Rome in recognition of the game's Vietnamese fan base.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • Converting an AI unit with multiple priests sometimes causes it to stand still, unable to decide which target to attack first.
  • Sometimes, AI-controlled priests may attempt to convert a wild animal, even though it should be impossible as you can't even select animals when you order a priest to convert someone. Animals react the same way as if they were attacked, so if an enemy priest tries to convert a lion, an alligator or an elephant, the AI-priest is likely to die. It is unknown if a priest can actually successfully convert an animal as there is no existing footage of it.
• Memetic Mutation: The weird language units speak spawned a few memes:
  • The "Rogan?" villagers (and priests) can randomly say when selected is considered an Inherently Funny Word by Age of Empires players: it's not often parodied by itself, but expect to see people randomly quote it when talking about Age of Empires I. It even made its way into the second game as an audio taunt.
  • Priests and their "Wololo" chant created two memes.
    • The chant itself is a source of music remixes.
    • One of the most popular Age of Empires memes is a three panel-format image parodying the priests' conversion mechanic. The first panel depicts a person or an object, the second panel depicts a priest, then the third panel depicts the person or the object from the first panel, except the person's clothes or the object is now the same color as the priest (often either blue or red).
  • The "Erectus" that units can say when given an order turned into a meme made to express horniness. The meme is mostly presented by a zoomed image of the Clubman unit with an "ERECTUS" caption below.
• Once Original, Now Common: Though the original game was a groundbreaking RTS in 1997, the release of the Definitive Edition in 2018 helped to expose just how much it had been surpassed by Age of Empires II, to say nothing of the several other games that had since iterated and expanded upon or diverged from the formula in the two decades since the original came out. Tellingly, a Definitive Edition of AoEII released a year later would do much better both critically and commercially, remaining supported for several years beyond with several expansion packs, including "Return to Rome" incorporating all the content from the first game's Definitive Edition.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The pathfinding is utterly atrocious. Your units will happily march the opposite way you ordered them to, often right into an enemy tower or catapult. Large units like elephants or catapults will get caught up on each other constantly, sometimes causing a full-on pileup that makes you stop and sort it out. Units will clip into inaccessible terrain and get stuck. Units ordered to attack will walk right past their target, then turn around and chase after it. This would be forgivable in a game released in 1997, but the Definitive Edition still has these problems. Return of Rome uses the second game's pathfinding, which proves to be a vast improvement.
• That One Level: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.
• Win Back the Crowd: After the fiasco with the Definitive Edition being Microsoft Store exclusive, it was added to Steam a year and a half later.

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