A lot of people seem to be complaining about Age of Empires 4’s graphics, saying it is low poly, cartoony etc.
While some of the complaints are legit, I believe a large part of it comes from the art style chosen for the game. The game has a blurred painting like style that many people don’t seem to be a fan of.
I have found a potential way to enhance these graphics by using Nvidia’s Sharpening Overlay, available for free with the GeForce experience app (https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/…). AMD has an equivalent I believe. I got this idea from someone who posted an image using AMD’s filter, but I believe a video does the changes more justice.
In the video I toggle the filter so you can easily see the difference. I am playing with most graphical settings on medium and at 1080p. Check it out here:
Youtube compression made the comparison not as clear as I would like, but I think the change is still visible here.
My exact filter settings are in the description, if you are interested.
Man, I just wish it had less distractions. I dont know, perhaps they tried to do too much and its all blurry as you say as consequence. Plus you cant zoom out because it fries vgas apparently.
An option to turn off all the noise in the background… Flat green ground, no bushes or useless plants, smaller trees, etc. Its so hard to identify which forests you can walk through, which you have to circle around… where you can and cant build, etc.
Some might like those, but they don’t do much for me (if I had the game, I wouldn’t enable). I prefer devs just swap in higher-res textures… more bump/displacement… and the like
Not to derail, but I’m reminded of how similar every building looks in AoE4, based on your vid… or at least how hard it is to identify buildings. All the white/stone rooftops, dead spaces, similar architecture and wall thicknesses:
