No one will convince me Age of Empires 4 is more readable as long as their technologies look like this,
What do you MEAN bloomery, Decarbonization and Damascus Steel are told apart by having a tiny dot indicating level on top.
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Nous somme à blâmer parce que nous ne regardons pas assez les tournois? Quelle tournois alors à propos d’AOE3? Ça me fume ce genre de commentaires, c’est comme si on critique un manchot de ne pas tenir un plat avec ses deux mains alors que c’est impossible pour lui.
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Funny that in later expansions they went even further with unit and civ names transiterated from the native languages. Like 70% of the Japanese unique units and techs were in Japanese LOL, coupled with abstruse icons. And people just ignore that. “AOE4 techs are easier to read and remember!”
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They truly need to issue a statement to the community soon with an apology, renewed plans for the future of the game, and a commitment to add the content, balance, communications, and QoL improvements they promised.
It’s literally not even asking for much, it really, truly isn’t.
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Credit where credit is due - at least for the eco upgrades at the Lumber Camp and Mining Camp, they updated the Tier 2 and 3 icons:
But yeah, these golden-silhouette icons bug me since the game’s beta.
While we’re at it, here are AoE 2’s and 3’s tier 2 icons for the wood upgrade:
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See, I’m the opposite. I’ve loved the gold motif since before release. Blue and gold is a classic “rich person” combo (royal purple doesn’t lend itself to colour palettes as well).
I definitely think the devs could do more to make things stand out (and they have been doing, slowly), but I see nothing wrong with the design / art direction itself.
The gold pips are consistent across pretty much every tiered research in the game. Not sure that was the best solution to it, but to anyone who’s played the game for more than five minutes, it’s absolutely readable.
Certainly more than having to memorise unique icons across the board, which is something that classic RTS games tend to struggle with (not a dig here at AoE III - it’s something a lot of RTS games in the 00s and late 90s struggled with r.e. iconography).
Ironically, changing the eco upgrade icons breaks this design, and makes the icons more dissimilar, rendering the point of the pips less relevant.
To be fair, as long as the icons look like they are related to say woodcutting, then combined with the pips, it still conveys “lumber technology of a certain tier”.
This is a better solution than only having a unique icon, or a shared icon with pips. Combining them makes a good balance between aesthetics and gameplay.
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Going back to the topic, have you guys now realized that the cancelled Baltic DLC would have been the ONLY regular “bread and butter” (in their own words) one, if not counting the AOMR DLC, they’ve planned in the past two years?
All the rest are strange “experiments”, reused assets, reduced contents, in other words, multiple “innovations” in the DLC format to reduce cost and/or sell stuff unrelated to the main game.
I’m not counting the AOM one because (1) it might be planned much earlier (2) making a new game’s first DLC an irregular one is too much.
The whole series needs to go back to its original course. We can accept slow, but stable support. WE could survive without this aggressive monetization. Then we could hope our game also receives what it should.
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I can’t talk about AoE4, because I never played it, (I find the medievel setting a bit overused in games, that is one of the reason I like AoE3, the setting feels fresher) but I played alot of AoE3 and a bit of Retold.
Honestly I prefer the 5-in-5 batch, that feels like I’m building an army, one class of soldiers finishing training at a time, whereas in Retold it feels like when you place a watering can under a faucet and have to wait until I have enought water for the watering can to be useful, also, kind of a pet peeve of mine; I like having a army number at a multiple of five.
I don’t understand why the Homecity mechanic was controversial, personaly it like something that was hated just because it was different then what players were used. For AoE3 at least I say it fits, you’re starting a colony and are receiving support from your homecity, I’d also say it offers the player more ways to play.
The snare I also don’t understand why it was controversial, for the AoE3 it makes sense, we are in a setting of gunpowder, and giving melee units a chance to keep other units from just kiting them to death everytime make sense (I think of it as a unit being woulded on the leg and not moving as fast), for a medievel setting though where most fighting is close quarters with swords or spears I understand why they didn’t include snaring.
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Dang, you are right. Looking at it, the last standard AOE2 dlc was in Oct 2023. AOE4’s first DLC was in Nov 2023 and I wouldn’t consider it standard since 2/3rds of the DLC were variants, and variants cleanly fit your description of “strange “experiments”, reused assets, reduced contents, in other words, multiple “innovations” in the DLC format to reduce cost and/or sell stuff unrelated to the main game.”
The studio has clearly lost the plot.
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Agree to disagree, especially as this is a tangent anyway (and you rightly want to get it back on topic).
Oh no. I just realized there was the Freyr DLC at day one, which makes only one civ having one additional major god and three minor gods exclusive to him.
So you see, most of their “innovations” are about breaking the game’s formats on the superficial level, so that they could avoid doing real innovations about gameplay and recycling past ones over and over again.
Those are not innovations, hear me people.
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There’s no point in keeping hope. They stopped caring about AOE3DE, see AOE1DE. Don’t waste your time on hope.
We must continue to fight. AOE3 is worth fighting for even if the current studio leadership is adamantly against it. The AOE2 community is in a full uproar and vowing boycotts, the AOE4 community is clearly displeased despite what the sycophants on the forums say (the cross DLC is rated “Mixed” on Steam), and AOE3 is in open rebellion.
The if the franchise community goes forth with communal action, particularly by boycotting all DLC, we can force real change. Other fandoms have done it before; just look at what happened with the Sonic movie.
Never give up, never surrender.
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What happened with sonic?
Remember back in 2019 when the first Sonic movie trailer came out and the Sonic design was cursed? The Character design was a uncanny valley blend with realistic teeth.
The fandom rose up in a riot, threatened a massive boycott, dominated social media, and the movie studio backed down, delayed the movie, and completely redid the CGI. It cost the studio tens of millions to do, but the movie ended up being a huge financial success with two sequels so far.
Fan pressure can work to the benefit of everyone, including the studio.
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I read it after you talked about Sonic, it made me lose hope. Reviews do nothing, no matter what happened. They still buy it no matter if it’s bad or good.
No I had no idea. But damn that’s an ugly hedgehog
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Don’t stop fighting. If not out of hope, then out of a desire for vengeance. AOE3 has survived abandonment before.
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