Well, bad news. Director of aoe 4 Quinn Duffy, who was responsible for right course of game decided left relic after nearly 24 years work at relic.
This is also makes me worry that there won’t be long support of game, especially when same thing happened after Dow 3 lost their director too and game became abandoned ASAP.
Proof:
https://ca.linkedin.com/in/quinn-duffy
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IS THE END OF THIS UNFINISHED GAME… ^^
nobody can change my opinion!
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Saying something and doing something are completely different.
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So you’re saying there’s a job opening? 
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This is quite big news (Quinn Duffy and Adam Isgreen were in highest decision making positions for AoE4), but as much as I respect him and he seems like a genuinely nice person, unfortunately I don’t think he was a good fit for a real time strategy game like AoE, where the multiplayer and competitive component is key. I could see his positive impact in the good single player content AoE4 shipped with, but at the same time, knowing how casual he is as a gamer after listening to how he plays in a podcast not using hotkeys and taking his time etc, he was very likely not the right person to understand the importance of lets say hitboxes for an example out of many. This immediatly sent me back to that glassdoor review where a Relic employee was complaining about the people in decision making positions there being out of touch.
I do hope he left because he found a better job and is doing well.
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24 year a long time.
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Now we know why …
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Oh crap. Quinn is one of the good ones. I wish him the world.
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Different topic, but how are hitboxes related exclusively to competitive multiplayer?
I mostly play single player against AI or campaigns and the hitboxes in AoE4 have been … inconvenient. There are many things that feel a little sluggish and unresponsive in this game, that this is bad not just tor multiplayer. It affects single player and non-competitive multiplayer too.
At the same time, I quite like the hotkey system in AoE4. Sure it would be good to have people be able to customize it for themselves, but they work fine for me.
This is normal. After a product ends, people who have been around for a long time look for something new.
He isn’t the only one working on AoE4. They all have heard our complaints.
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Don’t know much about the director and his direct impact on the game but i don’t think the game will lose support, microsoft has been investing a lot of money reviving his franchises to let them just die; pretty sure relic will continue but there is other studios that can work with aoe in case relic no longer does like creative asembly did for Halo wars 2 or in the worst case World´s edge can take the lead.
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“Casual as a gamer”
Do you know that age 2 game director was a board game designer? Do you know that he barely played the game and he was even more casual? Do you think that game directos needs to be pro gamers? You talk no sense.
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I don’t see why not using hot keys matters. I don’t use them and I do fine in multiplayer
You are the one talking non sense because you didn’t understand what I said. I will try to explain it once again. While game designers are not pro-gamers, they still need to understand the competitive side very well in this day and age, and work with such gamers. Age of Empires 1 and 2 were made after closely inspecting the market where C&C and Warcraft reigned supreme, and they tried to understand why those games were successful and how can they replicate those aspects.
Quinn Duffy is dangerously casual for such a title and that would imply him trying to at least understand the necessary machanics and features in such a game which need to be a priority, in order for that not to be a problem and not see his casual mindset into the actual game. Unfortunately we can all see this (his understanding of such aspects) did not reflect into the actual game, as much as you say it didn’t matter.
They did kinda try for the first time in their careers with this title, probably pushed by Microsoft/World’s Edge, but unfortunately they havent got the elements which make a competitive RTS playable right. Have in mind that AoE4 and CoH3 are the first 2 games in Relic’s history that have some sort of hotkey customisation, they simply were too out of touch to understand this was a necessity these days. They were actually caught by surprise, in an interview years ago they said they now have no choice but to provide such elements for competitive play and they are trying to figure out how to do it. Ofc hotkeys are just an example, it’s the same with not being able to view the map after a game, no patrol function etc. It’s things that to a casual gamer designer might not come into mind, they don’t even notice the lack of these features. These are the things which that Relic employee was complaining about in the company when AoE4 was just announced, and the fact that such people in charge were also very rigid and hard to argue with.
The development of AoE2 was a whooooole different story with everybody in the team contributing.
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Quinn has been also heavily involved in CoH throughout his time at Relic, which has a large multiplayer presence. So, uh, I don’t think your opinion reflects reality at all.
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Nah, I wouldnt say CoH has a large multiplayer presence, definitely not in the ranks of AoE and SC.
There are other people dedicated to gameplay balance and competitive… you have no clue what you are talking, many of the best RTS ever made has nothing to do with competitive devs.
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So I have “no clue” what I’m talking about, but in the meantime people went through the SP content for AoE4 and whats left is mainly the PvP scene, and here we are with AoE2 having more players now. Hmm, I wonder why many didnt stick with the PvP in AoE4.
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COH is lived since 2006, for 16 years… Age2 was dead many years ago when RTS genre started to die and the only RTS titles were sc2 and coh and resurrected with HD and DE editions, those games are pretty new. if COH were designed by a pro gamer probably that game won’t have the amazing mechanics many RTS can only dream about.
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Nah, you are the one with no clue, AoE2 never died, it always thrived. So the only RTS games with decent player numbers right now are AoE2DE and SC2. While AoE4 is also there atm, it’s still dropping every week. Before this (HD and DE) they were still AoE2-gamepark-igz-voobly and SC2, the RTS games with meaningful concurrent players. What do these games have in common besides solid gameplay? Proper QoL features designed especially for competitive play and streaming. Although a very fine game, CoH1 had very low player numbers remaining, since it was not designed in such a way.
And I’m not saying it should be designed by “a pro-gamer”, but by people with understanding of such aspects in mind.
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