I’ve also read the news in gaming industry about Battlefield 2042 already dropping below Battlefield V player count, and with that it’s being regarded as a big flop of a game. Steam is actually offering refunds for the game outside it’s official guidelines.
So I decided to check AoE IV and AoE II:DE player counter on Steam and guess what? AoE IV has less players now than AoE 2.
What does this mean, is the game really dying already? People waiting for fixes? Personally I feel it’s a shame, hopefully it wakes up the publisher to allow devs to bring in more fixes.
Grande coisa isso, normalmente fico tempos sem jogar algo e nao jogo nada, gasto meu tempo com outros entretenimentos. O jogo não tem algo que te segure por muito tempo e infelizmente não creio que haja muito a ser feito pra consertar
I think this video explains really well the current issues the game is having and why some players are leaving.
I love this game and I still have loads of fun with it, but I do agree a lot with what he was saying.
This game still have potential to be great, but it all depends on the devs decisions from here and it’s also up to us as players to provide constructive feedback in a manner so that we are taken seriously by the devs rather than posting things that will just look like childish rants, many criticisms here are greatly valid points but worded in ways that makes it more likely to be ignored. I am confident this game will pick its numbers up once issues are fixed and features are added, but patches and hotfixes need to statt coming much quicker otherwise problems like what we are having will start to seriously hurt the game.
There is one giant thing missing in AoE4.
Custom content.
No custom Random Maps.
No custom Scenarios.
No custom Campaigns.
No Mods.
AoE2DE basically already has multiple mods included and also man custom Random Maps, custom Scenarios and lot’s of custom Campaigns.
AoE2DE has it’s origin in a mod and adds a lot to AoE2.
AoE4 has nothing but a handful of maps and 4 campaigns.
But yet it took multiple months for the player numbers to drop down below AoE2DE.
For anyone who isn’t into competitive multiplayer the game doesn’t have much to offer yet.
Depending on how the modding tools will end up be like could fundamentally change how people play this game.
I feel like AoE4 might be a bit like CS:GO, it needs to overcome it’s starting difficulties to really take of.
Most people thought CS:GO was dead in the first year when it dropped blow CS 1.6 and CSS numbers. Not it’s 1. on Steam.
It does mean AOE2 offers more varied gameplay, since you can switch between custom content, scenarios, custom matches with special modes and conditions etc.
In AOE4 you have:
You have fun (subjective) campaign with no replay value.
You have skirmish battles against an AI that is no fun to play against (easy too hard, hard too easy, inconsistent attacks and always reevaluating their attacks/retreating make them very boring to watch as well).
No Lobby customization to mix things up.
Both skirmish and multiplayer suffer from bugged factions.
It’s just a really bad developer that on top of all the mistakes they make, also doesn’t communicate well. When people (including me) started to realize they can’t even do basic maths, they all left. Personally I went back to SC2.
AoE4 is an unfinished game that is still missing some very basic content (random civ, random map, customizable colors, etc etc) that has been standard in every AoE game to date; it’s also notably more buggy and unpolished than AoE2. AoE2 DE is a complete game that’s withstood the test of time quite well.
We’re in uncharted territory with the way games are released prior to completion now. It’s possible that once AoE4 reaches its completed state, it will draw many of those players back to it; games like Street Fighter 5 were released early in a state that was less than acceptable to many players, but over the course of years were refined into something genre-defining.
It’s hard to know for sure what the developers have in mind for AoE4, though the AOE series has a history of being built on over long periods of time, with additional civs and even structural changes added to games over time (think of AOE3 and its two expansions) so it’s very likely that whatever we have a year from now will be much better than what currently exists imo.
It’s too early to die, the game was too much fun for many people. I think besides the natural decrease of players after a big release, most took a break and will come back to at least checkout the new patches. So relic has some time bought with a good core, but time is still working against them to finish the game.
Looking at the steam charts…this isnt a “dying game”. People are just waiting for a patch, anything to change the meta. You see the same thing with AoE2 DE as well. Hype around patches and updates that slowly goes down and back to the core group of players. Nothing in the steam chart should make you worry as an AoE4 player. This isnt BF 2042. There is still a lot of content coming for AoE4 and a lot of changes, just taking time.
15,000 players isnt dying.
I am one of those players who is waiting on a balance change to jump back in. I do think they need to be quicker with bugs and adjustments. But it was also the holidays.
I am confident AoE4 will find a core and healthy audience much like AoE2 has today.
But guys… devs just finished their vacations. And the company decided to give them the holydays, even in the current state of the game. That’s something I absolutely praise.
The gaming industry context is terrible for customers and for developers. Games are launched “unfinished” because investors just want to see the sales numbers go up, and they only care about customer experience if the sales start to drop. Devs have to work a lot to meet ridiculous deadlines. And now they had their vacations. A deserved one, I gotta add.
Stop saying the devs are the villains here. They are just inside an industry that don’t really care about them, about the customer or about the game. Let them rest and be patient with it.
I see a lot of people telling that would rather wait AoE 4 to lauch as a complete game, with less bugs, exploits and more content, but can’t sit and wait for things to get done in a pace that doesn’t suck people’s souls out.
Yeah it’s a good video. And it doesn’t even mention the bugs that are taking forever to be fixed. To me that’s an important reason why I stopped playing as well. And of course, you can say these just need time to be ironed out, but the fact that so many crazy bugs actually made it live for so long made me lose any trust in this developer. Sometimes it feels like this community is trying to teach Relic / Microsoft how to run a rts game in 2021/2022 and that’s just crazy to me as it’s one of the most expensive titles I bought recently.
I don’t think the game is dying, but it’s going to take a significant amount of time to turn it around from here. It would have been much easier to hold onto the initial player base if it had released later, in a better state. Bringing players back to the game once they’ve left will be much harder, because everyone is looking for different improvements, so they’ll never all come back at the same time and it will be hard to re-gain that large player mass.
I feel that 4 can, in time, become more appealing than 2, it’s just a long way off yet. I already find the walls annoying in 2, how they’re discontinuous with changing terrain, vs 4’s continuous walls, and the lower frame rate unit animations in 2 annoy me, having got used to the higher frame rate animations in 4. They just need to make it so that everything about the game is at least as good as the same elements in 2. “Just”. It’s going to take a long time, because there’s a heck of a lot to do to get to that stage.
And yet another confirmation in a mountain of evidence. Delhi and Abbasid are together the worst civilizations in AoE4, Mongols the best, far. Extremely suspicious.
Would be interesting to see the xbox game pass statistics. Are there any sources for that yet?
I’d argue that the crowd that didn’t pay 60-80€ or more would be less pissed about the current unfinished state. I mean that has to be one of the benefits of offering a full games catalogue for a monthly price: People can bounce between different games and never feel like they paid too much (no matter how mediocre the individual games are).
I wouldn’t say I lost my trust on the devs though because ausse also mentioned on his video about the certification process which has to do with Microsoft and it delays the release of patches. Also we have to consider that we had Christmas and new year and many of the devs were on holiday.
