I’ve had the most fun playing the AOE:IV campaigns (not the DLC ones) out of any of the AOE instalments by a mile. The real life cinematics mixed with historically accurate educational content was a great spin on the franchise and made the gameplay much more immersive.
However, most of the time I play AOE it is with friends and family playing long custom MP games. This is where AOE:IV is absolutely atrocious and why we have gone back to AOE2:DE.
The main gripes:
Way less features for customizing the game than AOE2 - How do you create a new instalment all these years later and actually LOSE features? The lack of ability to set treaty times, regicide and conquest, even to choose your pop limits! (not to mention being capped at 200).
No Pause or Save/Load game function in-game - This is actually the worst of them all, for long session where we like to play on extreme AI with 90 min treaties. The lack of ability to save/load or even pause the game is a mindboggling choice. Especially, again, when this feature was available in instalments prior.
Reliance on MODS - I feel like all games these days just releasing their game in a terrible state and expect the modding community to take over. This seems to be the case with AOE:IV as there are a suite of mods that aim to increase the problems outlined in point 1. However, these mods end up breaking the game, outlined below in point 4.
BUGS - From de-synch errors causing our MP game to become unplayable after 2 hours of playing, to modded custom pop limits, or even the base-game 200 pop with 8 teams breaking the AI pathing system so much that you cannot move your armies anymore. This game is riddled with so many game-breaking bugs that the thought of starting a huge MP campaign gives us anxiety, as we know it’s only a matter of time before the game breaks and we can’t finish it.
Lack of post-game stats - The one time out of five that we actually were able to finish a game, we were met with such lacking end-game stats that we had no desire to play again. This is where AOE2:DE shines. We love playing co-operatively with each other against AI and the real battle against each other is who can get the highest team score, though we always sit there for a while comparing each category against each other.
As listed in point 5, out of the 5 times we have tried to play this game together, 4 of them broke. AI pathing and desync errors being the cause each time. With the inability to load it back up, we have given up completely and have gone back to AOE2:DE, because after 3 years of release, it’s clear these issues will never be fixed.
Aside from this, we actually really want to love AOE:IV. Putting troops on walls, the updated graphics, the differences in how each race plays- we do want to love it. However, not enough effort has been put in to allow us to play the game the way we have enjoyed playing it for the past 20 years.
You can’t set treaty times at all. no true conquest, destroying landmarks is as close as you can get, no options to change pop limits, and as for the regicide comment. If it’s restricted to quickplay FFA then that is far from what I’m talking about.
I hope I’m wrong about this and more settings are just hidden under my nose somewhere, if I’m wrong please let me know.
Actually, Advanced Game Settings is a MOD. It has nothing to do with the base game and furthermore, is no longer being supported by its creator (see link) due to dev choices.
Thus bringing us back to point 1 and point 3, once again.
There is absolutely no desync in age4, never experienced that. They are probably because of your mods.Try uninstalling them
I think they plan on adding the pause feature next patch.
For game stats go on aoe4world.com you can see stats about each of your games if you search for your account.
Hopefully they will add more customization for pop and game modes. They have been doing it slowly they added the king mode in recent season (isn’t that the same as regicide?). You’re comparing with a game more than 20 years old with tons of expansion of course they had more time to add features.
I guess you were not around when there was not even an option to pick your player color.
The game is horrible overall, not just as a MP game. Including the campaigns, which are the least immersive imo and look like they were made on a budget. Quality (and also expensive) cinematics are prerendered computer graphics. Videotaping real-life locations with a drone screams cheap. And ironically, all of AoM’s campaign cinematics are rendered on the fly using just the game’s engine - which should be even cheaper - and it’s still a million times more immersive and interesting than AoEIV’s.
I’m sure that travelling around the world and taking videos was great fun for the team but perhaps not so much for the player. Relic’s/World’s Edge(?) philosophy around AoEIV was day and night compared to what Ensemble did and to everything that made these games great.
And to quote Bruce Shelley on that, when during an internal microsoft meeting Bill Gates asked on making Age of Empires an educational product, he literally answered
“I don’ think so, it won’t go anywhere unless we entertain people first”
(…) “If you build in too much historic detail, you run the risk of making the game obtuse. The players should have the fun. Not the designers or researchers. We are trying to entertain people, not impress them with our scholarship”
They sure had fun travelling and researching and videotaping, I know I would! Until at least they laid off 20%? 30%? of their workforce?
Besides… you can even find free educational content on youtube about all of these events that would surprise you by its quality and immersiveness!
As someone else put it perfectly elsewhere, the game is creatively bankrupt, in everything.
I didn’t have mods installed when we desync’d. I think the desync occured because I kept hitting ESC to try and pause the game, whenever I hit ESC it caused a bit of lag each time which I imagine is what contributed to it.
Those AOE4world.com stats aren’t the best. They look like they’re mostly for competitive not social. And it looks like the only stats you can see are account stats. Not game stats like how many relics you had or how many resources you farmed etc…
Real video recording are definitely more expensive than game rendering. Not sure why you think it’s cheaper. It’s definitely not. It’s even the reason why they didn’t do it for the expansion campaign because of lack of budget and many people in the reviews said they missed that. So people really liked the real-life documentary cinematics and I think they were great.
My friends did this for their wedding. Surprisingly, as is often the case when people on the Internet speak about something they know nothing about - not cheap!
Your friend’s wedding budget for videotaping is so much comparable to CGI cinematics. What a ridiculous statement.
Is this some kind of weird projection you decided to do here? I’m very rarely making such absolute statements but you’re ouright, flat out, ignorant on the topic you decided this time to advocate the game about. Which is not really an issue on a public forum, but becomes an issue when such ignorance is touted so blatantly and arrogantly.
Do you have at least remotely an idea of what CGI cinematics entail? 3D modelers, animators, texture artists, riggers, lighting artists, compositors… do you have any idea of the cost of such professionals? Are you aware of the production cycle of CGI? Starting from concept art and going up to compositing and pre preprocessing? Putting aside the costs associated with project management and coordination among departments. Licensing of software for these tasks, especially for large teams, just that alone is probably already exceeding drone videoing. Render farms? Maintenance of the render farms? storage solutions? rendering time? Which for high quality content for something like the campaigns could take from days to weeks.
In the definitely cheap drone footage, the environment already exists, CGI requires everything to be created from scratch or through expensive asset libraries. Then you have to add complex visual effects like particle systems, fluid simulations, explosions… which require additional expertise, color grading, sound effects or voicovers will also be necessary.
Unsurprusingly, as is often the case with random apologists on this forum, they have no clue what’s coming out of their keyboard. It’s appalling that this comparison is even a matter of debate but that’s only the case because people tend to express their opinions on things that do not have the slightest clue about, and also have the audacity to do it so brazenly. The same goes for the VoidMaker5560 above, whose understanding of what he is saying is definitely void. This apologist attitude - often by newcomers who are satisfied by a substandard AoE - is the worst thing that has happened to these forums.
UPDATE: Just tried playing tonight. 2 and a half hours into a NO MODS custom dominion multiplayer game with my partner who is on the same damn network as me, and this error occurs:
Then that’s it. Game over. Not choice to reload a saved version or anything. 2 and a half hours down the drain. This game is officially a piece of shit and I’m done with it.
No, I compared it to you talking about videotaping real-life locations with a drone.
I responded to nothing about CGI.
No, you called something cheap despite evidently having no idea about the costs. You are, factually, being wrong.
If you’re comparing CGI to drone flyovers, that isn’t remotely what I was talking about, and AoE IV’s campaigns features a bunch of animated pieces to boot.
If your argument is that you prefer CGI, or that you think CGI is indicative of a higher cost investment, then just say that. Instead of whining about “apologists” because you yourself were called out for faulty assumptions.
