Enjoy 
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Good video, I like how thorough he is.
Nice to see a review which goes heavy on the technical side. However Im not pleased to find out that AoE4 goes heavy on 1 core and uses mostly 4. With this strong emphasis on optimisation to the point they even went ahead with lower detailed graphics, I was hoping this was to be the game’s strong point.
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The review is okay but you really notice that sometimes he has no idea what he is talking about and is straight up contradicting himself.
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The documentary stuff is beeing critizised heavily with “too sterile” and “lack of immersion” without any character dialogues and no other voice but the narrator by pretty much every review at this point while he’s saying exactly this distance and lack of characters to follow/identify with is the reason why it’s so immersive.
That’s just straight up wrong. -
He’s praising Age4 for great visual design easy unit distinction cause of clear visuals and visual responsiveness.
The lack of visual clarity always was and still is a heavy critizism of Age4 since with environmental objects such as taller grass and overusage of “team colour” textures, it becomes impossible to tell units such as imperial official, villager, spearman, archer apart.
So that’s also just wrong.
The only clear thing is TC and houses from other buildings and cav from inf and maybe prelates cause their distinct white robes. -
He’s saying that this Age is one of the more performant Ages that aims at lower end systems, but instantly critizises the game 2 topics after in mesurements, that the ryzen 5 3600 (modern 6 core) is already falling at 70-80fps in static watching 1v1 scenarios with an extremely unoptimized client cause of no use of the dx12 pipelining.
The game IS NOT aimed at low end systems, but modern systems which have a 4-5 year old cpu at max.
ESPECIALLY when you want to play anything beyond 1v1 in 60 fps.
I still love DF and follow them for years because of the good graphs and visual mesurements they are putting on screen, especially in comparison to other stuff they mesured before.
But honest to god, sadly game reviewing is not their strength at all…
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Isn’t that probably a result of them catering to weaker cards though? Older ones that may have less cores.
Oh, so it’s the other way around, they didnt develop the game towards new hardware capabilities 
Pretty much. We know they’ve tried to keep the system requirements low. If it needs 6 cores or something to run well then that wouldn’t work.
I see, but why not make the game run on more cores when choosing max or ultra settings?
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It depends which reviews you read - there are many others besides DF that found the campaigns and mini-docs engaging and immersive. It’s a pretty subjective aspect to a review to start with though.
I think this may just be you - or people unused to playing/watching the game much. Each of those examples look quite distinct to me. Camel archer vs camel swordsman is one that could be improved.
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Huh? That’s exactly what Digital Foundry praise the game for, the campaigns. Have we watched different videos?
Well at that point he was talking about CPU not GPU, so I’m not sure max or ultra settings would make a difference.
This review kinda worries me: Since the CPU (not using multiple Cores) and GPU (fps drastically going down when moving the camera) utilization is not optimal at all, I guess if this game launched with “next-gen” graphics almost no one could play it.
Well normally post-launch these things might get fixed, but it could indicate that the devs really were in a hurry to finish this game timely since most feedback, scenario editor and other things will come later.
Was Microsoft unwilling to give the devs more time?
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I think a game needs to be built from the ground up to use multiple cores properly, no? Dont think it cant be patched later on.
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True. Depends on how the engine handles it, don’t know if they left that feature completely out of their current Essence Engine iteration or didn’t have the time to configure it properly. We will see.