usually i don’t reply and just watch the thread burn but i’ll put my 2 cents here, tsuda has a point, if your game is well made it’ll see success, aoe4 worked well for people that didn’t have their senses calibrated by older aoe or RTS like starcraft, but anyone that had their senses precalibrated quickly noticed missing stuff and potential/actual issues throughout, major one being game launching as early access for lack of better way to put it, now big bit here is, what is considered a success by publishers, is it 10k concurrent players, 20k, 50k, higher,… this question should’ve been answered before smt is called a failure
another tidbit, even flops like DOWIII may contain elements that the next product in the dev pipeline would benefit from, in case of DOWIII, feature that would help aoe4 is the unit selection panel being basically aoe2DE system, with blizzard style ctrl/shift behaviour, but relic sadly didn’t incorporate this into aoe4, and if anyone says aoe2 style unit selection screen doesn’t work in rts with no selection limit, just play SCII for a bit then come back when you get that it can be done
but you think that niche means that is not sucesfull or not worth the investment
I fundamentally disagree with this. In any entertainment medium, success is down to money earned at the time. This doesn’t necessarily correlate with it being well made, or even good. We have cult classics in film (and TV) the same as we do in video games. Things that were recieved poorly, or simply didn’t sell, despite actually being good in ways that weren’t appreciated for some time after.
Here, imo, we have too many people are attempting to link “success” with “good”, when the former is sales converted into retention, and the latter is opinion. We can like bad things. I get accused of that all the time. But the flipside is true. People can dislike good things. And similar sunk cost fallacies apply. “you’re blind to the faults in the game” has its opposite in people failing to recognise a game’s strengths.
We can speculate about a theoretical bigger success all we want, but Age IV has been successful. To the extent that some people have had to invent reasons why (nostalgia, “kids these days”, and more offensive generalisations besides), because it didn’t match their dire predictions about how they claimed the game would do.
The fact that folks like Tsuda have to compare DoW III (which was down to under 1000 concurrent players in less than a year) and Age IV (more than ten times that on average, a year and a half out from release), is laughable. Pure and simple.
the problem with aoe is thast when a bad game is sucessful its model is copy pasted on future aoe. Ths one is when the old audience and the franchise will die because is driven by money as you said. Thats what I can said if aoe 4 is succesful because we don’t know the costs and tourneys revenue which was poor recently in audience compared to what is used to be on the first ones. The comparative to dow3 is viable because it was the last relic work at the time and showed how they manage their games which showed a big red flag and like its previous work it went like that one on aoe 4. pure and simple.
That’s fine. It’s just a game after all.
I don’t think it’s less interesting. I come from playing mostly aoe3 (since 2005) which has the most complex and unique civs of all the games but since I bought aoe4 I’m really enjoying the game. It is a lot less complex than aoe3 and for that reason I thought it might be boring but the civs have just enough uniqueness in units/techs/landmarks etc that it just works and they’re different enough from each other that each civ is fun to play.
too low. Also gives steam charts veracity. Agame like aoe 4 should gather 20k+ players
AoE2 DE is a niche, bigger than 4 currently, but niche.
RTS are a small niche, including SC2.
Yes, I think, the same… AoE 4 has potential if the devs (or at least FE) do things right…
Relic can do much better with its engine. For this reason i would like to see a graphic DLC.
For me COH3 looks really good
Because it can do more with its infantry because there are less in any given match.
I also hope that the developers continue to invest in improving this game technically. But it’s not “the devs can do much better with the engine”. It’s “CoH 3 has smaller armies”. That’s the reason.
I’m spending good words for Relic, don’t i?
Relic is full of good people, but I respectfully hope the franchise moves away from hiring outside developers and towards focusing development on FE, CaptureAge, and any other companies of homegrown talent.
Here we go back to the same old paradox.
A: R___c can do better than this.
B: No R____c cannot.
Question: who is defending R___c?
I do too, for no other reason that the next time a choice is made (that gets a bit of outspoken backlash), folks won’t be able to blame “outsiders” and will actually have to try and rationalise said choice in a more constructive way.
Again, here, I look at the Definitive Editions, which have both had their fair share of issues and controversial decisions (one being super recent, even).
Given that you can’t be talking about anyone else other than me, this answers itself. Old habits die hard though, eh? 
Let me pose a simple maths problem to you. It’s oversimplified, but hopefully it does the job:
Game A and Game B, both using the same engine, have a limit of 1 million polys per frame, and units in game A cost 500 polys each, and units in game B cost 1000 polys each. Game A has a population cap of 2000 and Game B has a population cap of 1000.
In this simplification, “polys” means “how good a unit looks”.
What happens if the polys per unit in Game A is increased from 500 to 1000?
That said: this doesn’t mean I think the devs can’t make AoE IV look better. That’s not the argument. The argument is “why can’t units look as good in Age IV as they can in CoH 3”.
Oops, didn’t mean to double post. My bad.
First of all, the assumption that “both AOE4 and COH3 have already reached the hard maximum number of poly imposed by the engine” is your invention.
I did say it was a simplification. But generally, games are optimised for the widest audience possible (this is just an economics thing - a thing I think we can both agree on is that the corporate Powers That Be like maximising potential sales).
So there will be a hard limit on the minimum spec hardware in terms of what can be rendered (I haven’t even checked what CoH 3’s are - I’m assuming higher than Age IV’s though).
They’re both using (for the most part) the same engine. So we can assume, whatever the limits are, they’re reasonably similar. In one, we have less units, and more detail. In the other we have more units (not necessarily variety, just count) and less detail.
Maybe they can both have more detail left. That’s possible. What I’m saying is whatever the limit is, CoH 3 uses more of it for the level of detail its units have, and Age IV lets the player build more units. At some point, it becomes a trade-off.
Feel free to disagree. Factually, all games have a per-frame limit in what they can render. Factually, Relic have in the past explained in previous games how the smaller scale enables greater fidelity. Sadly I don’t know what sources survive for those statements.
Mine is a simplification too.
And now you need to prove “both AOE4 and COH3 have reached the hard maximum of number of poly imposed by engine and the ‘widest audience’s’ average hardware configurations”.