I once thought so too, but now AOE2 is already considered too complicated in the thread right next door XD.
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Coincidence that a veteran fan said it and not a new player. league of legends can afford to have dozens of champions and skills, because it is not a niche. aoe only goes to reaffirm what its genre, RTS, is, a true niche!
It’s a niche because companies behind rts dev teams screw up and derail the interest on rts years ago. happened with aoe 3 that is supposed to be an spin off initally but become an sequel that aoe 2 fans wasnt ready and initiate the aoe 2 centric dispute, sc2/wc3 by blizzard current situation and incompetence, relic since coh 2 and their p2w and buggy releases. Also being an moba doesnt mean it’s easy. Moba is more complicated than rts in timing, positioning and counter table around the dozen of heroes /champion/whatever… It’s almost like rts but with more action which could be a solution for rts games by an aproach to casuals or make it more frenetic. In aoe franchise aoeo did something with those quests, aom with reducing pop army size and making micro and each unit more valuable, aoe 3 with campaign and deck system. All those fun rhings are trown away in aoe 4 which is a shame. Let see if the the pup deal with some of those issues.
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yup those as I said those numbers are product of ms mismanagement and aoe 2 centric from players and recent focus on recent remakes. ty for proving my point
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I think this is reading into it too much, but more flavour is always nice. Regardless of how good or bad anyone thinks the original design is.
I also hope they build on naval gameplay after their (imo good) redesign of naval that was explicitly described as creating a stable platform for future experimentation.
About the upcoming season V, they said 'visual upgrades" and i was thinking if we finnaly see better textures for models , arrows animation and the siege crew and more zoom in options like AOE3DE (to see Battles more close).
It would be a new start for me and i would immediatly reinstall Aoe4.
Graphic and animation have always been for me the main problema.
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Tbh, I’ve never read this. I’m glad AoE 2 is since DE’s DLCs trying to proove people wrong that civs and stuff is always the same.
Yeah, it’s a whole thing…
Yes, in fact Robot Entertainment still exists…so I don’t know what a modern AoE made by them would be like 10 years after AoEO…
Yeah, that’s the only thing I’m interested in…besides new civs and campaigns obviously…
Yes, the entire saga always had its controversial games… AoE 1 (for being very archaic in its mechanics and pathfinding), AoE 2 (for wanting to type what happens with the saga), AoM (for its pop limitation and single use god powers and in EE for the Chinese expansion), AoE 3 (because of the decks, the campaigns, the limitation of buildings and now in 3 DE for being very “woke”), AoEO (because of its cartoony graphics and being very pay to win) and now AoE 4 (for going back to the Middle Ages and have outdated graphics from 10 years ago, in addition to wanting to appeal too much to the AoE 2 audience)…
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Yea, I’ll be the first to admit that I know that my expectations are far detached from what the developers are plotting, and these flowery words may stir images that they never intended. We’ll have to see the actual PUP to decide whether it is as exciting as it sounds, and if the developers are on the same page as us and vise versa.
In any case, I do hope that the upcoming changes will be going in the right direction.
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I agree!
I also prefer to zoom in and watch the battle.
It is so satisfying.
If they improve unit animations, and textures I will enjoy it a lot.
Let’s hope they heard us.
We’ll see if it’s really the case the developers strictly follow some brilliant “simple and intuitive” design principle (which may neither be one that the developers really follow, nor a brilliant one if it really exists, but people just say so), or it’s just because they haven’t finished all the most straightforward, most to-go design options for every game at the early stages of development.
I have seen so many examples where it is actually the latter.
Personally I think the asymmetry in AoE4 is in a nice place between AoE2 and AoE3. Adding a bit more would not be bad (and they seem to be doing so). At a certain point though complexity can get out of hand and complexity does not always provide depth.
I’ve had this exact thought. I’ve already seen people attribute changes or features they like to FE while Relic remains a useful scapegoat for the ones they don’t.
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There’s nothing specifically wrong with relic. My observation is that after 25 years, our franchise has a bazillion little elements and styles and design rules. Nobody can parachute in and start designing a game that matches them, let alone feels like a natural extensions of them, without spending lots of unpaid time studying and marinating in our games. Dropping a few hundred hours into aoe2 is simply not enough. Hubris may tell outside devs that they already know enough, but they just don’t. Respectfully, they just don’t.
The unfair advantage that FE has over Relic and over the people in charge of World’s Edge, for that matter, is that FE is comprised of diehard fans of the franchise who then became game designers. That’s not an insurmountable obstacle, but it understandably takes a long time for the others to catch up.
Hopefully the others have caught up. Outsiders are always welcome in our happy community. Particularly those who do their homework and appreciate the reasons we all love this place so much.
Relic has been working on aoe4 for six years. Just yesterday they finally renamed the Man-at-Arms unit in some civs that historically never had one. That’s progress. I have no idea how on earth it took six years, but let’s take a minute and at least appreciate the baby steps.
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it feels like the game is more rushed on AOE4. its quite sad really, they had a great chance revive this franchise and be more successful than any previous age game and the youtube viewers count showed.
had they not release half assed/ incomplete game and make customer playtest for them and wait 1+ year for fixes, this might have had the potential to replace SC2.
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And please respect the previous games that made AoEIV possible. You don’t have to play them but at least show them the respect they deserve. We have enough tribalism in the community as it is.
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I believe it feels rushed because they started building an Age game before they knew what an Age game was. It’s easy to build an rts game set in the Middle Ages. It’s a whole other task to build it to feel like an Age of Empires game.
This is why architects exist. Better to build it once and build it right.
A wise man once said, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” Relic just jumped right in without a sharp axe.
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No offense intended, but I don’t think many folks here really understands what it takes to “build something right”, when it comes to this kind of thing specifically.
It’s good to be that idealistic, and it’s good for anyone to tell the devs how to build it right. But engineering doesn’t really work like that in a production environment, in the slightest. Ideas meet reality.
It’s funny to me, because I know many Relic devs (historically) have been longtime RTS genre fans, and how many different RTS games they’ve played (including, specifically, the AoE franchise). I’d say that they were simply attempting to play to their strengths when building the core of the game.
I think the game could’ve done with more time in the oven, but that’s true of most games. The nature of the business rushes games out, to the game’s detriment, the devs’ detriment, and to our detriment. So that kinda goes without saying (for me). But “build it once and build it right” isn’t how software works. Software is iterative. Always has been. Even AoE is (within each iteration in the franchise).
Would anyone want to go back to vanilla AoE II at release? Or even III? Or do we agree that the patches, support and expansions they all received helped build them into the things we remember nowadays?
It’s very obvious that the devs consider some things core to AoE IV. The blue-and-gold motif, for example. Like it or hate it, considering how much else they’ve changed, that hasn’t. They’ve threaded that throughout the product, marketing, even places like these forums. It’s a brand, coherent (in a good way).
Another thing would be the setting. Very AoE II-inspired. Good and bad. Sensible and not? I think the setting is sensible, but I think more unique units, more flavour, all goes a long way.
These decisions are core decisions. Architected; built. However you want to call it. The weaknesses in the devs’ end product (at release) are a mix of technical debt (no remappable hotkeys in any of their past games, for example) and intentional choice (catering to competitive / ranked play with a lot of their post-release support).
I think plenty of people know what an Age game is. But are we all on the same page? There’s a reason (someone mentioned tribalism) why we all have our favourite iterations, and for all the stereotypes (valid or otherwise) of AoE II players I’ve seen, there’s also a group identity that I can roughly describe as “anti-AoE II”. And that causes friction, because this game obviously chose II for its base inspiration.
It’s funny that we keep coming back to that as a negative, but at the same time the success of AoE II is thrown at Relic (and people who like AoE IV) whenever “how to do well” comes up.
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I think I mentioned this in another post recently but the way I look at AoEIV is like a house. The foundation is heavily inspired by AoE2 for good reason as it remains the most popular game of the series so automatically it offers a great template to revitalize the AoE brand. Then you have the walls of AoE3 being built as what we’re seeing at this very moment (unique units, landmarks, mechanics, etc. A tad of AoM in some of the religious units.
Relic has managed to do all this while keeping the identity of AoEIV as its own game. We can argue till the cows come home about the initial vision Relic was aiming for and what kind of playerbase it was meant to attract but I’ve seen them start to branch out now and that is why I want the game to have a long enough life cycle where those branches are fully realized.
I’m talking about houses and now trees but I hope you get what I’m trying to say.
I was pretty harsh towards AoEIV when it came out but I have softened quite a bit and while I still haven’t played the game in over a year I’m just waiting for a time when I feel like I can give the game a 2nd shot. Every AoE game that I have played has offered me something and I’m hoping with time AoEIV will do the same. Those 16 hours I put into the game when it first released left me feeling rather hollow.
As for the anti-AoE2 sentiment, I think that has a lot to do with a segment of the playerbase itself and not the game. Things used to get pretty toxic back in the day and it wasn’t coming from AoM, AoE3, and AoEO players. It still flares up on occasion (Viper getting backlash for streaming AoE3DE for example) It saddens and angers me when I hear prominent AoEIV streamers repeat this toxicity without having any involvement in the AoE games beyond the newest one. Or people that want those older games to die and be replaced for the sole benefit of AoEIV.
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That is your opinion and not the majority. RTS is niche for 2 reasons:
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It’s not very social, it focuses a lot on 1vs1.
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The skill floor is very high and you have to invest a lot of time to understand something of the game.
Until they improve that, the genre will never be popular.
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