Well, this is what you get for keep the game so secret, as if it were some sort of nuclear launch code hack algorithm or something. It’s almost ridiculous how the beta stages were treated, not nearly enough to provide decent feedback.
Most people were so shocked by the graphics that balance didn’t even come to mind.
How so? AOE II and IV usually have about equal numbers at peak on Steam, then there are all the people playing AOE IV via Gamepass to easily put it way past AOE II.
Or people who plays aoe2 with gamepass to easily put it way past AOE 4 or not.
Do not make statement without data. You can “check” some numbers with open datasource.
Data taken from aoeiv and aoe2 net, so it includes only players who played in last month, and who played at least 10+ games to recieve rank.
**2vs2 and 3vs3 are different game modes for aoe4 but intersection should be almost 90%
Try to check ur info with some arguments, not because u want it.
while I might agree with you on bugs, abandonment etc. I want to point out that devs != publishers.
Publishers have the money. Devs are the muscle. Sometimes pivotal ideas come from the publishers, sometimes from the devs’ side or their managerial part.
I can’t believe people still conflate these two. This leads me to question your counter-argument to the ‘audio bug’ workaround mentioned by @GorbMort
If this game gets abandoned it will be because of Microsoft. And honestly I can’t believe this will happen. SEGA on the other hand has been downsizing for years now.
And yes, I’m also aware of the disaster release of dawn of war iii. But that’s not on Relic per se (if they were too incompetent then SEGA should’ve been more careful during the hiring/buying new project process).
I also can’t believe how many people don’t understand this!!
As long as Microsoft keep paying for a dedicated team of developers from relic, relic will continue working full time on the game.
This happen when you showing and releasing a game with a mediocre graphic After the beautiful AOE3de.
I said It sometime ago and i feel to confirm my impression After played all the alpha version of CoH3: Aoe4 seems developed by the less talented team into Relic. CoH3 shows much many Interesting features, a new Dynamic campaign, the last version of Essence Engine with new generations effects and animations and more.
Oh here we go again. Another genius commenting on the sound bug. It’s still existing - watching elite mod Indric casts, people still have it LOL… even a half brain monkey would try every option available in fixing this decade-old bug the moment it was known so his “solution” is laughable and even proposing it just shows he, like you, has no idea what it is.
When the same company repeatedly abandons games with game breaking bugs, it’s not really all on the publishers, it’s the mentality of the developers. They love making new games with interesting mechanics. I respect them for that. But they’re also bad at maintaining their existing games (other than CoH). Publishers, SEGA especially, are fairly forgiving with their RTS developers and rarely intervene, look at Creative Assembly and their plethora of total war games, all clones of the original Rome Total War. Look at what they did with Rome: 2, overhauled two times, and finally met all what they promised in 2013. Has Relic done anything such? No. It’s not their thing, denying this and blaming everything on the publisher is like denying Bioware or Dice fault of the mediocre performances of their recent games and blaming everything on EA, it doesn’t make any sense.
It’s Indrid, by the by. Didn’t even realise he was still casting, I thought he retired from it. It’s been a few years, mind you.
The workaround I posted works. Maybe it doesn’t work all the time, sure. But people need to try something before knocking it, and it doesn’t look like you have. Do you even play, or are you just going off of casted games that other people are playing?
Of course, the fact they’re running a mod is another problem, but I don’t expect you to appreciate that either. You’ve got your axe to grind, and off you go and have fun with that 
Yes, keep making excuses for their ■■■■ work
this thread did not age well
yup now is still behind from every aoe (except 1)
Aoe3 is still worse in numbers
yup but still active with frecuent updates (in comparison). Also it seems the more older aoe 4 it gets the nearer it gets to aoe 3 numbers.
Things that aged poorly ^
As someone who plays Celeste on a regular basis it’s good to see the best AoE game gaining popularity 
In general- now is bad for most games like that. We had a super hot couple of months when it comes to game releases, on top of the usual distraction in the form or Gamepass games, ones from game bundles, a growing number of free and F2P games…
Certainly fragmentation is not helping any single title to break to a very wide mainstream.
And even worse than fragmentation I don’t even know what’s the best thing to look forward to. I’m supper hapy about upcoming new content for 2DE and 3DE… But IV is not doing super great, and while Devs are in the middle of fixing and completing the experience it might never catch up and regain traction.
Peronally I’d love to see a sequel to 3DE, with the amount of content from 2DE, and on a completely different or heavily upgraded engine, because the one used in IV is hardly jawdropping and doesn’t create as much buzz among general public, like presentations of Anno1800 or Frostpunk games do for example. It can be charming to look at, but it’s not a game seller that would help creating a huge user base, from which mp scene can thrive.
this outta show them not to release broken game. but real talk, they’d probably never care nor would they change that behavior, because thats how gaming industry does it now. release broken game riddled with bugs and unfinished content and then fix it later.
for a triple A popular game the above might work, for barely alive RTS game you can’t really pull such a stunt. sad thing is, the people that suffer are us, because MS will most likely ignore their mistake and simply think its due to RTS genre.
Honestly it’s hard to say anything without knowing what is the situation inside MS.
In order to learn from a mistake, you have to acknowledge one, and I couldn’t even try to guess what some execs think. I think game sold at least OK-ish for an RTS, developers are involved in seemingly long support process for the game, from the gates they have been pushing competitive stuff… We all know the concurrent player numbers, but the question is do decisive people know or care about it at all.
Microsoft now and from the turn of the millennium are two different things. They have so many studios, huge service for consoles and PC and from that perspective AoE IV is probably fairly inconsequential (when it comes to prestige, and financially) on the grand scale. It’s certainly not a Forza/Halo level of importance.
Halo had some serious issues, it was delayed quite a bit, and even then it came without some features. Just like this game. But it’s such a big topic I’m not going to try to expand it here and compare these two.
Also it’s so much easier to acknowledge, identify and fix issues in a smaller company, especially one that is self-publishing or does it with help of a parent company. Here Relic is not MS 1st party studio (like ES, owned by MSGS was) nor path from fans, through developers to MS higher-ups is short.
It’s a very weird situation. We have passion projects that revived and improved the original trilogy, fan revival of the only online/service AoE game that is also great, original developers that have been dead for like 13 years, and now this Relic company that has been designated to make 4th mainline game in the spirit of the sequel from 1999, that is doing worse than a said sequel (MS Store players doesn’t change the situation, especially when you count OG AoE2 and HD editions).
I have no idea how it will look in the future. I expect everything, from the announcement of big expansion for IV, silence and decline without any MS intervention, an announcement of MS buying Tantalus Media+ Forgotten Empires and making them in-house ‘RTS/PC’ studio responsible for support of IV and creation of V… I have zero idea 
The only thing I know is that WarCraft, Empire Earth, The Battle for Middle-earth or Command&Conquer fans would love to have problems like that
this is not the first time they commited a mistake like this with aoe
