As far as I know, more than half of my friends in China who played AOE4 has uninstalled this game because of the terrible civilization balance. The win rate of the Chinese in 1v1 is very low. The bad experience has undermined the players in China to continue to play this game. What’s more, the recent unbalanced patches have given AOE4 a very awful reputation in China, which decrease the probability of others joining in the game.
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They’ll all end up overturned if this were the case, bought items almost always are better than the free ones to encourage you to buy them, I highly doubt it’d be any different.
I thank the gaming gods they will never actually do this f2p ■■■■■■■■ bc of Microsoft gamepass, they wouldn’t be able to.
AoE4 has basically no content and no way to create user generated content.
No custom random maps.
No custom scenarios.
No mods.
All maps that are played in SC2 were made by players and not the developers. And the “Arcade” is also very popular.
If they implement user generated content in a nice way that actually works and doesn’t require things like every manually subscribing to the same map and restating the game like 5 times then it can offer a lot for replayability for many players.
Oh yeah and for competitive players changing the map list for ranked matches sounds like a good idea.
tldr:
Bugs and unbalance makes players leave.
New content makes players return.
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PLEASE FIX AOE4! DO NOT LET IT DIE! WE WANT IT TO SUCCEED!
too late.more than the 80% is already gone according to steam charts
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AOE2DE had a ruff start too but with continuous support they managed to build up a large playerbase. Remember how awful the performance with the 4K pack was?
AoE4 had a better start and is seeing good support so far. If they really deliver on the modding tools this month the future of AoE4 is bright.
Right now AOE4 has very little to offer for someone that doesn’t play ranked and even then it’ still the same maps as on release. AoE2DE changes the map pool regularly.
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I think that once the spring update comes in things will get much better. The game seems to be going on the right direction, they have several plans for the future, it’s just a matter of bringing all of these quality of life features and also the features that are already present in previous games.
This game has loads of potential.
Hopefully they will also focus on improving the balance between civs as well as addressing the issue before even thinking of adding new civs to the game as this can be really bad for the game and drive players away.
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Player count immediately post patch is lower than by about 3 thousand. Lost Ark released, so it’s expected. With Warhammer 3 rolling around this same month, I fear the playerbase will tank… permanently.
They really need to think about short-term player retention right now too. Seeing the release schedule of titles that will sink PC gamers, I don’t know how they decided to release this game in November in the current condition.
and both game seems in better state and with much larger content than aoe 4
thing is that at release amount of players on steam was only half of what coh2 had for example, so it did start quite low already. they will have to do something quick if they want to change things around
If you look at aoe2 vs aoe4 popularity for all time in the graph below, it seems aoe2 hasnt lost any of its playerbase and in the long term aoe2 playerbase has only increased due to the marketing and publicity of aoe4 by microsoft. which makes sense, people always checkout other aoe games which they have played before when a new one releases
if you see the last 6 months of graph below you can see the impact of aoe4 launch on aoe2, there was a slight dip but nothing much. aoe4 started with a huge fanfare and i would argue it had the most age players at that time compared to all previous age game releases. the exponential drop in player numbers is also understandable given it happens with any new games. a lot of people check it out and then get bored or move on to the next game.
what makes me concerned that microsoft hasnt had a hit new age game release since aoe2de. i mean aoe2 is fine but its not a new game. i believe they lost the formula with ensemble studios, or maybe ensemble studios dropped the ball on this long ago. i really hope aoe4 player numbers pick up as the game gets more refined with patches and DLC’s and what not. we do have a motivated community and we dont mind putting our money where our heart is. but at the end of the day any amount of publicity or marketing is only going to take this game so far. RTS was already in gradual decline worldwide and has only started to pick up thanks to new development from game studios and interest from the public. hopefully it will continue to build momentum and more and more people will come checkout aoe4 and stay.
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Well i think Forgotten Empires and Tantalus have done a Great work with definitive edition. Relic seemed to failed with Aoe4 but not because they aren’t good developers but only because they left their comfort zone like Coh and Dawn of War. Maybe Creative Assembly could be the right option for the next title. I don’t know. We’ll see what they’ll change with the Spring update.
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no its because ms management and all og talents already left relic years ago.
Actually, that’s the reason that the game is hard to balance. Because the civs are barely asymmetrical, but they receive massive bonuses which are OP on specific maps. At most 1-2 civs are able to compete with the dominant faction.
Starcraft is more balance because the bonuses that civs receive are “handicapped” by obvious flaws in their unit roster. The bonuses in Age 4 are not immediately linked to massive flaws that must be overcome, like for example, the lack of full upgrades for Goths in Age 2.
At the end of the day, the opinion of the people here on the forum have little significance. We are not the people who stopped playing. It’s those who tried the game a while and decided to move on to other games. What do they think? We don’t know. If they think like we do, they’d still be here.
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I don’t think there is need for any additional momentum. The game is fine as it is. There are 70000 players online right now. Not even counting gamepass. You are free to think these are glaring issues but at least 70000 people would not agree with you. If these problems are so serious why are 70000 people enjoying the game?
EDIT: Sorry I just time travelled from last October. That’s what people were telling me back then.
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I think/hope that as long as there’s a stable number of players for matchmaking, AoE4 will survive. Additional content, balance changes, DLC, game editor, etc. may revive interest back to AoE4 someday.
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