FitzBro did a video recently where he asked the question if the developers are killing Age of Empires 4. I recommend watching the video.
There should be a better communication and information on what goes on behind the scene. For example work on a DLC. So that the people getting hyped and not leave the game.
For example when we would know that the developers work on a DLC besides the Roadmap criticism that the development is too slow would be maybe invalidated.
What do you think? Are the developers killing Age of Empires 4?
Lack of communication isn’t even that much of an issue for me tbh. Biggest issue is that they seem to be extremely overwhelmed with balancing this game out. While I do know that it isn’t an easy thing to do they have made some decsisions that are simply not reasonable. Like the extreme nerf to mangonels without having imperial ranged units in mind or the second buff to berry bushes after delhi and abbasid were already considered strong civs.
At this stage I honestly think that it would be more helpful if 3-4 people of the community worked on a mod that builds on the current game version and tries to balance out the game making more strategies viable during all stages of the game.
the season starts one week after the update Age of Empires IV in 2022 – introducing Seasons, an updated roadmap, and feedback tools - Age of Empires We have reported serious errors in fully reassignable hotkeys, such as the impossibility of queuing orders with shift and the absence of some unit functions that disappear when choosing fully reassignable hotkeys, because they must fix all these errors to launch it since it is the patch defnitive of the beginning of the second season can not have any errors as in the pup
Completely agree with Fitzbro, however it’s not the devs who are killing the game, but the execs. I’m sure the devs are working their asses off trying to balance and squash bugs on this mess. Steam player numbers for June are in and player base dropped another 14%. Interestingly enough, AoE 3 has been slowly but steadily gaining players.
Season 2 patch is a joke with stuff that should’ve been in the game at release, not almost a year after. No new civs, no new maps, no new biomes or gaia, no updates to graphics and some major bugs still persist since the closed beta.
I just don’t get why they’re being so secretive on a frickin’ RTS. It’s not confidential rocket science here, the game is not even that innovative. We are left to wonder what’s going on and people always wonder the worst. I don’t know if it’s an actual executive decision not to communicate, or is it simply that the AoE 4 team at Relic is so small that they don’t have the resources.
But hey, if they don’t communicate, we won’t know! Thanks for killing Ensemble Studios, Microsoft! That surely was a hell of a good decision!
Seems like they got noobs on the Age team. What else explains an RTS in 2022 with no unit Color’s for players just red and blue and even those aren’t working properly when in replay.
@RadiatingBlade edit: Be respectful towards other forum users per the code of conduct.
Apparently 4th iteration of a game with less features than the original.
It’s like someone wanted to pull a fast one on gamers. Gamers will remember this and it will hurt the franchise. If DLC and updates are months and years apart like in previous games then this is the end of the line for AOE and I been playing it since 1997
I don’t think it’s a developer issue. I think it’s a management issue. I honestly believe the AOE 4 team has the talent, they just lack the leadership structure to combine that talent with a coherent vision. Whoever is spinning the plates to keep the circus together, either has been shackled by their superiors or lacks the presence currently to do this game justice. To make the quality of product that they’ve already spent the money to make. The shame of it being the only people that would have that information, would be rank and file developers. They’d know if it’s a middle management issue or from higher. For obvious reasons, that’s not going to be public knowledge.
Pretty much agree with Fitzbro, probably it’s more an issue about the atrocious community management and overall communications from Relic, as well as staff assignment, then a dev issue per se.
It’s just as simple as realizing that Relic had two AAA RTS in development at the same time (AoE and CoH). When Microsoft approached them, they possibly could only offer to set aside a small part of their devs to work on AoE (because CoH is their flagship) and Microsoft was ok with that. Relic is not a massive studio and I doubt they hired a ton of extra devs just because Microsoft signed them a check.
Relic definitely has the talent, they have created CoH, WarHammer and Homeworld. But you can only do so much when your biggest guns are already working on another title.
I mean, if we take Flight Sim 2020 as an example, Asobo wasn’t working on another simulator when Microsoft approached them, right? It’d be incredibly dumb to hire a studio already working on another game of same genre, but here we are.
Microsoft definitely had the money to dust off the AoE 3 engine, hire some great RTS devs and deliver a truly next gen AoE 4. Was that more difficult and expensive? Yes. Would it have yielded a significantly better product? Yes.
I do not think it’s the actual developers to blame , that is to say those that really work on designing and implementing the game (but people use that word to refer to whoever is in charge). They just do what they are tasked to do.
But I always feel there is something wrong with the higher level project management.
Their design director left six months ago, one of the two community managers left last month, and more higher ranking people have left after the games launch. Their overall team is quite smaller compared to CoH3. I have seen the quality of CoH3, it’s much much better than aoe4. So it’s not just a relic problem, it’s a Microsoft problem. After ensemble studios was dissolved they havnt been able to come up with even one original aoe game. All they have done are respinning old hit aoe games into new titles just to keep milking the fan base.
The reason they are putting so much effort into releasing support for mods is that they expect the community to take over and do rest of the work for them for free. Any DLC on top of the already bug and hack infested game will not make it better but only make it worse.
I’ve seen alot of games sustained for years with the help of dedicated mod community.
Skyrim comes to mind.
Vtm Bloodlines launched in 2004 and received unofficial patches for years. The latest unofficial mod is from this year. Ofcourse there as well, Paradox bought the licence and destroyed a possible continuation.
What’s really worrysome is that they often enough introduce new bugs while fixing bugs. E.g. the bonus of network of castles differing for various units. That really points to a bad software architecture that is very error prone.
At this stage I think that if they do not want this game to go down the drain completely they should fully focus on bug fixing. I’m not 100% into this anymore but I’ve seen a video of Grubby some months ago where he did exploit the randomness of network of castles bonus. Can’t remember anymore if it was just a visual error or not though. Idk if they have fixed this bug by now.
Relic have a history of working on two titles at once, so while I appreciate you wanting to create plausible explanations, I wouldn’t get invested in them as though they were factual.
