Neo-Confusionist is a real political faction, a very influential one, led by Zhu Xi (that’s where your poor lil devs get the name from) and sounds like a playable faction in an RTS.
Not some “younger generation” fantasy trash like “Zhu Xi’s legacy”.
EDIT: removed name calling
It can revolve around one character while not called a character.
A civ in the game is a faction and should be called a faction. Like you will not call a unit “spear formation”.
And you also have your regular unit production and even regular landmarks. Those do not revolve around one character. If it really a moba-like hero centric design then there should not be other controllable units or buildings involved at all. As long as you’re managing several units and buildings, it is a faction not a character.
I understand, I just think that putting the focus on “Followers” is as immersion-breaking as some find the civilisation being named after the leader.
Immersion is a tricky thing to balance, because we all have different thresholds for it. And I appreciate that “oh no everybody has an opinion” is a tiring thing to read, but that’s the reality of a Variant as unique as Jeanne D’arc. Some will use this as a reason for it not needing to be in the game. Others will appreciate it because it’s unique.
I don’t think the name will settle much at this point. It all depends on what lessons the Variant has taught the devs (and how much the wider community cares about the backlash / how popular the Variant is amongst the whole playerbase). That’s what will inform the existence of a) future Variants and b) whether or not to re-use the Hero-centric design.
Like I said, this variant is the one with the most quality work but the least effort to put the assets together in a consistent way.
Because it is by all means “Chinese”. It’s so broad and generic. They combined several “Chinese” assets from a wide range of timeframe and geographical locations——which is fine because that’s how most AOE civs are designed, but now you need to name it differently from the already-existing “Chinese” civ, designed in the exact same way, and that is difficult.
In that sense “Jade Empire” is ironically more fitting as a name (though looking terrible in a historical game). If they have to scrap that name, they have to choose some name that is more specific, but they simply can’t because the civ design is by no means specific. OOTD and JDA are specific. Ayyubids is a traditional civ design but don’t 100% overlap with Abbasids. This one is neither, so whatever name you find will have problems.
Tbh ZXL is like in AOE3 they added a few more cards to Chinese (usually via free updates btw) so that you can build a different deck both in terms of theme and gameplay, but it’s the same Chinese civ.
You take stuff way too seriously and personally. I just found the name Neo-Confucianism funny.
I believe it can at least alleviate the problem for many.
Like I don’t really like Malta’s design in AOE3. It’s comic. It has a lot of unnecessary gimmicks like teleporting and exploding buildings. But it is called Maltese, not “Defenders of the Island” or “Jean Parisot” so you won’t find it standing out in the civ list.
For future civ designs, I think they should start with concepts that won’t have naming problems (because it is so easy. Look at the 40+ civs in AOE2 and they all have proper names). But I guess the whole variant civ thing is limited by time and budget so they have to find names after finishing most of the variants rather than the other way round.
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But my real worry is that modern games in general seem to lack a distinct “tone” or theme that earlier games have, and lack basic care for that. They tend to all sound and look like generic pop culture when they don’t have to. That is sad. I hope we don’t go down that path.
Most FPS games whatever the setting or tone have bright colorful weapon skins and unfitting character designs from anime and celebrities. I don’t really like AOE3’s comic hero skins. They can be cheat units, easter eggs or time-limited events, but not in the main game that you would see occasionally.
Ironically AOE4 started with maybe a tone. It had actual documentaries for the campaigns (which is ironically the “wider audience”s’ greatest impression about this game). Then it discarded that tone in its very first expansion.
That is why I’m actually the most critical about “Empire of Jade” and “Zhu Xi’s Legacy” than all the others. These are the names you may find in generic fantasy games, or the skin store page of a mobile gatcha, but not in a game based on history. Especially when there are far better candidate names and concepts out there, and you can completely avoid the naming and immersion problems if you take a slightly different path requiring not much additional effort.
And especially in the already very niche genre of RTS, especially especially historical RTS. I can understand it for the larger games like FPS when they collaborate with others to expand the audience, but I don’t think the “wider audience” who would never care about RTS or AOE would think “wow this game allows you to play Jeanne d’Arc or really cool names like Zhu Xi’s Legacy” and immediately dive into it.
It is smart (and sneaky) when games use real historical settings. You skip most of the world building. People can already attach those names with certain images before looking at the game. History is more dramatic than any artificially-created drama. Those are the advantages of using such settings. You already earned yourself without any additional effort a basic level of immersion which most generic fantasy world building would never achieve, and you need a lot less effort maintaining it. I don’t think it should be discarded. And I would overreact when developers and players of games that take the advantage of history don’t show basic respect to history.
Then maybe read some history. It’s a real and serious thing that really existed. I bet quite a few people might find “Holy Roman Empire” funny or think it is Rome too.
Not many names could be funnier than “Zhu Xi’s Legacy” even if you don’t limit your scope to historical settings.
Sorry if I took it personally when that was not your intention.
That’s alright.
I know it’s a real thing. I just don’t see a kid, or even an adult that’s not a historian, wanting to play with the Neo-Confucianism. It’s a game, and it’s not meant to be historical to the letter. It’s about using some weapons, or units, or landmarks, for them to ring a bell when you see them in another context, and say “hey, I know that!”. As in, inspire people to have an interest in history, not teach it directly. They’re not re-enacting history, it’s just a theme for a video game.
Lemme re-use the same argument.
RTS is a niche. Historical game is the niche of niches. Using historical setting means you can at least steadily attract that smaller but dedicated group of players but keep the “wider audience” away in the meantime. Nothing much can be done to break that limit.
But if you want to make a new RTS without the previous historical civilizations but only the fantastical sounding ones like “Empire of Jade” or “Someone’s Legacy” you will lose that audience too while still likely failing to appeal to the wider audience. The risk becomes higher.
AOE4 had a decent start because it spent lot of efforts trying to appeal to that niche. They name the civilizations with more specific political entities and designed them more coherent (which is a problem previous AOE games face: some “civs” cover too much stuff while some elements cannot fit into any “civs”), and made documentaries for campaigns to build up such a tone. Many people were attracted by the documentaries and only played the campaigns then left. Then its first expansion smashed it, despite still having a historical campaign. I feel there are opposite directions clashing with each other. It’s a pity.
Because I have been careful suggesting changes to any AOE game (otherwise there will be harsh resistance), I am mostly talking about names. And even as a name Zhu Xi’s Legacy is horrible. If I were to suggest more drastic changes I’d reskin and rename the whole thing, units, buildings, techs, for a coherent design, but keep most of the gameplay.
The core problem as said in OP is that the concept itself is inconsistent. They basically made “Chinese v2”, instead of really more specific and focused representations (as they advertised) like OOTD or Ayyubids. That’s why you can hardly find any good name for it other than “Chinese”.
I think this is going to be a factor in any game that seeks to secure a wide userbase. If a game doesn’t retain numbers, it’s seen as a failure. Some still claim AoE IV to be one, for that exact reason (not talking about any here, “low numbers means bad” is used to attack any number of video games, including other Age titles).
So the devs need to balance popular appeal, and their own vision for the game. Tthe original campaigns are a great example - I love them. But I seem to be in a significant minority, and to that end, and possibly because of cost, the developers moved away from that style in the Sultan’s Ascend. It’s interesting though - more (but not many more) have popped up since the Sultan’s campaign dropped to say how much they like the style of the vanilla campaigns (though the mission design in the expansion is generally much better).
All that said, I understand the complaints r.e. Variant names.
I agree that the Sultans campaign is better in terms of level design but backwards in terms of narrative. However I think it is still in-line with the traditional historical tone (just more subjective, like previous AOE campaigns). When I say the overall tone discarded in the expansion I mainly mean the variant civs.
I still didnt play joan ark since the release its so stupid to have a person as civ.Only the ayyubids ok if they can remodel its landmark its very ok.I wish they could have done the variants right.It can have same language,same basic units skin and same architecture but they need to have different unique units and landmarks.With different unique units i mean real new units not some colour changed of a same unit.Same with landmarks too.
I still hope variants we have now removed or improved name and skin wise.
AOM civs with different major gods is a great model for this. I don’t know why they did not follow this very straightforward pattern but choose to do a lot of unnecessary brain gymnastics.
You make a list of variant civ and civ and say “which one dont belong”, of course the variant civ dont belong, because they are variants, not original civs. Doesn’t mean they don’t belong in the game. They just have a different naming convention for variants.