Had they played the other games in the franchise and discovered the bazillion ways the other games have moved beyond AoE2, perhaps AoE4 wouldn’t have felt so stale in the ways you mention.
However, I have studied the franchise and I absolutely would stand behind using the same four resources (which appeared in three of the original five games – AoE1, AoE2, and AoEO). Stone is replaced by Favor in AoM and sort of by XP in AoE3.
Meanwhile, though, their rote adherence to AoE2’s buildings, units, techs, and backwards civ design was one of the most heartbreaking decisions they made.
I agree that AoE4 plays like a peculiar rehashing of AoE2. Like if AoE2 was the only game in the franchise and someone who didn’t really play it much was asked to make a new version of it.
their creative squad did work on boulder bay 2 seasons back, made it really boring. I enjoyed the original a lot more. All they had to do was have boulder bay1 and boulderbay2 if they really wanted changes and people can simply choose which they prefer to play.
but no… better salvage a decent map and maintain a boring map pool.
I’m dubious of the amount of impact the Council really had on the direction AoEIV took. Well, besides an AoE outsider suggesting ranged units should just keep firing while a melee unit is all up in their grill for the sake of readability. I’ve never seen readability become such a talking point as I have with this game. I digress.
When I first heard about this council thing the mistrustful cynic in me saw a ploy to garner player trust after such a long absence and new studio taking the reigns than actually gathering feedback. It was a PR move first and foremost. If feedback was really important to Relic/World’s Edge then why didn’t the game release in early access?
You take a bunch esport players that have no real history with AoE and think they’re going to provide insightful suggestions for an AoE game? really? And yes I’m aware there were casual and AoE lifers as well but that isn’t the point I’m making here.
I don’t blame the Council at all so please don’t take this personally (you of all people) I’m a results kinda guy and while I wasn’t part of the all-mighty few I think back on the product upon release I am completely befuddled. I can’t fathom anyone asking about color picker, random civ select, flora and fauna, static animals, etc. Either the feedback wasn’t valued or the council was made up primarily of people that didn’t care about that stuff or Relic/WE had its own vision and wasn’t going to deviate from it…or time/budget constraints…whatever.
Idealistically, the council is something that may look good on paper but for whatever reason, in this case, it didn’t achieve what it was there to sell us on other than generating hype and hype is a powerful marketing strategy to sell games, even those that end up being subpar.
Again, I don’t blame the people that took part in this but I do look with great suspicion at those that make the decisions. Results, not emotionality.
This is why I asked earlier about CoH 3 (I think it was in this thread). The community Council there obviously had an impact on the game (as did explicit pre-release feedback from the wider community).
If we go solely on results, did that work?
There’s a weirdly big focus on the Council here in Age IV, for whatever reason. I’m not blaming you! It’s a very common and often-repeating line of discussion. But I keep coming back to the same conclusion (regardless of being on it or not).
It’s kinda irrelevant? The buck rests with Relic (and World’s Edge). Moreso when nobody on the Council can talk about it. People can be on the Council, and like the game. People can not be on it, and like the game. People can be on it, and be very critical of how the game came out. And vice versa. And so on, and so on. It’s all valid.
tl;dr: CoH 3 had more revisions to the game based on community feedback, and it came out (at launch) as worse (by public opinion). What lessons should Relic take away from that?
Certainly it’s not that simple.
People complained about COH3’s textures and colors in the testing phase. They say they improved it according to the feedbacks, but it still does not seem to satisfy some.
COH has a group of smaller but more dedicated fans. Not as big as AOE. Not to mention a lot more people only heard of AOE or played it without learning much about it.
The lackluster functions and obvious unfinished parts (eg some units have poorer animations) is more of a project management thing than a community feedback.
I’d even assume WW2 diehards may have a higher standard of realism for WW2 games because it’s a period where we are more familiar with and most of the games try to conform to that (not many people would complain about the overuse of ornate golden plate armour, or oversized two-handed warhammer in medieval games). When people talk about WW2 games they picture FPS where realism is very important for most of the games, or extremely hardcore strategy simulators. I haven’t seen a successful, cartoony or heavily fantasized WW2 game (BF5 and COD vanguard was bashed hard).
These are all factors contributing to its “poorer” reviews (for now).
AOE4 has been out for more than a year. Those who dislike the graphics or style had left long ago besides a few who still want some improvement.
There were fierce arguments about the graphics between the last few trailers and the release.
I’d also say AOE4 does one thing right: it succeeds in attracting the aforementioned group of players who only heard about this “reputable” series (mostly AOE2 though) but never played it with any depth. So when they see a “more polished and diverse AOE2” “with great campaign documentaries”, it meets their expectations.
A lot of other series tried to appeal to the “wider audience” and failed hard.
Me too. And I agree that the people being asked questions will always affect the answers. Someone who has never played anything but AoE2 and plays AoE2 exclusively at a competitive level or plays the game as a paid content creator will absolutely care about very different things than someone who has played every Age game for 20 years but strictly noncompetitively and from a place of love for the confluence of history and video games.
I was not exactly surrounded by lots of similar people, though ofc we all had the same franchise in common.
Similarly, it can be very difficult to deliver hard truths to super kind, caring people who have chosen you out of the crowd to deign a worthy representative of millions of players. It is tough to tell a game off without telling the developers off, too. It takes a lot of very carefully phrased sentences and is still very unlikely you can do so without pissing them off.
But yet it is still groundbreaking and praiseworthy for a video game franchise to have enough self-awareness that it, itself, does not understand itself as much as its playerbase to even have a council. I can only imagine creating such a thing took a lot of heavy lifting behind closed doors. And for that, this franchise will always have my respect and deserved optimism for the future. Anyone who already knows they need help would be receptive to even more help than they may have first realized.
this right here is something all AAA games (especially likes of Halo) should take a note on, smt aoe4 absolutely did right is, they made the game for the audience that they were aware of (proven by success of DEs), and in terms of reviews and initial reaction, it worked, yes post launch is currently in wrong direction, but i wouldn’t call it unsolvable by any means
Not many series have AOE’s nostalgia and reputation though. That’s a huge advantage (unfortunately there are some series who do not even know how to make use of it). Whether people have played it a lot is not important, as long as many have heard good things about it (mostly only AOE2).
For one who has played AOM or AOE3 extensively, AOE4 offers few new experience. However that is not the majority. Many people did not even know these game existed, or only heard of them “being very different from AOE2”.
I don’t think the influx players would be as tolerant to AOE5, because they have re-established the “standard” or baseline of what the game should be like.
I am actually beginning to personally believe that in a business perspective, there isn’t so much reason for them to spend resources on aoe4. Probably have a small low expenses team that does non-breaking stuff like cosmetics / balance changes. Once you bag the $50, there isn’t so much left to do. You’d then have the core coders work on other stuff. CoH3 is $60 I believe?
You don’t need to analyze too much to notice what’s actually passionate work. Nowadays I prefer the free model and also people seem to spend more on aesthetics. You surely need a reliable platform and a larger squad to handle masses though. From a business perspective again, what they have done to this game makes sense, and it’s less maintenance if you only have to manage fewer servers.
Let’s not forget they gave out two new factions with new mechanics that were plainly less “vanilla” than launch (which is a common pattern in RTS games).
To be clear - I want more. I look at the hotfixes that CoH 3 is getting and I want that kind of attention here. But CoH 3 was launched later than Age IV. They’ll have undoubtedly learned lessons here that apply there.
But that doesn’t mean what we have hasn’t had substance. The problem the devs have is satisfying a wide breadth of player interests.
Which is why I really hope they move more on the mod tools soon. CoH 3 even launched with a public API for things like stats and leaderboards. That’s cool! I want that! I consume APIs for a living
I’d imagine a joint dev team presents unique challenges. CoH 3 is a purely Relic effort. It has different challenges.
I’ve seen an unfinished Age of Empires game suffer a disappointing release and an impatient fanbase before. It didn’t scare me enough then. It does now.
Issue is I cannot even feel whether they care, you don’t even see them communicating with the players in their own forum. To have a map name added to the loading screen after 1 year, the fanbase must actually be really patient.
The problem I had (and have) with the council is that the greater the number of people, the dumber (and more middle-of-the-road) the decisions they take. Should the game be more like AoE 2, or less? Should civs be more asymmetric, or less? Should siege be manned, or not? Should we focus more on the campaign or multiplayer? Every person has a different vision of what would’ve been a perfect successor, none equal to the other. So things end up being a compromise of everything.
Left to their own devices, humans make awful choices. I’m not going to get into politics, but you see this all the time in elections and referendums. We need leaders to narrow the focus and discard nonsense.
If you have one person, or a small group of people that came up with a very specific idea, that’s fine and that’ll result in either a great or a terrible game, but sure as hell it’d be something unique and full of personality.
Take Chris Taylor when he imagined an RTS without a minimap for SupCom. Now imagine he had a council saying that was a dumb idea. The fact that we got that game was precisely because Chris had nobody to object his (at that point) exotic imagination. Or imagine when someone at Ensemble said “hey, let’s make Age of Empires but based on mythology, not history”… blasphemy!
Even if the AoE 4 council had minimal effective influence over the game, it surely at least indirectly swayed creative decisions internally. That’s one of the reasons we ended up with this perfectly acceptable, average game but aiming for absolutely nothing more.
And yet, if you make a game by completely ignoring fan opinions, you can also mess it up.
The Council model is not unique to Relic. The concept has existed for years.
There are no right answers. A lot of problems have multiple solutions that can be applied. There are only results and post-mortems (post-mortems are one of the important parts of a project in games dev - as far as I can tell, they’re widely practised).
I’ve said this before, but it’s fine to speculate, but you’re never going to get at the truth. Just like we’d still be here if the Council never existed and people had issues with the game. Everyone always wants to know what went “wrong”. And yet we often remain baffled.
It’s tricky. I’d love it if developers were more open about things, but much like your comments about the consensus of a large group of people, a similar thing happens when developers open up about these things. They’re often met with a lot of nonsense.
Or some counlcil member saying that synk kills for Dawn of War games is a game breaking experience, or someone saying that crew on siege affects redability ( hahahaha!)
