I believe I’m not the only person who doesn’t like the aesthetics of aomr. I summaried why aoe3 looks more realistic and aomr looks like a child or mobile game.
Aomr has buildings that are curved. Some of the roofs or walls of buildings that in reality are rectangular, straight, are protrayed as having some slight curvature in aomr. This is not necessary at all.
Lighting and colour of the environment. I cannot explain clearly but the immersion of battlefield feelings is better in aoe3. In aomr it feels more like a mobile game. To me it feels as if many units and buildings are made of plastic.
Unit movement animation feels more detailed in aoe3. Aom units sometimes feel skating on ice.
The smoke effect in aoe3 makes it more realistic, in aomr arrows are like lightning…i know aoe3 is in a gunpowder era but even aoe2 is more realistic than aomr.
Terrain rendering. In aomr some terrain features are not realistic, for example rocks on hill,
Compare the rocks in both games.
In the first screenshot you can also see the curved building i was talking about. This art style is usually used in cartoon drawing or mobile games. I don’t know why they used this art style in a big PC game instead of a more realistic art style.
The nature of the game. Aomr has myth features and supernatural abilities while aoe3 is based on realism. This can’t be changed because aomr is based on mythology anyway.
Too many aura rings, lines, glowing units, circles in game in aomr. It ruins the immersion. Aoe3 only has explorer glow and floating xp texts, and the floating text can be disabled to look more realistic.
However despite all above, aomr still looks less cartoonish than aoe4. I m happy about that in comparison
AoMR is a remaster/remake of AoM.
AoM had those buildings and had even more saturated colours.
If they) made it look more like AoE3(DE) it would look less like AoM. A lot of people would be complaining if that was the case.
In the end it’s all subjective.
The problem with the mobile game look is that the genre of RTS has been extremely popular on mobile an was pretty dead on PC for like a decade so people just automatically start associating RTS with mobile.
Also mobile devices have so much performance now that they you can just play AAA games on them.
I wonder how many people play AoMR on a computer with less performance than the newest iPhone. I bet half of the PCs used to play AoMR have less performance than the newest iPad.
Yes original aom runs in an era where pc was not as powerful as today’s ipad that’s for sure. But mobile device without keyboard and mouse is incapable of playing serious rts aomr is a dedicated pc rts. It should not look so cartoonish. And then aomr is not original aom the graphics is new . My rtx 3070 can run aoe3 at 110hz but at max settings team game it is below 50hz. So aomr fps is even lower than aoe3de. I don’t think any mobile device today is more powerful than rtx3070. So they won’t run aomr properly. Aomr is still a dedicated pc rts game, i feel bad that it looks like mobile game. Anyway monile game doesn’t have to be cartoonish and pc game doesn’t have to be realistic, but for aom which is part of aoe series it always feels good when it has realistic graphics settings, instead of a fortnite feel. It is like pubg vs apex, aoe3 is like pubg and aom/aoe4 is like apex
I never implied it would be a good device to control those games (the iPad supports mouse, keyboard and external monitors though) I was just talking about the graphical capabilities.
AoMR has higher polygon models, higher resolution textures and more advanced graphic features like ray tracing. If you have ray tracing turned on you should really turn that off, it’s not worth the performance hit.
No but most people don’t have a GPU as good as the RTX 3070.
Most people have a RTX/GTX xx60 GPU or even the laptop versions which are a lot less powerful.
Also the new iPad is ridiculously fast, especially in CPU performance.
The new iPhone got multiple current gen AAA games ported to it too.
Graphics are subjective. The original AoM had a very colourful colour pallet but it did not have enough graphical detail to really be able to have a strong art style.
AoMR tuned down the colour pallet so much that it was criticised for it during the betas which is why it looks a little more colourful now.
AoMR did not fundamentally change the design of the units and buildings because people would not want that, there for it has to have the look it has now.
The Norse buildings did originally have those round shapes so they need to have them again today.
Also they are realistic too. They didn’t build straight lines.
Not even Greek temples were build in straight lines, they had slight curves in them.
Calling it Fortnight because it’s not 100% realistic is a little too much in my opinion.
I hate the look of Fortnight or Age of Empires Online but I love how AoMR turned out like.
AoE Online also runs on the same engine as AoE 3 and AoM but I think youi know how that game looks. Same deal with Fortnite which runs on the Unreal Engine.
It amazes me that people still think it’s only a minority that thinks the graphics looks cartoony and plastic. It really is a let down and they dropped the ball on it.
Age of empires online is cartoonish on ######### Vanilla age is not any way looking like age of empires online.
Retold uses desaturated flat colors. Building textures are flat and shiny.
Age of Mythology: Retold has a semi-realistic or semi-cartoonish look, depending on the eye with which you look at it.
It’s okay for an AoE (and especially this one) to have some cartoonish style. It’s a mythological game and the important thing is that there is polish within that art style (readability too) and that it’s fun to play.
Retold is LESS cartoony than the original. The color balance is more true to life, less oversaturated, and the models use raytraced lighting for realistic materials.
Age of Mythology is less Saving Private Ryan and more those old stop motion sword and sandle movies like Clash of the Titans and the Odyssey. Some of the myth units even have a claymation kind of look.
When you are in gameplay you feel it, or watching a stream. When the units start moving, and you looking at the buildings and units from a normal gameplay zoom level not super zoomed in, it feels cartoonish. Maybe it has something to do with the movement animation as well?
The problem here is art style, not the theme or setting of the game. Legacy aom looked way less cartoony than retold. They were supposed to be faithful to put a new coat of paint on the legacy art style and they don’t, they went a different direction.
AoM retold seems to have a lot more color. I really like how AoM retold looks it’s the prettiest AoE game yet.
If you prefer how Legacy AoM looks I would suggest playing that. Or using/making mods that make the game look less cartoony.
