You seem, on your other posts, to be truly not understanding why the variant civs are repelling some ppl at a point where they are ready to boycott it.
It’s not only about the name. But the name is the visible expression of the concept.
I can understand why they choose to make Jeanne live hundred of years, from dark to imperial Age. It’s historically false, but ok, they are coming up with a new gameplay mechanic and modifiying history is kind of mandatory in this case.
However,
I can’t understand why all Ootd units are called « gilded units », the historical Ootd did not have that. Ottomans for example used to deploy Janissaries armies. So it is not complicated to create new things anchored in history, see ?
I can’t understand either why ZXL has shaolin monks in a neoconfucianist civ and jade roofs on top of some buildings. I don’t see the purpose beside serving an european fantasist (and offensive according to me to chinese) orientalism.
I can’t understand why Ayyubids have a siege engine named « The tower of the Sultan », I made my researchs and I did not find anything about it. However, when you google « Ghulams », « Ghazi raiders » or « Mangudaï », you have answers to what they were, so, again, it’s not hard to create historical based units !
The comparison doesn’t really work well because even if you don’t buy the DLC, you still have to play with the new civs in the game.
And I don’t think there is a meaningful amount of players willing to boycott the DLC. This forum specifically has always been super negative with people boycotting the game over every decision from art style to the camera zoom to not having certain civs.
It’s not like DLC is ever a guaranteed sell, and from general community impressions, this one will be super popular.
The DLC is going to be good gameplay and value for money, and the variant civs are about gameplay and vaguely represent niche subsets of a civilization, to enough of a degree that historical perfection not only isn’t feasible, but it’s also minimally important.
Your attempt to find something to complain about really is a weird look.
If the man who was making those pizzas would have told me at first that his pizzas would be bio and good for health, and then 2 years later, he decided to change the recipe to make it unhealthy, I think I can express my opinion and tell the others that : « Those pizzas used to be good for health, but do not buy them rn because they are not anymore, if you take care of your health »
And here « healthy pizzas » means « historically accurate » according to me for the game
I totally agree with you, to be honest, we cannot have a debate if you are not considering that history is important in this game. The DLC is, ofc, bringing a lot of new gameplay and I am sure it will be fun to play but it is not the point I want to talk about on this topic !
I think it is possible to associate fun gameplay and good historical background. For me, history matters in AoE 4 (the 4 is important), otherwise If they abandon this aspect, I’ll just return to Age of Mythology.
Absolutely no one here or on any other platform will stop you from boycotting the game if you choose to… but these threads from people who are slandering the content is just deeply confusing. It seems to be more about persuading other people to agree with you or just riling up the community and spoiling it for everyone. Misery loves company.
The East Asian region generally dislikes Japanese and I feel conflicted whether to purchase this DLC. Except for Japan, the other content in DLC is great. If it weren’t for Japan, I would easily purchase this DLC.
I feel indifferent toward the variant civs. On one hand, I dislike the entire concept of them. Furthermore, my fear as silly as it may sound is if they potentially deprive a roster spot to mainline civs like Mayans, Aztecs, Norse, etc since we have no way of knowing how many DLCS IV will produce when all is said and done. Perhaps I’m being paranoid but it isn’t without reason. For a game that has immersion problems for me seeing these variants in the menu would be quite jarring so at least I hope there’s a drop-down menu for them so if I hate them I can at least pretend they don’t exist lol.
On the other hand as a fan of AoM and AoE3 I have to applaud the devs for doing something different. I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t take a step back and look at past Age titles and how ES wasn’t afraid to try something new. Things like this are always divisive.
For now, it’s a wait and see until the DLC comes out to see how players like them. I’ll be in no rush to make a decision either way.
This is where taking liberties comes in to make a fun and interesting game for us to play. We can argue about things that make no sense history wise all day long, but at the end of the day it’s a game and it’s meant to be fun!
AoE 4 tries to be as respectful to history as possible, but again they need to balance that with history and the fun aspect and that means sometimes certain liberties has to be taken which means they need to choose fun over historical accuracy.
There is nothing fun about making an orientalist borderline racist name like Empire of Jade then covering it all up with one historical person and pretending nothing happened.
There is nothing fun about ZXL as a name, which is not a civilization, organization, group, or anything at all. It is entirely made up, and it doesn’t describe the in-game mechanics, civilization in any meaningful way. There is no “fun” in this made up bs when there are clear, real things that can represent it instead.
All I feel is dread from the awful decisions that went into trying to lazily craft these variants. I can tell you this takes very little effort knowing how it is to put such content together. Said it before and I’ll say it again; this feels like they are making me pay for a fan made mod.
Too bad we can’t make proper mods because they scammed us on the editor as well. Fun!!
Gilded units represent the black army in history
They just needed a new name because “black unit” doesn’t sound very good.
Zhu xi is a name they patch at the last minute. The civ wasn’t supposed to be about neoconfucianism, only a few of the landmark such as zhu xi library. That’s the reason i think it’s still wrong name since it doesn’t represent the civ. But i hope they keep Shaolin monk. the gameplay of civ in general seems great. But it has nothing to do with zhu xi or neoconfucianism. I didn’t mind name not being “civ” name. I think jeanne darc is the best name for jeanne darc faction. But the zhu xi one still puzzle me.
Tower of the sultan I don’t see any issues with that name. That’s not a big deal.
Have you, uh, tried? I don’t think providing the same developer tools they use to make and support the game is a “scam”, but maybe there’s a different meaning there.
We have folks making custom scenarios, custom ingame UI components, and so on. One of the most popular mods expands the actual match settings.
Like, if you just want a dumbed-down scenario editor vs. the current tools, sure, but that won’t make “proper” mods.
Don’t get me wrong, I keep harping on about better modding support. But that’s different to anyone who just wants the scenario editor from past games. It’s pretty much an entirely different thing, and it won’t let you do what the current tools let you do.
the limitations are, stuff like cosmetic UI mods can’t be performed for anything but custom games and skirmish, you can’t mod your own civs, units etc. no custom asset import and so on
I mean, there’s a laundry list of things, it’s more about what a “proper” mod is, and whether or not folks are expecting a scenario editor specifically. That tends to be the root of more issues with the existing tools, and I get it.
But I also think the current tools are undervalued by folks that haven’t given them a proper chance.
This is separate to repeatedly asking the devs for state tree access (which would really open up modding regardless of the current limitations), or fixing issues like we have with cloning core data.
other than asking for this exact bit, we really need to add more categories, having everything that isn’t a gamemode or map thrown into the same bucket and limited to 1 mod at any time isn’t ok
Here is where we will disagree with each other and just because you feel this way does not mean the rest of us feel the same way. The fact of the matter is that what I can see from all the different forums, the majority of the player-base is happy with this expansion and are looking forward to it.
When the expansion finally come out the variant civs might suck and not be what it seemed to be but until I can try it for myself, I’ll trust the information on the website as well as the people under NDA that speak positive about this.
Regarding the historical inaccuracy we can agree to disagree about the variant civs.