That is my main personal frustration with all these. Because there is no need to do it in this way.
You don’t need to look at any other game. Just other AOEs.
Do they need to invent a semi-fictional premise when trying out new mechanics like units with Protoss shields, or units with aura buffs, or auto-gathering buildings, or units training units, or switching to “another civ” mid-game, and all the crazy stuff?
No. Actually people including the so-called 100% historical accuracy crowd are quite tolerant towards wild game play mechanics. It’s easy to fit them into any RTS setting, including a historical one. Simply slap a real historical skin on them. Done. That’s how every AOE was made.
Nice try. Please don’t try it next time.
I’m still going to buy this DLC but I’ll keep bringing this up before the devs spend some efforts in making them more consistent. Last time they added more unique units to the base game and I think it’s great, despite a lot of people saying “you don’t need them/they will mess up balancing/this is not a historical simulator” before the change etc.
EDIT: and there are people here who speak as if the devs are trying out something so new and radical unprecedented to the series, that you have to invent a new concept for it…
But you’re right! I try to react less, because I often don’t get anywhere with it, and I often don’t end up being my best person about it. But if someone is going to call the mod tools a “scam”, then sure, I’m going to reply to that. I care a lot about modding, and it’s important for the game.
Which is exactly what I did, and you still treated me like an object lesson that needed to be portrayed negatively. Good times.
Sorry Gorb, I legitimately was not trying to point you out here. I wanted to show the leftmost edge, which shows who had commented the most in that thread. I was replying to @MedicMaaan for this bit of context. That is him in the image next to you in the case that this was not clear.
To elaborate on this:
I still hold the opinion that human brains tend to avoid making twisted and convoluted logical efforts in a design process as much as possible, especially when there are to-go options at hand.
There are already concepts similar to “variant civs” in the other AOE games.
Split Indian civs in AOE2: do they start with real peoples that cover different parts of the subcontinent, or an “Empire of Elephants”?
Gods in AOM: do they start with real gods that really belonged to the civ, or Kratos?
Revolutions in AOE3 (I know it’s not the same but comparable): do they start with real revolutions and former colonies of the right time period, and assign them to the related civs, or a “what if Amazons re-emerged in Russia”?
Or even the release civs in AOE4 (counting the anniversary edition): these are the no-brainer options if you list out the regions you want to cover and the most prominent nations in those regions. Would you even need to start with anything fictional?
Now going back to the variant civs.
If you want to come up with a list of variant civs requiring less work on new artwork and voice acting, what are the first options that come on top?
Sub-factions of existing nations. Peoples groups that are culturally related to them. Maybe a narrower but more concentrated time period or geographical span, like a shorter but important dynasty, or a line of major local warlords.
In short, Ayyubids. I don’t see as much complaints on this variant civ after they got rid of “Sultan’s Army”.
This is a game “inspired by history” so if you have quick and straightforward inspirations from history, why would you go for the most zigzag path?
In fact most people here had that intuition when they first saw the variant civs, including many active defenders now. I can’t imagine the team had such a different mindset that they sat and brainstormed together for a whole evening and decided on the current options.
So I can think of three possibilities:
(1) They really don’t have more time or resources for these. So they have to do with the least demanding options and mostly existing assets.
(2) Someone higher-up really wants to push this concept.
(3) Someone higher-up doesn’t care about historical representation (meaning they sometimes hit the spot, but would not mind if they don’t).
And neither is good news for me.
sometimes the ones who are close to the dev/ fanatical to the current state are the ones who response- Anyway the game dlc is not worthy to buy. The content is lazy
I would be the happiest if they announce a corrective patch of variant civs later. I’m not focused on what they actually did before, I just want to game to be immersive at some point !
I’ll wait and see more videos and opinions before to buy this DLC.
I spent a lot of words and threads about what i didn’t like of this game, especially graphic and animations, how to improve this game but developers choosed other ways.
I learnt to don’t post so frequently as before because it’s useless.
My hopes are looking to AOMde and a possible AOE5 set in the ancient times praying It Will new moved by a next generation engine.
I have admit that AOE4 male me losing Faith in the future of this franchise.
Honestly, like, tell me what you truly think :
Making a civ based on actual China and call it “Empire of Jade”, reuse current chinese buildings assets and add jade on the roofs, is not pure laziness or at least lack of time ?
I’m only talking about the variant civs, Byzantines and Japanese received a lot of attention.
First of all, they aren’t called Empire of Jade anymore, so I suggest you call them by Zhu Xi’s Legacy.
But as always you and others aren’t telling the whole story, you take out things in order to try to make your argument more compelling. You are leaving out the following:
Zhu Xi’s Legacy gets all new landmarks that the Chinese doesn’t have
Zhu Xi’s Legacy gets all new technologies that the Chinese doesn’t have
Zhu Xi’s Legacy gets three new unique units that the Chinese doesn’t have
Zhu Xi’s Legacy gets new strategies that you can use that Chinese doesn’t have
Zhu Xi’s Legacy gets new assets of building models that the Chinese doesn’t have mixed with reused assets from China due to them being a variant of China so it make sense
Zhu Xi’s Legacy gets improved Imperial Officials with unique upgrades
Zhu Xi’s Legacy gets different effects from all their dynasties that the Chinese doesn’t have
And the list goes on… All in all it sounds like almost the same treatment like any other new civ minus the soundtrack, language they speak and somewhat the assets as they are reused. Makes sense for a variant civ. Call this lazy?
You can dislike the variant civilizations all you want, it’s your right but the issue I’m having is that you guys always try to dumb down the variants and ignore everything that they are doing with them, to make your argument sound much more greater than it really is.
If you going to judge something then at least acknowledge the whole package and not pick and choose what you want to mention and make it sound like that’s everything there is to it.
They aren’t called “Empire of Jade” anymore because half of the community pointed the problem. If everyone was ok with this, they would have released, in a historical game, a faction that basically has never existed. I mean, it’s logical for me to produce content which resonates with history when you develop a history based game.
I will be more precise because it can be confusing : The laziness / lack of time resides in the documentation, the historical work you should make before development. When you come up to release a “civilisation”, you must :
Use an existing one
Be logical and create a coherence between gameplay and context
Here are some incoherences :
Ootd existed 30 years at the end of the period covered by most civ of AoE4
Jeanne d’arc is living 400 years in the game right now
ZXL I just explained earlier, the “Zhu Xi Legacy” never existed as a civilization
If I am not criticizing the whole package, it’s because… There is actually a civ respecting the rules I listed : Ayyubids (Order of the Dragon too if I extrapolate). You’ll never see a DLC detractor tell that Ayyubids need changes, cause devs succeeded to make the closest definition of a civ variant : A civ anchored in history which shares enough culture or design with another one to reuse some elements.
Devs reused Abbasids components for Ayyubids, and Chinese components for ZXL. But no matter the time they have spent on each variant : the main difference is that one civ is legitimate to exist because it actually existed, the other was born from an idea that, in simple words, can be summarize as “Think about the first thing that comes up when I tell you China : Jade”. Because even though they changed the name, it’s almost even worse now because you have logical conflicts within the civ : Neoconfucianism and Buddhism for example → Laziness or lack of time during an early conception which is currently leading to problems.
Small nitpick, but as we’re on the topic - so does every unit that doesn’t die in this game, because that’s exactly the kind of abstraction a video game needs to make.
I’m not saying “therefore accuracy doesn’t matter”, I’m saying “any single unit can last the entire lifespan of a multiplayer match”, and therefore Jeanne is no different.
Yes many people including me sent in feedback about certain names that me and other had issues with, Empire of Jade being one of them. They listened and they changed it to Zhu Xi’s Legacy. Let’s move on from this whole Empire of Jade debate as it’s meaningless now when it’s no longer called that.
Every variant civilization is either based on a historical figure and/or a historical group of that time, hence making all of them somewhat historical accurate. Now of course they have to take certain liberties in order to make a civilization worth playing and that is fun, so some elements might be created by the developers for the sake of the civilization to function properly but this can be said about any other civilization in the game so purely judging the variants is strange to me in that case we should apply this for all civilizations.
Just like @GorbMort wrote before me this is what I call nitpicking. With your logic we can say the same thing about all the units in the game surviving from dark age all the way to imperial age. It’s a game and it has to take certain liberties such as this.
This is just starting to get ridiculous at this point with these types of discussions. I get it with the name issue for some of the variant civilizations, but all this nitpicking to try find flaws while ignoring everything that they are doing right is getting tiresome to see it being repeated every single day by the same group of people.
I’m all for providing constructive feedback, this isn’t it in my opinion.
Those age insiders are probably getting paid to tell something good about game and attack the player who points out the problem of the game.It doesnt matter how many proofs you show them they keep deny it.They are just paid actors to make game look good but everything is obvious those acts has no achivement.
They are just paid troll army so everyone dont waste your time with them maybe they gifted them the dlc instead of payment who knows .Thats why they are so passinote and against every logic.
I’m more from a AoE 2 background and interested in the dlc because of the variant civs for two things: 1. It gives the player a good quantity of contend with still a good amount of variation for a reasenable amount of development time. And 2. if the devs only add normal civs that totally differ from each other in AoE 4 like maybe 20 normal civs in the future non hardcore gamers will not be able to play a majority of civs on a good level.
In my opinion if the variant civs gameplay is good and devs aren’ t doing something completely of the scale with history accuracy the civ variant concept is a very good idea and gives a good amount of contend to AoE 4 in the future. And for more casual players like players who play AoE 2 and AoE 4 and are maining let’s say China on a good level will be able to play China and Zhu Xi both on a good level. The 4 variant civs are actually looking good in my opionion
