I’m not mad, I’m baffle by the lack of professionalism of those “game journalists”. But then again, their goal is not to be 100% objective but to sell papers / clicks and not to pi*s of too much the publisher in the process.
Remind me of the cyberpunk 2077 debacle. Almost every “reviewer” gave in to the hype and gave a great score to the game. One of those journalist though the game was just “good” with many issue and rated it 7/10 … then received death threat from crazy fans. A year later what is the user score on metacritic? … 7.1
The whole industry (game journalist, devs and fans included) is just f*cked up.
I guess the “easy-to-see flaws” are not decisive. Gameplay and mechanics seem to be great but the reviewer is dissapointet that many low hanging fruits are ignored (e. g. full hotkey support or details of animations)
Agreed. Many of them are disconnected clickbait leeches.
To defend this topics review and reviewer in particular: His actual video(in german, adding auto-translated subtitles takes yt a while) is great. It’s really disconnected from the final score though. Same with written articles…I sometimes buy the thing and always enjoy reading it, but completely ignore the scoring system.
Yes, I remember even “honest” youtubers like YongYea were among those who overpraised Cyberpunk 2077 in their reviews. He really got burnt for it by his own community and later apologised though.
Gamestar is not known for “critical” reviews. Apart of writing about games, appealing to mainstream audience and don’t getting unpopular with publishers is also on their agenda.
in my opinion the gamestar describes everything very well. it is exactly what i thought in the beta.
and think, we will see some fixes and more details in patches.
sadly the most developers have a problem with the deadline from the publisher. and so also relic. the main game is great, but you realize where the had not enough time. in interviews the told us to add more festures like mods, mapeditor… after release.
what remains is the best rts for years. the best rts i played since aoe2. and that’s great!
That score fits pretty well with the (current) RTS players’ psychology.
Okay there is indeed a lack of details and animations (which a 3D game back in 2000s can successfully implement), but you would not notice them when playing the game/mirco and competitive gameplay is more important than graphics/gameplay is king. As long as the base gameplay is good you do not need them, and there are not many big RTS publishers nowadays if we let this game fail we would not get any more RTS in the future at all!
I don’t know if RTS is really cursed or doomed for some underlying systematic shortcomings. RTS back in 1990s~2000s could implement great graphic details by the standard of their time, same did every Age game. Almost every other living genre could continue to improve their graphics, details and immersion up to the present day. I don’t know how many people objected the customization of weapons and the ability to inspect them closely in many present-day FPS (because you won’t notice that in the midst of a match), or map details as small as walking men or animals in turn-based strategies (because gameplay is more important and as you zoom out so much you’ll almost never see them). But all of a sudden, at the time of 2020s, poof, RTS no longer need anything like that.
Ironically after years of playing mostly RTS since I was a kid, I began to wonder whether RTS is really the genre for me.
graphics aren’t everything. what you looking for (since the closed beta) isn’t age of empires at all.
some of your critics are good, like on the zoom. but alot of them are a bashing against the game, like you wanna make the people hate it. nearly every post the exactly same criticism, and you ignoring the whole gameplay in it’s all greatness .
also i am not ok with every designchoice , but i have love for the franchise and the game. i have respect for everyone working hard on the game and trying to make a game which has the power to exist through the next decade and bring people together for some fun.
sadly the most developers have a problem with the deadline from the publisher. and so also relic. the main game is great, but you realize where the had not enough time. in interviews the told us to add more festures like mods, mapeditor… after release.
And I think they should be punished for it. But unfortunately, there seems no way to punish the publisher without also the developer, who certainly tried his best to play the hand he got. Even if reviews wouldn’t be that inflationary with their scores and sales suck, it’s more likely the Studio gets dumped before they are granted a extra year for their next game.
86% would be an accurate rating for AoE IV after the small features pretty much everyone requested are added. Things such as: being able to zoom out more, better hotkey customization, choosing your color, seeing the map after the game…
These all sound like they could unironically be done under a week by a competent team (unless there are some deep limitations in the engine) and would improve the game a lot. Until then, AoE IV would be closer to an 80% to me, but not much higher
