I don’t know why people keep pointing to aoe3 ragdoll physics like they are good. They are fun sure, but way, way over the top unrealistic.
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They are the best in the series and certainly, afaik, the best in the genre when AoE III came out.
This a RTS game, not a simulator, nothing here is aiming to be ‘realistic’ whatever that would mean in reality. Considering the technology, even vanilla camera setting, hardware back in the day they were and still are very impressive.
Over the top? They don’t play a huge role in the gameplay and are most visible as a part of building and ship destruction, where are fine, and in combat during encounters with artillery.
I haven’t seen a video when they test the impact of cannonballs on a human body, so I don’t feel there is a ground to call them bad - it would most likely make more sense to have realistic body dismemberment than having the force of that projectile transferred into the unit model that goes flying into the air, but that’s WAY above what was and still is capable in almost all strategy games.
Sadly not a lot of examples of good RTS games where physics plays a big role.
AoE III physics is great. With ludicrous zoom it makes even more sense since more nuanced impact and interaction would be simply lost.
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Strangely, Relic RTS games like Dawn of War 2 and Company of Heroes 1/2 have really good physics in them so it’s odd they chose not to implement them similarly in AOE IV as the game engine can clearly do it. I guess it’s possible release version might be different than beta somewhat.
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Yes, but even in DoWs it was underused and didn’t have a big impact as it could.
Relic was more about sophisticated scripting- destruction, kill animations etc. Not a lot of actual impact on the gameplay as great as for example structure damage looked. Most of that was fairly rigid and binary. Still- looking at the competition- very good.
One of the best things in CoHs/DoWs is looking at the battlefield at the end of the game, after all bombardments etc. it often looked like pictured from WW1 - complete barren wasteland.
It’s crazy that with modern tech in IV building destruction is SO poor.
There is no even basic impact on the environment. Not even visual. In other genres they at least to try to implement a visual one- realistic snow, mud, dirt, rain, real-time generation of puddles etc.
In beta there was nothing. And what was present (like dirts clouds) was crude and fake looking as hell.
Not expecting terraformation, it’s not this type of RTS, but even building rubble was just poor and basic looking. Low detail, poor blending with terrain, wrong scale, no smaller touches like realistic smoke, smoldering sparks, some light haze from the fire… Just kinda old looking 
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Talking specifically about DoW II for a second as it’s the one I’m most familiar with, it had real-time terrain deformation (in vDoW these were handled by ground textures painted at point of impact - no actual terrain deformation).
However, it was really tough on the CPU. Any CPU. This was most apparent in The Last Stand when everything went mad inside one relatively-small arena.
There’s probably a lot more that can be run on the GPU nowadays, I’m certainly no expert there. But physics in general is probably one of the more (perhaps even the most) complicated areas in terms of representing it with any degree of “reality”. That’s why a lot of it involves “faking” it on some level (not that this is a bad thing).
For example, vDoW had these things called “sync kills”. They proved very popular in the community (though at times divisive, especially in DoW II), but all they were were custom animations. Not physics. Unit A would go into a lengthy custom animation (taking damage the whole time, in vDoW - somewhat unhelpful at times), while unit B was already dead (in terms of the game simulation). Actually doing that with the units themselves, organically, using some kind of procedural system? Orders of magnitude more complicated.
Of course, its a bit unrealistic. But its a video game. It is supposed to be fun, enjoyable and put a big smile on our face. Its these amazing effects that make me keep going back to them. I remember my friend screamed in excitement when he saw the Ottoman Great Bombard in action. 
Big agree there, couldn’t have said it better. 
Reading through these recent post you’d think most of you haven’t seen a major PC release in ages.
I’ve seen people claiming this is a positive echo chamber and people will be surprised at the negative reaction of the larger playerbase. That’s unlikely. Most official forums are cesspools full of doomsayers and negativity. This has been the case for for any major PC release within the last decade and a half I can remember. Pretty much regardless of the games genres and how successful they actually ended up being.
It was the same for Starcraft II where during the entirety of Beta and in the final weeks leading to official release a vocal minority raged at Blizzard for sending the game to die like that and thereby murdering both the franchise and the genre. For months after launch the same vocal minority insisted the pro scene would quickly collapse and players would return to SC:BW within weeks. I believe it is fair to say reality didn’t quite turn out like that.
More recently, I’ve been a alpha tester for New World for several years leading up to it’s recent release. I cannot remember a time period between being introduced to the Alpha more than 3 years ago and the first Open Beta a few months ago were the official forum and pretty much every unoffical forum I am aware of were not dominated by a vocal minority of doomsayers. Personally, I never even bought the game, but just a few weeks ago it had one of the most successful launches in history.
It’s a forum thing. That’s just how these message boards work ever since a broader audience got introduced to them. Most likely, because that is just how people work. It goes deeper than that, but
statistically we are much more likely to share negative experiences and criticism than anything positive.
Now I am not saying critic or negative feedback are bad. They are obviously very important. Just don’t give in to the temptation to assume your own pain points with the game are any indication on how the larger playerbase is going to react to the game. You’d probably be wrong.
At the end of the day AoE4 is still a huge gamble. It’s the first major release this (almost) dead genre has seen in a very long time. Chances of this being a huge hit have always been pretty small. It might very well crash and burn, it might just do “decently” or give RTS some kind of resurgence. You won’t be able to predict the outcome by browsing this forum and the vast majority of issues discussed here will have little to no impact on the actual success of this game. At the very least I can guarantee the game not wowing you when played on a 4k 75" display is not going to matter one bit to the vast majority of its target audience.
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I strongly agree with you , well said
Agreed in everything, that exactly happens to me, I am a big enemy of mediocrity, which is my feeling after playing beta test… oh and you forgot to mention CoH 1, the inmersion in that game was insane! before the 2019 preview I dreamed and imagined so many times how good would AoE 4 by adding the best features of that game and the ones you mentioned…but after see the latest gameplays and streams I am getting more and more disappointment
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Sure, but Dawn of War 3’s, and any other failed games’, official forums were also full of “doomsayers”. They are only “doomsayers” if doom doesn’t actually come to pass. It’s the same sort of meaningless observation like “they always want more zoom”. Does that mean the game can never be too zoomed in? No.
Official forums will be frequented by fans, which are more likely to be critical than non fans which is why forums appear to be “full of negativity”. Personally I find that word “negative” to be too negative, I prefer “critical”. Also, I prefer to voice my criticism on these forums since I don’t run the risk of interacting with any of the developers of the game here.
The problem is that AoE4 is a very safe, very classic RTS. You are not likely to find a market for it outside of the core fans. I do believe the impressions of the game on these forums will prove to be an accurate representation of the larger player base’s impressions.
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There has been constructive criticism. There has also been lots of criticism and negativity that is not constructive at all. You could easily find dozens of examples on here of people calling devs lazy or worse because they personally disagree with some decision (often aesthetic) the devs made. Plus all the things people were saying about Adam Isgreen with nothing more than an out of context quote to go on.
Too many people see something they don’t like or agree with and assume that means it is wrong. They seem incapable of understanding some things are subjective and their opinion is not necessarily any more right than someone else’s.
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Sure, and it would be nice if everyone voiced their thoughts in a respectful manner. But. This reminds me of several discussions the popped up on the beta forums, on one hand you had the people who opened topics and said something along the lines of “this game sucks, it looks like a mobile game, I hope you all die” and on the other hand you had the responses which were “this is not constructive, it’s all subjective, you are a waste of a beta tester”. The last part is what got me thinking. Who is the bigger waste? The people who can’t respectfully articulate why they dislike the game or the people who just agree with everything the developer does? The zoom is a good example. To them it was perfect before they changed it, and it was perfect after they changed it. It’s always perfect because it’s what the developers want. It’s very respectful to them, but is it helpful to them?
Not saying this is what you are doing, it just reminded me of the situation in general. To me it seem that for every disrespectful negative person on here there is a positive, can’t find anything they dislike about the game if their life dependent on it, person.
And again, I’m all for people being respectful (and honest) with their thoughts.
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Believe what you will. Even if it was an accurate representation, there’d be no way to prove it regardless of the game’s performance.
Keep in mind though that 97% of the core doesn’t even read message boards. This forum does not represent the core. The core doesn’t even acknowledge its existence.
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97% of movie goers don’t acknowledge or participate in focus groups or feedback surveys as well. They still end up representing them rather well.
If the game was a fresh take or a groundbreaking new genre then I would say that the forum goers would have a 50/50 shot of accurately predicting what the bigger reception is going to be like. But for a game so generic (not a bad thing), in a genre that has been incapable of finding a new audience in the past decade, everybody with a radically different opinion from ours is either not going to be playing it at all or will be gone in a month. What you see here is what you get. I believe.
Also, it’s not that negative here. I think people who believe it is are just being overly sensitive. I think it’s mostly lukewarm.
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I am sorry, but that is just not how the science behind that works. At all. Scientifically this group simply doesn’t qualify as a representative sample.
Agreed. I was mostly referring to this thread an maybe a handful of others. All in all, this place is fairly tame outside of some obvious troll accounts and some posters stuck in various parts of the seven stages of grief after their personal expectations were not fulfilled.
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Indeed there are always these two kinds of people.
However I do think people need to remain constructive in order to be taken seriously. Either by the devs or by fellow forum posters.
In general, especially for the Closed beta forums feedback, everyone was very descriptive and articulate with their posts. Tons of high quality feedback over there. And although Relic hasn’t been the most transparent about design decisions, there has been evidence they do read.
We are nearing the end of high activity on these forums IMO. Only a few weeks left before launch so most people will either finally decide on whether they want the game or not. And discussion will probably only gravitate around future DLC, bugs, and the occasional historical post.
Added with a few weird nationalists and lots of political agitators.
And this is what is bothering me the most about all of this.
We all want this game to be the best version of itself and do the best it can when it comes to sales and activities.
But even me personally, I feel very insecure about my purchasing decision.
Especially on that price, when they have an “add/fix it later” mentality, cause I’m not sure if the game is not “successfull enough” for them, that they just take the money and run DoW3 like or change it so much that I basically bought a different game that I now don’t like anymore.
Alot of critizism that I’ve read really points to the same conclusion:
Please take a bit more time, a few more months, to polish stuff and add a bit more content.
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Right, forgot about those. I believe those come free of charge with the historical setting.
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Yeah I think those are fair concerns to have honestly.
It’s pretty hard to tell what Relic actually wants their final product to be.
But we’ve been constantly told by them that the beta versions we’ve tried were imperfect/incomplete builds of the game they want at release. I’m curious to see what that actually ends up being.
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