I like that! I feel that’s a great stance to have 
Thanks!
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Folks… the graphics in AOE2 DE are WAY better than in AOE4. So this idea that they have to have poor graphics so that people with low spec hardware can run it doesn’t make any sense. It is the art style, not technical limitations. Same goes for the zoom level. People were already able to adjust the zoom level to zooming WAY out via some hacking with the beta version. There was no issue with it as far as I am aware. For reasons I can’t understand, they purposely want to limit players options in contrast to the rest of the age games which allow tons of player options. Zoom levels, enhanced graphic packs, etc. Seems to be a different design philosophy (we know what is best vs you choose whats best), not technical limitations. My best guess is that the art style was chosen to appeal to ‘kids’ or non gamer types. To dumb it down to make it seem more family friendly, something that mom’s wouldn’t object to as much? Honestly I don’t know what was behind the kidsy art decision, which is obviously very different from the art style of all of the previous Age games.
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Which is why you aren’t the one making games.
Whether you like the art style or not is purely subjective; many of us don’t have a problem with it.
Complaints asking for more polygons or additional animated models are asking for things that increase system spec requirements.
As for zoom, how much of the game a player can see at once has a definite gameplay advantage. Allowing some users to play with more of the game visible because they can buy a better computer starts bordering on pay to win system which isn’t fun for people.
It’s important that players are able to compete evenly with all supported hardware and it needs to play well at whatever the largest game type is.
Just because it doesn’t impact you with your system and the one way you want to play doesn’t mean it’s a non-issue.
Additionally, the art is just not nearly as important as the gameplay.
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Sure, but “impossible” conveys pretty much the same meaning, plus or minus a thread or discussing the rabbithole, hah. It’s just different types of impossible. For you, I get the feeling because it’s theoretically possible, the systems that limit it you seem to present them as being by choice (and, on some abstract level, I guess they are). But for me, it’s about what I actually think can happen. If something is possible, it has to be able to happen within the business as it stands. For example, let’s take another random example. It is possible for me to get a wage rise. It is impossible for me to ask the CEO to step down. I could! But I’d be laughed out of the building (and possibly a job, I don’t know). And sure, they could technically say yes. But I can’t imagine any reality where they would.
That said, I appreciate this is purely semantics at this point. I appreciate that we’ve got this far with it, honestly. I get where you’re coming from a lot more clearly, and hopefully vice versa (even a little bit).
Render engines typically have a rough (or hard) limit in the amount of things that can be rendered on the screen in a single frame. So it’s not so much that not everything is on the screen at once, but everything that could possibly be on the screen at once has to be able to be rendered without everything breaking down. And games (well, game engines) do wonderful, even bizarre tricks to make this happen at times. But there is, ultimately, a limit.
And that’s what you hit in raising fidelity on a technical level, in say RTS games (or similar games with a huge amount of content on-screen). And absolutely, just polycount and texture size don’t tell the whole tale. It’s just two of the easiest things to talk about, as a rule (and honestly, the easiest to map to my experience with 3D pipelines which is getting a bit dated now).
When it comes to LODs, the maximum detail that goes into a model still has to fit in that render limit, i.e. what if you can manipulate the camera to be flat, and view a lot more models at that high level of detail? DoW III gets a lot of flak, and I don’t want to get into it, but one thing was the fixed camera. You could only zoom in or zoom out. No turning the camera on its axis at all, unlike previous DoW games. The developers stated their reason for this was performance - it constrains the viewing angle. It means only a certain amount of things can be shown at once (like your suggestion). I have no confirmation, but probably to show the massively-detailed Elite units as best as possible (as they are, for whatever faults the game has, incredible to look at in a lot of cases).
Unreal 5 is still incredibly new. Games won’t be leveraging it at all for a good year (depending on source code access / whatever Epic is cooking up). Games won’t be able to take proper advantage of it for some time after that. For a frame of reference, UE4 came out way back in 2014. I say “way” back because that’s a solid console generation ago (roughly - PS4 was what, 2013, and the PS5 was technically 2020?). I can’t speak to how good UE5 would be for RTS games specifically, but I have heard secondhand (so feel free to disregard - I’m no authority on this) that it is (as you’d expect) very FPS-focused even for a relatively accessible, generalist engine. A lot of RTS studios roll their own engine, and I’d imagine (Unity being in a similar boat) there’s some correlation as to why, there.
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How do you explain the previous age games offering zoom levels (AOE2 pros never zoom all the way out btw) and superior graphics while having identical or lower system requirements?
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Of course people don’t zoom out all the way, at some point things will be too small to be useful; that statement provides no value at all.
They also don’t play zoomed in all the way because being able to see more provides you with a huge advantage.
So now that we’ve gotten past your worthless reference to what professionals do, did you actually think about what I wrote, or just read it and furiously post?
There are any of a number of reasons for the zoom settings being what they were in the old games, there’s no way for us to know why they picked what they did. They also changed them in various editions.
Why the settings allowed what they did in other Age games doesn’t apply to Age 4, it has different graphics and is balanced around difference civs with different mechanics.
You can apply any negative reasoning you want but at the end of the day people who make entertainment tend to want as many people as possible to be able to enjoy what they created, not just people who can buy the best hardware.
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You have it wrong. You buy the game and play for less than 2 hours, leave a bad review also saying you may change the review to a positive if Devs do better, and get a refund
How are you going to change the review to positive if the devs do better if you already refunded the game? I don’t think Steam will allow you to rebuy a game and get a second refund.
Now, I’m not so sure that is completely correct. For a game that came out in 1999 running on a 2D engine and was remastered twice in 2013 and definitively in 2019 on the same engine, I personally am not of the opinion that it looks better than a game run on a 3D engine in 2021.
Now when it comes to graphics, the reason it runs well is not because of the art style. In fact, the art style has very little to do with optimization. The game runs well on many different setups is because the engine is optimized to run well on many different setups. The art style is a Stylized style similar to many other games. The poly count does not affect the art style, since the models are most likely low-poly with a high poly version skinned over it (which is a technique used by the majority of games now). The textures are then drawn in the stylized art style and after the high-poly models are unwrapped and the textures are then used on that, so that it looks good on the high-poly skin.
As to the zoom, I think it should definitely be increased as well, since with the lower poly count, everything will still look good with the high-poly skins.
Now, both 2D and 3D engines have their limitations. Its always going to be a trade off when it comes to that. But when it comes the graphical fidelity of a 2D engine over a 3D engine, 3D will always be more intensive, and with good optimization, can eventually run on many platforms without too high of an impact on both the cpu and gpu just like a 2D engine can.
Ill tally this up to 10 cents
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I think he was being facetious.
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Yeah I actually agree with this
I much prefer a game focus on gameplay and features than fancy graphics
however age 4 has mediocre graphics, but we’ve gained no extra features for this.
With the current graphics we should be able to have 500 pop cap games, and massive zoom out ability
so we can have epic battles with tons of these low polygon models.
Instead we got…
no next gen graphics
and no next gen features…
why would i switch to this from aoe2de…
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I’m going to strongly disagree. Maybe you meant AoE III: DE, but as it stands, your comparison is just laughable.
I’m not knocking the work that went into AoE II: DE, but you are for Age IV, so.
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It’s not laughable at all. I got a friend who had never played AoE before to play the AoE 4 tech stress test with me, and after that he bought AoE 2 DE when it was on sale for 1/5th of the price of 4, and he said to me unprompted that the graphics in 2 are miles better than 4. I agree with him.
It’s enough to make me think the game must be showing something completely different on other people’s screens, because 4 just looks terrible to me, it’s not even remotely close to looking as good as 2. I was running it on a 1440p screen with the quality settings maxed out, and it doesn’t even come close to 2 without 2’s enhanced graphics, and 2 looks even better on a 4k screen with the enhanced graphics.
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People can like whatever they want. I have a good friend who thinks Age IV looks brilliant. But an opinion doesn’t make for a fact. The graphics in Age II (any version) are all based on the original 2D sprite style. It’s iconic. People know it’s AoE by looking at it. But it isn’t on any level comparable to how Age IV looks. The water tech alone in IV blows (any version of) II out of the water.
You mentioned the art style before, right? If it’s the art style that you dislike, beyond being subjective, then it doesn’t matter how technically-good the graphics are. The quality of the graphics is irrelevant if you don’t like the style. And not liking the style doesn’t make the graphics bad. It just means you don’t like the art direction Age IV has gone with. There’s nothing wrong with that, either.
This is why we need to separate out “art style / direction” and “graphics better / worse”. Because they mean pretty different things, but people like to use them interchangeably.
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Here is a post I made comparing screenshots of the different games, for clarity, so everyone knows what we are really talking about. Yes, graphics are an opinion, but then again everything in this thread, including the topic of this thread is an opinion, we don’t need to rehash other threads. Part of the ‘desaster’ are the graphics, but it is only part.
I agree with GorbMort that the art style is to blame, not necessarily the engine. I think they could, and maybe even will, offer an option for a ‘realistic’ graphics pack to replace the existing graphics for people who prefer the art style of the previous age games. If they combined that with a flexible zoom system all the way out to whole map zoom, they would without question get higher sales, how could you lose sales by offering more options, people who like it the way it is could keep it that way.
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Neither are you?
And many of us do have a problem with it… see how much we gained from this nonsense argument?
Let me tell you a secret: There is a thing called an options menu. Where you can lower your graphics settings to fit your system specs. Thank me later.
You can also google things like “Dynamic LOD” and “Tessellation” to get a feel how much a fully developed 3D engine like Essence can do to allow dynamic and adjustable visuals, from beautiful and detailed down to low-res playmobil.
There is absolutely no need to start with the lowest common denominator and allow dropping down to EE1 era graphics. Without getting the same min specs as those old games, mind you.
Look at this amazing runescape update!
Fog of war handles that issue. This is not Stronghold where you can see everything at all times.
What can be seen and reached by your units should be visible for you (which is not the case, e.g. trebuchet).
If anything, a low field of view benefits high APM players (pros) since they are used to jumping around over the map utilizing hotkeys. Us average plebs using their mice to scroll loose valuable time and miss a lot of information.
The two interact. There is no way around it. I’m not watching a movie, I constantly gather visual information to make gameplay decisions. When the games visuals push me to zoom in close and watch the butterflies instead of zooming out and observing the battlefield, somebody designed for the wrong genre.
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I find it hard to separate the two. For example, is bad lighting a choice of art style or a technical problem? To me, the aim should be to make it look like a photograph of a real building of the type depicted. If the “art style” is something other than that, then we’re into the realms of it being a fantasy game instead. The “art style” is only separated from technical weakness by intent, and I can’t really guess what their intent was vs what is a technical shortcoming.
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I think there will be adjustable pop caps. Just that 200 will be the minimum.
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I agree. Visually, AOE 2 DE looks very attractive and superior. All units are easy to read, we can see all the tiny details on them like their armor and weapons. Lighting is perfect. No distracting glittery animations. with just one glance, we can know what’s going on the screen. It’s too pretty to ever stop playing.
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If you prefer photorealism, you prefer photorealism. Not all games shoot for that kind of look. If you’re judging the lighting because it’s “not realistic”, you’re not judging it on its technical merits.
If you don’t know what bad lighting looks like, then you can’t really comment on it, can you?
Poor textures are easier to notice, right? Or blocky models, or something. Some things are more obvious to the untrained eye (and these criticisms have been raised by people about Age IV at times). But we need to separate out “something is bad because I don’t like it” vs. “something is bad because I know that’s not how it would look if implemented better”.
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