Gamestar is a very well-known German-language magazine that tests games, among other things.
Yesterday they made an article about AOE4.
The title of the article is: Age of Empires 4 in the post-test: What happened to the savior of real-time strategy?
Here is the link to it:
Unfortunately, only subscribers can read the whole article.
Even though I’m not a subscriber (maybe someone here is and can say us more what they wrote?) I could see yesterday that they don’t change the score in the post-test. Why? Because they said too little was done that would justify increasing the score from the original test.
Unfortunately I must say this actually true
This would have been a good opportunity for AOE4 to receive positive marketing. Unfortunately it turned out the other way.
It is imperative that development accelerates so that AOE4 takes advantage of such opportunities in the future and not lose more players. I think the developers do a good job. But AOE4 needs more developers to be able to cope with all construction sites.
Modern games have this build in hall pass called “early access”. Which has shifted from a state of game development to a type of consumer branding. I’m not entirely sure why AOE 4 didn’t take advantage of this generally accepted yet borderline predatory way of doing business. You get all the protections of saying “this isn’t the final state of the game” (which keeps dreamers dreaming), get that initial boost in income and have a built-in justification to raise the price later on.
well , first of all , the game wasnt ready for 2021 , we still lack so many features to this present day.
Balance was horrible and it still is in some point…
Honestly they seem kind of tired of the game or those in microsoft dont paid them enough.
Dont get me wrong , the game is really good , and i admire relic A LOT .
But it honestly seems like aoe3 de is the game that they like more , with big updates and so much content in just so little time !
The second problem of aoe4 was that they didnt hear us in the closed beta . I hope im not in NDA anymore but seriously , we gave so many feedback and so little things ended up being better .
Indeed some of the best features we had got deleted in stress test , like bombards and late game siege capped until imperial and researched chemestry .
ranged units fighting in melee when meele units fought them .
You could upgrade stone towers .
And so much more.
I really hope that or relic expands its aoe4 team or microsoft paid them more.
Because things like changing unit values can be done in mere minutes , like we did in tuning packs .
Changing projectiles its really easy too. But those things really takes them ENTIRE months to change it. Something is off and i cant feel it.
age 2 and 3 have different studios working on them, 4 is relics work, i’d say its more closely related to company of heroes 3 needing hands on deck, also seeing closed beta people revealing all the good and bad in it truly demonstrates how misguided the game seems rn
Yeah I know, devs automatically get a pass all the time for some reason. But this shouldn’t be the case here, after it took them months to fix basic bugs which only introduced more bugs. Or after it took them months to implement basic features like post-game map view which they thought they’ve achieved with one of the first patches and clearly said so, but it wasn’t actually working (if any any of you remembers that embarrassment where they went back and said they actually meant implementing only post-map view where you stay in and spectate the visible map of allies - but that “feature” was already in the game so nothing was changed lmao) - so they were told by management they needed to implement that, but they just didn’t know how to code it in.
So it’s a mix of management, but also incompetence of the devs. And incompetence should never be accepted. Many of them are new with no experience prior to working on a triple A title like AoE4. Go figure.
i do think that trickling content in via seasons is a massive mistake, they obviously have most of the content for it working well ahead, why not release what you know for a fact works
also remember when it took them like 2 months to fix relic dupe? and they somehow missed the building foundation dupe and took 2 more months to fix that
This is how I feel 100%. You hit the nail on the head.
So many of these things in beta could have made this game a masterpiece. Instead we got a lack luster rts that had great promise. Everything this game is screams “cash grab” to me with no regard of the quality of game they put out
Upgrading stone towers, ranged units fighting in melee when meele units fought them. Bombards and late game seige caped!!! THIS IS THE DREAM. WHY THEY REMOVE/NOT ADD IN? Just these changes alone would make this game so much better.
p.s aoe3 de is so much better on every level. To bad its older and dosnt have the same hype. Its almost like a different studio made it. O wait it was
It was indeed the dream , it was sooo fun to play with late game siege ONLY on imperial . Game was healthier.
Yes ! you could add cannon balls and emplacements.
Another good feature that was removed and i honestly like this , because it brought so much micro to ranged units .
I think i still have some aoe4 closed beta gameplay but im not even sure if i can publish it because of NDA but wow , it gives me nostalgia .
Another thing that worked really well was unit habilities , like the longbows palings were OP on the beta BUT only because horseman was really op too. Instead of giving all archers palings they just nerfed palings and nerfed horseman .
Palings were deployed in less than 3 seconds , now they are deployed in at least 6 seconds wich makes them USELESS.
agree.
I was a fan boy… Then the truth hit me hard , dont get me wrong i ENJOY every match i play but every time i open the game i ask my self , why did i not mentioned this when i had the oportunity in the closed beta…
I was maybe too blind about the new fresh air aoe4 beta gaved me or it was that the game was in a better state than in stress test?..
Im not criticizing the game , im just hoping for the future and making clear my point here.
In the season 1 survey i wrote a letter for the devs saying about all of these closed beta changes that should come back , i really hope they see my letter and PROPOSE to the closed beta comunity the comeback of these changes.
LOL, I can do so much more alone in 6 hours.
They are simply underqualified.
In fact, balancing, fixing bugs, etc are so easy. They just need to change a few numbers (5th-grade math) jokes.
The only problem is the test as it takes time to get the appropriate feeling.
