I know that devs may or may not reading this forums, but in case they did, first of all it is a nice effort back to last year when the game received badly needed graphical update although mostly at terrain rendering and metals rendering.
But, I think the game needs more overhaul in graphics, other than terrain and metals, if we look on Company of Heroes 3 which is also using the engine that powered this game, it shows that this engine can produce realistic and detailed graphics.
There are 3 of the most urgent things need to be fixed related to the look and feel of the game :
Units and building proportion, it just completely off looking that units is almost as big as building
Units and buildings texture (it needs more dirt or something that applies grittiness, both unit and building are too clean)
Filter, as the current game feels too bright and colorful and doesn’t feels like medieval period
I know that relic has massive layoffs these last few years, but is it too hard to get graphics quality on par with what they did to Company of Heroes 3 ?
One of my biggest problems with CoH is it’s overly drab and gritty look and feel. AoE has more colour in it, as AoE always has.
I don’t consider this representative of graphical quality - just aesthetic preference. There are plenty of things AoE IV could improve artswise without becoming brown, grey and “gritty”.
I think there’s plenty of wins that don’t involve making things look “gritty”. The OP mentions weapons for example - lots of room for improvement there.
Even if devs aren’t going to make it looks gritty, at least they can overhaul the texture material, right now almost all metal things in the game are still looking more like plastic instead of metal. Both armour and weapons looks like toy instead of real weapon. Is it that difficult to fix or is it because, once again, vetoed by pro players for the sake of readability ?
Readability is important for all players, but I feel you’ve got an axe to grind so not really interested in a tangent there.
I literally just agreed about touching up weapons as well. It’s a part of the post you chose to reply to. Maybe engage with what’s written, instead of going on about whatever you think pro players are up to (also - I’m nowhere near a pro player)?
For me readability is also important factor, as I found out it is indeed important, being able to differ between units in a glance is very useful. But,I think having real metal texture isn’t gonna hurt readability right ?
Easier to differ between what’s what, more so on large battle, if the texture is better.
I don’t think so! So long as the specular doesn’t go too silly with light sources.
(e.g. in historic terms we’ve got a ton of examples of polished metal reflecting light and blinding / partially blinding onlookers. Cool as a game mechanic - a literal headache for a real player!)
I don’t think we’ll see other big graphic updates. I’m on the side of who believe that all the graphic updates have been added to the game at this point. Graphic changes on models (something similar to COH3) would request too much work by developers. They should remade all units in 4k resolutions as we seen with Season V. Also weapons should be remade to seem less plastic and more realistic. Too much work, imho.
I don’t want to turn off specular completely, thanks. I’m just saying it’s something that needs to be considered in realistic metal textures. I’m not saying that it can’t be done.
Like so many things, its a matter of time, effort and resources. I assume that Relic is currently in earlyish development of whatever their new game is. They also have teams updating AOE4 and COH3. They just became independent and staff got laid off, putting even more pressure on the dev team.
Modern graphics, using modern systems, take a lot of effort to produce and improve. One major reason dev time takes so long these days is everyone trying to compete for the best graphics, which requires a large amount of time and labour.
So with such a small team, what do you choose? Everyone wants a big update with new civs. That takes alot of time to also do. Do you focus on updating systems, civs and balance? Or do you take alot of those resources to “improve” the graphics?
(I also do not mind the graphics and have always thought that AOE4 has a good readability and nice looking models. Plus they made the choice to make the graphics scale well to less powerful machines, to make the game more accessible to more players)
The irony is that even AoE2 seems to be more realistic than AoE4.
It would be interesting if they changed most of the textures and released it together with a new DLC, with the intention of creating a big hype and attracting even more attention. It would be a great advertisement to present new civilizations together with a new graphic texture update.
An example of a new texture… would be for iron armor and weapons, giving them a metallic appearance. Improve the water/sea graphics. New texture for stone and wood, obviously affecting the visuals of buildings and ships.
It’s not hard to imagine what the game would look like with a massive texture change. However, I think it’s almost impossible for them to be interested in making such a big change. It’s a shame… because it would be an incredible advertisement if it came together with the new DLC.
No, they won’t do anything, they never cared, I’f you remember they were more interested in adding things like purple maps, avatars not related to a medieval game, a MOBA hero, we still have the same destruction animation for all siege units, so no, they won’t do it but you will get the soulless season updates.
And its rewards are pointless too.
No one cares about those useless banners and monuments because none of them have much use or fancy animations.
Instead, they can reward players with different building skins, GAIA animals of the map, and unit skins, and so on.
Then it will make the game rich in content.
But, lets hope someone who understands these problems comes in and fixes the graphics of this poor game.
They never cared? If that was true then the game would have already died because they would have stopped addressing all the issues post launch & they would not bother with making graphical overhaul in season 5 for example among other things.
You might have issues with this game, you always had since day one but don’t make up lies to suit your truth.
There’s a pretty easy fix for one of the biggest problems with the game’s graphics: the textures of the weapons and the way they reflect light.
As detailed in the post linked below, many of the game’s weapons are completely emissive, which means they aren’t affected by light sources or shadows. However, the metal textures on some weapons, like the Musofadi sword and the Handcannoneer barrel, do work correctly. This means it’s possible to change this for the other weapons too, hopefully without too much effort.
It is one of the details that has been requested for years. It is something that has been addressed in more recent models (Musofadi warrior and Ghazi raider in particular), but has not been changed retroactively for older models. I believe this is something that could be addressed in a minor patch, if they wanted to bundle it with a major patch that would be fine too. But it isn’t hard to fix.
Majority of AoE fans complain about colors being too washed out in AoE4, not too colorful.
Building to unit scale is complicated and not really needed. This is not a realistic simulation, it’s a strategy game.
There are other things that can be improved, and those improvements would make the game much more popular, because most of the casuals like to take in the graphics and reimagine the times:
Having dust / snow on buildings depending on biomes.
More biomes and improve bad looking ones from base game. The new biomes look amazing.
Biome specific fauna (add more animal types and predators to make the world feel alive).
Improve and add to game the Winter biome (add snow to buildings and footprints).
Weather effects.
Lighting improvements and different times of day added to maps as an extra layer, similar to biomes.
Improved textures on some of the base civ buildings (the wooden planks on Rus buildings look like a flat picture).
Improved projectiles. Arrows look like they’re conceptualized instead of depicted. Siege projectiles look bland.
Less color on units to make them look more grounded. Also make Japanese units hair not shiny, it looks ridiculous.
Improve the glowing effect on units. Japanese units look like they’re radioactive. Make the bannermen glow as the do now, and the buffed units glow more subtly.
Improve texture on berries. They look underwhelming compared to everything else.
Improve contact animations between units. This is also a gameplay problem, as it’s hard to tell when units hit each other.
Speed up some animations so that they have acceleration, like when Villagers chop wood, or when melee units hit. It looks off to have the weapons and tools move at a constant speed.
This game is very close to being a masterpiece. And trust me it can literally blow up in popularity if more is done for casuals. Visuals and not abstracting certain elements (like the arrows) are incredibly important to pull casuals in. Even little details on the buildings have a huge impact.
AI is very important too. But most importantly, a scripted casual mode (dedicated co-op) for people that are not competitive, with added matchmaking will at least double the player numbers, because atm the game is basically only catering to the multiplayer crowd, which is always a minority in RTS games. Just look at Starcraft 2 and how much it exploded once a co-op mode was added.
Also an active pause function in singleplayer. Casuals love to strategize while paused.