I was seeing some games art renders on artstation and my attenzione have been catched by some artworks made by Relic artists for AGE4.
In the previous vision this game would have been more and more ambitious with cinematic segments, big navale Battles, Great sieges and also soldiers on boats
The naval parts seemed very good and more close to Relic’s style, imho.
I don’t know what happened during the development but the final result Is not good.
Those are literally early mood/concept arts. Doesn’t mean they planned to have anything from that in the game.
Every game has weird and crazy ■■■■ in its concept arts and having people on boats doesn’t mean they ever planned to have them there.
I would loved to see this innovations, this new vision for Aoe4. But as i said, this game have been made for E-sport and all of these tournaments (useless because there aren’t new players) show It.
I understand that it is a concept, they are usually exaggerated, but this does not seem very exaggerated to me. It could be polished and implemented in the final version.
As i often said, i didn’t like Aoeo graphic and artstyle but i always thought that this game had a great potential: civilizations were very uniquez, there was a world map with different missions etc.
The Anno series have something like this. It’s really great. It’s crazy to think that a game like Anno, which is not even an RTS, has basically more complex naval construction, combat and trade than AoE 4.
What strikes me most in these images is the scale of units next to any other structure. It certainly looks more realistic and appealing than AoEIV’s current one.
I’m not aware of how well this scale would play out but when I hear Adam Isgreen saying in a publicly available interview that they consciously opted for the current one else AoEIV would be a “game for ants”, it makes me think that versions of the game at some point did have a more realistic scale (I think that can also be inferred from XO19’s trailer? not sure) and that these images could show more than just fun concept art that means absolutely nothing.
After all the design of these ships looks pretty much identical with what AoEIV currently has - or had during the beta -. Of course if you eventually make the call to go with gullivers in Lilliput for units, any initial plan to have gulliver board the lilliputian ship’s deck would be scraped. (it’s all wild speculation)
There’s full scale realism and then there is approximate scale realism. That concept art above is full realism, which is really not ideal in the limited screen space you have in an RTS. Approximate realism would be AoE 2, where you have castles and cathedrals that are clearly smaller than their real-life counterparts, but the designers took care to make doors and windows appear to scale:
AoE 4 achieved none. Buildings are just shrunk down as a whole, without accounting for height, door/window sizes or even decorations such as horses in stables. The result is an inconsistent and unrealistic mess. The closest to AoE 4 would be AoE 1.