Lack of new Voicelines for The Templars and English variant, both uses reused voices, no new ones
No Deus Vult, Gods wills it, uses royal knights, charge, cavalier, for honor etc which is unfitting.
Mercs for Polish, Spanish etc will be speaking French which makes no sense.
4 Kings models for English variant the same which is weird and out of place, we have a model for monarch hello? at least use that.
Raising price the same as Sultan Ascend for 2 variant civs, lack of new civs like Vikings, Spanish, Aztecs, Incas etc. next dlc will probably price 25$ for 2 Civs, 1 Variant.
All of this shows, that Microsoft is running out of money and budget and they are not interested in developing AOE4 Further, the amount of updates and new stuff aoe2 is getting is massive in comparison, same with on AOM, the dlc was done extremely well and has a ton of new content, despite the playerbase being 4k. AOE4 on the other hand has a playerbase of monthly close to 25k peak and its getting treated this way
after the next DLC, its very likely it will be the end of the game and no more new content after. Its a sad day but we must admit this is whats going to happen, we have 2 years without any new civs nor content.
I’m looking forward to seeing if this comes true. We’ve had this prediction made nearly every year, and the game is as popular as ever.
However, this DLC feels like it just barely meets the qualifications of a 15 dollar value. Sultan’s Ascend really should have been sold for 20-25 dollars, the lower price seems like a subsidy to encourage players to purchase it. Compared to any other Age DLC it has massive content:price value. As a result, the comparison feels a bit fraudulent.
I’m more curious to see how they handle the voice lines for the many unique units that Knights Templar are getting.
With their standard units, such as the knight UU you referenced, it makes sense for them to share voice lines. Yuan raider has fire lancer lines, Imperial guard has lancer voice lines, camel lancer/desert raider have camel archer/rider lines… that’s the precedent that has been established. Those units are a morph of the original concept, so they share that design.
But for the order units from Castile you would expect a medieval Spanish dialect. It would be strange to add a Polish order and have them speaking french. That’s something we haven’t had revealed yet, and I would share your disappointment if those unique units didn’t bring more to the table.
Jokes on you I guess one the french royal knigth quote is :
“Dieu vous ait en sa garde, avant !” → “(May) god watch over you, onward !”
Anyway the knights of the order are still originaly extracted from the secular knigths and nobility, so all the references they have to honor and else still apply and would still apply even if they were extracted from something else anyway.
Also we don’t know what language the units from non existing civ will speak. Unless you have a direct proof of the opposite, and if true I would be jsut as disapointed as you.
I’m a bit more “scared” that the Teutonic knight will either get the HRE MAA voicelines who would be out of place or the knight ones who may sometimes refer to a non existant horse or saddle.
Comparing the releases accross the franchise doesn’t mean much. When the Sultan Ascend was released, AOE 2 only got Armenian and Georgians (and the civ rework I think), the games will never receive the same amount of content at a given time and that’s normal .
The current AOM extension developpement was started even before AOM release, they literally have to do this DLC and the next one because it is what people have bought by purchasing the premium version of AOM. No matter how bad the playbase would look they would have to do these 2 DLCs. We will see after these two though I’m not super optimist that they will continue much beyond that as the playerbase isn’t even as big as AOE3.
About the price, you think that we would have got Ottoman + Malian for free and the Sultan’s Ascends for 15 $ if the game didn’t have a bad launch ? Let’s be real it was probably an effort from microsoft in order to attract and keep more AOE4 players. Now that’s done I expect the DLC prices to be rather comparable to what we see in other strategy games.
We don’t know what the next DLC will be. Could be more variants, in which case, I’d declare the game dead.
It’s very unlikely for that to be the case considering how long it has taken to develop, though. Relic seemingly has been the roadblock when it came to further developing the game. They’re not an inhouse studio, so that was always going to be the most vulnerable decision behind AoE4, and with Relic essentially imploding with the launch of CoH3, it likely severely hurt AoE4 development.
AoE4 should’ve always been helmed by studios that Microsoft owned. Though it looks like FE is taking more control of things now, that should’ve been the case from the beginning. These past two years, I imagine to be the cost of taking this risk. The truth is simply that AoE4 was never Relic’s priority, as it was not their IP.
Honestly, I’m surprised Microsoft didn’t just buy out Relic. Though truthfully, that would come with a lot more baggage than just AoE4. I can’t blame them for not wanting to invest millions into CoH.
I’m hoping AoE5 is fully developed by an inhouse studio completely dedicated to Age of Empires. We need a new Ensemble that we can communicate with and who tells us what is going on. Besides the development issues of AoE4, I think withholding so much information from customers has been a critical mistake. The multiple-company spidersweb they have going on, has left much to be desired in that department.
Not necessarily. You could just imagine that they utilized rudimentary French for better cooperation. But, this is just the consequence of AoE4’s format. To design more elaborate civilizations with our established standard, it would mean needing a lot of assets, like voicelines, music, models, characters, textures and so on. And to skimp out on any of these will just feel, well, not right. Your issue seems to be voicelines. I’m much more upset about models.
Knights Templars are a lot more creative than say, JDA. But, because JDA exists entirely within the French realm, there is nothing to question. So the creativity here is what is costing Knights Templars, and its bittersweet. Because on one hand, we’d probably never get a real Crusader civilization (Considering that AoE4’s format are Empires/Kingdoms). On the other, they’ve dedicated a lot of effort to create it, and they’ve done decently considering the few resources they seemingly had at hand.
At the end of the day, it’s a compromise. I’m a variant hater, but I think this DLC’s price would’ve been justified had Lancasters been as transformative as Knights Templars. While I don’t like variants, I don’t buy into the initial philosophy of “English, with 2 new units and a different civilization bonus”.
If we’re going to do Variants, let them be like Knights Templar. More creative, more expansive, and actually, you know, different mechanics. ZXL remains a sin in my book, because all of the mechanics they got, China should’ve gotten. Instead, I find myself having to play a pseudo-China with a cringy name. That feels awful.
I think more communication should’ve been a no-brainer decision in hindsight for whoever makes these decisions, but I do think there are cases where “withholding” information is fine.
Consumers (understandably and fairly) lack any real knowledge of how professional software development works, and get (again, understandably and fairly) emotionally attached (as do developers, but that’s not my point). This translates into a lack of understanding when plans change, which they often do in games development especially (compared to regular software, and my BU has already been through two roadmap updates for the coming year already).
I’ve been online honestly too long (though not as long as some), and I’ve seen this pattern play out a great number of ways. The only real suggestion I have is to share timely updates (however small) more often, and don’t overpromise (or semantically go near any kind of possible statement that could be interpreted as something that will later down the line bite the developers, proverbially).
We live in an age where the industry itself is groaning under the weight of publishers seeking the maximum ROI, and consumers being exploited by off-topic factors that pit them against the developers making the games they enjoy. It’s very hard to have a good faith discussion about literally anything anymore (one of the reasons I effectively gave up moderating forums, some years back). I wish that wasn’t the case. But it makes me very cynical when it comes to developers opening up.
I only really use reddit for a niche mobile game. So pretty much guaranteed to not be me. I’m gorbles there, as I am most places (except here, which requires my ancient Games for Windows Live → XBox Live login).
You’re sounding like the poor developers are the most innocent people in the world, like they are in the same trench as us and it is some sort of “collaborative” relationship to get through the hardship together.
If so, why don’t they simply come out and tell us they need more time/money? Why do they phrase cheaper work as a great deal? Why do they have to maintain this toxic positivity that even means to cut cost are advertised as innovations? Why is their only measure in respose to the pressure deceiving customers into buying overpriced products?
We all struggle to make a living, through fair and honest means. Don’t sound like they are the only people who have to make a living, or they are the most miserable people out there. In fact they live a better life than most of us.
Customers come in with good faith and will not take the initiative to ruin the relationship. Mutual trust is earned. They killed the trust with more and more empty promises and fake hypes. The industry killed itself with greed and dishonesty. I will not consider myself in the same trench with someone thinking of 365 different ways of picking my pocket.
Edit: I’m talking about the industry as a whole.
Guess what, we can hear from their proxies all the time. These people are more loyal to the company than any individual within the company and can react in seconds.
It’s just that the poor developers are too shy to show up themselves.
The only shortcoming is those people may not in turn communicate our response back to the developers, because they believe the latter need their protection and would faint upon hearing criticism.
They just spent $70 billion to buy Activision about 1.5 years ago, I doubt they’re running out of money.
It might be an internal recognition, though, that they feel the game needs a lot of TLC to become more viable and attract more consistent players to it, which they could be unwilling to invest in at this time. Or maybe they are prepping to switch gears to the creation of an AoE5.
Maybe they’re working on AoE5. If so, that sounds good to me. AoE4’s ship has sailed, for the most part, as it’s now going on 4 years old and it’s clear they are steadfastly latching onto many of the design and gameplay decisions made for the game’s launch. In other words, they don’t seem willing to budge on some low-hanging fruit items that would attract more players (zoom level, UI, population stuff, etc,). Besides, four years is a pretty reasonable lifespan for most games.
Hopefully, they already started AoE5 a year back so it is only a couple years away… as opposed to them not starting yet and we all have to wait another 3-5 years from today or some future date before launch. In which case that could be up to at least an 8 or 9 year gap between AoE4 and AoE5
I don’t know how much it cost to make AoE4, but it seems like spending, say, $50-$100 million on AoE5 is pocket change compared to $70 billion. In fact, $100 million is only .14% (0.0014) of $70 billion. Let’s go!
The resources allocated to things like corporate takeovers are a very different thing to the resources allocated to things like games development projects. It’s difficult to compare the two. It’s like them investing in data centres for generative AI. It’s a very different pot of money, all told (even if acquiring ActiBlizzard is more aligned with games development than not).
What corporate (and by this I tend to mean c-suite or otherwise upper management) tend to see is the impact on their quarterlies and / or stock portfolios. Acquisitions can be very good for that (and the subsequent layoffs tend to be the icing on the stock price cake).
Games are different. More volatile. More investment vs. return (for the vast majority of releases). Requires paying people more what they’re worth (even if they are, on average, pretty drastically underpaid)
