I’m going to ask everyone to avoid monologues and heated discussions. Also, please contribute ideas on how to improve the game aesthetically, rather than just trying to counterargue those who give feedback.
I have my own point of view on what could be realistically added (whether it takes more or less time) to make the game more visually appealing, but I also want everything to be condensed here so that it is easier to visualize.
The feedback I’ve gathered elsewhere and here. To summarize.
The common feeling is not that AoE IV looks bad, but that its visuals are too flat and artificial for its potential. The highly saturated colors and some “unbelievable” or plastic-looking materials (metal, wood, stone) detract from the immersion, and many would appreciate graphics options that allow them to adjust saturation, lighting, or shaders without losing competitive readability.
Several players mention that some buildings appear too low or compressed in height, which breaks the visual scale of the game. Better adjusting the proportions, along with optional and well-optimized visual enhancements, could make the game more atmospheric and impactful without sacrificing performance or clarity.
Some call for the use of AI as an efficient way to raise the base level of the game without remaking all the assets from scratch (they are not asking for AI to replace art). They also insist that it should be optional or scalable so as not to affect performance, reinforcing the general idea: Improve visual impact and detail without compromising clarity or accessibility.
Finally, something similar happens with animations and physics: Certain battles lack weight and impact. Combat, unit deaths against bombards-type sieges (for example), how shoddy it looks when the siege is destroyed, and how light the collapse of buildings looks have a lot of room for improvement. In some cases, it looks almost weightless, which means that battles and sieges don’t convey the forcefulness they should. Along the same lines, the lack of siege operators (beyond the “yellow ghosts” that appear to pack and unpack the siege) feels unnatural, and adding them, improving their animation, would go a long way toward selling the spectacle of the siege.
If there is anything else that needs to be added, please let us know. At least, I think we have condensed almost everything fairly well.
Hopefully, there will be the capacity and resources to improve everything we have discussed.
What I’d like to highlight is…
Age of Empires 4 uses the engine from the game Company of Heroes…
This part is really strange…
Because Company of Heroes has the best operators I’ve ever seen in an RTS game. Really detailed.
Not to mention the realistic physics effects.
And all of that, it seems, was removed when making Age of Empires 4.
I don’t know if the team wanted to speed up production and not make certain animations and more severe physics effects.
But everyone remembers that SEVERAL animations were bad and that over the years they were improved…
Examples of some animation corrections that I remember:
However, all of this and much more has been improved over the years! But it shouldn’t have been like that… They should have done the animation well from the beginning and not need to fix it later.
Of course, Age of Empires 4 can still be updated and change a lot, but honestly, I believe that won’t be the focus. Since we have a lot of work for future new DLCs, which also demand a lot of attention and time.
But there’s that feeling… that we could have gone much further in terms of animations, graphics, and physics.
I think AoE IV has a specific, painterly art style that people are free to dislike (and metals could definitely do with some additional polish still), but AoE III: DE is more saturated than IV. Without a doubt. Having played both on the same monitors (as I’m sure many have), the colours are more amped up (especially the greens / vegetation).
(this is not a criticism of III either)
I don’t think anyone can summarise how common this feeling is, and if it’s concrete suggestions you want, I’d go a very different way. Here’s my list:
All of these combined would really differentiate each game in IV and raise the bar generally r.e. polish.
Siege operators have been discussed a lot. CoH 3 doesn’t have as large a armies as AoE IV does. If they have performance headroom to work with, I genuinely think improving grass would have a greater overall impact. Look at what they did with water.
One of the most common criticisms of AoE3 graphics is the high color saturation, the bloom effect, and yes, the overly colorful environment/vegetation, something that can be adjusted a little better in the graphics options. I would say that the old AoE3 with DE details would probably look better.
The fact that the game has a slightly more realistic feel (with better building proportions, texture adjustments, and a more balanced color tone) is probably not something that people would be against, right? In fact, it could attract more people.
As for operators, even the bombard cannon in AoE2 has them. I think it’s a step backwards, I’ve always thought so. I don’t think there would be any opposition if they were included either.
You’ve added new ideas, which is great, especially birds, haha.
For readability, I might even reduce the player’s color in the uniformity of all units, Because the design of each unit in each civilization already has differences, so color saturation in that unit doesn’t make much sense.
That’s possible, but it’s probably because AoE is more popular than DoW… DoW DE, which is the remaster of the most popular game in the series, barely reaches 1500-2000 players, which is less than the number of players AoE 3DE or AoMR currently have…
Command and Conquer has “villagers,” but they’re more like harvesters (at least in the Tiberian line). In Red Alert 1 they’re ore trucks (miners in RA2 and ore collectors in RA3), and in Generals 1 and the canceled Generals 2 they’re helicopters and bulldozers for the USA/EU and for China, and actual workers for the GLA…
And that’s without even mentioning Warhammer 40,000 Total War…
Yes, don’t worry, AoE 4 will continue to receive DLCs until at least AoE 5 comes out in 2027-2031…
For that we’ll have to wait for Age of Empires 5 or Empire 2: Total War…
Yes, that would be ideal… to launch the game in Europe and Asia with historical campaigns between the 1500s and 1900s (French, British, Russian, and Japanese campaigns) and then expand to America and Africa…
Yes, I suppose they’ll add blood for AoE 4 in a graphics patch at some point…
Yes, they did it for “reliability” reasons (which is stupid), but in their defense, AoEO doesn’t have siege operators either…
Good old CoH 2… I hope they put in the effort so CoH 3 can catch up…
Yes, exactly…that’s precisely why we need blood in the game…
Yes, it looks great and that’s something that was missed in AoE 4…
Yes, you should never be complacent with a game, no matter how much you love it, everything can always be improved, and within reason, positive criticism is always valid. When Age of Empires III launched in 2005, we complained that its campaigns weren’t historically accurate, and the expansions gave us more historically accurate campaigns, and then in the original game, historical battles and maps. With Age of Empires Online in 2011, we complained that there were few civilizations and no PvP, and throughout 2012 they added more civilizations and PvP (and Project Celeste added even more civilizations, events, and quest packs starting in 2021). With Age of Empires IV in 2021, we complained that the civilizations were few and somewhat simplistic, and they released new civilizations and variants in 2023. And since we complained about the variants, in 2025 they released better variants, and now new civilizations in 2026…
Yes, it’s a good option…
I think they’re very different from “villager”.
But I understand what you meant.
I’ll just explain in more detail, so that those who have never played the games can understand.
Command and Conquer is divided into 3 large universes.
Tiberian/Tiberium, Red Alert, and Generals. However, the first two are quite different from Generals.
The only “Command and Conquer” that has something closer to a “villager” is C&C Generals if you play with the GLA faction, since its “villagers” are literally “workers” who build, collect resources, and I think repair as well (Basically, this “worker” is the only unit in the game that performs the same 3 functions as a “villager” in Age of Empires. The other factions depend on 2 units to complement each other).
But the other “Command and Conquer” games in the “Red Alert” and “Tiberian/Tiberium” series don’t have units to build or repair buildings.
— They only have a resource-collecting vehicle (That’s why some players call them “collectors”).
Basically, you use your highly technological command center, where you “buy the construction” that will build itself in true “Transformers” style, Rsrsrsrs, and to “repair” it, you just pay for it to do the repairs on its own as well.
Thanks for posting the iconic photos… it brings back memories! hehehe
Sure, we’d say that CNC Generals 1 and 2 are the most “Age of Empires” of the CNC games, I’d even consider them a “modern Age of Empires” (USA, China, EU, GLA)… Red Alert would be more like a “Panzer and Panzer: Cold War games” or a RoN in its Cold War campaign (except for RA3, which I’d put in the Generals’ place in terms of more modern gameplay, aka Allies, which would be 80s NATO, Soviets aka the dieselpunk USSR, and the Empire, which is basically WWII Japan with modern or more futuristic/cyberpunk 22nd-century technology with Gundams and laser weapons) and the Tiberian CNC games are the futuristic ages of Empire Earth (modern age in TD, digital age in TS/CNC3, nano age in CNC4)…
Well all ends to the bad decisions Worlds Edge and Relic Entertainment have choosen for the game.
A bad mix of color, lightning, contrast and saturation plus low textures and a terrible unit/building scale ratio made the game not appealing for the majority of players and numbers do not lie
I remember how the game graphics was called “Fortnite-like, Cartooned, Mobile, Clash of Clans and so!
A very bad decision for sure
Yes, in my opinion AoE 4 will stay in that state with 12k players, almost the same as AoE 2…
Do you think 12k concurrent multiple years after release is “not appealing for the majority of players”? That’s well above III: DE’s numbers (even before support was yanked away).
What do other RTS games on Steam look like? Tempest Rising (which looks very fun and has great reviews). Broken Arrow? BFG: Armada? The Dune one? Stormgate?
If Anno counts, how’s that doing?
What numbers do not lie?
Are you Blind?
Have you seen the whole picture?
Almost 75k people on Release Peak and then a tremendous downhill of 15k concurrent players dont give you the numbers?
Dont speak the whole drop that much for you?
This is not about AoE III being so much smaller in comparison. This is about AoE IV and its playerbase man
Why do you have to be so antagonistic? You didn’t explain that you were talking about player retention from launch.
Civ 6 had over 160k players on launch. It’s down to a quarter of that.
Games lose players after launch. AoE II and AoE III are old games with dedicated playerbases (that are unlikely to abandon it easily), which is a factor in why the drop % for their DE re-releases was lower (even then, III: DE dropped from a peak of 16k all the way down to 4k - again, before MS yanked its support). Most new releases that aren’t remasters lose a significant percentage of their peak players.
And none of this has pretty much anything to do with graphics. Some players won’t like the graphics. Some players won’t like the graphics for AoE II: DE, or III: DE, or Retold. It happens.
You made a post talking about the graphics, and you provided statistics to evidence your claims about the graphics. You were the one talking about “bad decisions”, and decided that the playerbase for this game was evidence that the numbers were “bad” in some way. Don’t move the goalposts.
In order to make the graphics better, the art style of IV should be preserved. Trying to appeal to players who don’t like anything about how the game looks is a recipe for disaster considering the 12k concurrent players the game already has.
With the way some of you (namely AoEIV detractors) constantly bring up player numbers, it’s like you forget that this franchise is the last remaining dominant force in the RTS genre. 2DE, 3DE, and IV are all in the top 5 RTS games on Steam. End of story. We all have perefences and that’s fine, so let’s stop cannibalizing each other with silly arguments. We’re not talking about Stormgate numbers for any of these games.
IV is exactly where I expected it to be, nestled between 3DE and 2DE. It was, and still is, a successful game that brought in new players in a way the DEs might not have been able to.
Besides, every single game out there sees a drop-off in player numbers.
Touch grass.
I’d like to see improvements to siege across the board in both animations and physics.
Well yeah you 2 have a point on what is the goal here
TL: DR Graphics on the game have been improved since launch and need to keep on march
Example: When Zoom in the graphics are pretty detailed but that detail got lost quite a lot when Zoom out
Hopefully with all the studios MS bought, they will put a huge team on AoE5 and go to town making it an AoE masterpiece. They now have a ton of developer and artistic talent under their umbrella, including even artists who worked on Blizzard titles. They had a lot of talent before, but now it must be simply immense. They also have a new gaming head, so we’ll see if or how much they like AoE, I guess: https://www.gamespot.com/articles/phil-spencer-leaving-xbox-as-microsoft-ai-boss-takes-over/1100-6538330/
Hopefully, even Blizzard could make AoE 5 and then SC3, or if they stopped relying on WoW, WC4…
They could contribute some ideas, but I don’t think I should lead that effort. They have different philosophies.
You could? Do you work for Blizzard?
I think Blizzard is ready to venture forth into new frontiers. Diablos have gotten a little stale, imo. Is any new WoW game popular or relevant? I haven’t been paying attention
Sorry. Translation error. English is not my native language. The translator sometimes doesn’t differentiate between first and third person conjugations.
