So in the scenario that the UI is never updated which is seeming ever so likely, can we at least get rid of this portion in the main menu? I would unironically prefer to see more of the background than have the main menu be a mess of overloading information like this.
It breaks a very fundamental design principle of complexity vs simplicity, and that threshold of 30/70 can be reached by yeeting these two unnecessary panels back to the design hell they came from.
Would also actually allow us to appreciate these screens you have been adding for seasonal events. Currently there is literally too much garbage in the way.
Indeed, no one really cares about Challenges.
The rewards are meaningless, and the XP is worthless.
Why?
The XP is just XP. It grants nothing useful to the player.
The rewards are meaningless and nothing useful.
Those banners, pictures, etc. are useless and boring.
Nothing fun in there.
If it did add or give something useful, I am all into having these huge challenge boards.
Since it is not, please just remove it or make it arrow, so we can click and maximise it to see it.
if they really want to have challenges too, they should just shove it into a tab at the bottom right with the event challenges because I also don’t care about those
I would prefer a clean menu as well. But not super urgent.
Related suggestion concerning menu UX:
I find it confusing that the “back” or “cancel” button are on different locations depending on the context.
Furthermore, keyboard binding like “ESC” or “RETURN” do not work either.
IMHO it would be a quick win to get a consistent “back” or “cancel” button location or at least a hotkey to navigate back without having to look “where again is the back button on this screen”.
Yes, if you still had a section with a customizable capital city like AoE 3 and AoEO to customize, the XP would serve you something and it would be something more RPG and progression in the game, but currently you just level up and that’s it and it’s super abstract…
Adding a Home City like this to AoE 4 would be beautiful. Each XP level could give one point to spend on cosmetics for Home City. Each milestone could provide more and more interesting customization options.
Of course, this wouldn’t have any impact on the gameplay (unlike AoE 3), but it could make the game menu more beautiful, thanks to the possibility of setting the city view of our favorite civ as the background.
Well, in theory, in Age III it was nice to customize your city since each game gave you points to buy cosmetics.
What was annoying was that to unlock your full deck, and even the Politicians age advancement mechanic, you had to play like 60 games with each civ. It was so annoying that people preferred to download mods to raise their city to level 50 in one go, or manually use cheats to gain free experience in 20 games automatically with each civ to have all the cards unlocked.
Fortunately, in Age III: Definitive Edition you already have the cards unlocked from the beginning and all the politicians available from the beginning. Additionally, the City cosmetics are still present, and the civs that lacked them now have them, as a challenge to play with the civs that you like the most and want to customize. The events to unlock mods and banners are fun too.
For AoE4, if something similar was done to customize something with the experience gained, it would make it more fun to collect experience (XP).
