we got some of those in this forum and a bunch of them on reddit
Relic used to be a very good studio, but now it has a sickess called âprideâ. For the latest coh3 update to community they repeatedly said, we are proud of coh3 release while at the same time steam reviews were beating coh3 to dead.
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You can be proud of something youâve achieved while knowing it needs to be better. Relic have also said repeatedly that CoH 3 needs to be better.
Selective quotes only expose bias.
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I donât care what the name of the company is that will pay the people who design a future Age of Empires game. I just care that those people do not design that game until they first take all the time they need to acquire enough knowledge about how Age of Empires games are designed.
Thereâs a million different details that need to gel together, and if AoE4 does anything, it shows us what happens when those details are ignored.
Obviously it is important to hire people with tons of expertise in designing games. The trick is for them to understand that their expertise simply positions them well to study our franchise and then ultimately apply that knowledge into a new game. Experience designing games is not itself the knowledge necessary to design an Age of Empires game.
I am not an expert in hiring studios to make games, so I am not going to form a coherent opinion about what studio should be hired to do so. But I am, respectfully, as are many of us here, an expert in what are the million different details that need to gel together for a game to have the feel and charm of an Age of Empires game. I suspect Forgotten Empires is full of experts in that area who are also experts in actually making games. It would be absurd for someone to attempt to design a future Age game and not insist on working closely with Forgotten Empires.
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Yes agree. For now we should see what Forgetten reserve for us. Gamescom Is near.
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AoE 3 screenshots for comparison
(To be fair, I used one of the photo modeâs effects on that one)
British home city
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to be fair even without photo mode its vastly superior compared to the aoe4 shot above, and that one is pretty much the best you can get in aoe4
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When it comes to the bugs my guess would be that the devs team lacks really skilled developers. In late 2021 and early 2022 literally every patch that fixed bug X for unit A introduced bug Y for unit B. Thatâs usually something that happens when encapsulation hasnât been done right in object oriented programming. If you donât have a good structure in your code from the very start things will just get worse the bigger the software gets. This is just speculation from my side but I think that they are constantly busy dealing with wild code so that they donât have enough time to actually fix other stuff.
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You say that, but the house in the middle of the second screenshot is way out of proportions. Nobodyâs going to be fitting through that front door 
If weâre gonna start making wild guesses about code, I would say this is an incredibly idealistic view of software complexity. Itâs a university-level answer. âjust do encapsulation betterâ.
What about the trade-offs of encapsulation? You canât have everything encapsulated in a system. What about inheritance? The yo-yo problem? If you want to make guesses about design patterns, letâs go. I love this stuff 
I am not interested in your childish attempt to start a superficial discussion about best coding practices. Something being wrong with the code of the game is very well a valid possibility and has been mentioned before numerous times as thereâs indicators for that assumption. Doesnât matter if itâs a design pattern, inheritance or encapsulation issue as we can only make guesses.
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Tbf, scaling was never accurate in any Age game. I personally never understood this specific critic people brought about against AoE 4 when the first gameplay scenes were shown in April 2021.
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And how to forget when they tried to sell blood in dlc in Attila TWâŠ
i think with aoe4 the problem was how blatanly apparent it was the buildings proportions didnât get adjusted when they were shrunk, stables, barracks, siege workshops etc. this was a rare exception in prior games at most, but with 4 it was, and still is, all over the buildings
to grossly simplify for gorb: you had to look and lowkey scan ingame scenery for scaling inconsistency in those past games, in aoe4 you canât not see them even if you donât actively look for them
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Buildings arenât proportional in any age game though. Also AoE 4 buildings scale isnât really any better then AoE 3 any way. They weâre talking about the water. Which the screen shot from 4 looks like trash for a game from 2021, not sure if that user was trying to show the at it looked good or not. I mean the water in the original AoE 3 from 2005 looks better then AoE 4. And that is not really just a taste thing the water just looks better. I donât know why the devs chose to make the water look so weird/bad in AoE 4.
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ig its right to use og aoe3 or better comparison with water screenshots, not the best example based on how good the aoe3 og water can be depending on the map, but good enough as it still makes you question certain decisions in 4, imo the surface of water in 4 looks rough in lakes and seas, in rivers its def better but not quite right either
allow me to demonstrate what i mean with rivers, last screenshot i swear
left the river for the end, iâll stop dropping aoe3 screenshots for now, i think they get the point across
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There is a reason that AoE 3 won the award for best graphics when it came out.
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my point at the end of the day is, aoe4 doesnât have to win awards for graphics (i do very much like the S5 enchancements tho, quite a bit too), it just has to be good enough to not be behind its predecessors (the comparisons in gameplay with aoe2 and graphics with aoe3 were inevitable, thats what happens when you call the game aoe4), its not far off that goal imo, some building blur still needs care but for me biggest offenders were, and still are the units, units were never suppossed to be their current scale for aoe4, they were evidently made for easy readability while being absolutely tiny (adam isgreen ant analogy), but at current scaling, those compromises end up visible in plain sight, at intended scale we wouldnât see them
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While itâs true that I wouldnât add a lot of AoE3 things into AoE4, itâs fair to say that some things I would (the strengths of AoE3 that other players might like). For example what I pointed out.
gameplay wise, aoe2 and 3 water arenât far apart mechanically, micro etc. besides few abilites in aoe3, the real difference, as you noted, are the coin(aoe3âs gold) deposits in the water in addition to fish, basically a full gold+food eco on water, smt aoe4 really shouldnât be ignoring as its significant in its impact
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