I played all day yesterday and wanted to give my thoughts. This won’t really be in-depth but I think it’s good information.
Graphics- Textures, shadows, etc. all look GREAT but the game suffers from the lifeless colors and terrain textures, at least on certain maps like Alfheim, of AOE4. Surprisingly this isn’t really that important, but it is a major difference from the poppy, bright colors and graphical clarity of the original game. But damn I was super impressed with even the main menu seeing the triremes in the water. It was beautiful.
General UI- I actually love the buttons. I feel like they’ve returned to the original AOE1 or AOE2 style buttons in a way. There needs to be a move all military button added somewhere though. And hopefully they add multiple UI styles (classic, retold, etc.) but overall, similar to the graphics stuff, UI isn’t that important to me. We also need a way to disable input switching completely for those of us (the majority) that are not using controllers. It’s very annoying. The tech tree needs to utilize the mouse wheel. The history section needs multiplier information added to the units.
Multiplayer UI- This is the worst part of the entire experience, and they are making the same mistake of AOE3. There is no internal friends list just a Steam one. Although it’s already more functional than the AOE3 one, if there’s no friends list this game is gonna be in big trouble (people already think AOE3’s a joke). Also, even more importantly, ranks need to be very conspicuous in a lobby instead of having to hover over people’s nameplates (And hopefully the devs can implement a themed rank system similar to the original AOE3 as opposed to the boring ELO system). Without obvious ranks, I guarantee a majority of matches will be imbalanced and people will get frustrated. We should be able to chat in the postgame window.
Multiplayer issues- I had one out of sync already. Also, the lobby list refreshes so slowly that many of the games on the list have already started or no longer exist, or sometimes doesn’t even show the games that exist (my friend on Discord saw different games than I did). Sometimes refreshing the lobbies doesn’t even actually refresh the list! When entering the multiplayer lobby list after finishing a game, you will actually see games from your last visit instead of an already refreshed page (This is an AOE3 thing as well.) Waiting for the “please wait” sign to go away to get to the next game is just a huge waste of time. I don’t like how the color/visual cue for “readying up” looks so subtle. I don’t like how you have to manually open the chat window in each lobby. I don’t like how taunts don’t show the number of the taunt. There are also other issues with just not being able to connect to certain lobbies for whatever reason or quicksearch attempting to put you in a lobby that doesn’t exist. Ranked team search with a friend doesn’t work at all but I’m assuming that’s just a beta thing. On a positive note, no lag! Amazing!
Changes- I really love the various tech changes (there’s so many I can’t list them all), unit additions, godpower tweaks, etc. Earthquake is more powerful, various gods’ bonuses have been changed, Lure can act as a granary, Heimdall has that cool tech that makes you age up faster, certain techs like Arctic Gale (?) have been outright removed, godpowers can be reused, you have to build ox carts, etc. I LOVE that hunting dogs was removed as well as Pig Sticker. This was on my wishlist!
Art- I already made another thread about this. I am going to just say that the new art DOES look AI generated, however many of the gods look great (Rheia, Theia, Loki, etc. look amazing to me). Bast looks horrible and needs to be redone. Some of the god art looks higher quality than others. Leto > Zeus for example with Zeus looking “cheap.”
Feel- This is where I think the game kind of shines. Attacks feel more impactful. I was using Toxotes and it felt like the arrows were really hitting hard just from the sound alone. The arrows just looked great. The Centaurs now do this arrow volley thing which feels amazing. Like I said earlier, the Earthquake visual effects… oh my god I love it. Fire attacks such as that of the Nidhogg look awesome.
Sound- This is related to feel. The new music is wonderful. The sound design is awesome. Really like the sounds when someone gets a relic or ages up. I don’t play the campaign at all so I can’t comment on the classic voice overs.
Visual Clarity- It can be hard to see what’s going on in a crowded battle. A lot of units look a bit too similar.
Miscellaneous- I don’t like how units get stuck or stop working (beta am I right?), the main menu theme loops, some godpowers like Lightning Bolt look like plasma and are too slow visually compared to real lightning (the original game did it perfectly), units bump into each other pushing them to the side (this is esp. apparent with ox carts) or they just get stuck and idle. I don’t like the stupid social “contract,” it’s childish, pointless, and it’s going to be abused. On a positive note, I see that there is voice chat. This is EXCELLENT and is super important to counter the non-communicators. It may be a good idea to have a little icon showing someone’s primary language if they wish to display it.
Conclusion- Great remaster, just clean it up, fix the multiplayer UI, and fix the art.