i would share some considerations:
- Developer said “we’re introducing a large set of new units and buildings and, in some cases, updating the overall visuals of many shared units and buildings to assist with better readability and make sure your experience feels fresh”.
So, are they improve the general graphic or only some models? Becase “in some cases” and “of many shared units and buildings” are in contraddition.
But what should we expect from these improvements? Which kind of improvements?
Looking at this official screenshot
It seems the same graphic and maybe, the only changes could be the sizes of buildings. Models seem the same in term of quality of textures. There are always “plastic weapons” and “chikens without animations”.
Personally i pretty like the AOE4 art style but we have to admit that unit models have low textures, with plastic weapons and saturated colours and for this reason they look a bit “cartoonish”.
The reason behind this choice is readability, of course, because developers thought thta the main base are multiplayer players but it’s not probably true. The main base are casual who only play with campaigns, skirmishes and co-op vs AI.
It has been stated by Capture Age, the new studio behind the latest DLC “Chronicles of Greece” and now, behind AOE4, with World’s Edge and Forgotten Empires.Here what they said (source: Pre-Order Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition - Chronicles: Battle for Greece - Age of Empires - World's Edge Studio)
"“Campaigns have always been central to Age of Empires, and fans of the series continue to hunger for more. We therefore decided to make campaign content central to Chronicles – and we’re approaching campaigns in our own unique way, with a strong narrative focus, a new presentation style, and an exciting variety of gameplay styles. Together, the Chronicles DLCs will tell a unified story spanning the ancient world!”. “The AoE II: DE community is pretty big and spread out. Our most visible cohort tends to be our competitive community, tournament organizers, and streamers, but there’s a rather massive and understated majority of our players that show up week over week and month over month just to enjoy their favorite Campaigns. They love Campaign content exclusively, and they’re playing them over and over again”.
This is true for all of AOE titles.
Now, AOE4 has been most critized for its graphic on reddit (a lot of threads), steam, youtube, Age of empires community and also on different professional reviews.
Many people thought that AOE4 was a step back from other AOE titles, in particular AOE3de and other titles like COH3 (from the same Relic and on the same engine) and Spellforce3.
Unfortunately also other aspects like "wheater effects, physics, projectiles impact on units (one cannon ball could kill only one soldier), low textures on models, determinated a lack of immersion and this is a very importanti thing for the casual players.
All of these criticisms have been listened by Developers and we had a good example in the latest AOE’s Survey New survey!
On this survey there was the last part related to graphic aspects. Developers basically asked to players what they would have wanna see in the future: “wheater effects, high qualiry textures, better animations, physic impact of projectiles, more fauna and biomas, high quality terrains and effects of terrains on units, stylized or realistic art style” and more.
So, the same elements which have been critized from many players since the first “Aoe4’s preview” on April 2021.
Personally i would like to see 4k textures on all units and buildings without plastic weapons and more realistic colours. Of course, more zoom levels to see battles more close.
As some people said on this thread, also option for blood would be very appreciated…
- Look at this new artwork (Crusaders Fortress)
There are logo of World’s Edge, Forgotten Empire and Capture Age (the mentioned studio behind the latest DLC of AOE2de).
There’s not RELIC logo. Relic is not publicizing this new DLC on their social pages and since the march 2024 (when SEGA sold RELIC) the studio is quite silence.
Unfortunately the studio itself faced a lot of lay-offs and after that they stated they wanna focused on their IPs: Company of Heroes and Dawn of War.
a) Company of Heroes 3 is going to receive a lot of updates and it’s now in a very good state, with a new DLC available this mont;
b) there are rumors (and i believe they are real) about a new Dawn of War RTS developed by Relic
There are also 6 images about new DOW4 maps.
So, i think, as i said in the other thread (this is my supposition) that RELIC is not involved into AOE4 anymore.
World’s Edge, Forgotten and Capture Age are the main developers.
This could explains all of this time to release a new DLC (the first will be released on april and the second one on October) and maybe it could be also the reason behind the next graphic improvements: World’s Edge and Forgotten consider graphic quality very important because they know that the main audiece are casual players;
- World’s Edge is moving on Unreal Engine 5
XBOX is now a multiplatform Editor and the next AOE will be released also on PS and Switch (AOMRE and AOE2de already announced for these platforms. Nintendo just waiting for the upcoming Direct).
Unreal is the most knowed engine and it could help with the multiplatform releases.
Considering the bigger audience related to all of these platforms, i could expect that next AOE5 will cover the "Ancient times " (the most loved period with the medieval times) and will have an amazing graphic moved by Unreal engine.
- AOE reached 60 milions of players and this is a fucking milestone. I’m very happy. RTS are finally returning.