Oh yeah, I can see it now.
A true labor of love. 
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Ä° just share that pic as example i hope they fix this before release
His design seems quite different from whatâs been presented about the Knight Templars. The only thing that strikes me in that clip is that a lot of the new units for the Templars were already in the game since Sultans Ascend.
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All of these assets are flexible and change in different ages.
The nicest thing I can say about the manors is that theyâve aligned the houses in Imperial so that it looks like a bigger house.
Iâll note something here. This is the kind of transformative usage of assets that should be utilized in Campaign to make the environment LOOK like whatever the hell they try to portray. Half the time, a town is one barracks, a mill and two houses. This is entirely why I could never take any of the campaign missions in this game serious. At least here, theyâve managed to make something creative out of preexisting assets.
That is how low the bar is.
Anyway. Props to them for making at least 2 actual new landmarks for Lancasters. Hoping they can commit to ALL new landmarks for future variants, if they insist on making more. Iâve given a lot of shit since the reveal, but they have truthfully taken a better direction with them than last time. Lancasters, as boring as they are, at least make much more sense than any of the prior naming conventions or fantasies for variants in Sultanâs Ascend.
Still, voting for only new-civilizations in the future.
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What would towns need to look like for you to take any of the existing SP content seriously?
And why would this not need to apply to MP?
I drove through a village the other day that was literally a farm and two houses - and thatâs in 2025, not 1415.
While I did use the word village there, Iâd imagine real cities in the campaign to feature recognizable landmarks or features. Instead, theyâre all just existing house, production assets.
Weâve moved on from WC3. This doesnât just apply to AoE4 but I think developers are not taking the âcampaignâ aspect of RTS games to the next level. They ought to go out of their way to actually make those areas to some degree recognizable, and not look like just custom game mod.
While Crossfire: Legion was abandoned by their developers, their limited campaigns at least did this. Their environment actually looks like what theyâre trying to portray, not as a lazy abstraction whose limitation is âwhat assets do we have from Multiplayerâ.
One thing to note is that, past RTS games would do things the other way. In creating the necessary assets FOR their campaign, they would repurpose them for Multiplayer later. This, being done in reverse, is far, far, far less engaging. And dare I say it? Not worth my god damn money. I donât want to pay for repurposed multiplayer assets to somehow represent actual history. That level of abstraction worked back in the 2000s with AoE2, but not with a 3D game that is trying to sell you on authenticity, detail and fleshing things out in 3D.
âMoscowâ
Take a look at that manor thing. They rarely, if ever did any mix-use of assets in the campaign like that. Theyâve definitely got enough assets to go creative mode and actually somewhat portray some real depiction of these places, but they donât. Theyâre completely satisfied with just dropping a house or two, a few production buildings and going âeh, good enough, this is Moscowâ.
The developers themselves are probably not to blame, but Iâd imagine that someone did not do their job in convincing higher ups to fund this part of the game sufficiently. AoE4 has done an amazing job at adding detail and authenticity to individual units and buildings.
This is entirely lacking in the campaign. It is as though they decided to simply make it out of the multiplayer assets they had. I say âit is as ifâ, but this is literally what happened. The investment on this end of the campaign is straight up just sad.
Last thing to note. Had they gone out of their way to make the campaign shine, that wouldâve bled through to the Mutliplayer aspect of the game. But, it is simply far cheaper to mostly, if not only work on the multiplayer side of things.
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So like world assets unique to the campaign (or custom maps)?
If so I can see what you mean, but care has to be taken to preserve viable gameplay. If you had a âcity quarterâ building (or similar), itâd have a single spawn point. This isnât always ideal.
For the campaign, personally, I liked the live action videos inbetween missions. That said my opinion was in an (anecdotal) minority. At least until Sultanâs was released, and all of a sudden we got people asking where the old campaign style went.
Personally I agree with you at this point. The campaigns are no longer any kind of introduction into MP. They donât need to be preserved as such. But changes in design would need to be communicated to players.
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Iâm not opposed to using multiplayer assets of course. Each campaign and setting should feature what is necessary for that depiction, and there ought to be consistency in that decision making and style.
I was quite against the Documentary style of presentation they had for AoE4. By themselves, they arenât badâthey are interesting in their own right. My criticism towards them was mostly that a creative product should aim towards creating something interesting for their customer to consume, and I felt that documentaries can be found and interacted with elsewhere. There is simply no shortage of them, so I would have hoped to find more interesting content to consume in AoE4.
However, Iâm not a fan of the new style of cinematics either. Theyâre just kind of lame. Feel like bedtime stories as opposed to anything exciting or interesting. Perhaps itâs just me, but I simply feel the new direction lacks edge and hype. Theyâre just so bland.
The irony is that, while I enjoy that theyâve gone out of their way to create something new and interesting, like a story to present us; theyâre kind of bad at it lmao. The documentaries (which were likely the result of hiring outsiders to put that together) were far more competant as a product, despite maybe not being the best fit for a game (IMO).
As it stands, both have their strength, but I would still take the new style with hopes of improving the way their stories are being depicted. Though frankly, when it comes to the campaign as a whole, this plays a much smaller role in my enjoyment than the actual environments, cities, settings and content within the maps themselves.
Well, it seems the design improves between ages. The Imperial Age one is quite nice:
Manor - Feudal Age (II) (Manor house)
Manor - Castle Age (III) (Manor house)
Manor - Imperial Age (IV) (Country House)
Ok, so Manors change beetween ages, like the true manor houses transitioning to Country houses. Well done.
I´m very curious if the new Technologies that Lancaster supposedly is gonna have gonna affect the income of manors or even more.
Well, only 2 weeks and some days for the DLC.
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What is well done? Thatâs just what happens to the houses theyâre made of when you age up, by default.
As you can see, in Feudal and Castle age itâs not even a building, itâs 2 houses that are disconnected from each other.
Itâs actually worse than I thought. Most of the DLC seems to be made out of scraps left over by Relic when they made Sultans Ascend. And they dare ask for the same price as Sultans Ascend for this. Good luck with that!
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Chinese unique building don´t change arquitecture beetween ages. Same with Ottomans Military Schools or even Bizantine Cisterns.
The fact that they consider a unique building that changes architecture between ages is, in fact, new.
And I like it.
Now, the fact that they look like houses is because theyâre residential buildings, and of course they must use the same structure as other residential buildings. And in any case, theyâre still Manor Houses, not Country Houses.
If you donât like them, well, I canât force you.
On the other hand, if you want to make a world of that, âdo it alone and stop quoting me.â
Well thatâs because Military Schools are unique buildings and probably donât have skins for each age. Here itâs how houses behave by default. Just jump into a game, make some English houses and age up. They change exactly like the Manors. The Manors are made up of 2 houses for that age.
Bro problem is not its changing in ages i prefer unique building and im ok if it doesnt change in ages.Problem is this:They just used 2 houses and turned one of them and placed it next to other one.This is so cheap so cheap.And i bought the dlc devs fix this you are gonna just do 1 manor model pls do that atleast.
I was already wondering why the Castle Age version of the building looks so bad.
Yes, they could tweak it a bit more, because the gate to enter the complex isnât noticeable, nor is the connection between the two buildings, which are supposed to be one. I donât mind that its structure is based on houses, but having a connection between the main buildings should be a pattern that persists across ages, not just the Imperial Age.
The one I think looks most uniform is the Imperial Age Manor version; they even look well connected. I think they started designing the building with the Imperial version in mind, and then looked for smaller versions for the earlier ages, but forgotten to anex buildings or making them with some differences from the normal houses.
Like 2 years ago, as the problem of âJade Empire nameâ, we could open a poll or a thread to discuss that specific point.
They might not change it for release, but it will be more noticeable right at release, when people who already pre-ordered the game try out both civs, so this is going to be discossed soner or latter.
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I really hope we see Spain and a civ like the Aztecs this year.
Aztec/Inca, Spanish/Portuguese, Khmer/Vijayanagara really ought to be the next ones.
Honestly though, with how eurocentric development has been so far, it wouldnât surprise me if the next civilizations were Poles and Norse. And then two years from that, Hungary and Scotland.
Iâd also love to see some African realms like Ethiopia, Swahili, Zimbabwe, and Central asian peoples like the Kipchak, Khwarezm, Volga Bulgaria are also welcome. Thereâs just so many cultures they could be working on. Some distant ones like Kyrgyz, Tibetan, Jurchen too.
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I want â2 Barracks in a yardâ that produces 2 units at once. Can we get that this year, Worldâs Edge?
That would eat up the development time of the two guys who keep adding Zweihanders to one handed units (theyâre the balance maintenance programmers with no expertise in visual medieval depictions).