the fire vfx and environmental detail especially are a huge improvement.
biggest complaint looking at them is the dragons front legs. they are way high up right next to the spine. it would look more natural if the legs were lower, closer to the belly like real life lizards such as the komodo dragon. its neck and head could be raised to compensate.
The Inferno looks kinda bad though. At last on a screenshot.
If it happens within like 1 second ingame it’s probably not noticeable.
also there is no illumination on the environment or units like in the original or previous aoe games from the vfx.
still much better than the previous fire vfx.
Real time lighting is very expensive.
The more detailed your environment the more expensive it gets.
So the relative cost of real time lighting grows at the same time the quality of the assets improves that’s why doing real time lighting has not becoming easier since AoM released.
The larger the area that is lit the worse it gets. Also more lights means more calculations and therefore higher cost.
Giving a small light to something like a burning building, a dragon or a bonfire prop is doable but adding a very large range light to a god power like the Inferno would likely make many people lag especially because it’s added cost on top of a lot of other effects that are already playing.
Only the Unreal Engine 5 has developed a new real time lighting system that is significantly more efficient. But the base line hardware requirements of that engine are already pretty high, the PS5/Xbox Series can barely run UE5 games.
I remember that better looking in the actual beta already but I only saw the Egyptian Titan once.
