[Poll] Graphic update

Age of Empires IV IV - Discussion
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2 Day summery

What is your opinion on the visuals of AoE4 on the videos and screenshots released during E3 compared to what we saw on the Fan preview?

Most people liked it before. A few people like it after the improvements.
Still more than a 3rd don’t like it. But only 10% think it’s beyond saving.

Which recent Age of Empires game is the best looking in your opinion?

I think this one is less useful because most people just voted for their favourite game.
AoE1DE has higher resolution sprites with double the rotation angles. And it honestly looks beautiful in my eyes, I don’t think most people prefer AoE2DE over AoE1DE visually, they just haven’t tried out AoE1DE.

But I guess it’s always hard to beat nostalgia.

Buildings, Architecture and Town Decals

Rating 3.86/5

Most people like the towns.
I feel like there a difference in quality between the Civilisations.
The Chinese feel like there was less effort put in compared to for example the French.

I think most people don’t notice how much the automatically generated roads and decals will make the town look so much better and more natural in skirmisher than anything from AoE1-3DE ever can.

Landscape and Environment

Rating: 4.37/5

Most people love the Environment. 60% directly voted for beautiful.
I’m kinda surprised that this got a better result than the towns.

I personally love the towns but I think the landscape doesn’t look as good as AoE3DE can look like.

Land Units

Rating: 3.38/5

Most people don’t seem to like the units too much.
I assume they think they are a bit “flat” or “boring”. The very bright player colours might also be a reason.

Ships and Water

Rating: 3.23/5

This is the poll with the worst rating.
It’s not awful though. still the majority likes it but not by much. It’s not far away from the neutral rating of 3.

Water is such a weird thing video games. In the original Crysis the water looked more realistic than in the Unreal Engine 5 demo.

Harmony between those aspects

Rating: 3.39/5

The rating is nearly the same as the one for the Land units.
Probably because it’s judged on similar standards.
The units clearly look different compared to the environment. That is done on purpose for readability but some people don’t like it.
This includes the scaling “issue”.

User Interface

Rating: 3.63/5

Most people seem to be happy with the UI of the game.
But I assume a lot people haven’t seen the UI changes done since the Fan Preview because they were only shown in the Extended Showcase. So not sure how representative this survey is.

When did Age of Empires 4 look the best

Quit a few people liked the old 2019 trailer more than the recent material.
It’s hard to tell how close that trailer was to the state of the game back than, it might have all been carefully staged.
I feel like the scaling and maybe the colour matching between units and environment are the main reasons why a lot of people like the 2019 trailer more.

The majority likes the more recent style of the game more though.
So it’s save to say they did mostly make the right decisions.

I’m adding some additional questions in this post.

Manned siege

  • Manned siege like AoE3
  • Golden siluets like AoE4
  • Nothing like AoE1 and 2

0 voters

Crewed ships

  • Crews
  • No Crews

0 voters

2 Likes
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considering how many of the siege emplacements in AOE 4 seem to be static i really dont in any way see a crew being an issue.

the reason AOE 2 doesn’t have crews is because crews are basically impossible to animate in a 2d environment.

23

Well , I guess this is the ultimate response to the devs , here they can see what we like and what we don’t , my personal opinion :

Things I like:

The grass, i love it XD

The archers and the new arrows , I love itttt

The new fire , damm it’s been so well done

Graphics now are really good

The French architecture (TOP CIV , for me haha) and the Delhi sultanate and the English and the mongols and ALL CIVS HAVE GREAT DETAIL DAMM

The new scale …

image
image1917×1077 2.29 MB

Just see the difference haha , the right one screenshot is new

Things I don’t like

Seems like water don’t reflect the boats , it’s only a shadow… :frowning: , they should make that in aoe4

Unit movement is better but I think they should improve it a bit , right guys?

The UI , emmm I don’t like it :frowning: , for me is like plastic , it’s boring and units have no photo , that for me ruins my imagination, I hope that can be changed pls

3 Likes
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False, something can be beautiful for some and ugly for others.

3 Likes
25

Interesting, according to all the graphic haters, they are in the majority, yet here we have 59% of the poll saying they like the graphics. :thinking:

4 Likes
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Yes, because this is a new game that really looks better than its predecessors. I’ll tell you scary now, but despite the excellent remaster, AoE 2 is still an old game, and this is very clearly seen especially in unit adimations, in some places it looks silky colored and flat, so yes, it was once a good game, now it is just a classic.

1 Like
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They just scream the loudest, because it seems that they are more noticeable and there are more of them, in fact, most AoE fonts like the visual and they calmly discuss other topics and wait for the beta.

2 Likes
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I’ve found that most of the time people who constantly complain are in the minority, they are just a very loud small group

6 Likes
29

Tell this to Civilization 6, Warcraft 3, StarCraft 2 and tens of thousands of their fans.

2 Likes
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It still is a good game and widely considered as the best RTS of all time. At the very least it is a top 5

The loud minority

3 Likes
31

Huh, silent majority is a thing after all. I thought more people will bash but I was wrong. Anyways, I did my best…I personally think game can use a little delay and little more polish.

1 Like
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On this forum. Don’t See the Steam community: it’s a totally mess but it’s also the most important PC gaming paltform. For now, AOE 4 Is not well received and that’s could be the main problem.
We’ll see what developers Will do.

4 Likes
33

doing polls in this forums doesn’t reflect the reality not even a 5%… I already visualize the mostly negative reviews on steam, and I am proudly be one of those.

1 Like
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Yes, here in the forum the comments are more positive than on Youtube or Steam.
And I have the feeling many people lose the interest in the game and don’t care anymore.

I don’t see the hype an Age game normally would get.

35

Steam is not the ultimate truth, I will repeat my comment to you from another thread, you are not at all awesome, summing up the feedback of players from YouTube videos, from polls of this forum and other sites (not Steam), we can conclude that people are happy to wait game, you can be proud in any other place, and this forum seems to exist for people who are going to play the game and discuss its aspects. You can just not play, and keep your very accurate analytics, with percentages, to yourself, this simultaneously causes laughter and Spanish shame.

1 Like
36

seeing this poll again, I like the outcomes. Except for units its mostly the most positive answers at the top, which pretty much is my opinion :smiley:

1 Like
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I think the poll results are not that.
I’m not sure how the results for an average game would look like but 30% thing the game doesn’t look good enough and 10% even think it’s beyond saving, that’s quit a lot.

20-30% thing the Land units or Water looks bad or even awful, that’s quit a lot.
I personally very rarely look at a new game and think something looks bad or even awful.
People that don’t like something are always louder than people that like something. So it’s to be expected that if 1/4 of the people don’t like it than you will see a lot of negative feedback.
We don’t know how the public opinion outside of this Forum looks like. Steam Community Forums are definitely not representative for any community, because from my personal experience people only go there complain about the game.
Same can be seen on Youtube, the ratings of the videos are very positive but the comments are not.

Some where between 1/4 to 1/3 of the community here has a problem with how the game looks like. That’s surprisingly many.
I hope the problems can be mitigated by them showing actual gameplay instead of always showing those zoomed in shots. No one looks closely at the units in the game.
Like for example in AoE2 all the arrows and other projectiles spawn in the wrong places but no one complaints about that because they just play the game. In AoE4 they analyse the little footage we have frame by frame.
In AoE3 all the faces of all units look dead because they have no facial animations, they look really creepy when you look at them close up. But no one ever does that.

I love how AoE4 looks like but from a Marketing/PR perspective they have to improve the public image of the game.
There are two things they have to do:

  1. Improve some of the most criticised aspects of the game (like water atm.)
  2. Show the game in more favourable ways. Show how it looks like when it’s actually played and don’t show strange camera angles all the time.

But there are things that can’t or shouldn’t be changed that people don’t like

  1. Scaling of Buildings and Units is very hard to change without impacting playability and readability. It would likely ruin the game if they went for a 1 to 1 scale between buildings and units.
  2. Manned Siege would be a lot of work to implement now, especially because people would expect different skins for each civilisation.
1 Like
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That is by if you are including Proportions-haters in Graphic Haters. For much people the only graphic complain (or the best) is about proportions.

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When i said developers are going a bit far from what people are waiting for in term of graphic i’m referring to the famous “official survey”

See the question n. 8: The most of people (80%) asked for bright and Realistic Graphic: realistic Means something between “AOE and Company of Heroes”. This Is the reason i often made the “Spellforce3” example.

Screenshot_2021-06-28-13-41-55-09
Screenshot_2021-06-28-13-41-55-091080×2340 311 KB

For now this game seems Bright but not realistic.

2 Likes
40

-Civilization: is literally based on schematized figures, you cannot demand proportions from it.
-Warcraft 3: casually i never played Warccraft 3 because visualy hurts me (by the proportions). And Warcraft it is not the more beautifull game.
-Starcraft 2: is a futurist game where some buildings/units/starships are too large or small to being representative with a correct escale. But by being a futurist game too many times dont have nothing to compare proportions and by that is not a point that highlight. (i played Starcraft 2 for many years)

Edit: i see too much to use Starcraft as example of bad proportions but mostly there are correct proportions in the game.