I want to say for the record, the issue at hand has nothing to do with women or their portrayal. I am not with @SubotaiMGL or @TsudaTumiko on this, I can’t begin to understand why you would care about low quality models that can’t even be zoomed into properly.
The issue at hand is fantastical elements like literal fantasy events with lake monsters and tree people, made up usage of weapons like Spears, Zweihanders, Springalds and Poleaxes, the disrespectful naming convention of Byzantine, Jade Empire and the arsenine decision making behind abandoning civilizations/kingdoms/empires as a basis for creating new civilizations.
Imagine you go to this page: Civilizations - Age of Empires
and then see “Jeanne D`arc” as a CIVILIZATION. She would be the cover for both? French and Herself?
What a horrible naming. For each one.
Look, I create a timeline showing the start to end from each civ based on “Learn” section of the game:
How is gonna be for variants?
Since each one starts after 1400
That would be Imperial age already.
That breaks too much.
How a 19 years old is a civ? We can add any person now and becomes a civ
How “Sultan`s Army” is a civ? We can add pretty much anything now, “Emperor’s Army” and then any generic king with an army
Let me be clear, I LOVE the idea of having variant civs.
I don’t know how they are, if they share landmarks or something like that.
my suggestion is:
Remove those names, completely, and then when we are selecting a Civ, we choose either the original or the variant. A dropdown just like selecting a color or a placement position.
Many games do that,
for example, street fighter, you can select your character and then you select the Ultra/Super.
I think it’s the best way to go.
We can have tons of content, we can have many variants for the same civ.
It’s all about historical background and theme. Every civ right know have it’s own real historical background. Considering that campaigns are essentialy a historical documents, It’s their work, how don’t they see this inconsistency in their naming? How Sultans Army and Jeanne Darc compares to actually a real civilzation and its heritage?
I have said this before and I will say it again. The developers do not know what to do with this game.
There are people greenlighting the decision to create fantasy elements. Does that sound like a what responsible and knowledgable studio would do? It is clear that their sense of direction is completely misaligned with what people expect of this game.
So it does not in fact surprise me that they have chosen to create such a ridiculous naming convention for new variant civilizations. As far as I am concerned, they were never capable for this job to begin with.
I don’t think it will really be like “Empire of Jade” or “Jeanne d’Arc” in your civ selection dropdown, but like how Civ 6 does the “variant” of leaders:
Chinese (Empire of Jade)
French (Jeanne d’Arc)
Age of Noob confirmed that each Variant civ will be selectable on the civ dropdown.
You will choose Jean D Arc, not French (Jean d Arc)
This civ really is a horrible idea to put it like it.
Others are also not really historical and too generic.
Soon we will have Khan’s army, King’s army, Emir’s army, I will be deleting AOEIV from my PC.
That’s maybe too much of a stretch, but I do have a feeling that despite the documentaries (handled by a separate group of people), the overall direction of the game does not care about history that much.
It’s more focused on espooooorts and “fancy stuff that could sell to younger people”. From the very beginning with the choice of icon styles and tech names (disclaimer: I know I know this is a design choice which is not necessarily good or bad. I just mean it reflects their focus and priorities).
I don’t think it is a stretch for I no longer hold out hope. They have made far too many mistakes for that at this point. I think they are genuinely incompetent.
The expansion is called the Sultans Ascend, yet the new civilizations are Byzantine and Japanese. The only Sultanate will be the Sultan’s Army, which is not a civilization. The very theme of the expansion is not properly represented.
And despite moving away from camera footage, which is a good thing; look at this.
At the very beginning, I was hoping that we would receive 3-5 full-fledged civs including DLC - Persians, the Mamluk Sultanate and the Kingdom of Jerusalem. For a very short time after I found out about “Variants” of old civs, I thought it was a great alternative to represent multiple nations and kingdoms instead of creating a huge number of civs like in AoE 2.
Unfortunately, now I’m disappointed with the “Variants” of civs, because they sound a bit like larger event mods. The concept is cool, but the execution is bad. I hope that the creators will at least change the names and flags of these “Variants” by the time this DLC is released.
BTW. I think that in the future there could be such “Variants” of civs:
Holy Roman Empire - Archduchy of Austria, Margraviate of Brandenburg, Teutonic Order state, Livonian Order state, Duchy of Saxony, Duchy of Bavaria, Switzerland, Duchy of Burgundy, Duchy of Swabia, Hanseatic League, Duchy of Westphalia
English - Kingdom of Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Kingdom of Mercia, Britons, Picts
French - Duchy of Orleans, Kingdom of Jerusalem, Franks, Carolingian Empire
Rus - Kievan Rus, Duchy of Moscow, Duchy of Polotsk, Novgorod Republic, Kingdom of Galicia–Volhynia
Yes. I am aware that the singular campaign of this expansion is about the crusades and the involvement of multiple Sultans. Yet despite that, they could not muster the energy to properly represent it in the most crucial piece of DLC: in an actual brand new civilization.
Have you played the variant civilizations? If not how can you say things like “the execution is bad” and state it as a fact when you haven’t tried them nor do we have any official information on them up until now that goes into deep details how exactly they will work.
As I’ve said before the only thing that we can provide constructive feedback about is the names for the new variant civilizations which seems to be final. Everything else at this point is pure speculation and assumptions from us until officiall news comes out.
We don’t have flags for the new civs yet, only the names. The only flag image that exists is Age of Noob’s flags that he designed, that he stated he put as placeholder for the video. They aren’t official flags.
We don’t know how it will display exactly in game. This is frankly my assumption/hope on how it will show in game. Still not a fan of Empire of Jade or Sultan’s Army, but I will withhold final judgement until seeing more details.
