Preview Trailers: Important points of criticism

Age of Empires IV IV - Discussion
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1. Graphics
Needs improvement:
-Design geared towards mobile games instead of homecomputers for the main target group.
-To ugly and kept too general.
-The grasses look fuzzy and washed out.

2. Units
Needs improvement:
-Looks out to stiff and unnatural.
-The colors are choosen to colorful and too gaudy.
-Units should not be able to stand 2 meters away from the building, but should be able to stand directly next to it. This is what is expected in today’s 3D game.
Should keeping:
-It it okay, that all peoples share at least about 60 percent of the same military and civilian units.

3. Game mechanics (animations)
Needs improvement:
-Great weakness of the game, it is not a matter of taste and a real problem.
-Cavalry units get stuck briefly while riding until, they get to the next horse step, which is noticeable and does not appear as a fluid animation.
-Archers show little recoil when shooting the arrows.

4. Effects (flames, projectiles)
Needs improvement:
-Explosions look boring, flat and cheap.
-In the explosions of the Chinese artillery, small bright spots of color can be seen instead of smoke or a whirling up of the earth.
-The explosions of the Chinese rocket launchers look too loud.
-The whole thing is kept too minimalistic and, as it currently looks, definitely not a Triple A production.

5. Performance
Needs improvement:
-Clear performance problems can be seen in the shown so far Trailers. There are hangers when the buildings collapse.
Aim:
-The game must also be able to run for people, who do not have the hardware and graphics cards from the last 2 years, but also from earlier, as there are many history people in the realtime strategy genre and older people also like to play it.
-In the case of niche genres, you have to make sure to pick up everyone and not just those with the best computers and graphics cards.

6. Campaigns: Narration
Needs improvement:
-In Age of Empires 2, the stories were read out by one person as a “diary”, although it was not a cinematic masterpiece, it seemed extremely authentic. The player felt part of the story and not an observer of a distant time.
-In the new Age of Empires 4, what has been seen so far, the stories are told as a kind of “documentary film”. The stories should not be told from a distance, this is a strong negative point that the developers should definitely fix before publication, despite the effort made so far.
-To create an epic “short medieval film” would be much better, than showing “drone recordings” of the locations with ghost actors but also real actors.

Age of Empires 2 key features
-The mood was always rather gloomy than comiclike colorful.
-Units killed gave death screams.
-Corpses quickly disappeared and got smaller and smaller.

Age of Empires 2 was never
-Comic art of the units.
-Cute animations.
-To big weapons, especially arrows are very noticeable.

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Best summary of the current state of game, unfortunately I think they don’t have more time and game will be release soon, they are going after Chinese market, that’s why the game look so strange.

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They would neuer admit to that, but you might be right.

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Chose one.

Just use the saturation slider in the graphic settings.
The game is a lot less colourful than AoE3, especially in the environment.

They try to emulate the AoE2 2D sprite animations that have no transitions.
I don’t like the decision either. A very small transition of like 0.1 seconds would do wonders.
AoE2 was also originally limited to 20FPS so harsh transitions were less noticeable because nothing was smooth.

This Rocket launcher just shoots arrows. They don’t explode on impact of something like that.
I think they wanted to show all gunpowder abilities of China at once so it looked overloaded, don’t think that will happen in the actual game.
Also Youtube Video compression kills that. It’s really hard to tell how that looks like in the actual game.

Wrong. Just wrong.
AoE2 had to work with a limited colour space (I think 256 colours) and they choose the most colourful colours possible.

AoE4 has cute animations?

That’s just wrong. The Throwing Axeman for example throws axes that most people wouldn’t even be able to carry.

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Since X019 Trailer was colorfull, I don’t know what you expect

ohhhh nooope my friend, aoe2 campaign narration is boring , at least in aoe4 you will have images and videos explaining the campaing. Ok “short medieval film” i dont see it nessesary.

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Well, I think the rest of the points you are right.

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Best would be, if they make 1 documentary campaign (as an experiment) and 3 “normal” campaigns with a storytelling person + ingame cutscenes like in Aom / Aoe3.

Colors are okay for me, but good summary overall. Agree with the rest of your points.

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Thank you very much for these words. The release for the game does not necessarily have to take place at the end this year, can also be next year. But you should also follow the western market, if you do not want to fail. And i know, they want to bring out a good game.

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The graphics are rather badly treated. Most of the reviews confirm this. Made cheaply, the grasses and the soil look mat.

Anyway really no, Age of Empires 2 camapign narrations are after all authentic, the player experiences them in the same time age. They may be boring, but leastways they are historically correctly assigned.

In Age of Empires 4 is that a disaster, i do not need a time traveler, who shows me pictures and videos from centuries ago, then has nothing to do with the middle ages. These are massive missteps, who will most propably kill the sale of the game.

Though, possibly the only and best solution to correct this big misstep.

Campaign stories should be kept as small as possible. They are just unnecessary twaddle. The game itself is much more important.

Thank you. I do really appreciate positive feedback.

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Unfortunately yes. The vegetation graphics of Age of Empires 3 are made much better made. And this game is 15 years older. What a shame for the team around of Age of Empires 4. If the developers do not want go towards to a tragedy, they should revise necessary.

No, just right. All people were able to carry the axes, nothing should be too heavy or rough here, as it like in real life. Look at the arrows of the archers, they look twice as big as they should be, good for a comic book, but not for a game like this. All of the reviews shown so far confirm this trouble.

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something really important is the BLOOD in the game or at least an option to aplicate this. It s the diference between kill people or dolls.

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Yes, i see it that also too. I would be in favor of corpses lying there, whether with blood or not, you can choose. For exemple Age of Empires 1 is much more archaic than the Second part and there, you will see blood on units, who were killed.

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I doubt if they are allowed at all to fix any of those very legit problems.

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He throws one from far range and he is carrying another one on his back

image
Ok buddy, you go throw that axe from a decent range and carry another one on your back

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The thing I disagree the most in OP’s is the campaign presentation. I am actually looking forward to see how the documentary style presentation with real footage of actual places turns out. It is something new which no one tried before, I believe, and I find the idea quite promising, and also way more educational. Of course, it remains to be seen how it will work with the overall immersion.

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It is strange but this image has more graphics and details than aoe4 :’(

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I don’t believe we have an image this zoomed in of the units, so who’s to say they aren’t that detailed?

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I think I can agree to that , except the colors… I like it so much xD

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image1920×1080 1.06 MB

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You can add that detail in a 2D game we’re is more easy to make a unit that model in 3D , sorry for my English.

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Preview Trailers: Important points of criticism; Further observations

Units
Needs improvement:
-Units do not seem very detailed which can be seen from a far. They are kept to general.
Should keeping:
-That soldiers can climb Townwalls with siege towers, is a very good innovation, one of the few :wink: In the old Age of Empires 2, soldiers could not be dumped over Townwalls. They were simply very suitable for bringing soldiers into the enemy village fairly unscathed.

Units (special abilities)
Needs improvement:
Long Archers (British)
-This units can place wooden palisades. The effect can be activated by push of a button.
-This special ability is supposed to help, to be able to stand better against the opposing units.
-If yet, i would see the use of wooden palisades much better among the Villagers, than with the long archers, it would be a lot more realistic.
Heroes (Mongols)
-Kahns go too far, as they can reinforce troops with different signal arrows, this has a slightly weird effect.
Generally speaking
-One should be careful, not to overload the game with such special skills.
-Active skills are easier to use with small armies, with large armies it degenerates into too much fiddly micro management.

Heroes
Needs improvement:
-The fact that the Heroes can only be used for all people in campaigns like in the old Age of Empires 2 is not an innovation, apart from the to big innovation in the special ability. It should be the other way around.
-Heroes should be increasingly integrated into the game application, including singleplayer and multiplayer maps.

Game mechanics (animations)
Needs improvement:
Horseman:
-When the horseman collides with opposing units, a white dust cloud is thrown up, which looks strange and subtly notchy.
-The arrows of the archers are not only comiclike big, they also fly strange.

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Yo confio en que la falta de detalle y texturas se debe a que grabaron la presentación estando en un Alpha. Pero posta pueden hacerlo con mejores graficos y si a alguien no le funciona bien se lo baja. Hablo de los personajes, el ambiente se ve genial y las luces safan (aunque me parece una lástima que no pongan ciclos de dia/noche en un juego de 2021. Sc2 tiene un escala de valores gráficas que van desde un realismo ultra a lo que podria ser un juego de 2004.