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.