Thank you all for your feedback! It will be forwarded to the team.
Starcraft’s emergence as a spectator phenomenon is part of the historical birth of esport and Blizzard learned from it, developing SC2 with esports in mind: you can see how it informed their design decisions on gameplay, visuals, UI, and spectator features. We take a lot of inspiration from Starcraft and its development tenets.
The competitive scene and esports are an important aspect to any PvP game. For AoE4, we consider it vital. From game balance, to modding, to tournaments and support. We want to capture historical moments, feature our own set of micro and macro challenges and have a depth in strategy that rivals the best of the best!
Community feedback is integral to our process. Thank you for your thoughts, suggestions, and concerns.
Edit - we saw the opportunity to clarify and expand on some of our sentiments in our original post. Thanks everyone!
U never played coop on sc2? The mechanics are tweaked to only play certain techs and the overall game speed is ramped heavily- but even tournaments play the games can be tweaked for faster play
Its kinda hard to tell rn about the way things will be balanced. (which heavily affects pacing)
Things could easily be changed with 1-2 patches.
There was a nice Spirit of the Law video that illustrated how slow techs and train times are currently.
The game speed vs the closed beta game speed changed as well. (different number of starting villagers etc)
Of coarse u might not end the round with elephants trampling tc but even if they changed the game speed and starting resources u could be sending units in by 5min instead of 10
It’s just the fact that this game is pinned on 1.0 gamespeed, even tho ANY RTS out there, Warcraft, Starcraft, other Age games, play at least on 1.5 times real time.
Ofc that is all relative, but the game (beside slightly increased tech/unit train timings) is pretty similar to AoE2 in game developement and flow sense.
Due to the fact that it’s 3d i’d say that they’d rather tweak numbers than increasing gamespeed, since it could make animations look out of place.
Lets see how it developes, for now it’s a slower age2 with similar unit movement speed.
I think its fine to have it in 1.0 speed.
They just need to adjust the timings of techs and recruit speed if they want to balance the game towards a faster pace. (they can easily change a 30 second tech to any value they want)
I think it is a very fluid thing that can be changed easily so we should wait to see how the devs think the game should be paced.
We can argue about how similar Aoe IV is to SC2 from our personal view.
But it is also a fact that Relic has taken inspiration from SC2 to design this game.
Interesting. Everything I’ve seen so far made me think the game is not meant to be an esport. I’m genuinely curious to know what concepts got transferred over from Starcraft 2.
In SC2 the units are snappy and respond instantly, they move much faster, die much faster (damage is huge, HP is low), fights take seconds to conclude, each and every unit promotes micro, the UI also promotes micro (units wireframe, unit stats visible at all times), animations are clear and show exactly what’s going on in a fight and which unit attacks which unit, the replay system allows you to see a lot of important stats like what units and buildings are currently in production, there are leaderboards in game, the game allows hotkey customization (both grid and classic layout) and rapid fire, supply blocks don’t allow you to still train units, focus firing and single-ing out units is sharp, you train way more than 3 workers per minute, splash damage is devastating and there is friendly fire for splash damage.
I’m not sure if I missed anything. I also have to mention that all the above features were present from launch. So what features from SC2 did they draw inspiration from that make AoE4 esports friendly?
To put things in perspective, I find AoE2 to be less esports oriented than SC2, but waaaay more esports oriented than AoE4. What SC2 esport features in AoE4 do you think the dev is talking about?
This is completely irrelevant and arbitrary though. They could fix the clock and times on everything in AoE2 (or any of those games) so that in game time was the same as real time without actually changing game speed at all.
Ofc it changes everything, literally everything moves/techs quicker.
The fact that the clock runs faster is because you’ll keep the overview of timings, so instead of having different timings for every single gamespeed setting you have one timing to see if you are behind or not for example.
That is totally independent of whether or not the in game clock matches real time.
As I said you could adjust all of it in aoe2 (creation times, movespeed, research times, the clock etc…) so that in game time matched real time while still having everything in game take exactly as long as it does now.
That was obviously not worth the effort, but the point is whether or not in game time matches real time is completely arbitrary.
They could make AoE 4 in game clock match real time and have the game play ten times faster than aoe2 if they really wanted to.
All I said was that the game being pinned on 1.0 speed when other RTS ended up at 1.5 or so is completely irrelevant. It tells us nothing at all about game pace. The game could be faster or slower than those other games.
Ideally they get the game at the pace they want while keeping the clock the same as real time.
