I actually did (with statistics) but the thread was removed. I understand, it’s ironic in both ways. So many butthurt uninformed people, and then people coming in to say ‘yep he’s right’ was intolerable and offensive.
There’s tons of censored or ignored facts all over that while were prevalent at the start, now with their remaining players out of the scammed thousands who left, they seem to ignore it. Such bad playercounts for a 2022 game plummeted and became lower than AoE2(1999 game) by a long shot across the board within only like a month. You might say, what about these other arguably even better ones, like AoM/AoE3? Yes they have lower players, but at release, AoM became the ‘top online strategy game’, AoE3 scored big numbers, AoE4 did not retain those numbers, even with buyers who thought “finally it’s the next aoe”.
The ‘Age of Empires’ title was used to make sales (people tricked it was ‘really’ Age of Empires and not knowing/caring it’s by new developers). To this day there are people not informed why the game is so broken and different; factually missing hotkeys, map editors, traditional modding tools, no AI/RMS script, and other useful features that were always core to the originals.
Tons of RTS people who played games in the series at a top level also gave their critiques and elaborated with points why it was not so good. (find these on youtube or on forums)
It has sort of moved past that point though and there is a ‘small cult following’ mostly of those who never played RTS games or little kids who can’t tell the difference, in a way like they do not know anyway and their ideas of balance are not fully able to be recognized. Much like how a top higher ELO adult player would sort of ‘know’ what to change but a newer player who just thinks something is too powerful does not always know. In the end aoe4 was a cashgrab and that was what people got.
You can currently count statistics from the AoE4 forums. The %'s are like 40-70% of X amount of posts chosen from the top down (any pool of posts rly), all ‘bugreports’, ‘features missing’, ‘errors’, even ignoring the somewhat tolerable ‘dlc suggestion’ threads (and not counting them as bad %). Some of these are even like ‘hotkey not even supported’ sort of patches that a novice dev would add in a day. Even though now we are reaching near the +1 year point, and tons of ‘patches’ that failed to deliver. Even to this day even though no one is outright saying anymore like ‘this is a cash grab by new devs’ (fact, it is ‘not’ Ensemble Studios, it is Relic) who made a game, that really is the same as a fake Ferrari car maker putting the brand Ferrari on a random vehicle, enough to scam a few brand buyers (fact, it is), after trying to make their own sort of RTS that flopped a few years ago (Dawn of War 3). The point is what a high % of bugs and missing things.
Top RTS players have found totally broken things that show the game is not ready for top level playing and competitions, and they conclude they don’t prefer it for a lot of reasons, even though the marketing has plowed through, and they now retain about 5000 out of 1000000 players. I’d imagine a lot of them did not refund and they scammed a ton of $ from just being named ‘Age of Empires’; not me, I’m not even bitter, I only spent like 1$. For this you only need to reference reviews of what most buyers thought, just count how many reviews say ‘this will be great, because its age of empires, one of my favorite games’, not knowing it was some new game, totally new team, no resemblance to the old one. Some critiques were the 1-dimensional siege units and 1-D way of playing the game where pros would try to make some new strategy and fail, then the only thing that ‘changed’ was a few values during patches; patches that, were hailed as ‘going to totally change/fix everything’. I had said before and said again those who thought ‘patches’ were going to iron out those major issues were wrong. They maybe changed spamming siege unit 1 to be replaced with spamming siege unit 2 by changing its stats a bit, those were the only sort of ‘patches’ that kept happening.
I’d imagine if it didn’t have the AoE name/brand, it would have ‘even less’ or be very forgettable… as many people proven were hyped that it’s AoE but literally nothing else. The weird concepts like ‘female khans’ and such were not bad but were kind of distasteful. Something good for marketing and sales or to teach kids something kind of irrelevant yet wrong, but that part is smaller things in the realm of opinion. In the end it’s still so flawed that even new players are constantly finding higher % of problems 1 year in, if they’re the type to put up with that at all. It’s not ‘anything’ like the original games which became not only top RTS games but at times top online games, and had so many players, if you think so, then you are lying. aoe4 to aom/aoe series, is like the empire earth to aoe series, a forgettable thing with ‘even less’ players that had a grandscale idea meant to be grander and inspired by the other, but did not execute it as well.
To this day the tricked players that try to put up with aoe4 still realize there are issues with it. Yet I ask, why take a group that failed at their own game, then tell people ‘this new game they made, it’s basically the same as this one?’ just to get people to buy it? Total hype and greed agenda. Maybe you can say like: it’s good to give people a second chance, but Relic had more than one chance, and didn’t deliver on this one even if more $ and greed was acquired. It seems many people are simply ‘unaware’ of these facts and when confronted with them they just can’t say anything about it.
The facts are there, the evidence is known, it’s just unfortunate the scam worked on so many.
i am personally currently on the same boat like you. Cause of reasons like focus, time, safety, future content options etc. I would really like to see a redone, good looking Atlanteans and especially Chinese, I really do. But I think working on the original 3 civs just makes the most sense for me at the moment at least cause:
