Spirit of the Law's new take on AoE IV

Includes updates in the PUP as well as other recent changes he hadn’t covered yet:

Takeaways:

  • This should’ve been the game at release, not 6 months in.
  • The scenario editor needs a PhD.
  • Player base may be too reduced now for all this to matter.
  • “Panoramic” camera angle is weird. More zoom is great, but why the camera swivels?
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I think that’s a fairly negative way of looking at it. We all know that this game was released at least 6 months earlier than it should have been, no debate there but the good news is that it is in a pretty solid state now. The additional camera option is nice, and fully customizable hot keys are great for the people who want that and the PUP has some great balance changes. While the scenario editor isn’t very accessible yet etc the point is that now is a pretty good time for people to come back and give the game another try because it feels like a full game now rather than the beta we got on release

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For what it is, it’s in a good state now, agreed, but sometimes you only get one chance at a first impression. As a developer (i.e. company), you need to take full advantage of the initial hype, news articles, reviews, etc. because all that serves as free advertising, otherwise and unless you rely heavily on people passing the word, folks will rarely pick up a 6 months old game or come back if they tried it at first and didn’t like it.

I was telling myself that I was surely going to pick up Cyberpunk after all its bugs were squashed. It’s been a long while now and I just don’t care anymore. I’ve seen plenty of spoilers and other games have piqued my interest.

Let’s be honest, RTS is only played by niche gamers and hardly attracts newcomers. Of those fans, they either like or dislike AoE mechanics so it’s almost a given they all knew AoE IV was coming and were paying a lot of attention to reviews and popularity. Not likely for those who didn’t pick it up then to go and do it now, but let’s wait and see the numbers after June/July are gone.

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Alternatively, and this isn’t aimed at you personally, read the documentation. Which Relic is adding to quite regularly, in addition to some fantastic community efforts.

Games in 2022 are complex, and often so are their tools. Expecting something simplistic only works if the systems can be abstracted to that level of simplicity. It isn’t always possible.

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Taboo word detected.

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SotL has several degrees, including math (plus biology, psychology, education) so I’d tend to trust him more than most if he states the scenario editor is not user friendly. That also perfectly explains why the mods released so far are also so basic. People are having a hard time coming up with more complex stuff.

Complex != hard to use.

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and i said in 1 reply that my suspect about mods of why it didnt make more content is because which in resume goes like this:
A: it’s too hard to use
B: No one cares about aoe 4

Yeah I was right about my predictions

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I haven’t touched my copy either.

Thats the real Hard Truth. And i’m not that confident (alot of pros are) the new Frost Giant RTS will change much.

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and older releases weren’t complex, give me a break, this statement is ■■■■■■■■ and you know it

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given they seem to be going the same direction as aoe4, i’ll hold any hopes and expectations back unless proven wrong

We’re talking about Stormgate, right? Yeah, I’m not too hopeful either. Apparently it’ll be free-to-play from the get go (not a good sign), its art style is not my cup of tea and the fantasy/sci-fi RTS has been done to death already (Grey Goo, Ashes of the Singularity, SC, C&C, SupCom…). How can they improve on those games, which some are classic masterpieces? Hell, the trailer has basically Terran Marines.

The thing with RTS games is that they don’t age as fast as other genres. You can still go and play 20+ year old games, repeatability is unmatched in RTS and some of those games still look great and are just as fun as when they launched. And that is a problem for newer ones.

A new RTS would need a completely radical new approach, say, something like Homeworld (real 3 dimensions) or SupCom (no minimap, strategical zoom) which revolutionized the genre.

Somebody said in another thread that we need a modern warfare AoE and at first I thought “hell no, wtf” but the more I think of it, the more it makes sense. There has been nothing of that sort, ever. Another option would be alternate history. Think of “The Man in the High Castle” or “Crimson Skies” sort of thing, which goes along the lines of finding a book and building an RTS out of it (e.g. Dune). But battling non-descript insectoid aliens? I’ll pass. The rest of the game would have to be AMAZING to pull me in.

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i think despite some of its flaws, company of heroes method does its job at being fresh approach to an RTS, outside of claustrophobic zoom out it uses, the rest is solid

but in RTS i think the biggest problem is the old classics are so good and in case of AOE, often made even better than original release with remasters, that its hard to see anything new going against it and not failing

The scenario editor looks like a normal game engine window.

His argument that it’s overly complicated is fair, but due to the fact it’s a literal game engine, it is(should be, I haven’t touched it) a lot more powerful as well.

That’s the only argument in favor of AoE4 I am ever going to make I believe.

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basically what it is yes, but with stuff still locked, cuz beta, we’ll see whats done with it over time

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somehow or another they needed our data from thousands of games to reach balance, the developers are not inhumane

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pretty much no one in this thread is talking about balance

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I loved CoH and CoH2, bought them both. The freshness of it was due to the WWII period, which at the time was popular in TV and film and never tried before in an RTS, and also the mechanics: soldiers able to take cover, get pinned, manned artillery being able to get captured if you killed its operators, great physics and great sound design. Both were games made with love and it showed. I would have preferred another resource collection mechanic and yeah, that zoom.

That being said, I’m not sure if I’m enough of a fan to buy a third one. So we’ll see how CoH3 turns out. I think we will be able to clearly tell who influenced more the eSports focus of AoE: Relic or Microsoft.

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What good is it to you to have ranked colors, map bans and a panoramic camera without a balanced goal between civilizations. rts have a small niche and developers can’t clone themselves

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Going back to the video I linked in my first post, if you watch it you can see the devs were already doing a pretty good job at balancing civs. They were all within ~6% in their win rates pre-PUP. Why do they keep going around in circles buffing and nerfing siege while other aspects are neglected? That is the real question.

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