Golden Swamp
in my opinion aoe4 hits the 30 minute mark often enough to be about right length, yes some games last longer but thats just a how aoe always worked, yes you could rush someone and end in 15-20 minutes, or sooner, but occasional long game isnât anything new, if anything developers captured the pacing fairly well, aside from unit training taking forever which kinda adds to the length, bit by bit, slows down rushes by couple seconds, and slows down late game battles
3 Likes
personally i think folks like you are putting way too much focus on esports part, just like for better or worse the developers, how long beasty needs to beat someone ingame doesnât matter, as i said, there are other factors at play here that i have yet to see properly considered, like training times being between long to eternity, and as your graph here nicely shows, overemphasis on feudal hit and run without trying to age up and taking a lead, yes, its two effectively pro players here, but this is common in any equal matchup
my conclusion is this, this isnât explicitely game related problem, this one is entirely on the players
training times being shorter would speed things up by a bit, at the end, the 120+ villager economies and 2 tc booming right away that has gone rampant is what is causing ultra long games, as you said, meta issue, but then, aoe4 meta is an interesting case, because here, players arenât really the ones setting it, its the developers instead, the other part of the problem is the modern RTS trend of people blindly copy pasting what pros are doing instead of thinking on their own
1 Like
Have me repair with stone, the distinctive buildings, please
[Have distinctive buildings repaired with #########################################################################
you know, thats actually not a bad idea, but again, how rampant is this issue OUTSIDE of the 12 pros?
Have me repair with stone, the distinctive buildings, please
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iâll ignore any beasty requests and instead look at bigger picture, the game shouldnât be beasty said this, so it shoud be so, please stop this, its the most braindead way of thinking
(doesnât mean heâs not a very good player, but heâs not the community, just an individual)
3 Likes
Lest play, age of empires IV beasty version.
Not every game in the world needs to have a set time of 30 minutes to be entertaining. Say a session of DnD often takes multiple hours and is often strung together with multiple sessions to conclude a story.
Of course, that is an entirely different genre and type of experience. But, even within specific genres, like RTS, games need not be identical all the time. Age of Empires has been one of the slower RTS out there in comparison to its peers, and that has been a hallmark feature of the franchiseâof longer, more drawn out games.
Changing that, would be change for changes sake instead of for the base of people who have stuck around with AoE for all this time. The argument that more popular RTSes are quicker doesnât really matter, as the genre is not so tiny that all RTS players can only be occupied with one game at a time.
The greater and more important question in my mind is phasing. Does AoE4âs gameplay experience have good phasing for the length of time? And thatâs an age old question which has always brought attention to the usefulness of each Age. âDoes Dark Age really need to last that longâ and so on.
And as for Beasty? It isnât like he hides his intention with these types of games. He stated not long ago that if an RTS with a bigger esports scene shows up like Stormgate, he would be moving over to that. Iâm sure he has insights on things like unit inputs that could be useful for us all. But, broader conceptual game design principles like game length, immersiveness, visualsâshould we really be taking his opinion on that?
The game should first and foremost serve the people who purchased it, and who intend on playing it for the game and not some artificial sports scene that may or may not be around in a few years time.
6 Likes
Personally, I would like the game to last a maximum of 35 minutes.
You can have fun in a long game or even in a faster game, boring will be a game with the same durations always with no variety⊠Age of empires is a game that itâs entire me mechanic lies in ages, so is expected that it will have longer games than a SC game, why is so difficult for SC players to understand that age of empires is a different RTS?
4 Likes
Thatâs eSports reasona. Nothing to do with fun.
The funny thing about this game is that the most eSports dev goes, the less players I see 
3 Likes
AoE4 is not an esport game at all. SC2 was an esport game.
To make esport in this kind of game, you need to make it epic, beautifull and fast. I am not gona watch a game china vs abassyde in lipany even if its beasty vs ML.
1 Like
Why needs to be fast ? People watch 1 hour dota games, I even played some local tournaments of dota 1 many years ago and some of the games were 1:20. 1:30 ( the most fun game I ever had in that game )
bit of trivia, starcraft I has more in common with aoe2 and 3 than it does with SCII, and thats across the board
Played a 2hour and 20mins 1vs1 ranked match couple days ago and felt like a epic battle lol
Its good to have the 20-30mins games but if it changed to a set time wouldnt make the game better.
A game mode with points similar to coh might be good for custom games
I am not saying fast in term of game lenght (most epic sc2 game was not fast), i should of say âdynamicâ.