The building models in the game are like temples in rural China. Chinese ancient buildings don’t use yellow or blue tiles. They usually use gold, dark gray or dark green tiles. The brightly colored tiles look ugly, not like official or folk buildings at all.
The correct building model should be like this, including the city wall. It looks good. The city wall in the game is a combination of eastern and western buildings, which is very ugly.
actually, I am not even chinese, and I can easily spot than it’s not “ordinary chinese buildings”
Most of them looks totally fantasy, and they probably look ordinary to you because you don’t feel concerned.
But if so much fantasy were done on the aesthetic of english or french for exemple, than it was done for chinese, you will probably notice how wacky it is.
I would say than an easy “fix” would be to work on the colors, some dynasty represented in the aoe4 screens never used these colors. (I am obviously not speaking about the player color)
An easy exemple to see how fantasy is chinese style is the castle, which is definitly just an european castle with asian roofs, and looks totally cartoon compartivly the aesthetic of other civilizations
interesting, it expains the roof. At least, not really the red part of woods, and the shapes; but still, the blue roofs are understundable, and not that shocking. Even if a bit weird if compared to the bottom right circle building, which is way more … brownish and austhere ?
The details of Chinese architectural models are poor. If you zoom in, the Roof Texture really looks like if it was a rugged iron roof. Some of them are not even tiles, like wooden boards. It is really ugly. There are many Chinese American employees in the game production group who actually make models with this effect. It’s disappointing that they can’t make magnificent and beautiful architectural models.
cant we just find a chinese person who can tell whether or not are these things accurate?
that would be much simpler and better in my opinion. and i hope we can find atleast one chinese person in these forms. right?
You took this screenshot from the Realtime strategy, Roleplaying and Browser game Terra miliaris from 2010. Yes, i like also very much this game concerning the building graphics. The building are made in a classic old school style and are kept so good as well historically correct.
This screen came from the same game and was a content of the Birthright extension of 2012. I wallow in good memories, if i see such pictures
Yes, without feedback, the game production team may not care. I hope they can see the feedback, otherwise the players who like Chinese civilization can only accept this ugly building model.
What devs only need to do is type Along the River During the Qingming Festival or Qingming Shanghe Tu(清明上河图) on Google and use that painting as a design reference, as that painting faithfully captures the daily life from countryside to city in Song Dynasty.
Just compare the painting with what we have in the game trailer, we can clearly see how inacurrate are those design in game.
I think just by changing the color of the roof tiles, we can get a good look and feel. The modeling of most Chinese buildings is okay
In addition, all the buildings in this game are small in size. It would be nice if they could be enlarged.
I hope that the Age of Empires production team can see our opinions and make some adjustments. It’s not difficult to change the color.
some models are really odd on some screenshots. I am mainly thinking to the castle, the archery barracks and the “forum”. (don’t know if it’s a forum like previous aoe)
I talked to my girlfriend who’s Chinese and she thinks overall the building architecture looks alright but she also mentioned that they have chosen architecture from different dynasties in China that is historically hundreds of years apart from each other and maybe that’s what gives this weird look about it as the architecture changed through the different dynasties.
