The art style of this game

That would be too simplistic.
I’d prefer a less radical approach with units of the same type having similar poses in the portrait, like the revolutionary variants in AOE3 DE.

Its not only 1 min trailer, but also the official statement.
That they are not really going to make it better.

https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe4/comments/e7s0z5/players_will_be_able_to_turn_down_the_saturation/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share

Problem is, even if you would shut down saturation, it still looks bad.

Just take a look at recent Rome Remastered, it’s also a colourful game and not like they have done much, still in comparison to AoE4, Rome looks 20 years ahead.

Gameplay wise we have seen that new RTS games do get simplified and dumbed down.

Nobody was asking for 2 times for Age of Empires to be a browser game, Dawn of War to turn into a MOBA or by C&C to make only 1 walking building on 4legs that spawns 15 units.

“Involving those E-Sports/Pro Player” rather did lead to make games even dumber, as those tend to merely over buff rush play, where you end up in real play by memorize 1 same simple rush build order.

Of-course everybody does deserve a second chance. But Microsoft did mess up meanwhile like at least 4 RTS games. Rise of Legends, AoE Online , Halo Wars 2, Age of Empires: Castle Siege

And after so many years with so many disappointments,
they present Age of Empires 4 with units that look lazy and cheap.

Dear lad, you are trolling us so hard. It’s the only explanation I can find for your rare stubbornness into strange claims :slight_smile:

Most of the people here wants AoE4 to succeed and to continue and improve upon the spirit of the series. Yet your examples as “should be” are of ugly graphics (I assume it), bland mechanics and incorrect assumptions about the failures of other games.

Developers are not stupid people that cannot spot issues that any random guy on the internet does. Yet they may be carried away, the flaw of seeing your work every day.

Microsoft has a lot of interest to revitalize the series with a long-lasting release, more even after the warm welcome of the Definitive Editions. I’m quite sure they keep a close eye that the core of the series is there and it’s correctly implemented.

Now that I “criticized” you (pardon me :smiley: ), let me give something in return. StarCraft 2 had art issues right before release. They redone the shaders and we got the beautiful games it is right now. The art direction of Age4 is very good (personal opinion), they will most likely do another pass to the shaders sometimes later so they take out the plastic look of some units.

Total Rome listed above is not 20 years ahead of Age4, it’s behind Age1 DE in terms of aesthetics.

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And here you go again, it’s obvious you just want a hyperrealistic age. You claim that isn’t it, and you just want the artsyle and such to be better, but you keep showing hyperrealistic games and say “It looks years ahead” of course it does, it is going for realism, Age of empires has never gone for realistic graphics, and if you would get the idea that it should have realistic graphics out of your head, than we can stop arguing about it.

3 Likes

Thanks, in hindsight I should have quoted that rather than just linking.

To me, the claim that the Long Swordsman is incorrectly named seems to be untenable, since it relies on the idea that ‘long sword’ cannot simply mean a sword that is long. The fact that ‘long sword’ means something more specific in a particular (and very niche) technical context is irrelevant: AoE is not that context, and a word or phrase in English can have more than one meaning. (The issue of the space is potentially more complicated, since ‘longsword’ and ‘long sword’ need not be synonymous; cf. ‘blackbird’.)

That said, it was quite amusing to see people arguing that the Long Swordsman’s sword is both too long and not a long sword. I don’t know enough about swords to comment on whether it’s realistic, but if so it’s hardly the only unrealistically scaled thing in the game. In any case, the complaints about the art style of AoE IV don’t primarily seem to be about scaling anyway.

It is not the Long Swordsman, it is straight up Longswordsman, which means he has a Longsword, not just a slightly oversized one-handed sword.

A Longsword is always a two-handed weapon.

" A longsword (also spelled as long sword or long-sword ) is a type of European sword characterized as having a cruciform hilt with a grip for two-handed use"

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There’s definitely a space in ‘Long Swordsman’ as it appears in the game (this is confirmed by the relevant wiki page, or you could just check in the game).