The curious case of AoE 4 graphics (lots of screenshots)

I get the sense from some of these comments that players believe that pro esports players are the reason that the relative size of buildings and units feels weird in AoE4. I cannot discuss anything from my time playtesting the game on the council, but it would be news to me to learn that it was pro esports players somehow developed this portion of the game.

In order to see the right amount of things in the correct proportions on the screen, buildings and units in Age of Empires games need to be cartoonishly distorted. That distortion was not as extreme in that pre-release trailer.

That does not mean that the game was somehow magically easier to play then, though. If you played the game with very large buildings and very small units, the game play is rubbish: either (1) you would either need to be super zoomed in so you could visually identify different units from each other and be able to easily click on one of them while the buildings take up so much of your screen that you get completely lost in your own city and can’t tell wtf is going on around you or (2) you are so far zoomed out in order to see the entire area of the map but you can’t tell the units apart, let alone click on them.

I believe those issues do not happen as much now, but they have been replaced with extreme sight distortions that heretofore have not been a problem in any other AoE game. That issue would be a factor of the buildings having been originally designed for a certain relative size and then being later distorted. I believe the problem boils down to the relative height of the buildings compared to their width and the large amount of open space in the building footprint.

Here is a link to more of that discussion. The building scale is wrong, but it's deeper than that

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