Yes, in fact if it were cartoon it would look like this…
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I would describe the art style as a semi-realistic approach with “painterly” qualities to assist in readability, both in a gameplay-sense but also a product recognition/marketing sense. A photo of AOE4 should instantly be recognizable as “That’s AOE4”.
They also had to create a look/feel that would feel consistent to players across a wide range of systems (old laptop to mega PC), screens (resolution, color, size), platforms (PC, and soon, Console). Readability TV vs Monitor is drastically different.
Basically, the art direction was a distinct choice that was likely iterated on many, many, times (I can hear Relic/World’s Edge/Microsoft shiver just thinking about it lol). I suspect that was one of the more difficult things the design/art/product teams had to work through actually.
Long-story short, Art Direction is set, unlikely to change (nor should it, in my opinion). This thread was about the actual technical capability on display out of Relic’s proprietary Essence Engine. EE5 is a widely-capable piece of tech that can do many (and not so many) things 
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Correct. My point when creating the thread was to evidence how Essence is capable of so much more detail and effects and even showcase some of those graphical features are present but strangely hidden from view.
I also agree that the overall tone the artistic department wanted to convey was that of a medieval painting. I am fine with that but I believe the end result is too bland. Not going far enough to having its own artistic soul but also not going far enough to the realism side.
The movie “300” is a very good example of something that took lots of artistic liberties but still feels historical and is immediately recognizable. AoE 4 stays in a forgettable area.
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Look how beautiful that game pops. Not a pixel out of place. And that perfect unit:building ratio
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wall gate interaction as i said. yeah but it seems they got trouble with formations becuase it was the first thing that got removed . it just looks suspicious the reasons why they take those decisions and got the result we have in game.
maybe it because it consume so much resources which is the reason why is poor optimazed but at the same time those feature are the one that are holding aoe 4 true potential. they have a lot of rework to done there because it seems something messy went into the code.
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Top level graphics from AAA studio, amazing physics:
It seems they don’t even bothered to fix those, of course the focus on Esports is more important it seems.
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Yes, I already resigned myself to the fact that the game has those pixelated graphics…
Pixelated? That does not mean what you seem to think it means.
For me if it seems… or else very low quality graphics… type as if it were 144p…
Well it’s not 144p or anything near that. So if you see something like that then it’s an issue on your end.
Didn’t you know they had guided heat-seeking missiles back in the Middle Ages? 
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Free Building demo for everyone on steam. 3-10 October.
A really small team have done this. Incredible.
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It is hard not to be negative when water looks like a closed down quarry with murky colours and null depth to it.
Actual water is see-through, and varies in colour from environment to environment. The AoE4 developers made the conscious decision to remove transparency the “deeper” water gets, by painting over the texture with a matte colour, thus creating the illusion of depth.
The problem is, water is far more complex than that, and is briliant to look at because of its interaction with light through waves, through varience in depth and clarity. To put that all aside for some cartoony interpretation of “Water blue and shiny” is beyond me in so many levels. It is hard to verbalize without stressing the absurdity of it.
This begs the question. Are all of their artists on CoH3 or working on DLC? They’ve redesigned ships, but left the water looking like cobalt contaminated sludge. I recall one of the developers trying to express that they were going for a painterly look–which comes across offensive knowing what that should mean.
Whether it is from a lack of effort or funding, it is just sad.
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Oh god, it’s worse than I thought. You can clearly see the real depth close to the shore in that video and the lame non-see-through blue layer.
No wonder why it looks like potato and why oars disappear once they touch the water, they are just clipping that layer. What’s under there? All the boars killed by Muslim civs that have disappeared?
That’s early 00’s water rendering at best. Basically all modern games render water with some sort of volumetric color gradient, so it’s transparent at shallow depths but gradually gets more saturated/opaque the deeper you go. Not THIS.
EDIT: I just had to see this with my own eyes. Of course it explains it all! I always wondered why shore fish could be seen but deep sea fish not, plus the oars situation. Only the shore is transparent, the rest is a fake opaque layer. Say goodbye to ever seeing sea life in this game, like whales, which have been a staple of AoE since 2.
Fish:
Oars (plus some extra fish):
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This is weird, because I’m pretty sure I’ve seen sea plants through what is being described as the “opaque” layer. Are you sure it’s just not a level of translucency? Are we sure it’s the same across different biomes?
Glad you asked. They’ve set it up so surrounding water has more transparency to allow for the see-throughness of it, revealing the seaweed. But, it obviously looks jarring and out of place like in this video;
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Ahh, I see. The biome differences must be making this worse, because I swear the difference (back when I was looking at water detail) wasn’t that severe.
Yes, most of the Relic team is working on CoH 3 so AoE 4 seems short of effort…
I would say worse…
Port Royale 1 (2002)
No Man Land (2003)
The Entente: Battlefields WW1 (2003)
Empire Dawn of the Modern World (2003)
AoM EE (I know it’s a 2014 game, but it’s still a remaster of a 2002 game)
In fact AoE 1 really…
That’s why when we talk about graphics we do it with fundamentals… you can not launch an RTS in the middle of 2021 with water from the early 2000s, that is, it will not…
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They didn’t, so that’s alright.
Isn’t that DE?
Like, I’m all for criticising the existing water where it could be better, but these comparisons make no technical sense. What Age IV will be doing technically will be worlds apart. The map editor alone demonstrates this.
What matters more is the end result. The technical complexity doesn’t matter to someone who doesn’t like it. Talking about technical aspects (especially without understanding them) gets us nowhere.
From what I’m seeing, the translucency gradient could do with adjusting (assuming there isn’t something stopping them) and certain things need more tuning for each biome (so that things like the sea plants don’t stand out obviously in tropical? water).
Ships interacting with the water like fishing does would be nice as well. It contributes to them looking too floaty.
I don’t like how excessive the water trails are in AoE 3: DE, but something like that would be nice too.