I did not plan to put AoE 3 or any game after 2005 because that would be the mid-2000s, and if I put games from the late 2000s, like Red Alert 3, it will be a humiliation for AoE 4…
No, it’s the original game…it is distinguished from the 3 DE, since the original game has that big tab at the bottom of the screen and besides that above it says “Discovery Age” when in the 3 DE they changed it to “Exploration Age” (since today it is known as the age of exploration, both in America, Africa and Asia and not so much discovery (because America is not considered a discovered continent, since it was partly known by the Vikings since the Middle Ages))…
on units, their lack of detail is a result of rushed rescaling, making units much larger than initially intended, thus exposing lack of detail, no such excuse for the rest tho
also before anyone says i’m only ever negative on graphics, lemme tell you, I actually liked the game’s original showing in X019 trailer, quite a bit in fact, i just can’t process why they changed many of the things to worse
and this is the same map, roughly the same location but slightly further zoom on DE, bringing this up for the sake of giving examples on how to effectively use certain techniques (there are things imo the og water is better at and things the DE water is better at)
how cliffs can be done with detail and still roughly equal requirements
a lot to take in but take time, i want the discussion to be productive after all
i think there’s quite a bit for aoe4 to take few notes on, not suggesting full on graphical overhaul, but rather smt to match the original X019 trailer
Do we have comparison shots for rivers in Age IV? I’m on my phone right now but I’d imagine rivers in any game look better because of what can be done with running water.
Like, I think the water in Age IV by itself looks good. I like how the surface looks in a lot of screens EricGonzalezM shared. But that doesn’t always come across well. Maybe more strength to the patterns (if it’s something like a noise effect), or a way to randomise it up or down. This might actually already be possible in custom maps, I don’t know, but I’m talking official maps here.
The interactions with water and the general translucency are what seem (imo) to let it down the most. Obviously, more Gaia would help too (but that’s another thread).
imo, water wise, reflections and sunlight positions are primary targets, giving maps more varied lighting, and more importantly, they have to somehow patch how reflections appear, they look good but you have to go out of the way to view them, that shouldn’t be needed
also on rivers, i’ve seen some good screenshots on couple threads a while back, it didn’t look bad there, but again, water fixes mentioned above would benefit them a lot
as said before, art direction here is a good one, but details of this nature do hold visuals back more or less substaintally depending on what you look at (trees will always look great here, general foliage too, as do most if not nearly all models, usually the texture is what lets the image down)
I also thought the AoE IV water had potential, but there was always something that felt off about it (and I’ve been saying it for a long while now). I have to thank @TheAchronic for nailing it down. It has been both a realization and a curse to see it.
Don’t know about you, but when I was a kid I used metallic paper to simulate ponds and rivers around my toys. This is exactly what was done with water here and it just blows my mind how this was deemed passable for a modern game. AoE 4’s water is just a reflective paper with no depth and no transparency… Wait, actually it does have both, but obscured.
And that in fact makes it worse. I see ships have fully designed hulls, rudders, oars but you wouldn’t know 99% of the time. Was this done to avoid having to add textures to the sea floor? Couldn’t that have been solved simply by making the water deep enough and increasing color saturation gradually like in virtually every other game? You still had to do the shoreline textures anyway. I just don’t get it.
No wonder why ships just disappear when they are sunk (plus another fun note: deep sea fish has actually no fish, just seagulls flying on top of their location, but when the water remains transparent far enough from the shore you can clearly see it. Which makes sense? Why render fish when nobody will see them?
Multiplayer test was not the right place to judge the graphic aspetcs. From what i seen in the previous beta, graphic was good.
Anyway, only One month to release and february 17th Will be also available the new Settlers game where Developers, After hard criticisms by users (including me) have done more improvements.
For sure, what the new Settlers have Is a great graphics
I mean, speculation is my forte, hah, but we could spend all day at it. I like doing it, but it often gets interpreted as finding a defense for what is. My guess would be performance (r.e. the fish, they may be modelled, there may be an animation, but what is rendered is often what is visible. If you can “cull” the visible, you have less to render).
But at the end of the day I have no idea. It could be an attempt to make biome-matching easier (though that doesn’t seem to work for the sea plant areas that Achronic provided a screen of).
What matters is: can they change it without introducing adverse effects? Apparently panning on water maps is worse than panning generally (which is a weak point, performance-wise). They can absolutely change it technically, because a) we see the gradient at the shoreline and b) sea plant “tiles” have moderate translucency. All we can do is leave feedback saying we’d like it changed, and hope that they find some way of making improvements.
Where I probably diverge from a lot of commenters in this thread is my confidence in the devs making improvements, so long as the product is allowed to be supported. I can understand why the game released as it did, because that’s typical for video games. Others find this unacceptable, and I make my peace with that. I’m under NDA, I’ve been under NDA for years. And years. Age IV is not my first “Council”-esque experience, or even my second, or even my third. All I can say is that every time, every time, it reinforces my faith in developers, and not the opposite. My experience will of course not be universal, but I’m explaining my confidence here, and nothing more.
I dislike the nature of the industry, but it’s the nature of the industry from the top-down, and the devs who spend their time making games often have very little to do with it (for a random, completely third party example: see all the various stories about Cyberpunk development vs. public statements by the studio heads). But that’s me just saying stuff I’ve said a million times before. It reads like excuses, I get it. I’ve been trying to bang on about it less. I’m just trying to explain my consistent optimism around projects that get long-term support. And I really am hoping Age IV is one of those.
Many games have been. We all like them differently.
I really don’t care about Cyberpunk, for example (even though I tend to like ARPGs). Wasn’t even that interested in it before all the stuff went down with it. I care about RTS, and I care about Age IV. People can care about RTS and not care about Age IV, or care about RTS and be disappointed by Age IV.
To each their own. So long as we can get something out of it that improves the game, that’s fine by me.
