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

personally, i do hope the tactical pause of COH3 makes it in eventually

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He is refering to me calling out the council, so he feels targetted. I didn’t mention him though, and people in the council have different opinions. Either way, I’m not gonna hold my tongue on decisions I believe were bad.

If he feels that is targetting his opinions, then that is on him.

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wanted to steer the topic back to graphics, as engine does those as well, look at COH3 and AOE4 side by side, its the same renderer but different color pallete, COH3 seems to have put more resources towards unit visuals, maybe aoe4 traded that for some other areas visually, can’t say much on that, could even be zoom related, maybe, coh 3 is super zoomed in even compared to aoe4

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Exactly. I’m not saying that’s what happened, but that’s just how it works. The developers make the final call of what feedback to incorporate, and what not to. And sometimes it’s because they prefer their decision, and sometimes it’s because there are constraints that can’t be worked around (which is sometimes the launch date for a game, unfortunately).

This is why I’ve said three or four times it makes more sense to just focus on the stuff that can be done better, instead of trying to make up reasons why it got like that in the first place.

But I’m not saying you have to hold your tongue. You can not like the end result, but speculating on how it came to pass is basically just making stuff up. It could be everything you dislike was 100% the developers’ decision (for whatever reason). You can’t know, and you won’t know. I’m not taking it personally, but I am objecting to you blaming the Council, however generically.

Don’t be sorry for not liking something. You don’t have to invent people to be mad at, though. That’s on you.

More importantly, CoH 3 is still in active development. And if my memory of the community council there is any indication, they’ve been working on it for a long time.

A byproduct of developing campaigns tend to be leftover tools and assets that can be reutilized in multiplayer. Actually; multiplayer historically in games were always an afterthought, which benefited greatly from whatever was produced for the campaigns.

AoE4’s lacking campaigns didn’t do much to help in that department. CoH3 in contrast has plenty of assets (by nature of the setting) but also from the more thorough storytelling that was deployed.

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rumors as i’ve heard them are the 2 games began development at about the same time

yup when everyone expected different units in each civ, better naval siege, better arrows animation, better elephant animation which the last 2 were the only focused but in the end the diversity only ended in only 1 civ.

building proportions, flags on mounted units, the graphic that only looks good on small scale but blurry and unplayable for some player in an actual game that they neede to fix the unit weapons to soft it but not solved,etc

Yeah, that’s a completely different argument to talking about misleading trailers. See what I said about you misrepresenting the game? I stand by that.

You’re complaining because a trailer didn’t show how the game looks for some people on some hardware that might not be on max settings?

Alright bud. You do you. I’ll be over here, talking about the graphics now, and what Relic / World’s Edge can do about it.

(also, the building proportions there are as they were on release - look at how large the villagers and units are compared to the Outpost, Mining Camp, etc - it’s just that the low camera angle makes the buildings themselves look larger)

Do you think more campaigns would help, or would they need to be designed differently?

the point of it is that everyone got the wrong idea because the small picture of the trailer ideas and the expectation

no but this should be at least the minimun for the average one and the lower ones vaiablility expectation that is way lower than it looks in the trailer.

building proportion clashes with semi cartoonish as they are meant to go full scale. It could worked on aoeo or any rts with similar style but not aoe4. even aoe 2 and aoe 3 managed to be better on that aspect.

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imo documentary part is rock solid, my issue was always the gameplay portion, example: norman campaign in second half effectively copy pastes the exact same mission 4 times in a row
if i compare it to in my case aoe3, there was a case of reused level, but there were 16 original missions between them
the levels that are mentioned here for aoe3 are the act 1 mission 1: breakout, and act 3 mission 2: hold the fort, in blood, ice and steel campaign

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Probably both, right?

It varies from game to game that has both multiplayer and story campaigns. Take say Doom Eternal, which has a multiplayer mode whose assets are mostly from its campaign. Because the story took priority, the design philosophy naturally follows that they would borrow alot of assets from that.

AoE4 was advertised as a multiplayer game first, and from the amount of Campaigns we have, we can kind of tell that this was the case. This means it was a conscious decision and not something you can fix by just throwing more money at it.

Though they did of course end up creating some assets like tents, small boats, some unique units (some which we’ll see in the new patch), it doesn’t bleed over much to the multiplayer.

But, I think more campaigns generally should feature improvements to the game in general as well, as long as they produce it well–example being, creating a biome for the environment that the campaign suppousedly takes place (much like Rus featuring Taiga Winter).

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Again, nothing to do with misleading trailers. That’s you saying “the proportions don’t work”. Valid opinion, but not what I was arguing at all.

Yeah, that’s fair. I was just trying to see if there was a preference. One’s probably (?) easier than the other (more campaigns in the existing style is easier than expanding the design scope - however much it’d improve the variety). I’d be very surprised if they weren’t planning more SP content, but maybe that’s also me just wishing for what I prefer.

The good thing here is Relic do have a long history making a lot of SP content, so there absolutely is something to build off within the studio (depending on how much World’s Edge covers, etc).

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si, lo gracioso es que ese trailer mato todas mis espectativas que tuve por años, fue como un retroceso enorme en la saga

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Well, it better. It’s a late-2021 game. But you can’t compare graphics like that. You gotta go back in time and place yourself in 1999 or 2005 and look at the competition when AoE2 and AoE3 came out. Of course AoE4 has the luxury of more complex geometry and textures and whatnot, computers couldn’t cope with that in 2005, but look at how recent games look. Objectively, AoE4 is one of (if not the) worst-looking RTS released in the last ~5 years.

But there wasn’t any need for a custom engine, with one great RTS engine already out there! Ripe for further development: the AoE3 engine (which apparently never got a name). You can see the potential in AoE3 DE. Westwood/EA gradually revamped SAGE for ages and the last SAGE games still look good today. You already have a ton of work done for you, like pathing, AI and such. I don’t understand why the hell they had to piggyback another developer’s engine while getting the short end of the stick in the process.

The problem is that come AoE5 and Microsoft will have no good engine of its own. What if Relic goes under? What if CoH3 bombs and Relic decides they will focus their efforts on other game genres? Will Microsoft then buy Essence from them? Not a good plan. The only solution would be finding another RTS developer with a suitable engine, so it’s rinse and repeat what we are going through right now, playing second fiddle whatever main franchise that dev has and restarting AI, player colors, pathing, etc. from scratch.

I miss the days of games like SupCom or AoM which took risks. SupCom by completely rethinking the RTS conventions and AoM for completely steering away from everything AoE2 did and still being successful. Controversial? Yes. Memorable? You bet. Will AoE4 be memorable? Well, a lot of people already forgot about it.

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i agree with the rest of the post, just wanted to ensure you learn the aoe3 engine’s name, Bang!

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We need petition to bring it back this game still have so much potential :cry:. Who asked is exactly right question I personally have not seen anyone here on the forum who thinks that the aesthetics and proportions are better now.

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0 AD compare unit to building size still playable

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I’m not sure “objectively” works here, when a lot of the criticism around Age IV is stylistic, or for missing attention to detail, vs. an “objective” lack of detail or quality in its assets. I guess you can equate attention to detail as a quality pass, but then I can guarantee that I could look at other RTS games released and do exactly the same thing.

But also, I think people are making that comparison literally, because of preference (or because they’re comparing it to the DE releases, or they’re comparing specific things they feel came out better at the time, like rivers in AoE III). I understand you’re not, but this back-and-forth is between a bunch of folks at this point.

i think its fair to acknowledge competition in this sense, because someone looking games up likely will compare, and yes there are folks that choose with graphics still
with aoe3 you had plenty of competing titles up to 2 years prior to 2 years after, including first COH, DOW, command and conquer generals and so on, here tho, all we have to compare with in the same genre is COH3, graphically, only taking big releases in here, i don’t want to overhype stormgate, despite believing it’ll be good, didn’t list SCII here because people understandably won’t immediately compare with over a decade old game, but its not the prettiest of comparisons visually, let alone in other areas (not counting game loop, age has 1 kind of gameloop, SC has another)

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Tempest Rising looks pretty crisp graphically.

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