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

So you’ve got nothing, and you just want to pick on me for whatever reason. Alright.

I don’t need to know Age III: DE well enough to know based on all the screenshots that people have provided that I am personally not a fan of the art style.

And I can express it in a way that doesn’t involve calling the developers, or fans of the game, names. I recommend giving it a try!

Certainly wouldn’t try enforcing “knowing the game well enough” as a requirement for criticism. Might impact some of the more vocal Age IV critics we seem to keep around here :wink:

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When I got something you would not read it. So it’s a waste of time.

And here is my something:

And remember I wrote a big long post in another thread on the same topic? What is your response?
“Oh you’re just trying to bring me down”

I do not think “knowing what that game is when seeing a screenshot of it” is any significant requirement.

And in your world you still think I’m on the same “side” as every one of them.
Surprise. I don’t have to agree with every one and every point to share the same criticism on something particular. But you of course need to disagree with whoever on that “side”.

The difference is most people come here with an opinion and that’s it. Not everyone brings along a million moral codes then act like a hypocrite.

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When you post nothing but a cheap gotcha because you read my post wrong, yep. Will continue to do so.

Your somethings are noted, though they’re from August last year, so I’m going to get on with the thread as it is right now, before you decided to derail it by picking at my posts with off-topic nonsense.

tl;dr for everyone else reading:

Age IV has a great art style for me personally, and I agree there are parts of it that should be improved that would help raise the appeal for most players without impacting anyone negatively.

Stuff like animating animals in the buildings, or figuring out how to improve the water fidelity, or even stuff like the grass and plant life that seem oddly-pixelated, even on higher settings (my guess is this is something to do with antialiasing and performance, but it’d be nice if the devs could do something about it).

Sorry for gumming up the thread with that other nonsense!

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Na, humbles himself alone… DE versions are going well on their side…

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Alright. I’d say these are almost what I would bring up (again) if I have to offer “something”.

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i would say GETS humilliated by any aoe

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Yes, even AoE 1 DE wins and that’s because it doesn’t repeat missions in its campaigns… the only thing that beats AoE 4 to AoE 1 is for having gameplay more similar to AoE 2 (doors, exchange of resources and better pathfinding)…then AoE 4 is worse than AoE 2, AoM, AoEO and AoE 3 being the latter the best of all from worst to best…

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It’s not just a random 2019 Youtube video. It’s AoEIV’s official Gameplay Trailer posted by the brand’s official social media. If people are still annoyed about it 3+ years later, then something in it was indeed misleading and in lack of other communication they are left pondering over it. Also, whether it was supposed to be representative of the final product or not, it’s probably better to hear what the devs themselves have to say about it than playing’s devil’s advocate on the forums.

Finally, try to understand that for longtime fans, one misleading trailer is only the tip of the iceberg of what went wrong with the development of this game and patronizing answers aren’t going to placate anyone’s feelings about it.

Date: 01/12/2019

PC Games: Age of Empires 4 was announced two years ago. We haven’t heard much about the game since then. How so? You obviously worked on the game but didn’t provide any hints, directions or any information.

Shannon Loftis: We’re very careful about what we say and when we say something, because we want to make sure the game we’re showing speaks for itself. We don’t show things until we’re happy with how it plays and feels. On the other hand, we took on the Relic Engine at the time. Relic has this incredible RTS engine. But we wanted to modernize it. We wanted to make sure it ran just as well on laptops as it did on tower PCs. And that was a lot of work. We spent some time remodeling all the basics and some time on game features. Now we’re ready to talk about these features and show them off. We all agreed: we’ll let the game speak for itself. We never promised the AOE community anything we couldn’t deliver.

Adam Isgreen: Everything you see in this teaser is actually in the game. Everything in it functions as a finished object. They all have a role, all a job. The wonderful thing is we played it pretty much from day one so we had something playable. You must have noticed the people on the walls in the trailer. That’s a big part of the game, wall battles and sieges. We have expanded the gameplay. It all works. You won’t see anything here and after we bring it out you’ll suddenly be like “Hey, where did that one thing go!?”. That’s all in-game, as we promise. And it will stay that way as we show more and more of it.

Source

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Apparently esporters are the only people that play games

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we as a player base and as a community must organize ourselves, make a petition or a survey and clearly show how much of us is in favor of returning the proportions to those we saw in the first teaser

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Never said it was random. That said, at this point, maybe we need a separate thread to talk anout prerelease marketing.

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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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I don’t think anyone would have a problem identifying the units in the case of the proportions seen in the first video, or that it would be much different from the current one

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The problem is that there are new camera options now that essentially gets rid of that problem.

Andy is wrong.

The fact is that there are other ways to solve this. Like scaling units and buildings with camera positioning in mind. Games like AoM could do it, and there is no reason for why AoE4 couldn’t. The fact is, the council failed on this matter and this is the result of that. A half-baked solution that looks awful.

EDIT: I’ll add that it is fine to fail. What is not fine is to perpetually defend it, and developers ignoring the issue that is constantly being brought up. Ironically most people still play with the default camera angle because the Panoramic one is awkward. There hasn’t been any updates to it nor any new camera modes–why exactly is this such a limited factor for a game like this?

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I am neither wrong nor defending this problem. I think the game looks bad. I just don’t think the problem has anything remotely to do with the players, whether they are professional esports players or anyone else.

AoE games should be developed by first studying and incorporating the beautiful design of the predecessors. I hope that the next games will do just that.

There are tons of details we were able to take for granted until AoE4’s design came along. Now we know we need to fight like mad for every square inch, and the size of buildings and units is no exception.

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There are many ways to look at this, but fundamentally, there is a clear and concise separation in what we were presented early on and the actual game itself. You could chalk it up to it being a developer making decisions trying to make things look better, but it doesn’t feel right in that the result ended up backtracking many good things about the game; things that people have been asking to return for more than a year now.

Maybe it doesn’t have to do with players. But, this just doesn’t make sense. If the developers made these changes with players in mind, then it obviously is a result of whatever target audiene within that playerbase that they are aiming for.

And ask yourself thus; who exactly would these changes benefit the most within this target audience? Is it players that enjoy immersion and graphics? Obviously not. In that sense, players aren’t at fault for simply existing obviously, but I would say this is why it is important to express that it was the wrong decision to prioritize that group. The focus ultimately ends up at “who is this for” and “why was it done”. And no matter how you look at it, you can’t say players are unrelated.

I’m not going to straight up blame professional players. But, it is no secret how much money microsoft has commited to that grouping of players. Whether it is marketing, designing the game in a way that actually lacks casual features like campaigns and proper editors, or the ridiculous amount of money poured into tournaments, these factors contribute to the obvious reality behind this.

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I agree that aoe4 lacks an incredible amount of polish that casual players love. The professional players I know dont really care that the chicken in the TC doesnt move. But that kind of stuff eats away my entire confidence in whoever is deciding things over there. It is hard to fall in love with a game when it feels like those working on it were not in love with it themselves.

The scale of buildings is no different. But I have absolutely no reason to believe the scale was ever correct or that it exists now because of pro players.

I do, however, agree that the design of the game feels aimed far more towards pro players than any other aoe game, and as a casual player, I agree that such a thing does me very little good.

But they can court all the silly little pro players and twitch streamers they want. Just make the chickens move and give the civs unique units and buildings and wonderful historically appropriate and interesting playstyles.

You know, like Age of Empires Online, Age of Empires III, and Age of Mythology

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Sensible. I do want to make it clear that, the focus should not be on the players themselves. I do bring it up a lot in my arguments, but they are simply the target of decisions made by people within Relic, Microsoft and World’s Edge. What players are, is context, and that matters for why things are done.

I agree with you in that, the decisions themselves is what is disappointing, and it is hard to be hopeful about them considering why they were made and who it was for.

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AoEIV feels like purely a commercial venture that lacks soul, unlike the ES games and what FE has done with the DEs which feel like a labor of love.

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^^^^ Bingo, I would agree with this

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