Marketing 3DE will hurt AoE4 in my opinion precisely because of the graphics.
3DE looks too good and AoE4 looks extremely lackluster by comparison. Many of us out there are just excited to play a good looking game. The majority doesn’t care about strategy.
People still think of AoE2 as a 1999 game and there are no graphics expectations from it. People still play it for the strategy aspect.
But for AoE4, good graphics were teased in the 2019 trailer, only to be replaced by the blandness we see today. So no wonder a subset of players is unhappy.
And it’s not just proportions. The game is so bad at textures that it knocks out immersion immediately. Units feel low poly with a smattering of player color and smooth surfaces. And the maps, oh lord, they are soo boring. Grassy fields literally have no texture to them - feels worse than a green pool table
Frankly, it is something that has thrown me off AoE4, because I wasn’t excited to play it for the strategy anyway. I just wanted some cool civ design, graphics, good AI and campaigns, and I’ve been disappointed on all four fronts. Oh well.
The definition of a “full game” is increasingly difficult to navigate. Between increased consumer expectations and corporate greed, you have two different groups getting pulled in the same direction.
We often talk about the “good old days”, and games being released “complete”. But in those days, post-release support often didn’t exist. Certainly not to the scale that consumers expect it to now. Games are panned if developers don’t support them for years into the future, whereas in the past they’d already be working on full-on expansion packs or actual sequels. Which would cost the consumer (more) money. And in turn earn back the investment (if popular / a success).
Corporate leadership is more than happy to take advantage of that by pushing to release an MVP earlier and earlier, because a successful MVP can make it up in support, whereas a failed title can just be left behind, losing even less in the initial investment.
This should be criticised, and that greed would exist independently of consumer expectations, but at the same time we need to understand how consumers want both “complete” games and neverending support, when the “good old days” only had the former (and even then not always) and rarely if-ever the latter.
in fairness, majority of old games didn’t need modern post launch support simply because most of bug fixing was already done well before shipping, some bugs would ofc make it through regardless but now explain this, in aoe4 at launch you could use wall segments in T shape to duplicate resources, with the rus you could dupe relics easily and on and on, a ton of major bugs, i don’t recall anything of that magnitude in terms of bugs in namely aoe 2 and 3 back when those first released (and before you mention balance, it was always balanced well, but ofc there were slip ups initially like teuton tc bonus in age of kings, but those were very rare but were regardless not fun to wait till expansion to correct)
i think differences in aoe4 trailer in 2019 and final game are more so lighting, saturation, exposure and sharpness, textures are basically the same in both, as pointed out by @GorbMort
as for why i think that
Nah, bugs simply went unfixed more often. I mean, there’s a complicating factor for this I’ll mention more below, but this is just history goggles. I know of plenty of older, successful games with issues that were never even patched.
I had fun crawling through the patch notes some while back. I’ll do so again when I’m not on mobile. I mean, tech wasn’t as complicated so the number of emergent bugs is less likely, but there were still some doozies.
Heck, look at the most recent AoE II: DE release. Tons of bugs being tracked in that subforum. Quite a few serious ones. If we assume that Relic and Age IV are the singular exception in this franchise (because they don’t care / aren’t competent / are pushed to release unfinished products), what does that say about Tantalus and FE?
I’m all for criticising corporate decisions, but all games have technical debt. All games have bugs. All games have struggled with fixing them, throughout games history, because all games are made on a fixed development with a set budget. Digital makes it easier to abuse that model, 100%, but it also makes it easier to patch and support issues.
In ye olden days, Age IV would very likely have launched in a more “complete” state. But it wouldn’t be getting anything a year after it was released, at least without us having to cough up another £15 - 25 for an expansion (and £30 on release then is surprisingly close to £55 now).
the comparison here was with the original releases in 1999 and 2005 respectively, aka, what ensemble studios made, not FE and Tantalus, those do belong to modern release category, i do agree with point being made otherwise, but i see need for clarification, a number of DE bugs for both 2 and 3 wasn’t there in first releases, that i assure you
I get you, but others were praising non-Relic Age devs for their care and attention.
I think all the devs are doing great with the resources they have, even as I agree that some things should be better / prioritised (for Age IV that’d be SP content and modding tools, imo - alongside visual polish and other bits and pieces).
pretty much ye, not saying DE devs aren’t doing well with resources available, but relic doesn’t have ensemble’s excellent editors for patching and additional content, so it would be reasonable to assume there’s some bottlenecking on that front, those editors are undeniably a big assistance to FE and Tantalus with DEs
Yes, I know… Maybe it was not for money but for lack of time or developers (because documentary-type cinematics show that they have a lot of work on them)…
Yes, it can be… At that time I was not so involved in PC games… I was more into it with BF1 and battle royals xd on PS4…
Yes, AoE 4 was weighed down by the expectation of being the first main and numbered AoE in more than 15 years,10 if you consider AoEO,19 if you come from AoM and 22 if you come from AoE 2…
Yes, I wouldn’t have said it better… long live the WHOLE AoE saga…
Yes, they still announce the 3 DE dlcs on their official AoE channel…
Yes, I return to the game simply for the mestrias, but I do not open it, I start playing the other AoE or other games…
Of course, before the games came out complete, had some expansion and then focused on the sequel…Now with games as a service, they come out incomplete and sometimes broken and in the post-launch they are correcting it over the years, they release patches and DLCs and occasionally the occasional expansion…Now the games last longer in time, but at the same time they are incomplete and the sequels take years to come out …
Of course…Each game is a game of its time…
Well there for example it looks a little better and that only issues of lighting…
Oh, is anything ever going to be done about the graphics? Maybe in a full expansion with full new campaigns? I see that as the only salvation.
At least if I could have GREEN grass like in the 2019 trailer, but everything looks so washed down it puts me off right away. And the water is horrendous to look at.
Say what you will about preference, whether you enjoy realism or stylized games.
One thing a game should never do is pick one, then backtrack a bunch because of people wanting the other. You’d think that is compromise, but when it comes to visual aesthetics, you’re only left with a reduction of a vision as a result of that tweaking.
Take a look at this. With the original lighting, colour temperatures, saturation, building and villager sizes, it looks decent. You can tell there was care and hard work put into it, even if you personally prefer realism over it.
I recall a lot of complaints about how cartoony the game looked with its bright colours. The truth is that, shifting that only made the models (which are already cartoony), and the game look far worse. It was a halfarsed solution to attempt to please an audience who had an issue with the general aesthetic, and not just the lighting or colours of the game. That wasn’t the only destructive change they made, as reducing sizes for the production buildings was also another bad solution that takes away from the original appeal of the game.
It should be undeniable, how much more visually incoherent the second picture is.
The game looked far better with its original aesthetic vision, regardless of how much it made it looked like a mobile game–which it still does, so much for that change. I mean, just look at how much nicer the foliage and environment feels with a warmer tone. Many trees in this game are very cold in colour, and likely needed that warm lighting to balance it out. And this extends to every graphical element in the game.
