Is not a playability question. If It would be, all towers would have the Same size.
Its as simple as they dont pat attention un visuals.
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Nice showcase. I’ve noticed this myself, but thanks for putting it on display 
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Yeah, but not cohesive tower design and bad projectile physics simply do not have an excuse!
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Well-well, looks like AoE isn’t the only one suffering from these similar condition.
Quite sad that people still hoped that the devs could improve the graphics, not knowing that those graphics are intended to be like that.
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Some may use the negative comments on COH3 to prove “AOE4 was doing okay”.
I’m seeing similar criticism points like lack of graphical details, functions and contents (sounds familiar?)
We are not the same.
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Heh. I was reading the reviews/forum last night out of curiosity and the overlap between CoH3 and AoEIV’s shortcomings was glaring. Don’t know how many CoH players play AoE but it’s not a good sign when their own baby has the same issues brought up by their most devoted fans.
Oddly enough the metacritic score is 82 while on steam the review % is in the high 50s last time I looked. A big disconnect between reviewers and players.
I have no previous experience with Relic outside of 15 hours of AoEIV but I am aware CoH1/2 are considered classics.
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Famously, CoH 2 has a lot of problems at release. It’s shaped up well, with years of both official and community-generated updates. But it didn’t launch in that state at all.
The difference is that the details are different.
Wqy before CoH 3 came out, people were posting images of CoH 3 to show how much worse Age IV looks in specific respects. CoH 3 looks like that - or better - now. The graphics haven’t gotten worse. They’ve been advertising details they’ve added in the run up to release (on social media, where I follow them).
The difference is (as someone with a lot of history with Relic games even though CoH isn’t my thing), the graphics has been a problem throughout CoH 3’s development. There’s a lot of fans that dislike the more colourful style. It could be as detailed as Crysis, and the colours would still put folks off.
Contrast this to Age IV, where a lot of the critics of the current look like how the 2019 pre-alpha gameplay trailer looked like.
The thing to take away from this is: are Steam reviews accurate or not? Because if we accept they are, then Age IV has been accepted far more positively, and has been since launch. If people want to find reasons to excuse Age IV’s high user score, it’s only fair to let people find reasons excuse CoH 3’s low user score.
Sure, people have been waiting a long time for Age IV. It has brand leverage.
But so have folks been waiting for CoH 3, and it’s a well-known franchise itself (no Age or Starcraft, but still very well established).
I think it’s an interesting case in demonstrating that a developer can work openly with a community for years, and still get a lot of flak on launch. Technical issues feature heavily - but so do things that they worked on as a result of community feedback. Could it be the community isn’t as good at designing a successful product as we want fan communities to be? CoH 3 has had a far longer and more public pre-release period than Age IV, too.
What lessons should the developer take from this?
And should the publisher take this as a warning to delay a game that needs more technical polish?
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I’d say the hype for AOE4 was much higher, but that also could bring about more tolerance, because “RTS has been stagnant for years” and AOE was nostalgic to many. If the delivered product is decently well then many people will be satisfied (most praises for AOE4 I see outside the RTS circle are the documentaries).
COH seems to be more limited to a classic within RTS fans.
For another thing, I didn’t follow COH3’s development process so I don’t really agree with using it to showcase how “bad” AOE4 is. I heard (1) they were more transparent about what they are doing and (2) they heard the feedback of lack of textures and details (which I really think as important and something AOE4 still could improve on) and announced to change it.
And I thought these are good approaches.
But the end product seems not as satisfactory to the critics of similar points. I’ve seen similar criticisms on other platforms. They didn’t really improve on that, or not enough.
As for the lack of functions and contents at release, you know that’s another thing that I keep emphasizing, and that’s a different topic than graphics.
I am aware it is currently a standard practice to release half-finished (at least relatively far less finished than 10 years ago) games and polish it further. I just don’t like it. If the companies want to take the advantage of early releases and less risk, they should also “pay the price” of being criticized for this behavior.
So considering most companies have chosen to do that, I guess the latter “price” is trivial compared to the earlier cash and lower risk. I cannot change that but I still do not like it.
But we’ve seen a lot more really hard landing stories in the recent years, so maybe they will alter this behavior later.
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Same. I have been closely watching reviews of CoH 3 and it’s very interesting to see the same pattern showing up. Regression or not enough of an improvement in graphics compared to the last game? Check. Weird animations and visual glitches? Check. Feeling of the game being released incomplete? Check. Extreme fps hits when panning? Check.
While I see all the parallelisms between it and AoE 4 given they use the same engine, I thought Relic had their top A-team of devs working on CoH 3 while keeping an eye on AoE criticism and bugs to address all that before release. I guess it’s a more systemic problem at Relic than simply AoE playing second-fiddle to their main franchise.
I have a similar feeling of Relic being stubbornly sticking to tried-and-true like Bethesda did with Fallout 76 and we all know how criticism for that game went down (it probably killed the Fallout franchise for good). Players expect that if the game is not groundbreaking in anyway, to at least be rock-solid, complete at launch and have all its edges polished.
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Maybe! It seems to be a lesson that publishers are only learning at-cost, rather than by looking at comparable examples across the industry.
I want to emphasise that DoW III had nowhere near the same performance issues as either Age IV or CoH 3 allegedly has (though CoH 2 on launch was atrocious, and DoW II was pretty sluggish on the whole until Retribution).
Obviously we’re all just guessing, I the same as the rest of you despite my experience with Relic titles, but it really feels like they weren’t given the time to overcome what was demanded of the engine. DoW III made concessions (fixed camera, etc) that will have helped its performance, but the difference is undeniable (in performance specifically).
Also, game engines are a lot of work. Even moving to something like Unity or Unreal has a huge upfront cost in terms of internal tooling, asset pipelines, licensing and so on. But at the same time, the fast-moving video games industry (in terms of employment) makes retaining internal knowledge more difficult (compared to regular software, and I can tell you we have the same problems over here!).
Relic, World’s Edge and every company that makes the executive decision to launch a subpar, underwhelming and unfinished version of beloved products deserve every bit of criticism and flack they get thrown at them.
Notice that I’m not pointing out developers themselves. They’re just the cogs of this unhinged machine whose project managers and other higher ups cannot help themselves but to put profit above all else.
As much as you loved AoE1, AoE2, Age of Mythology and AoE3 in the past, Ensemble Studios is dead. It is gone. As much as we want AoE4 to represent any of those former traits, it is not a product of the past. Like a puppet posing as an Ages game, it is puppeteered by a company more greedy than willing. This is a pill that is hard to swallow. All we can do is try to enjoy AoE4 for whatever semblance of an RTS it is trying to be, not as a spiritiual successor of the former games.
No doubt that this game is playable. Being playable doesn’t justify the absurd production strategies involved in developing a game and launching it halfbaked to an audience that experts far more.
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Exactly, the distinction between what a large company decides and what individual developers are able to do while restricting themselves to those decisions is a key line to draw.
I think for the most part the Relic devs assigned to AoE 4 have done a stellar job. The audio design guys especially deserve a lot of recognition. Balance-wise it’s clear they have some great talent around. The artistic department was the weak link IMO.
Company wise is a completely different story. I’m not sure if it was mostly Microsoft, or Relic or WE or a combination of all 3 of them. I thought it looked like budget constraints imposed by Microsoft on Relic but now that CoH 3 seems to be plagued by a lot of the same issues I’m not so sure anymore.
Your words remind me a lot of what I said more than a year ago. This is a playable, acceptable game, but it doesn’t live up to the AoE franchise. Playable and acceptable don’t cut it anymore. Ashes of the Singularity, Grey Goo, Iron Harvest… all those have been modern, acceptable RTS and nobody even talks about them anymore. AoE 4 feels like a cheap copy of what Ensemble used to make, like those cars in GTA that look a lot like BMWs but stop short just before copyright kicks in.
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How can we accurately assign blame?
I asked a couple of questions a bit further up - one focusing on the devs, and one focusing on the publisher. Relic isn’t a publisher.
Like, I get shorthand, people venting about the “developers” mean “all involved parties”. But this isn’t that.
But I’m interested in discussing what that actually looks like. Is the launch window anything to do with Relic or WE? If not, how do they deserve anything? And if they do have control of this aspect of project planning, what is the publisher providing? Just the money? That still ends up being a finite resource that the studio will run out of.
The question is important because we need it answered for any “fix” to be possible. It’s entirely possible Relic and World’s Edge feel our pain but can’t do anything about it. It’s entirely possible they don’t.
In short, they screwed up another saga… but I have faith that they will fix it in two or three years…
Technically they are not gone…they created another company and only stopped doing RTS when they saw the failure of AoEO…
True, AoE 4 is a good and acceptable RTS, but it does not live up to what is expected of the saga to which it belongs… it cannot be that its predecessor, which is a free to play game and with cartoon aesthetics, has more content and beat a freshly released and triple A game in everything…
Yes, we can’t do anything, we just have to wait and then they fix it…
Sorry, my comment was not responding to yours at all but instead I was just making my own statements on the general theme. As for your questions;
I was not trying to put blame on a singular party, nor make any relevations on how to fix anything here. That is to say, it was not feedback on how to change anything about development or the developers.
I just made two points, the first being that companies involved in bad industry practices should expect to receive a bad reputation in return. The similar issues of both CoH3 and AoE4 should paint a picture of how Relic wants to do things, and though it is their freedom to do them as they like, it does not mean consumers need to enjoy it nor stay silent about it. If this sounds like me putting blame on Relic or putting them as a target, that isn’t the point here, but I am using them as a relevant example to instead target all companies doing this currently, as it is relevant and familiar to everyone in this thread.
The second point of mine was that expectation is what weighs down AoE4 a lot. This is related to the first point in that, the production of the first few games had entirely different set of production values which led to the products many loved from the franchise. In continuing with AoE4, those expectations were not met and I stressed that we should try to enjoy AoE4 for what it is under the new set of values that led to its production instead of as a spiritual successor of the series. The original studios is gone, and will not return to produce an AoE5 that everyone will love.
I get the sense from your comment that you want us to tell you why we think things went wrong and how. But, it is impossible to say. We don’t know what kind of agreements they had with who, and how much effort of whichever company was involved. Whether the involved companies had agreements that left them without the necessary funds, time, with management issues or production issues, and were unable to speak of it as per their contract, it really doesn’t matter. The ultimate point is that, decisions were made that left them shorthanded somehow–and it seems to be a reoccuring thing with their products. You can be sympathetic to indivudal developers who put in their heart and soul, whether it is programming, art, music, design or general management, but if the scope was never intended to deliver a full product, or failed to deliver the intended product, then it just sounds like bad business decisions led to a bad reputation. That is entirely natural.
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No matter how spectacular graphics it has, an RTS without a healthy ladder is not worth it, nobody wants a dead game with spectacular graphics, most players have average graphics, raise the technical requirements due to their graphic demands, in a niche game, it’s a lousy idea. end
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/
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Fair enough!
The thing is - does it? Let’s say both releases were rushed. I’m not sure they were (anymore than most are - you should see my deliverables and I don’t even work in games development), but let’s go with it.
In that case, is it what Relic wants to do? Or is it what they’ve been told to do?
I understand for the casual consumer it really doesn’t make a difference, but we’re here, on the dying medium that is a web forum (I don’t mean that critically - I love forums), because we either care more than casually, or we’re grandfathered into caring about forums as a medium. Or both - I’m both.
Expectation weighs down any franchise. How long has it been since CnC4?
I think the evolution of Steam as a platform has changed how we think about both user reviews and game quality. The digital ecosystem has normalised post-release support and enabled publisher (imo) laziness with product quality. That’s all just my opinion, I have no stats or hard evidence for it.
But I was online for Dawn of War II releasing. I was a community moderator at the height of forum popularity. I saw a lot of the stuff we see now. It was just less discoverable. When DoW II was released in 2009, Steam was so immature as a platform Relic went with Games for Windows Live (ouch).
I think expectations have been a thing for a long time. Just look at the rap Age III got, and now it has its own hardcore dedicated fans.
Nah, I just want to explore it. I’m guilty of it, but I don’t like the whole “arguments are for winners and losers”. I want to understand. And it’s rare to have a forum that allows this kind of topic divergence without being a hellhole. These days, forums tend to only be super strict, or super everything goes (in a bad way).
Thing is, Relic have always been known for experimentation. That’s what drew me to them, years ago. That and Warhammer.
But CoH 3 is a very conservative release. It is very safely, a CoH game. It doesn’t take the risks Relic are known for taking. It builds safely on CoH and tries to do right by it. DoW II didn’t do this. Heck, vCoH didn’t do this. Relic are an RTS studio known for releasing a pretty good TPS with Space Marine, for crying out loud.
Their stuff has a pretty good track record. It’s only been since CoH 2 that that’s been a discussion point (as divisive as DoW II was, it has a dedicated fanbase to this day, and did well enough to earn two expansions). So I’m not sure the problem is a recurring one. I think each franchise has different expectations and it’s a lot for one studio to live up to several of them roughly in parallel.
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fair point, i’ll use aoe4 here, on its own with no franchise to attach to its a very competent RTS entry, rocky launch ye but at current state besides visuals really, its still competent, but its not a standalone, being a 4 in the franchise made expectations right around those of SC as aoe of old belongs into that category, if the game launched in current state, that 86% review would be very appropriate, but ofc launch left its ugly reflection
now on relic themselves, i can’t quite pinpoint it but it almost feels like systemic issue in their development cycle (besides being according to some insiders slow and inefficient, but i won’t use this without more concrete evidence behind it), imo the engine tech, and this will be hard to do, needs a from bottom up rewrite, old code is causing both performance bottlenecks (thats part of the camera panning frame drops) and bugs that could’ve been avoided otherwise (but ofc there’d be fresh bugs, thats how software is), this won’t help Aoe4 and coh3, but for future projects, it’ll have to be considered
COH3 right now is suffering from early access like AoE IV, also it has a huuuuguee issue, the AI in campaign is brain dead, people are praising is multiplayer game play even with so many issues ( audio, animations UI etc)
I bought the game but I am not playing yet I am waiting for some patches and then I will review the game, company of heroes community is very mature and we won’t accept half cooked games, yet all the issues ( except the wokeness in DAK campaign ) are fixable.
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I think this comes from Relic management, I don’t understand why they insist with this weird art style.
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