I don’t understand. Are they refering to another AOE (maybe AOE 5) or to AOMde?
This Is the new Digital Foundry’s review about Company of Heroes 3 graphic
Summarizing:
Very good textures, terrains, animations, detailes.
Mediocre Shadows and lacking of Ray tracing, Dlss and all of the moderni techonologies.
So this game sounds more conservative with a good graphic After all and very good performance.
There are many difference from this review and the one about Aoe4
The main problem to me for AOE4 is the Essence Engine that it’s not good for this type of RTS.
Don’t you think it’s coming the time to switch this engine embracing a new One? Unity or U5 could be a a very strong solutions.
PS: i’ve already bought Company of Heroes 3 but i’ll upload screenshots (for a properly confrontation with AOE 4) later due i’m playng Settlers and Atomic Heart.
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just to remain about the “Unity Engine”, i’m playing the new Settlers and i think Unity could be a good choice also for the future titles in the AOE franchise. I took some screenshots
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I played the actual released game!
You are a laughable because you cannot notice these!
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I’d like to take this time to bring the thread back to the topic.
Here is a question. Would anyone else have wanted them to do more to make buildings feel alive?
I do not simply mean moving chickens, horses, the endlessly moving mill, smoke coming out of houses, or the recently animated curtains. In many 3D RTS of the last decade, production and tech buildings come to life when in use. We see this done in CoH3 as well, when you produce units at the Headquarters, some lights turn on from both within and outside to signify that it is in use.
I could have seen this been a thing in AoE4 as well. Imagine for instance that, a dock had some kind of wooden crane like the Lumber Camp, that would “animate” and move from a spot to another when the dock was producing units or researching something. A Blacksmith could have its forge flicker with light more intensively and start pumping out smoke instead of always doing so. A mill would start turning when there are nearby gatherers. A Siege Workshop could use that empty courtyard and showcase the thing you are building, slowly being built and rolled out of its gates as it finishes production. An archery could feature arrows being shot from within into the Targets sitting outside. Barracks could have their dummies spin occasionally. These are just random ideas, and I’m sure they could conjure more fitting and better ways of implementing it.
And sure, maybe this would have an impact on gameplay as your opponent would be able to see what was in use and what wasn’t (which I think just adds to the experience if you ask me), but besides this, I cannot think of a good reason for them to not have tried this at all. And before one person comments “it’ll look too busy or be too intrusive”, I’m sure you could do this in a manner that would not be distracting.
Think about it. You have all the powers of modern tech and the best representation of a medieval village you have are static buildings? In many ways, it feels like their intention was to simply mimic AoE2 and not move beyond that, which is a shame as AoE2 did have technical limitations of which we should be moving past.
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I liked this way back when I’m Battle for Middle Earth, and I like the idea here.
It’s also been used by Relic in their other games (as well as CoH 3).
Then open a thread comparing the UI between the two games. I’ll bring some screenshots of CoH 2 and we’ll see which game looks more similar 
Think the problem with aoe4 the game play is good but your just throwing down a bunch of square building. It should be bit more towards your building a nice looking city as well
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It may be AOE4, because there was a semi-official news that members of the TFE team were called to develop new content for Age of Empires 4. In the past six months, the update speed of Age of Empires 3 has also fallen off a cliff. Before that, there were quite a lot of new content every month. (Of course, the developers of Age of Empires 3 may also be called into the development of Age of Mythology),
The graphics for this game look too much like Age of Empires 4.
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Graphic wise it looks prettier than AoEIV to me. However reviews like this one sound oddly familiar.
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Obviously it will be AoM… for AoE 5 there are still 4 years to go…
Yes, I think the same…
And if they had set it in World War II, would it have turned out well?..
Maybe U5, Unity is good, but since it doesn’t become so widely used by the industry…
Those are good…
It looks very nice…
Yes, that would be very nice and the graphics engine also allows it…
Sure, that’s the idea…since AoM RT uses the same graphics as 3 DE although without Havok’s physics… maybe now they will include them for the remaster…
Those features are incredible to have!
As I remember, Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth did it pretty well!
Towers would have real archers in and on them shooting enemies,
Caves would have spiders and goblins etc running around it (different defensive building).
Blacksmiths start burning and releases a lot of smoke etc
When war dogs would train, dogs etc train in the cage.
Elf towers also created fog, to make elf units invisible and enemy units to have shorter vision, this is where ranged units shined the most and I did all the time. Felt so powerful and fun.
It was all great additions, and I loved all those details.
AOE4 absolutely lacks all these things. It has 1% life in the game. But mostly, it is just so empty and soulless.
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I don’t have an ingame example right now, on my phone, but here’s the Chapel-Barracks in the original Dawn of War.
DoW II barely had any buildings, but they brought this kind of thing back in DoW III.
A super underestimated RTS franchise, that one.
The attention to detail was second to none. Did you know that in the very first game they released (a 2004 ancient game), when your army walked through forests, they would scare birds away? That was amazing. Had AoE 4 gone that way we would be telling a much different story today.
And yeah, warg lairs had animated wargs and warg-keepers. Troll cages had animated trolls in chains. Archery ranges had archers firing target practice. You could get your units on top of walls, you could even get trebuchet emplacements on walls (how cool is that). You could set enemy Mumakil on fire and they would trample friend and foe alike: imagine having tankier war elephants in AoE4 but with the risk of becoming uncontrollable.
I just sigh at the thought of all we could’ve gotten had the game took a different direction, instead:
Enjoy a game made by people who knew what they were doing:
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Apparently the forum ate my post, lol.
Anyhow, Age IV is made by people who know what they’re doing. The fact that Relic animate buildings in every other RTS game they’ve made, including DoW III and CoH 3, suggests that this is intentional, either by design or by compromise. Nobody has to like that, of course.
(and the idea that there is no developer cross-over between DoW III, Age IV and CoH 3 is . . . pretty unlikely to say the least)
I’m skipping the mechanics side of things (Mumakil, etc), because that’s not simply aesthetics, and I’d like to keep the thread focused on graphics. And this is from someone who played the heck out of BFME and the sequel.
Would it be nice if we had more detail like this in Age IV? Undoubtably. Do I want to make a “ask the devs for stuff without inferring insults” challenge? You bet. Seems to be a hard one to complete though 
if it was inteded it means that ms is lazy or relic is. both are part of the reason why aoe 4 is bland as we said in this thread.
it was 1 year since launch. a pacific method is almost exhausted at best and some newcomers are dissapointed by the actual game during the free weekend. Also for the last line, Are you trying top provoke everyone here that proved you that this game is so flawed to be considered an actual aoe?
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Folks say “I think they were lazy” when it comes to not including things they wanted in the game. I understand that.
That said, saying, or otherwise suggesting Relic don’t know what they’re doing, when they’ve done the thing in question in every single other RTS game I’ve seen them release is . . . well, just inaccurate really. That’s lazy, in a different way.
I think we can all agree that less laziness is good
No, I wasn’t attempting to provoke anyone. No more than comments like Eric’s are designed to provoke something, which is a very mild bar. We disagree over some stuff. There’s nothing wrong with that. I disagree with you all the time!
because he told you the truth and an actual and detailed counter argument
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I intentionally left out the word “devs” because (and I will repeat it for the n-th time) I think the devs have been doing a phenomenal job with the resources and decisions they were given.
When I call that in another game “they know what they were doing” it’s sticking to their guns. Having a personality. BfME had it. SupCom had it. C&C had it. Past AoE games had it. These decisions about art style, mechanics, level of detail, financial resources, etc. come from high up.
I think it’s still worth talking about mechanics because at the end of the day we also have to include spectacle in what makes an RTS memorable (and mechanics are part of it), which is something AoE 4 seriously lacks. An elephant on fire, which is not far removed from what could’ve happened back in the day, would be something that players would say “this is awesome!”. Yes, it’d need a ton of balancing if it’s going to rampage through friend and foe alike, but my god would it be worth it. BfME also had functional unit formations, with buffs or nerfs depending on specific use cases. That was great.
Or, if you don’t want to put in the extra effort in balancing stuff, this is a trebuchet with flaming projectiles firing on enemies. The death animations take the fire into account and depending on how close boulders hit, units fall. How units react when a massive rock or cannonball hits them in AoE4? “Did I just get hit by a trebuchet? Minor nuisance, I guess I’ll keep foraging.”
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He accurately described one of my favourite RTS games and then used it in a bit of a cheap gotcha. But you do you. You don’t care unless it makes the game looks bad 
I know Eric cares, even if there are a lot more things he’s critical of.
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