yes as he show you that an old game has better graphcs, use less resources and have more mechanic that aoe 4 can use than aoe 4.
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Fair enough. Rationally, I know making a game involves more than the devs who make the game, my brain just goes to “devs” when I read “make the game”.
But I think I disagree on what comes from where. Everything follows down from the budget. Art and tech decisions are normally made with that in mind (after a certain stage once the project is greenlit). Every project is different. A lot of them hit the reality of a deadline at some point during the creative process. I don’t think anyone high up said “no animated animals in buildings” when it came to Age IV.
It’s really hard to see every game obviously be at the mercy of its release window. CoH 3 did a ton of stuff for its community and has been very communicative with it (two hotfixes since release and counting), but was let down by launch impressions that thanks to Steam it’s going to struggle to recover from. I really don’t think consumers or investors truly understand how complex modern games are anymore. The thing is, consumers don’t really have to. Investors prolly should, but seem to just want a (fast) return on investment. Stuff that worked to push a game out ten or twenty years ago just doesn’t seem to be working anymore.
And I’ve got nothing against the mechanics, it’s just we could do a whole thread on them. Essence is a fantastic engine for complex and interesting mechanics.
Better graphics? Are you kidding? I loved BFME but it’s pretty dated now lol.
The building stuff TheAchronic was talking about? That I was talking about? All other Relic RTS games do it lol. Relic can do it. It’s not that they can’t.
But they don’t have to be! That’s the most frustrating thing I hear constantly!
Some of the most successful, most loved games around are not complex at all, don’t have multi-million dollar budgets and don’t need 10 years of development to be good.
It all just comes from an idea, from originality. Granted, THAT right there is the difficult part. Same thing that’s going down in TV and movies nowadays: “If we throw money and complexity and a lot of writers and famous cast on a project, it will succeed.” NO! That has to stop.
Was AoM complex? I’m sure it took a ton of work, but compared to modern games it probably cost a fraction. It was just a crazy collection of great ideas that became a memorable game. Why do people remember C&C Generals so fondly? The hilarious voice acks, the little quirks and details everywhere. Don’t know if you played it, but the GLA units constantly complained about having no shoes, and one of the upgrades was actually shoes:
I know we have (some) wrong people leading some of AoE4’s decisions when you see they remove the quirky boar aggro we had. Players started using it in creative ways, but “oh no we can’t have creativity here” so we’ll just remove that behavior. Seeing the boar being exploited was one of the funniest things when watching casted games. (I’ll probably make a new post about this, it deserves it).
They say in modern times you become memorable when people make memes of you. The Avatar movies are said to be very successful failures because nobody even remembers the character names after walking out of the theater. Besides the strǣl-bora jokes (initiated by Drongo really), AoE 4 has absolutely nothing to recall fondly.
CoH3 has been hit the hardest because they tried to add something that doesn’t fit the franchise, the goddamned Total War copy and it’s incomplete and broken and just bad. They also made this weird choice of having you command Rommel’s armies while at the same time showing you how you and your actions are destroying lives in Northern Africa. How are you going to enjoy your fictitious war game with such stupid contradiction? Who greenlit that!?
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On the contrary, I think the campaign map for CoH 3 is amazing, and a natural evolution of the “metamap” (that was the name) campaigns of Dawn of War: Dark Crusade and Soulstorm, as well as the non-linear CoH 2: Ardennes Assault campaign. I came from Relic games. At the very least, me seeing the evolution there makes sense. I appreciate people who are Age-first want things to be more Age-first (and there’s DNA in Age IV that isn’t - I get that).
I mean, if you want to play a historical wargame and remain oblivious to potential atrocities inflicted by said historical wargame (assuming it’s accurate) . . . I suggest not playing that wargame? Find an ahistorical one (like how Command and Conquer often plays out), or a sci-fi one, or whatever. Or something like Europa Universalis (though that’s grand strategy) where you write the history and the names are abstract more than they are pointed. Modelling history comes with modelling history. Care must be taken so that atrocities are at the very least not excessively glorified, because we’re talking about stuff that’s on the edge of living memory still. It’s tricky (and it’s something previous CoH games have had to kind of dance around - though there was something similar in how they presented the Soviet forces in CoH 2)
I dunno. We could probably do with a whole thread on CoH 3, it looks like.
To get back to Age IV, games kinda have to be complex nowadays.
I’m a big fan of “a game has to be a good idea”, but this doesn’t work when it comes to franchises. Consumers are seemingly even more risk-averse than usual when it comes to a new sequel, and this is most problematic when previous iterations do substantially-different things. DoW II had it trying to split the balance between vDoW and DoW II fans. CoH 3 ironically hasn’t had it because CoH has been pretty iterative as a franchise. Age IV has it because II, III (and Online) are substantially different with their own purists. And AoE II has the largest remaining fanbase, and thus the largest remaining group of purists.
How do you appeal to that? How do you build appeal for that? Relic evidently went for “let’s base the game more on AoE II than other entries”. Can you say with absolute certainty that was the worst move? Can you say with absolute certainty that leaning more towards a blend (which means inherently more towards III) would’ve been better? And would better be more successful?
These are questions that have no real answer. I’m mainly just trying to get your take on it, as I’m sharing mine.
I think Age IV is successful, and viewed as a good game. I think there are a lot of little ways that could add up to it being a better Age game, and I think the developers should pursue that feeling. I don’t think it’ll ever shake all of its criticisms, because some of them seem to be a result of intentional design choices. But shaping up the rough edges, tackling some of the visuals raised in this thread . . . I think that’d all go a long way.
Modern games are complex because they have to run on modern hardware. Modern hardware is complex. People expect software bang for their hardware buck, and a large amount of the problem with Age IV’s graphics from its detractors seems to be “what is my hardware doing”. Because they can’t see where the power is going. If the game showcased this with little details here, more polish there, these complaints wouldn’t exist as much as they do. Games have to be complex, and they have to have an idea (even if that idea is derivative, or locked to a franchise vision). At least at the scale of Age of Empires. If it was an indie title, the optics would be massively different.
this,
i sincerely hope someone at dev team sees this part in particular, right on point
It is a good game. It won’t be an icon of its era but it’s stable, it’s playable, it’s fun in short stints (for me) but I can clearly see the holes and I can’t be accepting of a game that should’ve been so much more and stopped right there at being just… good. A former boss I had used to say that being good=bad, because when you are good, you’re merely average and if you are average you are in fact bad. You have to aim for excellency and this game sadly didn’t reach that far. But I recognize that for a lot of people this may be their first foray into RTS and they may be blind to (or excuse) where it’s lacking.
For all that I say about AoE 4’s graphics, it’s not really the main problem. The intent of this thread was to showcase that the Essence revision in use here is, in fact, capable of good-looking scenes and that the game weirdly choose precisely the worst angles and settings to make it look like Ecce Mono.
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What about 20 year veterans of the genre? Can’t we accept that maybe some of it is taste? Especially when it comes to aesthetics 
It’s not all missing animations or flat seas.
I absolutely know what Essence can do. I don’t know you, but I’m from those games. I also know how well they run. What their pathing is like. For all of the complaints about responsiveness and stuttering . . . folks here don’t have much experience with CoH 2 and DoW II, heh (or their predecessors).
I think for all the things that can be improved, some people just don’t get on with the style chosen for Age IV. And that’s fine. Sometimes I do wonder what the discussions would be like in an alternate reality where the style was the only point of concern. I like the style, so that kind of what-if is interesting to me.
It is actually exactly the opposite!
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aoe 4 graphics looks OUTDATED for an modern game. the fact you say that relic can pull it but they don’t makes them worse.
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Well it’s because LotR BfME 1 and 2 were developed by EA Los Angeles (ex-Westwood and developers of Command and Conquer and used SAGE engine from CNC Generals and after CNC3,RA3 and the infamous CNC4)
I agree with that, imagine coming from 3 DE super alive and vibrant and start playing AoE 4 and you see that there is not an iota of life… fields of pastures and forests without native fauna or flora and you say, what is this? the 90s?..the campaign missions with bandits attacking your merchants have more life than those bland skirmish maps remakes of aoe 2…
Yes, because DoW II is more of an RTT than an RTS, perhaps to give some competition to the MOBAS that were beginning to rise in popularity, CNC 4 wanted to do the same, but it did worse…
Yes, in the 2000s the developers allowed themselves to experiment with many things… in fact the elephants that go crazy are in a mission in Delhi in the Indian campaign of AoE 3 TAD, where to make your way in the city you have to blow up the ammunition depots and the elephants are scared and begin to destroy houses and British musketeers…in 2007 that was the maximum and it demonstrated the potential that AoE 3 had in its day…
Yes, I think it was intentional rather than being lazy in its development… but it is true that AoE 4 is far below its prequels and that although it has potential, more is expected of it because of the name it represents…
Both are correct in yours point of view…
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Nah, they look fine. The fact that people are fine with the 2019 trailer shows that the graphics are fine - it’s the specifics of those graphics (saturation) and detailing (Gaia, water interaction, water transparency, building animations, etc) that seem to represent most of the problems.
The graphics don’t magically get better or worse because someone upped or downed a saturation slider. Peoples’ appreciation of them will change, though.
If you don’t like the art direction / style, that’s another thing entirely. Still doesn’t make it outdated though.
That’s correct, I mean, the graphics don’t matter much to me but the interaction on the map that allows me to immerse myself in that world that the game offers me… imagine I play CNC Remastered that has graphics from almost 30 years ago ,but the interaction that there is in those maps (people running from the cities in Tib Dawn or the bridges being destroyed in Red Alert allows you to immerse yourself in that world, even if it has old graphics)…
yes… if they cant add just one more floor to the upgraded version… it means all is lost…
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I am still waiting for an RTS with DOW 1 level animations.
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DoW III literally does exactly the same thing 
yep you re right about the details but the graph would drag them down. That’s why I suggested the remake of the art style and graph which also determine how good the graph will be which as you can see when building got tonnned down for a more competittive readavility which was mentioned in past posts.the matte tone and the one that tries to emulate pictures of that era dont work for a rts if they pour that kind of effort by them. Also I remenber when some ppl expected an 4k texture dlc which was very wtf for a game that supposed to come with it
I’m here to remind people of disproportioned buildings and stationary decorative animals.
I can get used to the saturation and color. It does not bother me that much tbh, and is very unlikely to change.
But these details are easy to fix. 3D RTS back in 2000s have them. I don’t think it’s particularly difficult for a big RTS studio on 2023. I don’t think either any “intentional art design” would believe something like stationary chicken is a great idea. It feels more like an omission.
Yes it takes time and there may be other priorities but do not pretend these are not problems.
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Here is a clip using the bigger building mod. Would’ve been great if Siege units were built in the middle of the Workshops courtyard using a slowed down packing animation during its production then rolled out of some fancy gates out of the courtyard when it was finished like so.
It can’t be just me that thinks its weird all production buildings have a courtyard but with no real purpose to them?
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Yes, buildings were good on dow3, but I was referring to animations overall:
this is unmatched, and it something that have been lost in recent relic games, even for company of heroes games:
https://www.reddit.com/r/CompanyOfHeroes/comments/11g95q1/brummbar_coh3_vs_coh2/
there is a reduction of quality with each relic new game…
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Sync kills are a separate thing, kinda. They’re popular, but they’re also very frustrating at times. It’s not just a competitive thing, it’s a general player thing when an Avatar in vDoW is immune to damage forever because it keeps sync killing.
They changed this in DoW II but this introduced the opposite problem - units would be vulnerable while sync killing.
It’s a gameplay problem, nothing to do with the animations themselves. If they ever want to bring it back, they need to solve the gameplay problem.
For example, I played a lot of Chaos. I’ve never been a competitive player. It’s still very annoying that my Bloodthirster in vDoW always loses health during a sync kill as it doesn’t count as being in combat.