I don’t see the problem when DOW1 sold massively well and put relic in direct competition with blizzard… sync kills are part of DOW, DOW1 is the most popular dawn of war game do date, still played more even than dow2, where you see issues I just see genius devs. Relic is losing quality, those are facts, is not a matter of tastes the evidence is just there.
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I’m pretty sure CoH as a franchise sells (and has always sold) better than DoW has for Relic, under any publisher.
Anyhow, agree to disagree over what is ultimately taste. I appreciate sync kills and always have. But I don’t like their negative impact on gameplay, and again, I never have.
Them not doing something you like isn’t a quality argument. It’s a taste argument. A lack of polish (static animals, oars not interacting with water, etc) is a quality argument. The same applies to Age of Empires.
Sync kills are an entirely optional game mechanic that impacts a unit’s gameplay performance.
So what about COH 2-3 animations comparison I just shared, tha is just an example of many that people keep posting ( you have to see plane animations ) if that is not quality reduction then I don’t know what is your standar of quality, question were you part of the age IV council ?
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CoH 3 is up to four post-release hotfixes.
One of those included an audio pass (among other things). Another targeted glitching textures (among other things).
Ideally, games wouldn’t need these fixes post-launch. But if your argument is “CoH 3 has issues therefore Relic are worse now”, so did CoH 2. Tons of them. CoH 2 is well known for having a really rocky release!
to back you up COH2 also ran like shit, COH3 seems to be almost too perfomant in comparison (nothing wrong with super high fps don’t get me wrong, but i do see where digital foundry’s point of lacking ambition on visuals comes from, but that doesn’t mean visuals overall aren’t rock solid, just fix the shadow maps on zooming please)
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I just wanna drop by and say I tried out 0 A.D. and not to beat a dead horse, but their stables do feature moving horses. Also gourgeous water, music and timeperiod. Quite an amazing open source free game honestly.
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Yes, since they put campaigns in 0 AD that AoE 4 trembles…you also have the 1000AD mod that moves the chronology of the game to the Middle Ages…
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Played 0 AD for 30mins few months ago and didnt think it was that good and back to aoe4.
But of course aoe4 can be improved to make it look abit better
If you like aoe3 you would enjoy 0 AD
you like starcraft2, aoe2 style rts you would enjoy aoe4 more
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Sure, it’s a very good game… you have 0 AD or AoEO; 0 AD is a more classic RTS and AoEO is a more modern RTS…
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Not to beat a dead horse myself, as a modder, but this game has been in development for literally decades.
This is what modders can do. They can polish. They have no deadlines. They’re resource-limited in that they don’t hire people in the traditional sense, but over time (assuming a coherent vision is kept to, and here it obviously has been) they can deliver amazing things.
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well anything is possible when you don’t have to bother with shareholders breathing down your neck
smt that should show somewhat i hope with stormgate (those devs left blizzard precisely due to shareholder issues preventing them from developing what they wanted)
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After installed COH3 i catched some screenshots with the maximum details.
Look at animtions: are incredible. And details on every units.
The Game runs very well without problems: very well optimized.
Guys, these screens are night and day in comparison to AOE4. I can’t say Coh3 has the best graphic but i was waiting for something this when Aoe4 had been announced.
Really hope to see a DLC graphic with 4k textures.
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How many units can you field at once? It looks like CoH 3 has vastly less units in play at any one time, compared with Age IV.
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I don’t know but this Is not the main problem: Aoe4 would had been the new title in the franchise and there were not reasons to don’t give more graphic options despite the Number of your army.
Do you have a good specs? Yes, you will able to set textures on ultra and see more detailes on your units and zoom into the battlefield if you wanna play with a cinematic mode.
It always been a “player’s choice”. I Hope that Relic would learned a lot from the AOE4’s launch.
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I’m not trying to say the developers can’t change things.
I’m pointing out that a game that (I presume) has far less units running about can do more with the visuals than Age IV can. Age IV infantry will never look as good CoH 3 infantry do.
It’s not a matter of “having better hardware”. The engine will have limits. Every engine has limits. You can’t just plug more hardware into it forever to get a better return.
The devs need to choose (carefully) between the things that’ll have the most impact for the cost. “making infantry in Age IV as detailed as in CoH 3” is something only an absolute minority will be able to enjoy, because it’ll require monstrous hardware if it’s doable at all.
There are much more immediate things they can (and should) address.
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in fairness, aoe4’s unit problem has nothing to do with polygon count or shading imo, these would hurt performance as you state, but more so with the current style on units not really being made in mind with current scaling, the simplistic textures for instance, being just blobs of 1 color with no patterns and so on, changing unit style wouldn’t hurt performance
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I’m not a fan of aoe 4 graphics but please stop spamming screen shots and non stop talking about CoH 3
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Why? We are talking about so many times about what Coh3 would have been look like and this Is the final release: no more pre-alpha or beta versions.
This Is the same developer and the same engine: the comparison looks to me quote legit.
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The polys do matter because a lot of the faces (for example) lack anywhere near the polyflow you can see in the CoH 3 shots.
The bigger problem (imo) are the texture maps (and the requisite increase on things like lighting to account for any higher levels of detail). Textures are both a memory thing and a runtime thing (see: texture streaming). I feel like we’ve discussed this one before though haha. Not sure.
We know the two games were made relatively similar together and use very similar iterations of the same engine. I can guarantee that CoH 3 doesn’t scale well with thousands of units on the screen. Happy to be wrong though 
Yeah, it certainly looks great…I played both closed and open betas and it’s like night and day…
Same as all CoH allow…about 100 units per player…plus AoE 3 DE looks better than CoH 3 with a 2005 engine and allows up to 200 units (even 250 if you literally play your cards right) per player …so I don’t see why AoE 4 couldn’t look the same…
That’s true, one thing doesn’t take away the other…
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