bound to happen with lack of communication which continues to haunt this franchise
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You’d turn it into a job with deadlines. As both a modder and a professional developer, there’s a huge difference between the two.
That c&c game looks more saturated to me than AoE4. IMO the real world is very saturated, vivid and high contrast. AoE4’s art direction goes for the opposite with more pastel tones, which is easy to look at but also looks flat so the colors don’t leap off the screen the same / less wow factor.
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I’m still hopeful. AoE4 has done a lot of things well, and the issues that plague it are rather minor in comparison to the good things. I’m sure they have their hands full, especially considering the circumstances with the company currently, but I do hope we keep getting good updates.
More fauna and berries in different biomes. Less messy textures on biomes. Slightly taller forests. Fewer reused trees. Better, more colourful lighting. Improving the UI visually. Siege death animations. Reduce latency to unit movement. Special effects like desert wind or snow (and building wear from environment). Better AA options. Correct spear models. More unique animations (a Knight wielding two handed weapon, or ZGN/Arb having different animations to crossbows). Higher quality unit texture (if its available, feel like its 1 stage too low). More exciting unique unit mechanics and less “new” units reusing assets (the Imperial Guard could not be more boring). Better casting and modding tools (like ingame editor or ability to change UI in multiplayer). Better arrow special effects (they’re weird looking). Potential blood/corpse DLC, mod or patch would be great too.
I still think the game is amazing, and I’m looking forward to what more they add to the game.
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All of these adds would be amazing and for this reason i asked for a “graphic DLC” in the last two years but as i said in the previous messagges i dunno Relic will have the resources and enough developers to improve all these aspects.
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Yes, I have seen people who, after trying AoM and a game like SG, have said they appreciate AoE4 more.
While it’s true that things like building proportions (a problem since launch), lack of fauna, certain animations and aesthetic issues, the UI, etc… can be improved, it seems that more people than you think see the AoE4 engine as modern.
I don’t dislike the “stylized” style at all because I prioritize a better readability even if it’s not super realistic. We’ll see how this game scales in those aspects.
However, some pros of AOE2, AOE3, SC2, and others were invited during the development. They certainly took their opinions, mostly the bad ones.
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They weren’t, at least not the SC2 ones. The council prerelease consisted of players from all Age games regardless of the skill level. The players from Blizzard RTS only joined post launch.
Yes, that’s all. Me and you we are often discussing about graphic aspect but if you remember well (and this is proven in the most of my posts) i always said that i like the art style. What i dislike is the quality of textures, weapons, the lack of improved physic (similar to COH3 or AOE3de), wheater effects and biomas diversity (speaking about fauna). For example i never seen sharks, whales or turtles on the island maps as i never seen bears, tigers, monkeys, wild horses and more.
You know, all of these elements could seem useless but they are very important for the players immersion in the same way as the high detailed textures and realistic weapons (in terms of colours and sizes) are very important to make a historical RTS great and leave to players the feeling of live the history".
As i said in the past some models are historical accurate but many of them (most of them) have not detailed textures and ofen the armours are going to confuse with clotes.
Obviously the plastic weapons and the wrong colours on helmets and the armour pieces could determine this effect:
I played the last public AOMRE beta and there are a lot of difference in terms of textures quality (and you should consider that there were some textures loading problems during the test itself).
This game offers a lot of graphic settings (with also AMD FSR. i hope they will add also DLSS for nvidia cards) and i playes with “mythic settings”. Game runs very good to me.
Unfortunately the “capture screens options” doesn’t take image on 4k
You can see how the Axe has “iron colour” as how it should be into reality
Look at the gold mine. It takes something from AOE4 (the gold venatures) but it looks more detailed
Details on the chariot (woods and wheels) and on the OX skin seem real
Look at how realistic are the units. The leather armor and armor pieces look very realistic
This is the “famous Zoom in” that i would like to see on AOE4. When graphic are detailed looking battles more close is incredible. Also Aussie_Drongo likes to “Zoom in” when he plays with AOMRE. So a beautiful graphic like to many people, also to streamers.
Buildings are more detailed and there are good proportions between units
Again, units have realistic armours and weapons and are very detailed
Noble Gallic cavalry: they are made incredible well. Armours, clothes, weaons. All seems realistic also for a mythological game. Horses are the typical horses of the north Europe. Also here there’s historical reserch. Now look at the AOE4 horses. They are all the same.
This is the realism that i would like to see in AOE4
siege Units: look at details on woods and iron. Simply realistic.
Different fauna for different biomas:
Giraffas and Zebras
An honorable mention to Atlantidean units that should remind to Roman Empire (but i would like to see a proper Roman civilization)
myrmidon
Armours and helmet are very realistic
And heavy infantry: this is “a kind of roman Legionary”
But what surprised me is the “roman imperial gallic helmet” (the most iconic roman helment with the famous lorica segmentata armour). This rapresentation is simply fantastic.
So this is why many people are asking for better graphic and textures updates. But all these changes are not coming with patches. They would need of related DLC.
Will Relic able to improve the AOE4 graphic wihout changing the art style? AOMRE has colour art style but looks more realistic because models are much detailed.
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I think the fact that it looks good at a medium or far distance for readability seems more important to me.
AoE3 has good textures and was never very intuitive and lacked that readability in battles at times.
Honestly i never had problems with AOE3de or AOMRE. High detailed units are very clear to me on map. Often i had readability problem with AOE4.
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I’ve seen this opinion come up a few times around which game engine AoMR should use. It seems odd to me how people treat the game engine as something the devs can’t modify, as if the BANG! Engine is still the exact same code from 20 years ago and hasn’t been modernized for AoE3 DE and AoMR. In some areas, the BANG! Engine is more modern than Essence given how it has support for features like ray tracing and screen space reflections. However the AoE4 devs can add those missing features to Essence too. Ultimately, how devs (4 & 3/M) improve their engines ultimately comes down to factors such as budget, time, and art direction.
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I have to ask, because to me this seems like the least effort change that could make the most impact that has yet to be done; what could possibly be the reason that players advocated for a washed out grey-blueish lighting for every map rather than the colourful and stylistically compatible one shown in trailers?
I honestly don’t know and also don’t know how much impact the players actually had.
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And do you honestly think AoE4 visuals are closer to the one on the right than they are the one on the left?
If so I’d recommend either turning up your graphic settings, or finding a good optometrist.
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Yes it’s totally only me that has filled this thread with 700+ replies of art style critique. Delusional.
Imagine doing personal attacks because someone else might not enjoy playing fortnite RTS and looking at fluorescent grass and plastic swords …
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Please understand you’re using a subjective take on this. The weapons are not plastic, you see them that way. The grass is not fluorescent, you see it that way. The person you’re responding to doesn’t, and probably won’t regardless of the number of times you repeat it.
For you the colours are brighter. But this is in direct conflict with other people’s analysis of the game being washed out, tinged with grey blue hues.
The difference between people that explains the contrast between analyses is the eyes that we see through. Maybe even the color correction on the monitors we use to display the images.
It’s just not something that we can decide through subjective terminology.
Huh? I’m not talking about art critiques generally. There are plenty of reasonable ones.
I was very specific. Do you or do you not actually think AoE4 looks more like the picture on the right than the one on the left?
The two pictures you yourself provided to demonstrate cartoonish vs not cartoonish.
I think it is apt to call the weapons plastic, because they are in fact lacking any textures at all (they’re white by the default shader)–which is more matte than plastic. The point is, that is not metal, and the question becomes why make it so?
There is no subjectivity on whether it “looks like plastic” or not. It doesn’t look like metal. That is simply a fact. In fact, many new assets seem to not follow this principle anymore, like some Japanese weaponry featuring real metallic textures or the Varangian Axe. Compare for instance the sword Varangian uses (old asset) with their Axe. There is no subjectivity here.
They should retroactively fix old weapons to match the new. It just looks better. In fact, weapons in general need attention. As with the link above, there are many other examples of weapons that hit with the wrong side. Additionally, there are an incredible amount of errors with weapons in general. Rus Knights wielding a two handed poleaxe with one hand. English King doing the same with a Zweihander. All spearmen using the Guisarme (even ones from China).
Weapons in this game are a hot mess. That is a FACT. And it wouldn’t take a lot of effort at all to solve these issues.
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We can, objectively. Colours are RGB data/ some colourspace coordinates, we can measure them, graph a distribution and determine the mean. It’s just very tedious to do.
What is much easier is showing how the scale is off, how the weapons are off, how the physics and ragdolls and reflections are not even up to 2010 standards, and it has been done in this thread before.
I’ll just leave this screen here because i cba to be gaslighted into believing the average fortnite or minecraft fan isn’t the main audience of this iteration:
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