This is one of the threads where I praise the potential of Essence, but let’s not confuse potential with what we are actually getting in AoE 4. Until devs change the sun position, let us tweak the default camera angle, fix the strangely difficult-to-view water reflections and add some form of sharpening, the game remains visually plain, dated and uninspired.
Water not elegantly transitioning to ground you say? Hmm… I wonder what game is this in my thread opener above:
In fact, TW has the upper hand because it has waves, apart from the small undulations both games have. A screenshot doesn’t make it justice.
There are just so many little details in TW and all later incarnations of the SAGE engine: When you place a building over trees, the trees fall down instead of popping out of existence. Large units topple trees. Heat distortion and fire effects are still top notch, units visually change as they absorb damage (could you imagine a trebuchet looking more damaged as it loses health?), buildings have different animations when they’re producing or idle. You can even rotate buildings as you please and just as AoE 4, units spawn from the front, so rotating is a strategic need. The only part that dates it is the shadow resolution. It shouldn’t be that difficult to justify better graphics on a 2022 game vs a 2007 one, but here we are.
In fact CnC always had excellent details from the first game and this very well in the CNC Remastered, for example the units when they are in standby mode, do push-ups or when they are fighting they throw themselves to the ground to improve their aim in addition to heavy vehicles running over the units and of course occupying the buildings from RA2…
I suspect some of these issue has to deal with the fact that AOE4 is the first major title Relic has made that deals with random map/seed generation.
It’s highly probable that most of these terrain issues (see MegaRandom) are due to the way generated maps are “created”. The campaign delivers amazing looking landscapes. roads, etc. (handcrafted)
The game looked great in my first closed alpha/beta waves. The fidelity is there, looks like you also played in closed testing, you should know what I’m talking about.
Relic should add a new “Next-Gen” setting to address graphical complaints. The issue this thread is discussing mainly ties in to unit/building scale and behavior. -That said, I do agree many of the Essence engine capabilities are weirdly “nerfed”.
I understand the desire to have a consistent art style no matter the power of the PC, fully support that. That said, making things look nice on models, terrain, builds, etc. is possible without killing/changing art.
Comparing an RTS like AOE/SC2/COH to Total War is Apples/Oranges. The various things an engine has to communicate on the fly are vastly different.
In a Total War game, units aren’t individually controlled. 200+ man squads of Men at Arms etc. are essentially a “unit” with a wide variety of idle, movement, retreat, combat animations. The game isn’t computing moral, animation, stats on a “per unit” basis.
CoH is the real benchmark game to use here. That said, CoH doesn’t have to compute micro/macro economic mechanics to the degree of AOE.
We weren’t discussing gameplay, though. We were barely even touching on the artistic capabilities of the engine (which in Age IV are excessive - the developers are intentionally not using them a lot of the time by choice).
Error 183 was what got me into helping troubleshoot technical support (as a volunteer) for Relic. It plagued the game for months, if not years. The game struggled with Ultra-level details for a good long while (basically ate up too much memory) and the sound quality was bugged / is still bugged in that it can cut out for no reason (and cause crashes if set to too high quality).
I know a lot about DoW II’s issues. It’s still a fantastic game I’ll defend to the death, but I won’t let people hold it up as “Relic somehow used to do better”, because every game has bugs. We base our opinions on either experiencing / not experiencing them, or on simply forgetting them.
(shout out to EricGonzalezM bringing up CnC3, which had so many bugs that needed patching, and likely a bunch still outstanding in the “up to date” Steam / digital release)
DoW II holds up surprisingly well, but mainly due to the strength of the character models - the representation of the Tabletop units is fantastic. The terrain looks good at a surface level, but doesn’t hold up if you look closer (especially things like foilage and other kinds of scenery).
DoW II had a lot of criticism thrown at it for shipping with five MP maps. That sore point stuck with the community for a long time. But yeah, I love all three of the games.
I wasn’t confusing the potential at all. I was just reminded of how janky that era of RTS games was (that decade being the decade I literally played the most RTS games; since then I’ve gotten into other genres). Like I said in my earlier post, you seem to have a stylistic preference, but you’re reaching for technical explanations.
Which is odd, because you know the game can technically do the things you want. You know that! The explanation isn’t technical. It’s not that Age IV’s engine is or isn’t cutting-edge (I appreciate this was Forcebreaker’s argument). It’s a stylistic choice. No more, no less.
Also, sharpening doesn’t make a game look more modern. To me, it makes games look more dated, because excessive sharpening is what I associated with RTS games of 15 - 20 years ago. For example, I loved the art style of Planetary Annihilation. It was all blocky, very retro-inspired in a way (true to its roots in TA, not SupCom), but the edges were soft. It gave it less of a realistic feeling overall, but that’s simply what I prefer. There’s nothing wrong with you preferring different, but the problem is when we assign some kind of objective level of quality to this preference.
It’s more noticeable in the specific Age IV screenshot you’ve given due to the sun reflecting off that part of the water. It’s noticeable in the top right of the TW screenshot without even having reflections to emphasise the intersection (the water also looks a lot worse in terms of the translucency, which I’m not knocking because it is indeed a game from 2007. But I certainly wouldn’t hold it up to Age IV as a criticism of Age IV).
Screenshots don’t do either game justice, but I’m not complaining that you provided them. They are, at least, both lacking compared to playing either game.
This is why I said CoH 2 was the only title that ran worse
they tried to appeal to too many different fanbases, the same they did with DOW3
maybe this does eventually happen, in the same way we can play aoe2DE with an official UHD graphics pack. if you have a lower end system you dont enable it. but most of the screenshots showing off aoe2de are with the pack enabled
anyone that has played relic games for a long time will know relic devs have a very peculiar set of ideas that they are extremely reluctant to change, but hopefully with time, they will eventually come around with aoe4 (looking at how long it took just for customisable hotkeys and player colour, which they refused to do for coh2)
it still blows my mind, devs are sticking to their stupid idea of keeping blue for the campaign colours, instead of going for any degree of immersion.
I think we don’t need next gen graphics, just better utilization of those, more detailed texture, better water, lest simple units/ships, better animations for corpse decay, crew on siege, normal building sizes, change toy weapons etc…
TW in this context stands for Tiberium Wars, as in Command & Conquer: Tiberium Wars. At no point anyone has compared AoE to Total War games here. I thought the screenshots were already pretty telling to clarify further.
To be honest I am surprised how detailed COH 3 and how they managed to implement new mechanics in a game that has a lot of mechanics, I still don’t like some FX effects but overall game looks amazing, watching pro players playing with this amount of detail will be amazing, contrary to age IV that siege still has the same dead animation
Every Relic RTS game since the original Conpany of Heroes has used a version of the Essence Engine.
Time creates opportunities. CoH 3 is newer. Combine that with a grittier art style and it’s natural that it looks pretty different and can do different things compared to Age IV.
Polishing textures and animations generally has very little to do with the engine. It’s just one of those things that takes time.
I mean, I don’t get it. The same people that generally agree Age IV was released too early attribute detail from polish to engine capabilities?
Why? The engine isn’t some magical black box. It’s a complex set of systems that gets boiled down to a single word for laymen to understand.
Well yes, CoH has a different art style. When things get strange is when you look at CoH 2, which is of course a significantly older revision of Essence, and a lot of its assets are of better quality than in AoE 4. Why? When doing a direct comparison of things that are strictly engine-driven (i.e. ignoring art style, texture sharpness, etc), you can still see way better water rendering, no issues with reflections, better smoke/particle effects, even building destruction was more complex. It still had canned destruction animations but not as glaringly evident as in AoE 4. Oh, and large units like tanks followed terrain contours, unlike AoE in which siege units always lie flat, no matter the incline. Why wasn’t something as basic as wheeled units following inclines not carried over from CoH?
All of these screenshots are from CoH 2, this isn’t even CoH 3:
Your screenshots are a combination of promotional and at odd angles. You know that changing the camera angle and playing around with elevation (relative to the light source) changes a lot of how Age looks, so the same follows through (that middle shot is way too close to the ground for example, and it really highlights how flat and undisturbed the water is even in the middle of an artillery engagement).
The thing about Age IV is . . . it’s an Age game. Everything here is speculation and shouldn’t be considered as informed by anything from my time with the Council (which uh I hope you appreciate makes discussing this difficult). You’re looking at Relic games, designed and made in-house by Relic. Full of the decisions that people have spent months criticising in Age IV (for example: the UI, camera angles and zoom). Age IV has been made into something resembling an Age game (not without effort, given the post-release roadmap), from something that isn’t what Age players are used to at all. Very few people I’ve talked to in this community have a great familiarity with Relic’s past titles at all.
Also, and I cannot stress this enough: CoH, DoW II and CoH 2 were all known for having pretty poor performance. Generally speaking. Not that you couldn’t eventually get them to run well, but it was a shock adjustment coming from Dawn of War and that earlier generation of RTS games. Dawn of War 3, however, for all its faults, ran as smooth as butter. However certain sacrifices were made to enable that (fixed camera angle, for example, presumably among other things). So it’s obvious that iterating on the engine leads to features being scrapped and (ideally) re-implemented over time. CoH 2 in particular was a game that basically never ran that well at all, and the scale of Relic’s games are in general pretty carefully-managed. You generally don’t get matches at the kind of scale of any standard Age match. The unit counts are vastly different. This, again, necessitates a trade-off.
(and explosions are a tricky one to discuss because you’re comparing a WW2 RTS game or a Warhammer 40,000 RTS game with the gunpowder explosions of centuries ago - but again, art style is also a consideration here)
). You’re looking at Relic games, designed and made in-house by Relic. Full of the decisions that people have spent months criticising in Age IV (for example: the UI, camera angles and zoom). Age IV has been made into something resembling an Age game (not without effort, given the post-release roadmap), from something that isn’t what Age players are used to at all. Very few people I’ve talked to in this community have a great familiarity with Relic’s past titles at all.