Let’s take it from the latest trailers. Feels like ships are skidding on ice. There is no sense of ships pushing through water or having any mass/keel under it. Water disturbances, waves, reflections, sense of depth… nothing is here:
Look closely at the oars. They simply disappear when they clip the water. For some reason transparency goes out the window unless you’re right next to the shore. The water line/edge is pretty rough too. It’s not only when the sun hits it just right as someone said above:
Then you are ignoring facts, yet I don’t care, since you were admin of Dow forums I have never seen you critize Relic for anything so I suppose they are perfect devs, people were not ready for DOW3 as they game was ahead of its time and AGE IV looks perfect, the siege dead animations are perfect, the building size are perfect and the lack of texture on units is just pure art o yes !
This is a personal argument to preference. It’s valid and I respect it in that it’s your opinion, but it doesn’t translate further than that. Much like me saying “I like how the game looks” has little relevance, so I haven’t made much of a deal about it.
If you’ve played CoH 2 extensively, you know well the performance issues I’m talking about. And you’re talking about getting money of your GPU cycles? In a game that has been criticised for being CPU-bound? What GPU resources are we talking about exactly, if we want to get technical about it?
Because the effects don’t come at the same cost as earlier Relic games? As per my point in raising them?
Remember: you were originally asking where the look and feel from past Relic games apparently went (in terms of engine capabilities, assuming the changes weren’t made for aesthetic reasons). I attempted to give my opinion on that. If you’re going to then take the argument to absurdity I don’t really know what you want from me. We’re past me answering the question at that point, for sure.
EDIT
Just as an aside, I agree with you that naval physics and related visual FX are too “floaty” and lack a certain weight to them. But I don’t agree with some of the examples you’ve provided of things done “better”. In my opinion, a lot of the other examples are too muddy - realism for realism’s sake, beyond the limits of an appreciable style (again: imo. Everyone else is fully entitled to a completely different opinion).
Just a volunteer moderator over there, thanks. Weird attempts to bait me into a response aside, I never said anything about the developers being perfect. I simply said if you dislike games journalism, but like reviews that match your opinion, then that’s just bias.
Sticking my hand into a machine here, but I truly believe lots of reviews are biased in favor of their subject matter, so I don’t find the things many of them claim to enjoy to be nearly as dispositive as the things they actually admit are bad. In this way, I think many reviews set a ceiling for how good the game is — it’s never going to be better than how a biased reviewer claims.
So I do believe a poor review is often more trustworthy than a good review.
With new civs like Malians and Ottomans, I was also hoping for graphics update for the anniversary. However, disappointed to see the same stuff with slight different units and terrain. No magic once more. As @AgeofNoob3936 said, they again chose the worst angles for trailers and graphics looked terrible. I don’t understand the laziness of not using the engine’s full potential. Imagine, Relic had few guys like AON or WinterStarcraft working with them, and we would have got an awesome product.
I was eagerly waiting for the Bombard, my fav unit, the most impressive cannon of the era with a powerful 1200 lb stoneball, and not a single solider gets flown away from its impact. They all keep fighting as if nothing happened. Come on devs, why? This is what made AOE 3 so special, the fun of seeing people fall in water or off cliffs is unforgettable experience.
They removed blood, they removed ragdoll features, siege crew, cool UI, made units cartoony, was it absolutely necessary to remove them? when will they stop making games or movies for 14 year olds and china?
When I was losing hope, I saw Farthest Frontier, though a city builder, what an incredibly beautiful game. I am glad there are other smaller studios who actually put love and soul in their games and know what people want. and I think encouraging them is the only way to ensure good games in future. I am really praying for AOM 2 and AOE 5 to not follow AOE4’s path.
And in my opinion that’s indicative of underlying bias. People critical of the game are going to weight pieces that criticise the game as more “honest” as pieces that don’t. What that criticism is is often more useful. Poor criticism is just as bad as unwarranted praise.
You have to take the good with the bad. Trusting something more just because it’s negative is a good way to ensure a feedback loop.
This isn’t to say that the negatives aren’t worth mentioning. Just commenting mainly on what you find trustworthy, specifically.
EDIT - just in case it’s useful, my measure of trust is primarily on specific writers, given their familiarity on a certain genre, rather than whether or not the review is positive, negative; or anything. It’s important to remember they’re just opinions at the end of the day.
My favourite writer could hate a game, and I could love it. It doesn’t necessarily mean I can’t trust them. How they cover the game could affect that, however.
I dont follow specific gaming journalists. I just recall reading a bunch of ink around release that all felt super remedial. I presume that’s a combination of (1) the writers writing for a general audience, (2) the writers themselves not really understanding Age of Empires in much depth, (3) me being a horrible Age of Empires gatekeeping biased knowitall grouch.
And then there are the interview questions. Oh my god those horrible interview questions. Dudes just lobbing softballs down the pipe. Meaningless questions and meaningless platitudes everywhere. It was particularly cold and harsh that night in my forsaken den of wrath.
I agree that there’s unlikely to be detail that satisfies longtime fans. The consumption is generally for the mainstream. I think for RTS games these days, it’d probably be Rock Paper Shotgun or bust? For a real deep-dive.
Outside of that, you’re reliant on fans like yourself attending pre-release events and the like. I used to get invited to them myself for Relic games, back in the day. The difference is you won’t find my questions and answers published anywhere haha. We don’t have the same editorial pipeline (though nowadays there are some excellent design-focused individuals like Wayward Strategy).
Right. So in this context, if some softball reviewer said, “the civs in the game are the most diverse in the franchise,” I conclude this person is an uneducated biased moron writing for the huddled AoE2 masses whose opinion isn’t worth repeating.
But if a softball reviewer said, “the civs in this game all feel uninspired and drab,” I conclude that the problem is such an obvious error that even an uneducated biased moron writing for the huddled AoE2 masses sees it. That opinion is worth sharing because if that dude is saying it, then the entire issue of whether the civs are designed well appears to be settled.
And thus concludes my biased and grouchy cherry-picked example of why sometimes I consider reviews helpful and other times consider them useless. I concede that this perfectly overlaps with my own conclusions. But the rationale inside my mind distinguishes them without it feeling at all like I am being arbitrary.
Because I have so little faith in the credulity of reviewers, it feels like to get to the truth, we need to use a strange filter that assumes the reviewer is an uneducated biased moron. As soon as they stop tossing softballs down the pipe and printing promises as facts and fluff as substance I will revise my opinions of their opinions.
The assumption here is, again, that the criticism is accurate and something a fan would also agree with. Which is what I tried to point out earlier, in less words.
(though nowadays there are some excellent design-focused individuals like Wayward Strategy).
