I think the big issue is,
they still did not understand how vastly different are RTS fans, Casual and E-Sports
You know, you can tart up your elitism with whatever flourishes you want, but its still lipstick on a pig.
I’m pretty sure Firaxis didn’t go “you know we should really make this new xcom as utterly obtuse as possible like the old xcom games, and totally ignore literally 3 decades of UI/UX changes that users expect”. Because really that’s what you elitists sound like. I’m glad Firaxis didn’t listen to elitists like you then.
I think it depends on how successful you are with your work,
if your decisions and choices are profitable and highly praises keep do good job.
But if your work failed, was unsuccessful and a financial disaster,
maybe you should rethink your approach.
Especially if apparently you do repeat same mistakes all over again.
I think at best to describe their last work by DoW3 and AoE Online,
is like put a pineapple on a Salami Pizza for vegetarians.
Now their idea is to put chocolate on a Salami Pizza.
There are situations where you can’t please all people with the same Pizza,
you have to make different meals.
Wise words
To put it in a similar way, you run a restaurant with Italian cuisine and then you decide to add sushi to your menu and call it a specialty.
Something doesn’t go right here, your audience expects Italian cuisine from your Italian restaurant, not sushi
The UI in age IV is for a futuristic game not for a medieval one, I don’t understand, in past we have different UI for each race/army and that was beautiful it gives personalisation.
Everyone, please attack the arguments and not the people making the arguments. Otherwise I’ll have to get off the couch and clean house. And I just took my shoes off.
They probably saw they could leverage on a famous franchise to exploit a market sector they were interested in. Of course, being an old franchise with millions of diverse fans, a big chunk of the player base have little to no interest in this direction, so the studio is just playing the salesman trying to rebrand this decision using a speech the fans might be more wiling to accept. That’s probably why we’re hearing that much about cognitive charge, readability, game pacing and such. These concepts, although important, were not a concern in the saga, but they just happen to be key elements in the competitive scene and streaming world (a door to this broader audience they are trying to target), so, surprise, they became the flag around all sacrifices are made.
I agree that readability is important (and 2D have it slightly easier by nature, in that sense), but unless you’re playing competitive and every millisecond to find a unit counts, the design of the previous entries is more than enough, and, in my opinion, in no way an excuse to transform this:
No matter how they try to brand it, this is a very different art direction style and follows a very specific strategy. Same with the obsession to make the pace faster sacrificing animation realism and map size (why would that be an issue on campaigns or single player? Map size should be expected to be customizable from little more than arenas to truly gigantic, as they were in AOE II), or the will to make everything obvious (over the top effect animations, huge arrows, fire icons…). These things would have never been discussed if esports and streamers were not a thing.
I see a lot of faith here on the chance they are going to fix it, but this is probably a strategic decision taken after months of meetings and OKR grooming sessions, so it’s very difficult they will switch direction at this stage, at most changing minor details to avoid a bigger outrage. I guess that the wise thing to do is move on and accept I’m just not the audience of AOE anymore (which, being fair, is just my problem and not necessarily a bad thing for the game if they find a market sector that enjoy it).
Funny how Age of Empires II has realistic looking units and buildings compare to Age of Empires IV and yet the readability on the original was just as easy to focus. Yet people still argue that the reason for the cartoony graphics in Age of Empires IV was because of readability since it’s a 3D game, forgetting the fact that Age of Empires II units and buildings were also created using a 3D application converted into 2D isometric sprites.
Your comparison with these 2 images basically says everything. It sums up all the negative posts about the graphics.
Not sure how some people on this forum can even dispute that.
AOE4 graphics, as they are right now, are absolutely chintzy and tasteless.
This reminds me of people/kids who would prefer cheap junkfood over a fancy meal at a restaurant.
Should this really be a discussion topic?
I am very interested to see how old are the people on this forum, my bet is that age community is mostly 25 to 40+, will 12 years old will be interested in this RTS? Is tha necessary to appeal to this sector ?
I’ve expressed similar thoughts in another post, but you were more precise. The only thing that I found bitter, although realistic, was “…if they find a market sector that enjoy it”.
Letting the market decide everything is what is slowly eroding all good things in life, even your own pleasure for the game. I could not agree with you letting go there. The market is made up of humans, and it should be for humans, after all. We should be on top of the market, not the market on top of us.
I agree. Catering to the mythical “Wider Audience” almost always backfires. It is best to keep your slowly growing but loyal customer base, than try to capture the attention of people who will applaud you, but never even buy the product in any significant number.
Because we have seen it happen, over and over.
Wider Audience does not exist, everyone taht is interested in your well-known brand, is already on it. Introducing changes to capture the attention of people who are not interested, will still not make them interested for more than 5 seconds, not make them buy the product you are trying to sell, and will alienate your previous customer base.
It has a very easily observable pattern of failure, with only very limited success.
A lot of teams tried it, to listen to pro gamers only, the result was and is simply bad. The “shadow council”, is never a good idea to represent a gaming community. Just because a person did memorize how fast to play a game, does not mean they understand game mechanics, they merely want games to stay broken and lame.
A good example for messed up game would be Act of Aggression. The community wishes were a complete opposite of what the developer team did. So the game was dead on arrival, the shadow council even assured that the rebooted version of the game was still bad. Why would you ask the same people twice who were wrong?
you don’t need to be a movie director to critic a movie same you don’t need to be a game dev or art director to critic crappy artstyle. Humans who buy AOE and MS products are professionals in different fields, just because they might not be in gaming industry does not disqualify them from criticizing the game.
I didn’t know the basic ability to enjoy or critic videogame art was to become a professional that works in game industry, if that is the case let game devs start making games for themselves and circle jerk and stop advertising and show games to public and expect them to buy it.
Every humans in this world has a sense of aesthetics, just like you are not agreeing to anything if anyone try to critic AOE 4. Thus I am gonna put back the same argument, let professionals handle it, that is players who are making threads with proof and proper comparisons. They are professional in making forum post and good at critic.
