Well i wouldn’t discard that option, in fact it could be early depending on aoe4 success, the only way to bring this game to his max potential will be:
*A new engine capable of rendering 3D assets and using multicore.
*A new team in charge of balance and civ design
*Limit to only 20 civs in multiplayer, the rest can still being played for single player content and campaigns.
*Spectating tools built in game and more advanced replay system.
*Using an anticheat third party software like easy anticheat
Haven’t you seen the endless balance discussion and civ petitions around?
There are just too many civs, keeping those balanced btw each others is a never ending subject, also if you want to lure new players in the competitive scene, the less civs and bonuses they have to learn the better, if you ask any new player they get easily overwhelmed by all the BASIC things they need to know, more civs are only preventing new players to even trying it.
The 3D engine would make the assets easier to load and will be more efficient, remember the GPU’s haven’t increased their 2D performance since like 2006 as its outdated, one major performance hit to this game version is the fact that all the animations requires lots of sprints, the castle animation breakdown was using like 1 gb of RAM,in other words its very inefficient the way they are doing it now, they could easily lock the view like we have now in 2d but using the 3D effects for units and animations.
I think that this would only work for multiplayer if it was done in the way @TungstenBoar said, with a rotating civ pool for ranked games. Removing civs won’t go well with most of the playerbase, no-one wants to see their favourite civ disappear.
I played the AoE 4 Beta. I went form deciding th buy the game JUST BECAUSE it was AoE 4 and SPECIFICALLY because it was from the AoE franchisde. However, after playing, i have decided to NEVER buy any more AoE games ever. Even if it is an AoE 5 or even 6 or even a spin-off game.
The fact that the game (where i live) costs the EQUIVALENT of $75 American dollars also helped in making the decision.
To think i even had an ENTIRE ARGUMENT about the cost of the game being $60 American dollars. AND WON that argument. Only to discover that some countries have the game cost being EVEN MORE than $60 American Dollars. Never even thought about the possibility that the game would cost more than $60 American Dollars.
That parties dont last longer than one game
That spectators still cant see the player chat, nor chat with each other
That there is no Save and Exit
That the Range indicator is still worse than fanmade mods
That about 10% of all games crash or lose connection
That restoring barely works
That every patch needs a hotfix because of gamebreaking bugs
That every new Civ is broken in order to sell the DLC better
That Nomad script is worse than ever
That Quickplay has an error sometimes kicking you out the queue without any audio
That Trushing was removed by gutting them
That TG Elo is inflated and people with 3900 elo (3000 used to be normal) smurf with 1,9k abusing the ladder
That there is no ingame punishment
That there is still no fun water balance
That there is no ranked lobby system for TG-s
That the new Civ boni being straight up copied by aoe3
That on release units could go through walls
That there are people who cannot access the game and crash every time (look in Bug Report forum)
That they made a new worse UI (just to sell it better to the outside)
That they don’t support mods over 300mb
That they copy fanmade maps without giving any credit
That they ignore the community and refuse to fix gamebreaking bugs
That the map pool is decided by 2000 players in the forum
That there is no proper balance (Arambai, Khmer Elephants, Imp Camels, now War Wagons)
That the DLC-s cost 10$ but have roughly the half content
That they ruin game consistency with unique castles for the new civs
That each Arabia map generation is worse than the previous one
That pathing is still much worse than on Voobly (most of these are quoted from reddit)
But we will have the Venetians, Swiss, Tibetans, Mississippians and Dinosaurs as new civs
The fun thing about all this is: People will still defend devs because it is an old engine. But tbh: this same engine with all its flaws will be sold 1 or 2 times more until 2030…
The engine was built for PCs 20 years ago. Pretty impressive to run this game with up to 1600 units on the field on hardware that is far from todays smartphones. But for this to run smooth on old hardware they had to optimize the ***t out of it (good job done there). Now thats the reason we only have up to 8 players, 32kHP max on buildings(on multi tech mods, only 16 bit are used for storing buildings HP, efficient on old hardware, noone would care about 32 or even 64 bit used for that nowadays), and worst of that all: the engine was a product. Written, optimized and shipped. Nowadays you have game as a service and always change code all the time. You would never optimize the code now as you did back then, because readability and ease of change is much more important than having one state that is optimized af. But now they have made a lot of workarounds with the optimized codebase, which results in bad performance and bad readability and changeability 11 worst of all universes combined.
Long story short: this game needs a rewrite of the engine with good changeability, else this game is gonna die due to the load of bugs every change introduces
