Alright everyone, you need to know one thing. What follows is purely my own subjective venting and emotional outburst. Since these are completely personal opinions, just treat it as something for fun:
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What’s the hot take I want to say? First off, I won’t thank the shitty Relic and World’s Edge for anything. I’ve seen people on forums thank Relic. For my part, I also play Company of Heroes 3, and they hubristically killed Dawn of War 3.
Ever since killing Dawn of War 3, Relic hasn’t been any good. All of this is self-inflicted. I think the only reason they got to work on Age of Empires 4 is because AoE4 runs on Relic’s Essence engine, which no one else can handle, so they have to be involved in every bit of development. Also, issues with this engine almost made expanding Age of Empires 4’s framework impossible. I still don’t get why they had to build it using the Essence engine.
Second, my second subjective hot take is this: I think it’s a good thing that this director, along with the 20 designers and strategy coordinators, got laid off. Even though this personnel shakeup and merger isn’t good news for the whole Age of Empires team. Because you have to understand, Microsoft doesn’t care about the spirit or legacy of the IP at all. All they want to do is supply funding.
The higher-ups don’t care whether Age of Empires lives or dies. While this director and his strategy staff and designers were in charge, for five whole years, Age of Empires 4 had low output. They kept messing around with so-called stat balancing. They even reworked the functions of military units. Every update brought really weird unit behaviors. At the same time, they kept selling variant factions built from heavily reused assets to players at a high price, dragging things out over and over and wasting players’ money.
For five whole years, I haven’t seen any real, substantial progress for Age of Empires 4. This includes improvements to game modes and custom skirmish options, and follow-up updates and refinements for the tower defense mode, the Inferno Mode. There’s a lack of support for the modding community, miscommunication on all kinds of levels. It even feels to me like this director and his design team don’t actually play games themselves. They prefer to sit back and make demands, aim high without grounding themselves, and fail to get a practical grasp on the game’s design and development direction.
My subjective guess about the potential problems if the Age team gets moved under Activision Blizzard: Mandatory online, battle passes, microtransactions and paywalls, over-simplified casualization, or the mindset of some Blizzard staff who’ve spent years trying to restore the so-called golden age of RTS esports. Age of Empires might have reached the end of the line.
Then they seem to really like taking ideas from Age of Empires 2 and moving them over to Age of Empires 4, and taking ideas from Age of Empires 4 and moving them over to Age of Empires 2. Doing this can expand gameplay ideas for Age of Empires 2 and support creative concepts for Age of Empires 4, which sounds great. But is it possible these two games were built with different original development goals and design philosophies?
Did they even notice that? Secondly, they had time to make tons of variant factions that keep annoying players. And these variant factions aren’t just pure copy-paste of assets; they even made new units. So I gotta ask, if these assholes had time for all this stuff, why didn’t they just work on main factions instead?
Let’s imagine, if they put in the effort to focus on actual meaningful work, on September 23, 2026, we might already have Spain, Poland, Hungary, various Southeast Asian civilizations, the Vikings, or Korea. But instead they spent all their time on stupid balance tweaks, ignoring attention to game modes and prioritizing proper civilization development.
So I think it’s a good thing they got laid off. Even with the team moving under Activision Blizzard, and the outlook for Age of Empires looking grim, I believe these people leaving is actually good for the Age of Empires games themselves. Both the Age of Empires community and Age of Empires 4 have been held back by them for far too long.
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But out with the old, in with the new. All of this is just my personal speculation, rambling and emotional venting, with zero reference value. So just treat it as a joke.
