Delhi Sultanate
China
as you clearly see most of models are not detailed and the most critical elements are:
- weapons: they seem plastic. For example, the spears seem pencils. Developers should absolutely improve them. They don’t help with readability but are very very ugly and unrealistic;
- chainmails and armourw: smost of models seem don’t have chainmail but clothes and it’s just funny. In this case we don’t ask impossible changes because some models already have good textures for chainmail
English cavalrymen, for example have good textures
3)faces and hands: yes i know, some of you will say: why should you want to see the faces of soldiers? Immersion, simply immersion. Most of units have too low textures about that.
However i have to admit that developers are starting to improving some models as you can see about heavy cavalry of delhi sultanate.
And there are other two units which seem pretty detailed in my opinion: the elephants drivers.
This means that developers already have some good models and it would be cool if they could improve all models and make them more detailed and realistic.
So, this game is pretty good but unfortunately the textures quality is broking the immersion for me. Developers already created the “Min Spec Mode" for all of people who don’t have good PC to play Aoe4. So please, give to players who would like to have more graphic details the possibility to play with more realism and immersion.
I know you have different priorities for the next updates and Dlc but i’ll ask you this:
Is there any chance to see a Graphic DLC or “a 4k textures DLC”?
Dear Relic and World’s Edge, I really appreciated your efforts on this legendary franchise. You are doing your best. With more improvementes this game could become one of the best RTS ever made. But please, hear what community ask.
Cheers, Jimmy.
4 Likes
Those who play AOE-3 will have noticed that in African markets there are chickens that are not static, they are animated. The horses in the stables are lively and proportionate. In AOE-4 they look like monuments.
In artistic terms, what is really well done in AOE-4 is the terrain (weeds, grasses and others) and the boats (although very small).
Projectiles of all kinds look fake. I think you were the one who made a video about how unconvincing the buildings hit by catapults look.
The remastered games raised expectations and not even AOE-3 had been shown. The game was shown in 2019 before showing AOE-3 DE. Until it looks better than AOE-3, there will be criticism.
I liked the gameplay a lot, but for some reason the battles don’t feel convincing like in previous games. Soldiers have good proporsions and that’s why I wouldn’t call them cartoonish, but they lack a more organic touch, and not such a plastic look.
7 Likes
I did the same thing via Nvidia Control Panel and it looks a lot better. I have a 4k monitor and even at that resolution the stock textures and postprocessing have this blurry feeling.
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Yeap for Radeon users, enabling sharpening at 40-50% game will look a lot better.
Mae cual es su Nick para hacer un grupito y jugar…
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The game is blurry and lacking texture.
As a 1st person competitive shooter game player, I notice the smallest bluriness.
Because competitive shooting games must offer crisp graphics and always turn off the motion blur and LOD. Basically, anything that makes it hard to see.
In AOE4, I can confirm this game is blurry! Tried all kinds of settings and this is my main issue with the game right now.
The lacking texture affects mostly barracks and some archers, units, man at arms looked washed out, for cav is a different thing, they look more detailed in tier 3-4
For me, everything is blurry. Such as units, buildings, terrain, etc.
I remember how crisp the game was during the Closed Beta. I was able to scroll in (zoom-in) much much closer than now. And was able to see what kind of helmet, decorations, and its little details. Now it is all washed out. Clearly a texture issue.
These characters look like they are from Runescape v1
Maybe the Resolution scaling is not set at 100%?
It is at 100% resolution scale and I am playing it on highest settings with Anti-Aliasing Off
After playing the release version for a few days, I sadly have to agree that the quality is lackluster. It doesn’t matter how high you put the ingame settings, at 1080p it lacks detail and crispness. 4k is still very much in the minority, so saying it looks better at 4k doesn’t help the majority of players.
I suspect this is just a symptom of an old engine that has reached the limitations of its ability. I just don’t understand how older games like the original CoH from 2006 built on the same engine can look as good or even better after 15 years of engine development.
2 Likes
Look at this list of features I took from the Essence engine Wiki page (Highlights added by me):
The Essence Engine featured many new graphical effects at the time it was introduced, including high-dynamic-range lighting, dynamic lighting and shadows, advanced shader effects and normal mapping. The Essence Engine is also one of the first RTS engines to create detailed faces with facial animations.
In Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts, the Essence Engine was further improved to include weather effects, and also added support for DirectX 10 on Windows Vista.
Dawn of War II uses an updated version of Essence Engine (Essence 2.0) which allows for more detailed models and textures; more advanced lighting and shading effects; more complex “sync-kills” than those in Dawn of War; and better support for multi-processor systems.
Company of Heroes 2 is the first game to feature the 3rd generation of the Essence Engine (Essence 3.0) which features DirectX 11 support. Improvement to the engine featured in the game include the new line-of-sight technology, TrueSight, which aims to better emulate troop visibility in real combat. In contrast to traditional unit visibility, TrueSight more accurately represents a unit’s visibility range based on environmental conditions and type of unit. Essence 3.0 also incorporates a weather-simulating technology known as ColdTech which allows for realistic obstacles and destructible environments.
Just look at the highlighted features. Detailed faces with animations? Weather effects? Detailed models and textures (more so than the original CoH engine)? Support for multi-processor systems? Destructible environments?
Despite the engine being capable of all these features, it seems very few of them are present in AoE4 to any noticeable degree. I cannot understand why that would be the case.
3 Likes
I mean, when was the golden era, exactly? Do we go back to Company of Heroes? Or do we go back to Tiberian Sun? I mean, I’ve played both (was never a huge CoH fan, but I played more than enough Dawn of War).
How many years playing RTS games do people need to have had to have an opinion that you’ll respect? Seems more than a little patronising, and nothing to do with you being a boomer or not at all.
The engine having support for something is not the same as that support being implemented for a specific game. It’s comparable to having an API for something. Let’s take Blackboard, a popular VLE vendor in higher and further education. Here’s the API docs for it:
https://developer.blackboard.com/portal/displayApi/Learn
Not everyone who integrates with Blackboard will integrate with every single API call listed. There’s no need. You implement what you need, accounting for development time available.
EDIT - whoops, I missed that you said the engine was capable of it already. Can’t figure out strikethrough on this forum, so just ignore the above paragraphs.
Destructible environments? In a medieval RTS? What are arrows going to do, blow stones apart? Massively detailed faces? Why? What’s the business case here? It makes sense in a game like Company of Heroes (or Dawn of War II), with its emphasis on smaller-scale, tactical combat. It makes no sense for Age of Empires, with its massive armies and massive amounts of casualties (that you replace, instead of healing, most of the time).
A bunch of things you have listed, the game has. Detailed models and textures? The game has them. Support for multi-processor systems? The game has that.
Like, don’t get me wrong. If you think CoH looks better, you’re perfectly fine to have that opinion. But it’s just an opinion; a preference. There are tons of things in CoH that don’t hold up today. The unit textures are far less crisp than they are here in Age IV, for example. But I can’t help but feel you’re focusing on the specific things Age IV doesn’t invest in as much, without highlighting its comparative strengths.
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Yes, it’s my opinion. But I’m not the only one with said opinion, as you can clearly see from the thread history on this forum.
I’ve played many RTS titles over the years, going all the way back to Dune 2. My experience most often on the release of a new title has been to crank graphics all the way up, say to myself: “Wow, that looks amazing but runs like crap”, and then turn the settings down to something playable. AoE4 is the first title I can recall playing where I turned settings up to max and said: “I thought that would look better”.
Maybe it’s art style, maybe there are some bugs that still need to be sorted out. The game has many strengths, and it’s great fun to play. But I don’t count visual fidelity as one of those strong points currently. Independent reviews have also highlighted issues which many players have pointed out, such as severe frame-rate drops when moving the camera, and apparently poor multi-core optimization.
So yes, there are many things AoE4 does well. But it can be better still with some work. I want to like this game and I want to keep playing it. That’s why we provide feedback to the devs, after all.
3 Likes
I wouldn’t think I’m saying you can’t provide feedback, or that you don’t want to make it better. It’s more the engine capabilities argument I was focusing on, is all.
I have a lot of time with Relic’s RTS games specifically (though I kinda missed the Homeworld era), and I’m invested in them techwise (I’ve modded every Dawn of War game, for example). Discussing stuff like this is a bit like my bread and butter, hah.
I agree with you in that Age IV you can crank everything up and still want more - but, this also comes hand-in-hand with performance, which on the whole seems very good even if you crank up the settings (on appropriate hardware). I’m way too used to Relic’s games (specifically) being slammed for not being performant enough, so it’s kind of a welcome problem to have? If that makes sense. If the game runs well and can be made to run better, I absolutely trust Relic to be able to bring something like the visuals more up to scratch. Not saying you have to agree - that’s just how I see it.
Things like ColdTech, for example, caused serious issues - ColdTech itself was incompatible with SLI / Crossfire setups, back in the day, and also caused a performance hit when CoH 2 out of the gate was very demanding in terms of hardware required for good performance. I could run DoW II on maximum settings, for example (or near-maximum, by the time Retribution was released). The same hardware could barely run CoH 2 on medium to high settings.
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Thanks for the added perspective; I don’t have much experience with Relic titles other than CoH and Homeworld. You’re 100% correct of course that the balancing act between visuals and performance is always a tricky one. Personally I’ve had no performance issues with AoE4 which is great to see. My system is very much mid-range (Ryzen 3600, 32GB RAM, Rx 5600XT), but at 1080p max settings even a 3v3 comp stomp runs smoothly with end game armies all over the screen.
I guess part of my frustration is that I’m not 100% sure whether the game can look better but doesn’t due to some visual bugs (The AoE DE editions certainly had a few on release), or whether this is as good as it’s going to get. Coming from the days of old school RTS games where everything was a bit slower-paced, I guess I’m a bit nostalgic about being able to sit back and enjoy the sight of your home base with your units happily going about their business. Unlike competitive shooters or MOBA games, sometimes you can just enjoy the sights and sounds.
2 Likes
Where do you see them? I post a lot of screenshots about them. The main models are ok but Saying they are detailed: absolutely not.
In all the screenshots you’ve provided. The textures are far more crisp, i.e. they have clear lines, there’s no pixellation, there’s no stretching of textures over larger polygons, compared to something like vCoH.
Which is understandable! CoH is fifteen years old! I’m not putting down Company of Heroes here. And I understand that people want more out of Age IV.
But at the same time, you have to recognise the technical aspects of the artwork that Age IV is getting right. Otherwise all I have to do is zoom in on a model from CoH, point out how some of the textures haven’t aged well, and ta-da. I can do that, if you want?