I want to express my opinion, although most likely I will be showered with tomatoes by a couple of local fans of detailing (which nafig did not make it on the RTS, but more on that later). What I see in the screenshots really looks very cool, the models are beautiful, the armor, the weapons are all cool, to be honest, I want to play it, I would like to express my gratitude to the insiders and developers who are working on AoE 4 every day, we are looking forward to the release.
Next, I want to talk about the bad, namely the reaction of the toxic percentage of the community, I would like to say separately that you are discussing RTS here, and in RTS, gameplay is primarily important. When we played the first Red Alert or Master of Orion, we didn’t think about how it looked, because the game fascinated us with its very mechanics, it was cool and new, building a soldier, a base and so on, really iconic strategies never chased cool graphics (Most RTS which are given as an example of more detailed graphics are very mediocre and abandoned, probably because in addition to graphics, gameplay is also needed), it’s certainly very cool to look at the unit models (although the activity is very stupid, but oh well), but most people will play strategy, they want interesting mechanics, they want gameplay that will keep them awake at night. I would like to cite as an example WarCraft 3 Reforged, where after overloading the unit models with detailing the game began to look just awful, in RTS detailing is not so important, since you look at the game from above most of the time, and you need the game to look good from above, and the picture in the same original WarCraft 3 it was lined up precisely for the view from above, shadows were drawn by hand, and so on, a tremendous amount of work was done on how it looks ABOVE, the Remaster itself destroyed it with detail and a bunch of “chips” of new graphics.
In conclusion, I want to say that I will definitely like this game, I am sure of this, the only thing I really do not like is to see the posts every day “The graphics are not what I want”, “I want two graphics options” (maybe then you two games do?), “The graphics are not realistic” and so on, as if people do not understand and do not hear what both the developers and other AoE fans are telling them, THIS IS SUCH DESIGN, the same transition in design as in Civilization between 5 and 6, if you don’t like it’s a problem of your taste, it’s not a problem of the game and the community, the developers don’t owe you anything, they do their job as they see it.
And instead of raising really important problems about when the Beta will be, or about regional prices, or about the optimization and performance of the game on release, people repeat the same thing over and over again that even the game is not a problem, and the funny thing is that this is happening in all branches of the AoE series, and in the AoE 2 and AoE 3 sections, (Moreover, the posts are written by the same people, which means that those who are dissatisfied with the design are even less than we think) I really start to think that the matter is in the community … Wake up people , this is just a game, you can simply not play and let those who like the new design and who are waiting for the game calmly, without swaying their nerves, wait and discuss their desired game. That’s all.