I know it would be a fair sized update, however, wouldn’t it be good if all unit models (both military and non-military) had an aesthetic which represented their civilisation. For instance, the villagers from African civs wear different clothing and have a skin tone which represents more accurately their region.
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That’s the main reason why I’ll never buy this game.
I used to play Age of Empires II years ago, and it left me with many great memories. Today, I’d love to return to it, but there is one aspect that, while seemingly small, would make a huge difference for me: regional unit skins.
I’m not asking for completely unique skins for every civilization. However, I would at least like to see regional appearances for villagers and the military units that all civilizations share, such as the infantry, archer, and cavalry lines. In my opinion, this would make the game feel much more immersive and distinctive.
I’ve read many discussions about this topic, and the most common argument against it seems to be readability. Personally, I don’t understand why regional skins would create significant readability issues. I’m only an average player (perhaps even below average) and I have no trouble recognizing units in AoE II. Even in Age of Empires IV, where civilizations are visually much more distinct, unit recognition has never been a problem for me.
Furthermore, I don’t believe implementing regional skins would have any meaningful impact on the game’s performance or installation size. Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition already contains a vast amount of graphical assets, campaigns, civilizations, and visual effects. Adding a limited number of regional villager and military unit skins would likely represent only a small increase in storage requirements while providing a significant improvement in visual variety and immersion.
With that in mind, I’ll leave some links at the end as examples of the kind of work that could be done to introduce regional skins for villagers and common military units.
Do I think the developers will ever consider doing something like this? Probably not. It would be difficult to package such a feature as a DLC, since many players would expect it to be part of the base game rather than paid content. From a business perspective, it may simply not be worth the development effort if it doesn’t generate additional revenue.
Of course, some people will agree with me, while others perhaps even the majority will continue to argue that it would hurt readability. If the developers ever decide to implement something like this, I doubt it will be because they read our feedback specifically; it would more likely be because it was already part of their long-term plans.
For example, as you mentioned, it would be great to see African villagers who look different from the standard European-style villagers, or to avoid having the exact same-looking infantry line across civilizations from completely different regions of the world. Unfortunately, I don’t think we’re likely to see that happen.
Still, we can hope and wait to see what happens, even if I personally believe the developers are unlikely to address this issue.
https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe2/comments/115fod6/middle_east_unit_skins_the_full_set/ https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe2/comments/1ezrj9v/india_units_skins_set_concept_art/ https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe2/comments/13a7m0a/american_units_skins_set_concept_art/
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If the devs are afraid about readability, they can make the skins optional, just as the 4K graphics free DLC.
(The Monk update should arguably be optional too, but the issue is alleviated by installing a Monk pointer.)
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Still eagerly waiting for this. I think converted Villagers would change to the new player’s skin when given a new task, but I’d rather accept that limitation than never having such regional skins. The Chronicles Villager skins were only the beginning, I hope.
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