I do not believe that games like Stormgate pose a direct competition to this franchise. AoE’s wildcard is its historical setting. Its core and devoted audience has always been people that love history and appreciate the beautiful diversity of human civilization. Generally, the fantasy realm of lasers, demons, robots and flying soldiers has its own audience.
I agree though that AoEIV is in a precarious position considering what a poor job it does of being the latest installment of this franchise and how it fails to cater to this craving for truly diverse and interesting historical civs/maps/units/…/gameplay.
It also wouldn’t be shocking if AoEIV sees its e-sport scene disappearing by an RTS game explicitly designed for e-sports and that may provide a valuable lesson to those who believed it prudent to compromise certain aspects of the game and of the AoE identity for it. Grasp all, lose all they say.
That’s a weird pattern I observe as well.
For example, AOE4 siege units did not respect terrain. They clip into grounds when going uphill. Only the “new” siege unit (Ottoman bombard) does——which shows it’s not a technical problem.
Same thing goes for AOE3. The DLC adds a bunch of new European mercenaries but only accessible to new civs, not the old ones (many of which are far more relevant). Six months later they added them to old civs in a free update but that comes also with a skin pack DLC. Otherwise the work would not pay off well. You have to sell part of the efforts.
Without subscription mode or micro transaction there is no incentive to refine the already-sold contents. That effort had better be put into actual profitable ones. Free new civilization in AOE4 also counts as this, because “we added A NEW CIV!” sounds much more attractive to the users that had not bought the game than “we fixed the siege unit moving animation” which is likely hidden in a long update log.
When expansions were sold as standalone games it usually came with general improvements. Now it’s no longer the case. I don’t think there is a way out of this current mode especially for RTS. You can’t give people “half a faction” in an RTS and let them buy the DLC for full experience (Total War does but that is more sp focused). And I don’t like micro transaction either.
But each RTS designed with E-Sport in mind and focus on PvP did fail.
Why should a lame version of over 20 year old Warcraft3/Starcraft BW stand today out?
The Micropayment as concept is outdated too.
new titles just dont gain new people to play them and by old titles people did by now buy what they wanted
Microtransaction are quite dead
Manor Lords is not a good RTS or city builder either, the engine looks nice, but the gameplay mechanics are very clunky.
Of course! the great nertf of the siege was in favor of electronic sports and not to satisfy the demands of team players
…also when they made the tower rush almost unfeasible it was not to satisfy casual players
To be fair there’s not much else around apart from a lame version of over 20 years old AoEII.
But it may stand out or not. Point is that esport and pro players have this tendency of migrating to the latest shiny new toy where the hype and (hopefully) the money are. Stormgate is being outright built to become that toy.
It’s not hard to see how those who jumped over to AoE from SC2 or wherever only to grind AoEIV’s ladder can turn their backs to it and not look back.
Problem is they don’t, they never ever migrate to next game.
E-sport and pro players rather stay by a game that did establish itself,
they are not good at learn anything new, so a new game, is not in their interest.
As proof, just check the top played games on steam and how old they are.
And how much alternative games there are.
and here we are a year later with a closed beta where the main principles of the game just feel off, too conservativ and risk-averse of producing a clone, just like LoL did with Dota, only with a potentially lower player base
