Why AoMR will have to have worse readability

Age of Mythology: Retold Discussion
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There are a few people complaining about the readability in AoMR but I think that is an issue that can’t be “solved”.

There are 2 big reasons:

1. You are used to AoM for over 20 years

If you have played one game for over 20 years you get used to how all the units look like on all the terrains and so on.
The same argument applies to AoE2DE, AoE3DE or any new game (AoE4). A game you have been playing since childhood has trained your mind for way longer.

Especially AoE2 players seem to be extra allergic to change. Things like regional skins have a lot of enemies because people trained their brain on seeing the same 5 units for every civilisation.

2. More details means more things for your brain to compute

AoM has very low polygon models and low res textures.
There are not many details that your brain has to filter.
AoMR has a lot more details in the units and the terrain. Unless you add some artificial highlights (like unit outlines) you will never be able to get the same readability as the old game.
You can choose to make a game that looks year or a game that is optimised for readability, not both at the same time.

If you look at other games in other genres. Early 3D games did not have to highlight intractable objects because the environments had little to no decoration.
If you placed a destructible crate in a game in 1999 you did not have to highlight it in any way since it was going to be very easy to pick out in an environment with almost no decorations.
But it you want to do the same today you need to make it very obvious that this object is different then other by making the crate look very breakable since there are many small none interactable object in every environment.

Game developers have started adding things like white paint onto ledges that you can interact with to communicate with players what parts of worlds are interactable. In an old game you did not have to do that because the number of objects a player could see at once was so small that they could easily tell which ones you can interact with, or at last try all of them relatively quickly.

Conclusion

Or course there is always things that can be improved to make the game more readable but there is a limit.
If you want realism you can not have perfect readability.
In real life a lot of military strategies evolve around distracting enemies or hiding from them.
Uniforms had banners, strings, flags or other details added to them that would catch the enemies attention to distract them from attacks.
Puffy uniforms, feathers on helmets and so on could lead the enemy to attack them instead the body of the soldier.

There is a reason why AoE2DE has a popular cube mod. It removes all clutter from the background turning resources into simple cubes for very easy readability.

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The biggest cause of poor readability in Retold are some of the map terrains. There are several god powers and effects which also lack visual clarity. The similar armor on many units and armor upgrade system also causes some visual confusion. These have been covered at length in other topics, hopefully the developers rix this before launch.

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You should make a new thread for every individual terrain texture you dislike to make sure everyone knows.

Terrain that looks realistic can not be super readable.
The best readability would be plain grey terrain with no details.

I’m pretty sure the main issues you have with readability come from stream compression on Twitch/Youtube and not from the actual game. Stuff like grass does compress very badly with most compression algorithms.
Have you ever played the game yourself or are you just interested in watching others play it?

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I think this is more of a habit issue. I for one think the readability in Retold is better than AoM EE, because the last time I played it was ages ago. I’m not saying it’s perfect, less so on green terrain, but better for me in comparison. Also, one shouldn’t expect perfect readability with an extra far camera. You have to close in on the action when necessary.

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100% agreed 20 characters

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Part of the readability problem is the terrain of some of the maps. I’ve gone into it in more detail in another post.

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It is frustrating that here and on reddit people continue to gloss over valid feedback about the graphics. Posts like these are why we will be stuck with the plastic looking buildings, weird animations, and mixed bag when it comes to terrain. Aoe 3 DE and aoe 2 de have great levels of detail and I’ve never had the same reaction to readability as i did when i played the retold beta. This isn’t a brain issue, this is a color issue, color saturation issue, unit scale, lighting, zoom level, etc etc.

One of the firsts post on this forum after the reveal in the winter was " we got the cartoon graphics".

I wish people could be honest that you can at the same time say its a major improvement, while also acknowledging that the graphics are lacking in many areas, readability included. Unfortunately, we have too many people here who are allowed to give their own opinion and patronize everyone else for making their own reasonable opinions about the state of the game.

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The problem with readability mostly comes from stream compression.

Video compression works really bad with busy backgrounds. Especially things like moving grass. It works best with simple static flat backgrounds.
One of the best tricks of video compression is to reuse parts of previous frames, even if they are at a different position on the screen. So if you have a static background it will look very crispy in a stream since it can use data from a previous frame and use all the bandwidth to concentrate on the view parts that changed, like units in that case.
But if the background has things going on like moving grass the stream has to update every part of the screen and therefor has to waste a lot of bandwidth on the background.

All of that is no problem whatsoever if you play the game yourself on your computer since there is little to no compression between your GPU and your monitor. It can easily change every single pixel on the screen in every frame.

Of course it’s always allowed to criticise the things that can be improved but I think many people expect something that is impossible because they don’t really know what they want.
People want super realism but also high readability at the same time without thinking about if it’s possible in the first place.

Wonky animations and stuff like that are neither realistic nor help with readability so they should clearly be improved.

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I wish the devs would do a live Q and A where they could explain their decisions on these things, because to me, some of the answers just seem like, shrug your shoulders, when a lot of people feel like, really? There’s NOTHING that can be improved? I really struggle with the notion that it is impossible when there are all kinds of games, console or PC, RTS or otherwise that look really really good.

I think aoe 3 DE has an art style that is much more on the realism side than aom retold, and the terrain looks vastly better, grass included. So I do think peripheral things like terrain and grass and lighting and color saturation can help to this end. Why does the retold grass look like a poorly textured xbox 360 era far cry style animation?

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Screenshot (5)
Screenshot (5)1920×1080 247 KB

age-of-empires-3-de-mexico-dlc
age-of-empires-3-de-mexico-dlc1920×1080 533 KB

When i look at these two screenshots, I think aoe 3 de has a much better overall clarity to terrain, color, and units

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Is the AoE3 one taken from youtube and from gameplay?

Things to consider:
Game visuals look different from youtube vs. you screenshotting from the game itself.
Also, graphical settings.

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I really wish the developers would communicate more.

Paradox Interactive Studios is so so much better at that.
They make weekly dev blogs over a year before release and then reply to a lot fo posts on the forums long long before release.

No a lot of things can be improved.
I just think most things are ok enough already.

That comes down to taste though tbh.
AoMR has higher quality assets and more advanced rendering, even including ray tracing.
It is just a different art direction.

Though I agree with the animations. Many of them are original so they are older and less advanced then the old AoE3 animations being reused in AoE3DE.

Those screenshots are a bad comparison.
One is taken from s YouTube video with all the bad video compression while the other one is an official promotional material with hand made scenery taking in the highest possible quality.

AoMR has a similar issue as AoE4. The terrain doesn’t work well with the video compression that Youtube or especially Twitch uses so it looks a lot worse there.
But I those games are made to be played and not made to be watched on Twitch.
While actually playing myself I did not have any readability issues in AoMR despite playing it for the first time and having hundreds of hours in AoE3DE.

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I obviously can’t open retold until the 24th, and didn’t feel like starting an aoe3 de game and finding the right shot for comparison.

I guess i am genuinely surprised that people are okay with retold art style. Aoe 2 DE and aoe 3 DE retains the feel and heart of their legacy titles whereas retold in many ways doesn’t really look like aom vanilla.

It is a bummer as I’m not the only one but people don’t seem to be speaking up about it on these forums

I played the beta, not just watching on youtube. I keep hearing about this video compression thing and i feel the same way about terrain when playing or watching on youtube.

They really don’t look vastly different when playing vs a screenshot. I think yall are a little overkill about that.

Its fine if you think the art direction is fine, but i wish people would be honest that it doesn’t really look like legacy aom, where as the other definitive editions looked like an fresh coat of paint with the same art style.

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What makes you think we are lying to ourselves so confidently?

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I think perhaps cos the majority do think it’s looks like legacy AOM just with updated graphics. You say you’re saddened by the lack of people complaining but perhaps this is because most people are indeed satisfied bar a few tweaks here and there?

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A lot of modern games use anti aliasing that’s basically a blur filter over everything. This is performance friendlier than the clean, crisp anti aliasing methods of earlier games. I assume, this also makes an impact.

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I didn’t say anyone is lying i’m saying that when playing the game vs looking at a screenshot it doesn’t look that different, and so the comments about video compression seem a bit overkill.

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I don’t think most people are satisfied, there have been many posts on reddit and on these forums, comments on youtube, and facebook, even in lobbies on extended edition where people say they feel the terrain looks off, buildings look plastic like, and that the color saturation is off.

It is not a minority of people who think think the art style does not look like legacy aom. Any objective person could compare aoe 2 to aoe 2 de and aoe 3 and aoe 3 de compared to retold and vanilla aom and it is very clear that aoe 2 and 3 de’s both have a closer match to their legacy titles art styles.

There are many things that look good in retold, but that doesn’t mean the art style is faithful to legacy, because it simply is not. They went with a more non realistic look, that is closer to aoe 4 and age of empires online. That is fine if other people like that for retold, but lets try to be honest and admit that it doesn’t really match legacy aom art style.

Go look at the reveal video from the winter when they had the hologram giant pegasus. You cannot tell me it doesn’t look plastic like and just not quite the art style of vanilla

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Once the 24th rolls around i will put max settings on aoe 3 de and retold, and do a comparison video. Try zooming in on grass on retold, vs zooming in grass on aoe 3 de. Aoe 3 de grass looks so much nicer, crisp, detailed and clean

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That is an opinion, an opinion I don’t agree with.

I’m not saying that AoMR is perfect by any means but I do think it looks amazing in my eyes but I also think AoE3DE looks amazing.

If I have more time with the game and especially the Editor, where I can look into the details and see what’s possible I might be able to decide which one looks better.
But atm I think I already prefer AoMR over AoE3DE and I can’t even max out the graphics without the frames going too low, I have to run AoMR without ray tracing.

One of the reasons why AoMR looks more different is because the technology gap is bigger.
AoE3 was more modern then AoM while AoE3DE is less modern then AoMR.
So the difference in graphics is bigger.

Some things like the colour of water and so on are down to taste.
All of the Definitive Editions changed the colour palette of the game to some degree.

You can choose between different methods though.

The goal of a beta is to collect feedback so everyone who doesn’t like something will post about it.
I don’t think there is a single style that could exist that would make everyone happy.
If the colour palette would be closer to the original there would likely be more people complaining about how unrealistic it looks.
There is no style everyone is happy with.

So yes it doesn’t just look exactly like AoM but high detail because it doesn’t want to and not everyone what’s AoMR to be that close to the original.
AoMR and all the Definitive Editions are not just made for old fans they are also made to attract new players.
And also not all old fans automatically prefer everything to be kept as close to the original as possible. There are many things people did not like about the original, like there are always things people don’t like in any game.

But what “faithful” means is still down to personal opinion.
I think it’s very faithful to the original but doesn’t just blindly copy everything.

That is a bad example because it’s a 3D model from a game that was shown in a completely different setting.
AoMR does not look like real life and the art style of the original AoM is even farther away from real life.

The way Hollywood does 3D is very different from how games do 3D so just putting game models into the real world doesn’t look good.

I never thought that any units in AoMR look out of place or plastic when I played it nor on any footage or screenshots I saw.

Why the 24th?
The game release on September 4th with up to 7 days advanced access for Premium Edition owners which would be 28th earliest.