The game was released, it’s fully playable. But as with, well, every game or piece of software ever released… especially ones over the past two decades… there are bugs that will need to be addressed, and they’re working on them. Plus, this isn’t just built for one console, Xbox or Playstation, with much more predictable tech; it’s for a wide range of PC configuration combinations. Of course it’s not going to be perfect. Not to mention the global release of the game where it’s obvious they want it playable on PC hardware that’s even 5-10 years old.
There are bugs galore in Fallout 4, GTA5, RDR2, Witcher 3, Battlefield games, etc. and they’ve been out a long time. They were, apparently, sold as “finished”(?) and yet years later they still have issues. I can’t imagine what they were like on release day, as I didn’t buy them until years after they came out because I didn’t want to pay full price and waited for steep discounts. I’m not sure what a game being sold “finished” means to you, but it’s rare if not impossible for a game to be perfectly perfect in every way, shape, and form upon release.
Besides, they freely admit they want to hear from the community and evolve the game… here are a couple excerpts from their post the other day:
I’m sorry you’re not happy with the game or that it doesn’t meet your standards of “finished” state, or that the game being malleable to the point where they want to evolve it with our support, but it is what it is. You can wait until it, hopefully, reaches a state you’re happy with, or just bypass entirely and keep playing past AoE games if you like those, I suppose.
Personally, I’m glad they’re not taking a stance of, “Here is the game we wanted to make, now take it or leave it. Here’s a patch to address a few post-launch issues… now, byeeeee for two decades!”
I wish. But, no, please don’t mistake positivity, realism, patience, and hope as paid-for propaganda. What about all the criticizers? (Which has been 99% of posts in the forum for 4 solid years?) Your argument is like me saying, “Oh, the Total War franchise must be paying people to flood the AoE forum to bash AoE4.” Wow, 2% of posts are positive here, I’m terribly sorry to disappoint you and go against the grain
Please talk about the game, and not poke jabs at people, okay? It’s against forum rules to attack or make fun of the people posting anyways
Developers say this about literally every game, even those that get abandoned shortly after. Not saying this is what is in store for AoE4, may it have a long and successful run, but I wouldn’t bet on it just because the PR department issued a statement about it.
Fair enough. I guess we’ll see!
But we’ve seen firsthand all the naysayers about AoE2:DE and how that was doomed… and early on, as if no more patches would ever come out. Yet they’ve done patch after patch to try and keep improving the game, as well as event after event. So far, with AoE, in general, their original words (like 4 years ago) of how they want to bring back AoE and continually evolve the games over time has come to fruition.
This is a terrible metric for two reasons. One, not many people are able to accurately perceive developer effort. Two, people lie.
Games cost money because they cost money to make. If you want to pretend it cost less money to make just to justify your own belief that it should cost less money for you to buy it, you can do so. But that’s not “definitely” anything.
EDIT
It really bugs me when people cite DoW III in this regard. It’s ahistorical. Arguably, it’s bad faith.
DoW III got around eight months of dedicated support. Pretty much immediately after release they abandoned their previous post-release plans to work on content the community explicitly asked for.
They did all this for free.
They recognised community concerns and did all they could with the resources they had to improve it.
I mean, I agree with not putting your faith in PR. But your quoted statement was accurate and was followed up on by the studio, so I really don’t like you insinuating the opposite occurred.
Is there any triple A game from an established series that didn’t have post launch support for 8 freakin months? and for free!!! Thank you Relic, for not having us pay for every patch you released like… checks the data… like nobody else has ever done in the history of games!
Your ability to spin them not focusing on paid DLC, just to do what they should be doing anyway which is fix the game, as something that should be lauded is practically astounding.
I thought CarryPotter was joking about people being paid to be here, but now I am not so certain.
as a new user it looks the opposite to me, i joined this forum hoping that it will have some interesting discussions but all i’m seeing is the same posts complaining about that same thing over and over and arguing in a bad faith.
We are too busy playing and having fun to have interesting discussions.
Here’s an interesting discussion, for my first online game I just had a Mongol player try to tower rush me. And the sad thing for me is that he almost won doing that.
The fun thing about the first few days of an RTS launch is that almost everything works (especially on me). If you have a plan and can execute it, it will probably work.
by this token, the drawing of your mom & dad you did when you were 4 should be worth $10k cuz it’s antique + a lot of hours put into it + unique + you judge that it’s worth at least $10k. No, the market gets to judge how much a product is worth, not the company. This is the fundamental premise of a capitalistic economy. If you can’t create a marketable product, you should go out of the market, not artificially inflate the price and pretend the product is AAA when it’s not, that’s called scamming (I exaggerate here, I don’t think we are quite there yet with this game, but it certainly goes a bit in that direction with the $60 price tag).
I am not a naysayer though. I base my opinion on evidence. Subjective evidence as a thought like “bad textures” might be, it’s still not “just hate for the franchise” as you are trying to sell it.
The game is bad according to fairly objective criteria. Something like, for example, bow strings not being pulled when an arrow is fired, breaks immersion objectively. The question is then, how low are you willing to set the bar, but even those who set the bar very low know that in an ideal world, the bowstring is pulled (just an example of course, I could make others like the Chinese “agent” figuring as an idle villager, on top of having very similar clothes to a villager, something even TheViper has complained about in his recent video).
''We’ve played multiplayer matches all hours of the day and night — all across the globe — to ensure that you’ll have a great experience when you’re ready for a game. ‘’
Then why do we hear Winter, Drongo and many others say that these gameplay mechanics are clearly desinged by someone who never played the game or they never played it to test the performance. THe multiplayer problems are so evident that its impossible to miss or ignore them. I wouldn’t trust their words. These are typical interviews and talks we see from everyone.
As @Green4uu said, not only visually but both. Even gameplay wise, aoe4 doesn’t do a great job as seen with many problems users are facing. I have seen many get bored within an hour, this shouldn’t happen with Triple A games.
I think the main two reasons are the lack of competition in RTS and the huge IP AoE holds with a really positive reputition they build over the past 2+ decades.
Everyone’s mileage will vary. I’ve played plenty of AAA games where I get bored within an hour
I’m not sure. I’ve never heard of Winter, and have only seen one commentary video from Drongo months ago, so I don’t know if they’re like tournament pros like Viper, or what. (I only know a couple eSport pro players… Viper… T90?.. and one more I can’t think the name of.) Either way, maybe AoE4 was designed for normal players and it works for normal players, and just needs some adjustments to help make sure it quenches the thirst of the handful of elite players, too? I played a few games during Tech Stress, and it seemed functional and fun enough to me at the time, and had an AoE vibe… and I’ve played thousands of hours of AoE over the years. I’m no elite eSport player, though
Sorry if my words misrepresented anything. I actually don’t think I was calling you a naysayer; as I’m pretty sure you haven’t stated one way or another whether or not you think they’ll continue to do dev-work on AoE4.
My ‘naysayer’ comment was actually directly applying to a brief conversation Jehovahkin1 and I had about dev promises post-launch. I gave a screenshot showing the devs’/studios’ commitment to AoE4; Jehovahkin1 posted a screenshot showing a similar commitment that was made in the past for DoW3, that, apparently, never came to full fruition(?). (I’m not familiar with DoW games or their backstory.) It was a surprisingly similar quote, for sure! But I was just saying AoE4 will likely be different than DoW3, as evidenced by the commitment Microsoft shared about the franchise about 4 years ago, and all the updates and events that have come out for AoE2:DE so far. Some AoE2:DE naysayers felt early on that it would never get patched, and that the devs didn’t care about the game or what the community said now that it launched, etc., etc. I’m paraphrasing the early days of AoE2:DE and probably exaggerating a little since it was years ago, but it was something to that effect.
Deluxe edition is utter disrespect to anyone who bought it. Its contents are almost non-existent and not really useful except for soundtracks. Probably the worst Digital Deluxe Edition in a game ever!
I didn’t say it was unusual. I didn’t say other games haven’t had similar support.
You’re the one who made it look like the studio didn’t listen to consumer feedback. They did, and completely abandoned all existing post-launch support plans to make that happen.
That’s all. You can still be unhappy with the game. Nobody’s saying you can’t. But I draw the line at misinformation.
As usual you are practicing misdirection, nobody claimed Dawn of War 3 had 0 post launch support. I said even games that get abandoned shortly after (and a game that drops all plans for future DLC almost immediately and drops any kind of support as little as 8 months later counts as a game that was abandoned shortly after release), will still have the usual PR schpiel of “we have only just begone!”, it doesn’t mean anything.
More importantly, we are discussing the practice of releasing a game as WIP, Dawn of War 3 is the perfect example of why not to do it, you abandon any plans for actual DLC (so you don’t throw good money after bad) and by the time you catch up to what should have been the game on release (not that they ever did), you already lost 90% of the player base so it’s impossible to save.
It really doesn’t inspire faith in this discussion for you to trot out a story about a theoretical drawing I made when I was young.
That didn’t cost money to make. Nobody was billing me for that time. It wasn’t for consumption.
The market does decide to an extent, yes. It decides by people buying the game, or not. Currently I’d argue the market is deciding “yes it is”. Which is why it’s funny that you’re making the claim that the price is being inflated. That’s on you to prove, yeah?
And I don’t think you can. You can say you don’t like it, that you wouldn’t pay the money. Nothing wrong with that. But you can’t say anything more than that.
If you want to discuss capitalism, let’s discuss how video game prices have basically not shifted at all, accounting for inflation. Let’s theory game that particular exercise.
Not misdirection at all. You’re the one who said “shortly after”. Eight months isn’t a short amount of time, in my opinion. We’re not discussing live service games here.
If you don’t want to be misinterpreted, clarify ahead of time. There are plenty of bad faith accounts of DoW III’s support and I’ll always speak out against them. Anyone using DoW III as a point in “support” arguments is a red flag, because they often misconstrue the effort that was put in. Not that I’m saying yours are now, sorry. Just explaining my reasoning to this point.
Saving the headache that is “WIP game” for another time, I agree that Relic should’ve stuck to their guns (if that’s what you’re getting at).
Relic was facing blowback that made some of the more volatile discussions here look like bastions of well-reasoned, good faith critique. As such, I can understand their pivot. It’s not what I would’ve chosen to do, but there are obviously things that I don’t know that would’ve factored into it.
Ignore the PR. Just look at the numbers.
AoE4 has nearly 3x the peek players compared to DoW3. And that’s just on Steam.
Many people likely play AoE4 though gamepass or just Microsoft store, while DoW3 was only released on Steam as far as I know.
Also AoE4 has 83% positive ratings while DoW3 has 47%.
On top of that DoW3 was publshied by Sega and AoE4 is published by Microsoft.
You can basically ignore anything they did with DoW3.
The decision how long a game will be supported is usually made by the publisher. The publisher could even go get a different studio to support the game in the future.
Compounding misdirection with another misdirection. Is there another triple A, non Gaas from a well established series, that had less support than DoW3?
There is nothing I need to clarify. Dawn of War 3 is single handedly the best example of why you shouldn’t take PR Schpiel seriously. If you want to misrepresent their purely economic decision to abandon any investment into future DLC for this game as some sort of altruistic decision to refocus their resources on fixing the game instead then that’s on you. Nobody is silly enough to buy it. Every game has it’s first few patches fix what the consumers biggest issues are, it doesn’t require abandoning future plans, unless you plan to abandon the game entirely shortly after, which obviously they were, since they did.
You’re always ignoring the important parts of the discussion and run us down some irrelevant road. So at least let’s go down an interesting irrelevant road. How does one consider DoW2 to be his favorite RTS when DoW1 is a thing that exists? I have been losing sleep ever since you mentioned it in our last discussion. I mean, there is no base building. You are limited to like 7 units in a map. It’s a horrid mishmash of RTS/RPG/Looter where you go around with 4 hero units and spam the health potion like we’re playing Diablo. I’ll honestly say I enjoyed Dawn of War 3 on release more than Dawn of War 2 even after it’s many years of support but Dawn of War 1 blows both of them clear out of the water.
