What if other competitive and high-level players don’t agree with all the criticisms presented? I’m sure they’d agree with some of it, no doubt, but what you’re “wishing” for here is for people who like aspects of the game to magically stop liking them, and I doubt that’s going to happen.
Looook, you jest sire.
OFC they won’t.
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What? This is mostly about missing features.
I won’t argue with you here.
But look at the launch trailer. It shows how they are aiming the game at people who have never played any RTS before.
While you may think that aiming the game at hard-core RTS players is the way to go, I think Microsoft thinks the other way. They know that the casual player stays away from the RTS genre, so they want to make RTS easy, so that casuals want to play as well without getting scared off by a steep learning curve.
People aren’t talking about subjective design choices like homing arrows or zoom levels. They’re talking about basic functionality like being able to remap their hot keys the way they want like any other RTS.
Nearly every single pro has expressed frustration around the hot keys in streams already. There’s also frustration raised about general responsiveness of units and hitboxes that are hit and miss.
I don’t think those are too much to ask from a AAA game from one of the most revered RTS series of all time. We can’t even choose a friggin’ player colour lmao. Imagine if previous entries released like this with no ability to patch digitally.
Hopefully they get resolved in future patches…but I absolutely detest the way game company’s think its okay to release games unfinished with a ‘roadmap’ to improve. Its just greed and laziness from the studios - gotta hit those quarterly targets after all.
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They tried that twice already with Halo Wars (simple gameplay to tap into the console market) and AOEO (that juicy micro transaction money of the browser-gaming wave).
Some people just don’t learn : P
All the points we go on and on about here, and which WinterGaming also adresses extensively, are also bad for casuals (zoom, production queue, hard to dientify and control stuff). It’s by no means pro-exclusive stuff.
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Again, you are just excusing quality of life changes beeing deleted that were beeing done over the past 2 decades in RTS games, which were makeing the RTSs easier to play over time.
Exactly because of these control issues, bad ui, unclear visual responsiveness, and so on, you are required to have more APM on AoE4 to play the game on similar speed.
It is literally harder to play and to grasp.
Not just for pro players, for everyone.
Especially ppl with low APM are going to have issues with that.
You are just making bad excuses as if a polished game or good designed control layout is somehow only something tournament winners benefit from, which is utter nonsens.
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I’ve got no issue with them aiming the game at casuals to bring a bigger audience - absolutely fine and probably the best way to go.
I do have an issue with missing / underdeveloped features that hinder more precise gameplay for those that want it, and that wouldn’t impact casual gameplay in any way.
It would be the same as me being useless at Battlefield or CoD, and the developers putting in auto aim for all players. Better for me but lowers the skill ceiling of the whole game.
Just my 2 cents anyway.
So what you’re saying is the few issues that there is competitive consensus around, the competitive players have already highlighted it?
You do see my point, right?
I’m guessing they already highlighted well before now, probably pre beta, and still not addressed.
Us consumers need to take responsibility for some of this by not just accepting undercooked releases, or throwing our toys out of the cot if a game gets delayed.
Actually the UI and QoL issues I do acknowledge.
I’m simply saying that just because it’s an RTS doesn’t mean it has to be made with a competitive player in mind.
I myself had lots of issues with the UI when I played the stress test… so I know what you mean.
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But I’m not discussing what consumers need to accept or not. All I did was reply to the OP about the language they chose, which I felt was a bit divisive considering competitive players are allowed to a) like the game, b) criticise the game, c) dislike the game and d) not criticise the game. There are valid reasons for all four stances (or a combination thereof).
You can disagree with people, perhaps, about the quality of the game at release. But if folks can’t understand that there are valid reasons why people might be happy, that’s not going to help in the same way denying there are things that can be improved wouldn’t help.
We are not talking about subjective design decisions like the way you balance out a game or visual design (do we make 3d or 2d sprite based games).
We talk about something that objectivly can be analyzed as “good” or “bad” for the player.
Zoom level, controls, ui layout, hotkey remapping are all things you can point out and say: these things are crippling the player.
Not tournament players, ALL players.
Again, noobs that don’t have at least 100-200 apm will suffer the most from constantly having to move the camera in a siege situation, they suffer the most from unclear layouts in the UI and so on.
I heavily start to repeat myself here, but I get triggered when I see ppl defending literally everything relic has done here into full “everything is relativ and nothing means anything, objectivity is dead” absurd stuff instead of recognizing mistakes and having a will to grow and do good as a game.
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You see how this is total nonsens then?
You bring quality of life and good designchoices on crucial parts such as controls in line of “high apmers” even tho this raises the bar of “apm necessary” to play the game.
And that’s totally fine.
Winter didn’t really talk that much about the competitive playing anyway, rather watching it with the UI and visual clarity, and general menu/control layout issues.
Otherwise I would’ve expected him to go way more into the lack of micro potential of units in the game, since there is basically no spellcasting, just auto attacking units without dodge/micro potential or high impact situations.
It’s more about what you bring to the table, rather than playing out situations and how you outplay your oponent which makes it by nature casual.
It’s less scarier to get into but also doesn’t give players a potential to grow in this aspect.
That would’ve been critizism for competitive play.
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Fair enough, I didn’t think OP was particularly divisive but just trying to articulate the games shortcomings. Ironically I think the things mentioned would make it easier for a casual audience rather than harder.
I don’t think this is a casual vs pro debate on features, more of everyone just wants to pull this game up to what we know it can be for everyone.
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Hey, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying the game doesn’t have things that can’t be improved on, or that Relic shouldn’t add more things to give players more / better options.
I was commenting on the OP’s phrasing about how they wished that more competitive players voiced an opinion. Competitive players evidently do. The OP’s problem is that some of these opinions are positive about the game, as far as I can tell.
No, OPs problem is that most of these players just dont care and will return to their respective games after the launch wave, rather than putting the effort to voice some feedback.
Answering to all those who commented on my post, quoted part of it or directly answered to it 
Thanks for your replies. Here are some clarifications.
I admit that I was a bit extreme when I spoke about the 1 % of very competitive players. And also when I said that the reviewer didn’t speak to me. Of course, the number of competitive players, who will be playing ranked MP games, is much more than 1 % (but certainly lower than some figures I’ve seen in these answers). And I admit that quite a few of the things he said are important to me.
I agree with most people here on quite a few things that should be corrected (for example better zoom, better UI, the possibility to pause in MP games, better lisibility of the units (Is it a spearman or a long sword?)…).
I reacted to what looked like another list of complaints (although I observed that I liked the review and found the reviewer honest). In fact I probably reacted to his score of 6/10. I believe that this game deserves better than that. 7,5? 8? and I believe that this score will go up as patches will correct some of the defects of the game. But I also believe that most players, including a bunch of competitive players, will give a better score to this game than 6/10. It looked harsh to me and gave me the impression that the reviewer was speaking not to the community, but to a small numbers of very top players.
This being said, as the reviewer said himself : quite a few of the wrong things about this game are easy to solve. So, let’s hope that the devs listen to us and make the necessary modifications. I think that this game has a great potential. It could improve greatly, but all will depends on the post launch support (patches, DLCs, expansion). Remember that all the numerous complaints about AOK just started to go away after the release of the Conquerors expansion. Nobody seems to remember the first year of AOK. Everybody loves The Conquerors.
(AOK was more polish from the start than AOE4, but still attracted a lot of complaints related to gameplay, The infamous TC rushes for example)
I may be naive, but I still hope for the best.
3 hours to go …
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Seeing how people on this forum can defend the lack of some options with “It’s okay. I don’t need them anywhay”, when those who need it ask for it, is kind of mind-blowing.
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Yep most AOE2 pros I’ve seen like the game and say they were pleasantly surprised by it and doubters should give it a chance.