Age of Empires IV

There’s some responsiveness issues with both games compared to Age 2 - 2D games are kind of WYSIWYG of responsiveness, 3D games tend to have a bunch of control and pathing issues that just don’t occur with 3D. I can definitely tell that responsiveness ect in Age of Mythology aren’t as snickity-snick tight as in Age 2… but to a degree, it’s less important because of the pacing and scale of Mythology. Age 3 tends to be at range and in formation so pathing ect are less noticed… but charge a mass of cav into melee and you do see some less than optimal bumping. To some extent this didn’t matter because both games had enough high-level, catass gamer only issues that they were just not competitive with Age 2 in multiplayer / higher level AI skirmish, so ordinary players didn’t care. They also balanced the melee units so that even if they were bumping around they’d have the armor/hp to do some work.

Age 4 just feels, man, that skirmish game felt like Baby Devs First Steps into 3D. At this point with the pedigree of everyone involved it’s not a feeling anyone should be having in 2021.

I don’t like what I’ve seen in gameplay videos so far although I can’t quite put my finger on why that is. Something just doesn’t click for me.

Playing the game doesn’t feel any better. It feels really janky.

For me a big part of it comes down to the animation. To put it bluntly, it sucks for the year 2018, let alone 2021. There are only 8 directions you can go, it’s not fluid at all, so it feels robotic. There’s hardly any animations they perform, and the graphics are pretty underwhelming to boot. Feels like a minimum effort job by their graphical department.

I’ve been wondering if it is a consequence of the game being built on the same engine that Relic uses for Company of Heroes. This is a lot more units than they’ve ever had to deal with since there is a potential of 1600 in an 8 player game.

Maybe. But considering what CA accomplishes with Warhammer Total War, it doesn’t feel very acceptable.

Played a whole bunch more today and I’ve got to say, unless this has a fantastic campaign, this is going to be a really boring game.

@vyshka how do you feel about the game? Wondering if I’m being too harsh.

To me from what I played in the Beta in August and a little bit yesterday, it is an average rts. Part of their problem is the expectation everyone has due to the history of the series, and I doubt anyone they chose to develop it could live up to that. I’m not sure a studio exists today that could live up to it. You have AoE2 fans complaining it is an AoE3 clone, and AoE3 fans complaining it is an AoE2 clone. We’ll see what the Blizzard refugees are capable of at Frost Giant. Outside of Frost Giant, and Relic there aren’t many studios left. I’m not sure Blizzard even has an rts team at this point. Petroglyph seems to be stuck in shipping mediocre titles for quite a while now.

The graphics don’t bother me much, but I can see how people would be disappointed it isn’t more. My main complaint there would be things looking a bit washed out. We still haven’t had a chance to play 2 of the civs to see how they will fit in, but I will need more time with the civs to really get a feel for the asymmetry. Definitely not at the Starcraft level. I don’t think I tried the Mongols in the beta, which was probably the most different of the civs available then. It seems to be quicker paced than the earlier titles. You will age up quicker, and town centers never have to stop pumping out villagers to expand your economy. A lot of people are upset about not being able to change all sorts of hotkeys, but that hasn’t bothered me greatly. The grid setup plus the function keys to jump between building types became comfortable pretty quickly. I wonder how much longevity it will have. It feels like the meta could be figured out fairly quickly, because it doesn’t seem nearly as deep as AoE2. It will probably do well enough that World’s Edge keeps it going, but I wonder if it will do well enough that they will follow it up with something, and what kind of studio will they have in place to make that game happen. Relic is already moving on to CoH3. They’ve previously talked about revisiting the Age of Mythology IP, so I hope it does well enough that they follow through and bring out another AoM title.

I’ve had fun playing around with it, so a lot of my feelings could be colored by my feelings for the previous titles. Someone coming into new could think it is wonderful.

Thanks, that pretty much mirrors my feelings too. My gameplay complaint is it feels very shallow.

It’s just weird to me that after playing my first thought was a desire to fire up Age of Empires 3! That’s probably not a good sign.

It’s never a good desire when Age of Empire 2 and Age of Mythology are available.

Oh i mostly play Age 2 … i mean, literally, it’s basically my main game for spending time with just in general, even between Humankind and Old World. At this point in it’s development and at this point in my life it offers something like infinite content. (Though admittedly i’m digging Humankind right now).

But the vibe, scale and pacing of Age 4 feels most like Age 3… and right now if i’m choosing between Age 4 and Age 3 - from the preview only! - I’m leaning toward Age 3.

It’s also because i’ve been pretty harsh about Age 3 over the years… but if this represents the evolution of Age, honestly, Age 3 feels pretty shiny by comparison.

I only got to play a little bit of the last beta of Age of Empires 4. It had some many of the features of Age of Empires 2, despite the graphics.
The mill, the villager drop off, the unit types.

But if the game play is faster, I guess that would make it much more similar to Age of Empires 3. Also, how aging works is closer to Age of Empires 3.

That being said, I’m currently binging through the Red Bull Tournament, which has my current favorite setting of Empire Wars.

Despite the fact that I can do it these days without any trouble, I dislike Boars and there role in AoE 2.

Boars give you something to do and worry about. In a way boars are a strange sort of genius that’s hard for modern developers to understand.

That said Age 2 is basically balanced for Arabia, and Arabia settings turned out kind of by sheer volume of choice to be the most competitive and balanced. Give each player 20 boars - the sort of map balance you see in Age 3 - and suddenly Age 2 is a much less interesting game.

It’s just make work.

I still need to watch the part of the quarterfinals and the last day. Sounds like there were some amazing series.

Anyone try to take a boar in Age 4? It would probably be shocking for an aoe2 player. I haven’t bothered with them yet.

I’ve gotten up to Day 3. That’s with skipping interviews, and fast forwarding all the forgone conclusions that sometimes occurs in the last 5 to 10 minutes of the game.

There just is too much to watch.

What’s this about a boar? I only saw one and just ignored it. Are they special? Just thought it was a deer type element that could nip your toes.