RTS Age of Empires IV - Medieval Again

[hello friend]

It's almost a straight upgrade, and it'll only get better as they work out the remaining kinks.

 

[LESS T_T]

 

[LESS T_T]

 

[fantadomat]

It looks pretty good.

 

[AgentFransis]

So it's AoE2 HD HD HD? Except it looks worse as beautiful sprites are replaced by fugly 3d. Migrating Mongols is pretty cool though.

I predict a spike of interest but the community and the pro scene ultimately staying with AoE2 DE.

 

[Digital Monocle]

Finally a worthy AoE successor. 3 was the biggest pile of dog shit ever

 

[Deflowerer]

Yeah, people will go back to AoE2 DE and this will kind of bomb.

Relic will be shuttered and/or sold off.

 

[Alfgart]

Looks like shit tbh

 

[Belegarsson]

It looks fine but at the same time it feels like AoE 2 remake with less vibrant graphics and weird arrow animation. The Civ 6-ish unit models look so out of place compared to the environment and buildings :/

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

I give this a "not even trying" rating. And again: wtf are they even doing releasing this 2021 when AoE2 is super-popular? MS, please hire me as a business development manager for your pc gaming branch, I really think we can agree terms quickly and I can do a decent job compared to the numpty you have sitting there currently.

 

[Multidirectional]

Original AOE III with crappy Bloom disabled looks way better than this, wtf.

 

[Morgoth]

Quite the graphical downgrade from 2019's teaser.

Remakes and Downgrades - "Power your Dreams"

 

[vota DC]

Finally a worthy AoE successor. 3 was the biggest pile of dog shit ever

The funny thing is AOE3 gave the mechanic that would make Samurai useful in AOE2 (switching from melee to range) to do their job and kill unique units but in Aoe3 Samurai were a totally different unit and were melee only again.
Mechanic wise AOE 3 was terrible....I mean units could have armor to cannons, melee and ranged but only ONE at time. If by modding you wanted a cavalry that destroy cannons but get butchered by pikemen then it would be vulnerable to cannons and every ranged unit....you could give a attack penalty against this unit but then you had to edit every unit and was a pain while AOE 2 modding with advanced genieditor was easier. Also they eliminated friendly fire.....some artillery combo were already invincible in aoe 2, in aoe 3 the problem is even worse.

 

[Alienman]

Lots of danger hairs in the videos, so expecting anything else than shit is too much.

 

[Shrimp]

Looks like AOE II 2 but with mobile/tablet graphics. Why should I play this instead of AOE II?

 

[Digital Monocle]

Looks like AOE II 2 but with mobile/tablet graphics. Why should I play this instead of AOE II?

We'll have to wait and see, I do agree that AoE 4 is redundant after the AoE 2 DE. Maybe just redo 3 from scratch and erase that monstrosity from existence.

 

[Young_Hollow]

They still have monks in it, although I don't know if they can convert. Conversion was/ is one of the cheesiest things in AoE2 and to keep that would be a major lack of spine. And they've struggled to balance elephants wherever they added them in AoE2 so hopefully they don't carry over too much of their design philosophy. AoE3 was at least different and trying to take a different direction, this just seems like Aoe2 with Fortnite graphics.

 

[Narushima]

Why does it look like Empire Earth?

although I don't know if they can convert

(click it, video will play at relevant time)

 

[Silva]

Age of Retardos.

 

[karoliner]

After Company of Heroes 2 i don't want to touch a campaign made by Relic ever again.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/age-of-empi...ions-naval-combat-and-4-historical-campaigns/

Age of Empires 4 is coming this fall with asymmetric factions, naval combat, and 4 historical campaigns
Looking good, AOE4. Looking real good.

I mean it as a compliment when I say Age of Empires 4 looks like Age of Empires 2. It may be 20 years newer and 3D instead of 2D, but one look at the blue splotches on buildings and the peasants working the fields catapulted me back to my old obsession with building armies of Teutonic knights who would lumber across the battlefield like better-dressed Terminators killing anything in their path.

"We knew we wanted to make a modern version of Age, but we also wanted to make a game that felt like Age of Empires and would be immediately relatable to the core community," game director Quinn Duffy said at a recent roundtable, where members of the AOE 4 team talked about the game in-depth for the first time.

I got a preview of the Age of Empires fan livestream Microsoft ran this Saturday, which only included a few minutes of AOE 4 in motion and a few hard details.

Three big things fans will want to know about right away: the plan is to launch with eight civilizations (largely from Europe and Asia, but not exclusively), there will be four campaigns tracing the histories of some of those civilizations, and naval combat is in. I would've liked to see a lot more of AOE4, but the short glimpses I got were still enough to pick up on how many changes can fall under the umbrella of modern.

The terrain is gorgeous and takes full advantage of being 3D, with dramatic cliffs and hills that will give an advantage in combat. Units in each civilization now speak their own native tongue—or, rather, tongues. "Playing a civ like the English, they start off and are very hard to understand in the first age. By the time you hit age four they're actually speaking Old English and you can understand what the units are saying," said creative director Adam Isgreen. "Instead of doing any kind of translation, when you play the Chinese, you're going to learn some Chinese, because your units are all going to be talking to you in that language. That goes for all the languages and cultures in the game."

Each civilization's musical theme will become more complex and layered as you advance. The whole world will even become more vibrant and saturated as you progress out of the dark ages and approach the Renaissance.

Age of Empires 2 was a great looking RTS for its time, and I still love its dense isometric art, but I think I'll probably lose my first Age of Empires 4 match by spending too long at maximum zoom, admiring the details on each building.

"Houses are different from each age," art director Zach Schlappi said. "The modeling actually changes, the textures change. It reflects the narrative: In age one you have almost primitive-looking buildings and structures using very basic materials. As you go through ages one, two, three, four, these buildings grow and become more elaborate and more decorative, reflecting the technological refinements of each civ."

There are still generic units shared between factions, because AOE4's developers decided to retain the triangle of cavalry, ranged units, and pikemen core to series' combat. But, broadly, civilizations are more distinct from one another, or, as game designers love to say, "asymmetrical." The Mongols, for example, can pack up all their buildings and move them, something the English aren't about to do with a stone castle. During the roundtable I also got quick looks at the Chinese and Delhi Sultanate, the other two confirmed civilizations. Each has its own aesthetic, down to the architecture and clothes on workers in the fields.

"So much time has passed, and other strategy games have evolved and iterated how RTS works," said Isgreen. He pointed to some major additions in Age 4, like units being able to hide in forests to pull off ambushes. Units can now man the walls around a city to fight off attacks, making sieges more complex and suitably dramatic.

Empires at war
After spending much of the last decade playing games in the Total War series, though, Age of Empires still looks like a throwback to me. Total War's battles let you bring in thousands of troops and play at something resembling real strategy—just getting the high ground and being able to charge your spearmen downhill instead of up can make a huge difference. The scale of Total War is on another level. In Age of Empires 4, a unit of pikemen looks like three men instead of 100, and cavalry seem to gallop up to an infantry line and then sit there dueling instead of smashing through it in a realistic show of physics.

Total War's combat definitely leans towards simulation, and Age of Empires 4 probably isn't trying to be that. I don't think it has to be, but I wonder how different its battles will feel from old real-time strategy games, which have fallen out of fashion in the last decade. Maybe the fidelity will be enough to make AOE4 captivating—there's a special feeling that RTS games can give you when they look this beautiful, as if you're a god marveling at all of creation from above (and occasionally reaching down to make the tiny people do your bidding).

Total War does have giant battles, but otherwise I don't think it has much of what makes Age of Empires so fun: creating a city building-by-building, watching it come to life, and encircling it with an immense wall. Sending scouts into enemy camps to torment their peasants. The increasing challenge of juggling a growing city and army that you only get in real time. You can't turtle up in Total War, but there was nothing better than turtling behind a wall in Age of Empires and chewing your way through the tech tree.

The asymmetry between civilizations is what tantalizes me most. The developers held back most specific details, but I did learn that civs will get different bonuses for building cities and landmarks, on top of tweaks to basic systems like trade, research, and production. There are also outright unique features and units, like the Sultanate's war elephants. Where the English are meant to be "comfortable" and familiar, the Mongols and some yet-to-be-named civs "really push the boundaries of what Age of Empires has done before in terms of how your civilizations play," said Isgreen.

"[Eight civilizations] is where we're starting. The detail we're putting into the civilizations and the focus on making them more unique—you can imagine there's a reason StarCraft had three factions the entire time, because doing asymmetrical balance gets massively complicated. For us, starting with eight is a big endeavor, and then we're going to keep expanding."

Age of Empires 4's four planned campaigns also sound ambitious: instead of focusing on individual historical figures they'll tackle a longer view of the civilization's history. The Norman campaign begins with William the Conqueror, then moves to the conflict between his children Henry I and Robert II, and then their children, and then their children, over the course of more than a century.

"You get the whole story of the Norman conquest, from the time this ambitious duke made his way across the channel and said 'this is mine,' all the way to the point where you're signing the Magna Carta and laying the foundations of what England is today," said narrative lead Philippe Boulle. "We bridge the gap between missions with these wonderful historical films. We worked with documentarians to go to all kinds of locations like Hastings and Dover, where these events happened. And that's just one of the four campaigns we're shipping with."

Four years after it was announced, Age of Empires 4 is finally out in fall 2021, but it should be playable sooner—a closed beta is on the way before launch.

 

[Ibn Sina]

Looks nice. I hope gameplay is as nice as it looks.

 

[Shrimp]

I'm kind of suspicious about the plan to launch with only eight factions. It reeks of DLC bait and paid unlocks.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

They're going for more unique factions so that's going to be the official explanation.
And I'm not sure I'd count on this game getting some huge post-release support.

 

[Shrimp]

Post-release support will definitely heavily depend on how well the game performs sales wise. They're definitely aware of what people associate the Age of Empires title with and that they shouldn't deviate too far from the original design and gameplay ("We knew we wanted to make a modern version of Age, but we also wanted to make a game that felt like Age of Empires and would be immediately relatable to the core community,") but I'm just personally not entirely convinced that AoE4 will be unique enough to actually be able to get its own identity compared to AoE2 which is where most of the aforementioned core players are.
I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up being one of the type of games that sells a sufficient amount of copies on release but almost immediately dies once people return to the game(s) they are familiar with.