Games

[icycalm]

Announce Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYwZ6GZXWhA

Too bad it will have flat maps and be inferior to PA in every way. I am sure it will have some stupid 200-unit limit, and of course no air layer and so on. I predict the best thing about it will end up being this trailer.

[icycalm]

HAHAHA Relic is making it lol.

[icycalm]

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/age- ... st-1142730

Hooray for a new "RTS" with tiny flat maps, some stupid 200-unit limit, not even an air layer, and made by the people who brought as the dumbest RTTs-disguised-as-RTSes-ever. I predict the best thing about it will be the trailer.

PA and Uber forever.

[icycalm]

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/age- ... st-1142729

I'm not sure I'm all that excited for another AOE game. I got totally turned off the last one when I worked out just how extreme the 'RPS' mechanics were (it's to the level that 1 guy who is the counter to archers can kill 100 archers extreme). I used to play these games when I was younger but the more they force the X > Y > Z > X mechanics the less I like these games. With simulated projectile RTS you still get natural counters (fast high dps units are usually good at chasing down slower long range stuff for example)- but without it getting to the point where one type of unit is effectively invulnerable to another.

Anyway, a new big RTS game is a good thing for the genre even if not my cup of tea, so I guess I shouldn't complain!

[icycalm]

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/age- ... st-1142737

Whoever thinks that there's no such thing as genre progress is living in fantasyland.

AoE was my 1997 GOTY: http://culture.vg/reviews/awards/game-of-the-year.html

But it is no longer 1997, and the genre has long moved on. Therefore, AoE4 is a retro game, and might well be enjoyable for a few days or at most weeks for the nostalgic among us, which includes me, but it is obsolete before even being released, and has no future at all precisely because it is being made with past standards.

About the only way all the above could be wrong is if Relic goes full-on RTT and turns out a micro-intensive game of great tactical complexity. Given their past games, however, I think there's no way this will happen.

[icycalm]

Added to Most Wanted section.

Yes, it's by Relic, and yes, it will be ludicrously primitive compared to PA, but it's still Age of Empires, and that still means something.

[icycalm]

https://www.neogaf.com/threads/concerns ... 4.1460744/

Concerns for Age of Empires 4

https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Emplo ... 568693.htm

I pulled this from a thread on the official AoE forums.

It talks about concerns from staff around the direction that the game is heading and the leadership in place that are making the same mistakes they made with Dawn of War 3.

I think it's a pretty unique thing to read as we normally don't get this type of insider info so early on in development.

In their defence, I will say that RTS is very hard to make profitable right now, especially at the level they would need to with the higher-than-average production values they seem to insist on. MOBAs have cannibalized support for the genre by taking away all the dumber players, then StarCraft takes the middle ground and PA takes the smart people. Meanwhile, Relic has so far taken the RTT lovers (Company of Heroes) -- i.e. those who don't really like strategy -- and the Warhammer nerds (Dawn of War).

So it's tough to navigate this spectrum and find a place for themselves, because the landscape is simultaneously complex and constrained. However, they have been given the AoE franchise, which is still selling ridiculously well considering how grossly outdated it is, so all they have to do is turn out a decent update of it, by not messing with any of its staples and merely updating the graphics and perhaps increasing a little bit the scale of the game (though not too much, because then the dumber fans will be turned off), and they'll have a decent hit on their hands.

Their mistake with DOW3 is understandable. It was an expensive game to make, with significantly higher production values than anything else they'd made before, so it definitely made sense at the time to try to imitate MOBAs in some respects and see if they could capture some of the morons playing those games. In the event, the morons didn't bite, and the game ended up alienating the series' fans, but no one could have predicted this would happen before trying it out, so it was not a wrong decision to make.

Now, however, they have an even bigger franchise on their hands than DOW, with a very well established formula that should be easy to not mess up. So all things told, I believe they made the right move experimenting with DOW3, and I believe their attachment to the AoE license was the perfect way to bounce back from that experiment.

After playing DOW2 and disliking it (3/5 at best), I still think this is an average studio that doesn't know how to make great games. The above comments are made from a business perspective: there are many people with middling-to-bad taste in games who play and like the sort of stuff Relic makes, so I think the studio can stay in business by simply continuing to serve them. And the AoE fans who still play AoE2 to this day are merely dumbasses who failed to adjust to strategic zoom. Shouldn't be hard to please this crowd if you don't make your game too complex, which Relic wouldn't know how to do anyway even if they wanted to.

[icycalm]

Age of Empires: Fan Preview - Tune In Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fFFIOkAX4o

Tune in to Age of Empires: Fan Preview on Saturday, April 10th at 9 am PT/ 12pm ET/ 5pm BST for surprises, reveals: new gameplay civilizations and campaigns, and so much more!

This preview already has a ton of new play footage. I guess we're getting a full blowout on the 10th.

Looks about as good as a game with only two layers can look. Much better than I had expected, for sure.

[icycalm]

Gameplay Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EU0AHLkHFA

Midwit RTS 2021.

Such a disappointment.

The only real progress is the real 3D environments. I.e. what Total Annihilation did in 1997. You can finally have that in AoE, yay. That stealth trick looked cool too, but it's barely more than a WC3-style power.

Apart from those two tibits, this is still good-old midwit RTS.

• Tiny maps (the two castles are at rock-throwing distance lol)
• Meaning tiny duration "wars", 20 minutes tops like in AoE, 40 minutes if you can be bothered to play that long
• Invisible black walls of fog all around
• No strategic zoom since there is no strategy lol and since the whole map can fit in one screen anyway lol
• Lower unitcap than games that came out 20 years ago
• Still only two layers of course since it's a historical game, so it's doomed from the start in that respect
• Bet you anything you want MP will be 10 people max, otherwise given how low the unitcap will be some people would have no units to control lol

Perfect shitshow. Complete disaster.

The perfect game for midwits who still play AoE2 in 2021, and will be playing it all the way to their grave, wondering why RTS "died" lol.

[icycalm]

To any midwit faggots reading this who think that AoE2 is great. This is what historical RTS looked like TWENTY YEARS AGO fyi.

[icycalm]

Cossacks even had guns and cannons, which make the mechanics MUCH more complex. So with its simpler mechanics, AoE should at least have MORE units than Cossacks, to compensate. But it has less than 1/10th lol. It has something like 1/20th the units.

[icycalm]

WTF is the point of having "ages" when each age lasts 12 minutes?

They copied that from Civilization, but Civilization lasts A WEEK.

Fucking autistic midwits.

[icycalm]

I am still playing the game day 1 with y'all. It'll probably be 5/5. But it will be a nostalgic throwback to 1999 and nothing more, that's what I am saying.

[icycalm]

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1466 ... mpires_IV/

A new trailer that’s pretty cool, all things told. Still pathetic watching them try to give the battles an epic air when there’s barely 50 units on the screen, of course, but the more detailed city-building aspect, terrain elevation, model detail and close zoom-in are all unambiguous improvements.

Official Gameplay Trailer - Xbox & Bethesda Games Showcase 2021
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4p9DCiI8QBY

It’s more than a little annoying that the most prominent character in this trailer is Jeanne d’Arc. Similarly, the cover image of Humankind shows a black scientist and a white barbarian... Meanwhile neither blacks nor women really play these games. Even Asians barely play them. If this keeps up I could see myself refusing to play them at some point. Let’s hope it doesn’t get that far, and they halt this behavior and come to their senses. Worst case scenario there are enough good older games in these genres without the ridiculous propaganda to play until I die if need be.

[icycalm]

Agent and Q have already bought this on Steam and I am sure they preferred to get it there, but for everyone else let me just remind you that it’s coming to Game Pass on day 1 and will be there for months if not years. I will certainly be done with it long before they take it off the pass, and if I want it for my library I can just purchase it on a sale a couple years later. Some people will prefer to have it on Steam on day 1, but for me it makes no sense to keep paying the Game Pass sub if I don’t get some value off it by saving on day 1 purchases.

[Beakman]

Age of Empires IV Technical Stress Test with Beakman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zn9QCELaUHU

Please note that I was playing on an underpowered laptop, so the graphics quality is not at its best.

I went through the tutorials while icy was next to me, and had a single 1v1 match against a random afterwards. Mechanically speaking, this is an AoE II remake, constrained to the same up-close camera and medieval eras. There barely seem to be any new mechanics. The only two additions I saw were that in order to advance to the next era you need to build an associated marvel (instead of just clicking on an icon in your city center menu), and that terrain elevation seems to have tactical implications, which is pretty cool (see at 1:10:00 how I was constantly bombarded by trebuchets).

Although the production values look unprecedented for the genre, the game overall seems too unambitious, playing it too safe, which is what the trailers conveyed from the beginning. It grabs nothing from the innovations of Rise of Nations or even from its own series after II. Tiny unit count with an up-close camera that makes e.g. a 4K display tactically irrelevant and with a range of historic eras as constrained as AoE II.

But it's a fun game if after the original AoE II, its HD Edition, and its Definitive Edition, you still want to play more AoE II.

Either the aforementioned RoN or probably something like Cossacks 3 is more representative of what's freshest among the historic RTS type of games, and it's disappointing considering RoN came out in 2003.

I loved the aesthetics, even the menus are beautiful. The audio is a standout. The situational music works very well and the battle sounds and voices are excellent (as good as they are in Relic's WW2-themed Company of Heroes series).