News

[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game, and might well be enjoyable for a few days or at most weeks for the nostalgic among us, which includes me, but it is obsolete before even being released, and has no future at all precisely because it is being made with past standards.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.