https://www.neogaf.com/threads/concerns ... 4.1460744/Inviusx wrote:Concerns for Age of Empires 4https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Emplo ... 568693.htmI 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 However, they have been given the AoE franchise, which is still selling ridiculously well considering how grossly outdated it is, so all they have to do is turn out a decent update of it, by not messing with any of its staples and merely updating the graphics and perhaps increasing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.