Microsoft Announces Age of Empires IV
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In spite of that, I feel this is nothing to be excited about.
Age of Empires 1 & 2 were special because they were designed by a special team at a company called Ensemble Studios, which was bought by Microsoft and sadly shut down in 2009. None of that team remain with Microsoft.
AoE4 is being developed by Relic, a company with no track record to speak of.* It has nothing in common with the game many of us know and love other than the title. It is extremely unlikely to have the depth, nuance, replayability, and well-thought out design that made the original franchise a hit.
In place of those things, it's likely to have shockingly poor multiplayer integration through the Windows store as Microsoft inevitably rejects Steam integration, and god knows what other modern problems like microtransactions.
Frankly I feel there's very little to be hyped about here.
And god do I ever hope I'm wrong.
*They made some decent games 15 years ago. How many of those designers and developers are still with the company now? How many will be working on AoE4? And were their best games good enough that they're still so beloved that they merit re-releases, new expansions, and definitive editions 20 years later? I don't think so...
Choosing what parts to keep and what parts to remove and then executing is not obvious or easy.
You could say the exact same thing about League of Legends and a lot of other games.
You said they have a good track record.
The current context of the thread is the revival of a game series 12 years after its last entry. This means they'll need to do a vast amount of work in updating both the graphics and the gameplay in order to produce a worthwhile successor. (Note worthwhile and good are not the same. It's entirely possible to make a good game that won't be worthwhile for a large portion of the possible audience.)
One of the examples you cite towards their track records is a game that had success, but was built in a completely different way from what they do now. (Immediately after the inspiration thus not requiring a leap in graphics; and gameplay-wise with a smaller feature set.)
Thus it doesn't seem to me that Company of Heroes is a particularly useful indicator for what they'll do with AoE 4.
(Edit: Also, tbh, due to what S:HOWW2 is (in simple terms, multiple games combined), the decisions of which parts to keep were trivial. I don't want to go into detail here as the post is already big enough, but i recommend investigation of the details.)
I agree with you.
As much as I love the AoE franchise, I doubt this is the comeback everyone thinks it is.
Game studios don't make good games anymore, they create and sell hype, and we keep buying into it.
Paradox's grand strategy games (Crusader Kings II, EU 4 and Victoria, among others) are absurdly deep and have a really broad play style continuum.
Cities:Skylines definitely has its flaws, but it handily took the torch from the fumbling wasteland of SimCity 2013.
Edit: To add, both series/companies do a great job of using their DLC to add actual, refreshing content to the game. That's a big win in my book over "Buy this new hat!"
Their last 2 games (Company of Heroes 2, Dawn of War III) were not nearly as good and were not well recieved, basically rehashes of past series aimed at an audience that doesn't play RTS games anymore.
Pretty sad considering they're pretty much the last old RTS developer still alive, and almost no one new is making RTS games.
Ensemble also made AoE3 which I loathed and Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds which was a bit of a turd. Also note that Microsoft acquired Ensemble in 2001, during the development cycle of Age of Mythology (which was phenomenal), so an independent Relic could be as good as or better than an internal Ensemble.
Taken from Wikipedia. Garry M. Gaber worked at LucasArts. Ensemble had nothing to do with SW:GB.
But yes, I agree about AoE3.
I do hope you're wrong, too. The seeming story of the person asking Mr. Gates for a new release is pretty charming, and will continue to be if they nail it.
Now if they are just trying to make another Age of Empires, that's liable to ending in shambles.
Exactly. Relic has no track record of RTS games. Real a Time Strategy (RTS) is completely different to Real Time Tactic games, the later Relic has experience with. The Halo 2 game was a casual one with even card game elements and dumbed down gameplay (no free base building, etc). Not on Steam - not gonna playing it. Sorry but no thanks to UWP Store. The last AoE is III, from the awesome Ensemble Studio.
I've always played these RTSes with friends against bots, and Relic have basically been at war with our play-style for a decade. First they said the RTS was dead, then dispatched with base-building and then added in terrain heights that are impossible to discern from a top-down view. Now they have made the DoW series into some sort of bad DotA/RTS hybrid, removing cover and morale, that's got terrible reviews.
Prepare for your fond memories of AoE to be trampled over.
They moved away from RTS to some squad-based MOBA-like.
Dune 2, Star Craft, Warcraft, Red Alert, CoH, DoW, etc., my friends got tired of the cheap strategies like orc tower rushes and the toxic taunting by human payers that you couldn't turn off and so instead we started to team up against the computer, increasing the difficulty or the number of computer players and turtling up in base. A relaxing macro game, instead of the frantic micro these games all seem to have evolved into.
Unfortunately as time has gone on the AIs seem to have got worse and the base building strategies side-lined, removed or punished.
I played a lot of StarCraft with my brother against AIs when I was younger.
I have since played a lot of multiplayer games, but as you said, it's not as relaxing, which is what I want from games nowadays when I take the time to play them.
I don't expect the OpenAI initiative with Dota 2 to automatically lead to better games AI in the foreseeable future, but I hope it might lead to a renewed interest in them in games, and in time something simulating real players in more games (minus the toxicity, and being pausable without anyone wasting anyone elses time).
CoH2: Company of Heroes 2
bots: Robots / Automated game play
RTS: Real Time Strategy
DotA: Good explanation provided at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dota_2
... and just in case anyone is confused by your abbreviation:
FYI: For Your Information
:P
CoH = Company of Heroes, WWII-themed real-time strategy game
RTS = Real Time Strategy
DotA = Defense of the Ancients, a (the original?) MOBA
MOBA = Multiplayer Online Arena Battle, initially a more action-oriented subgenre of real-time strategy, though IMO closer to real-time tactics games as it's smaller scale with more important units and itemisation, no base construction/management and more limited resource management. I think the RTS link only exists because the "original", DotA, was a mod on an RTS (Warcraft III) (it was not the original one but as with e.g. Minecraft it basically opened up and popularised the genre), probably the most popular eSport category today
AoE = Age of Empires, real-time strategy game set in a semi-realistic past, the first two installments were roughly set between the stone age and the middle ages or renaissance, the third one does not exist and is set during the Age of Discovery
And then there's always http://openage.sft.mx/.
I remember some of my first "hacking" was running chat bots in the MSN gaming zone lobby for AoEII.
But why?
O CANADA O CANADA O CANADA O CANADA
- https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=13857...