@Major Helper: Ow, that's too bad hahah... altho, as described by Maw, you're not losing *too* much
@MawBTS: Yep. After playing the game for quite a while, I gotta agree... At least partially
Got absolutely no problem with the game being (very) similar to AoE II... *IF* it was properly modernized. Which is... not the case, sadly. Don't get me wrong, I DO think that the base of the game is pretty solid and even polished to some degree.
After all, any potential mainstream RTS will pretty much HAVE to play it safe to get there nowadays - especially one withholding such a heavy name on its back.
However, what is inexcusable are the SEVERAL, and SEVERAL, (mostly) QOL features missing that were already present in MUCH older games, such as AoE II (especially DE) and Starcraft II. Hell, they coulda just copy and pasted those and it would be better than the current state of the game.
- Minimap is absolutely a clutter-fest and borderline useless
- Hotkeys are just about as customizable as the graphic settings
- Absolutely no marker for unit task-queueing
- Lack of ways to select specific units inside groups
- Poor overall control over what you select & group management in general
- No global queues for unit production
- etc...
These ALL being well-established tried-and-true features present in pretty much... any successful RTS. What confuses me the most is the fact that they've already gathered this very feedback from BETAS and for some reason chosen to ignore it.
In the second place there are the technical issues:
Lackluster pathfinding, clueless unit AI (prioritizing to attack harmless buildings vs. literal enemy soldiers picking your troops off nearby, absolutely no kind of autofire for siege weapons, and all while still walking out to their deaths for some reason sometimes), and performance drops (mainly the camera stuff).
About the corporate-friendly writing... didn't dig too much into it, but seems about right. Doesn't piss me off too much
since I mainly care about the gameplay itself but is indeed a bit worrisome, to say the least. Now to be fair, I do think that the gameplay of the campaign is quite entertaining, along with the documentary-styled cinematics.
Well, at least the gameplay-core of AoE IV is pretty solid in my opinion. They managed to strike quite a nice balance of uniqueness in between civs, lying somewhere in the middle of AOE II and III's. Which is what has kept me from thinking this is a bad game. It just needs quite a lot of (mainly) QOL patches before it manages (if soon enough) to flourish... That is if Relic actually decides to listen to the community for once.
This and a goddamn map editor, which the lack of in the first place simply puzzles me.
TLDR: The game was clearly rushed, but it has a solid foundation
[This message has been edited by rewaider (edited 11-02-2021 @ 01:58 PM).]