Microsoft is putting an Age of Empires survey, make your voice heard!

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Re: Microsoft is putting an Age of Empires survey, make your voice heard!

Post by kami_ryu »

https://old.reddit.com/r/aoe4/comments/ ... rogrammer/

see, the game is no where near being close to release because they still have pathfinding programming to do

Also 14 civs is a lot. but I don't think it's too much. I could be wrong
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Post by Dolan »

Goodspeed wrote:...
Hold on, I'm just getting warmed up.



You know why Ensemble invested 3 fucking years into developing this game? Why did they do that, because the game engine is the same as the one they had already developed for AOM. And AOM came out in 2002. While AOE3 nilla came out in late 2005. So they needed 3 years for what?

I tell you why they needed 3 years: just to develop game content and almost nothing else. Because in the early 2000s you could no longer just make a good RTS and expect it to sell well, the momentum for RTS games was gone, they were no longer so popular, except for niche audiences like Startcraft or historical, big-battle games like Cossacks: European Wars. You needed to come out with a game that had some exceptional features which really made it stand out, that made people mesmerised with it and willing to spend money to play a game from a genre that was typically considered niche. RTS games only had a brief spell of popularity in the late 90s, when AOE2 coincidentally came out.
Timestamped, but only watch a few seconds for the relevant sequence:

https://youtu.be/3hdHiX2mg6k?t=69

So what did Ensemble decide it was going to be the biggest selling point of the next Age of Empires game? Graphics. They spent 3 years developing content that would look so incredibly good for those years, you'd feel compelled to buy the game and play it. The AOE3 lead developer from Ensemble even says that great graphics were their biggest achievement in AOE3. Again, just a few seconds in the documentary:

https://youtu.be/3hdHiX2mg6k?t=774

All that stuff which is packed in those big archives of assets in the game is what they worked on for 3 years. Maps, textures, animations, hundreds of units, object models, trade routes, water ripples/deformations/mirroring, shaders, AI scripts, UI versions (they built a few different iterations of the UI until they got it right). Some of the textures made for warships were actually handpainted, they were made on canvas and eventually scanned and digitalised. There was a massive amount of effort that went into making those graphics for warships look as natural and vibrant as possible, because they were trying hard to avoid having those warship sails have a plasticky, artificial look when the wind blew into them.

They also tried to make AOE3 the most innovative game in the whole series, trying out tens of new game modes and victory conditions, developing the campaigns, and improving the scenario editor. There's probably a huge amount of stuff that they tried and eventually discarded, either because it turned out not to be fun or viable or because they were eventually running out of time.
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Re: Microsoft is putting an Age of Empires survey, make your voice heard!

Post by musketeer925 »

Crazy that pathfinding is an entire position on the development team
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Post by Garja »

ye 14 is simply too much, better to have like 6 unique civs
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Re: Microsoft is putting an Age of Empires survey, make your voice heard!

Post by Goodspeed »

Dolan wrote:
Goodspeed wrote:...
Hold on, I'm just getting warmed up.



You know why Ensemble invested 3 fucking years into developing this game? Why did they do that, because the game engine is the same as the one they had already developed for AOM. And AOM came out in 2002. While AOE3 nilla came out in late 2005. So they needed 3 years for what?

I tell you why they needed 3 years: just to develop game content and almost nothing else. Because in the early 2000s you could no longer just make a good RTS and expect it to sell well, the momentum for RTS games was gone, they were no longer so popular, except for niche audiences like Startcraft or historical, big-battle games like Cossacks: European Wars. You needed to come out with a game that had some exceptional features which really made it stand out, that made people mesmerised with it and willing to spend money to play a game from a genre that was typically considered niche. RTS games only had a brief spell of popularity in the late 90s, when AOE2 coincidentally came out.
Timestamped, but only watch a few seconds for the relevant sequence:

https://youtu.be/3hdHiX2mg6k?t=69

So what did Ensemble decide it was going to be the biggest selling point of the next Age of Empires game? Graphics. They spent 3 years developing content that would look so incredibly good for those years, you'd feel compelled to buy the game and play it. The AOE3 lead developer from Ensemble even says that great graphics were their biggest achievement in AOE3. Again, just a few seconds in the documentary:

https://youtu.be/3hdHiX2mg6k?t=774

All that stuff which is packed in those big archives of assets in the game is what they worked on for 3 years. Maps, textures, animations, hundreds of units, object models, trade routes, water ripples/deformations/mirroring, shaders, AI scripts, UI versions (they built a few different iterations of the UI until they got it right). Some of the textures made for warships were actually handpainted, they were made on canvas and eventually scanned and digitalised. There was a massive amount of effort that went into making those graphics for warships look as natural and vibrant as possible, because they were trying hard to avoid having those warship sails have a plasticky, artificial look when the wind blew into them.

They also tried to make AOE3 the most innovative game in the whole series, trying out tens of new game modes and victory conditions, developing the campaigns, and improving the scenario editor. There's probably a huge amount of stuff that they tried and eventually discarded, either because it turned out not to be fun or viable or because they were eventually running out of time.
Did you have a point with this?
None of it seems to support your ridiculous argument that AoE2 was/is only popular due to timing and nostalgia, as opposed to merit.
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Re: Microsoft is putting an Age of Empires survey, make your voice heard!

Post by Goodspeed »

musketeer925 wrote:Crazy that pathfinding is an entire position on the development team
It really is
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Post by Imperial Noob »

Goodspeed wrote:
musketeer925 wrote:Crazy that pathfinding is an entire position on the development team
It really is

It better be! The current situation in aoe games in unbearable

And as for 6 civs... That's just ridiculous. This would only mean a boring launch of the game and then 8 or more new, OP civs behind 10 layers of paywalls.


@Dolan To be fair, without the graphics as they are I wouldn't have played this game past 2010. They are a piece of art. :flowers:
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Post by Dolan »

@Goodspeed

AOE3 is a step-up over AOE2 in almost every category. However you want to define it. Even if you judge things only technically, not just based on personal preference:

-Game engine capacities
-Graphics
-Physics
-Random maps
-Scenario editor
-Civs unique features (AOE2 civs are too standardised and undifferentiated)
-Strategic depth (cards, decks, homecities, trade routes, shipping points)
-Faster pace is better because slow pace is just boring and doesn't reward skills enough (it also wastes too much of your time if you need half an hour just to get to the third age) <<-- this is just based on preference, though
-Music
-UI
-Game options
-The hotkeys system

And it's a historical fact that AOE2 came out right at the nick of time, when RTS games were just becoming popular with the general public, which was something new. They just got lucky with AOE2, that's all. And AOE3 didn't have such luck and it had to work harder to reach the general public and to get its own fanbase. It was also harder because once the market evolves, people have much higher expectations: just like it happens with smartphones today, when nobody cares that the display looks great on your phone, when there are tens of other brands out there that can do the same thing for half the price.
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Re: Microsoft is putting an Age of Empires survey, make your voice heard!

Post by Kaiserklein »

musketeer925 wrote:Crazy that pathfinding is an entire position on the development team

Well it all makes sense now actually. They must have hired some homeless drunkard they found under a bridge especially for that
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Re: Microsoft is putting an Age of Empires survey, make your voice heard!

Post by Kaiserklein »

Dolan wrote:@Goodspeed

AOE3 is a step-up over AOE2 in almost every category. However you want to define it. Even if you judge things only technically, not just based on personal preference:

-Game engine capacities
-Graphics
-Physics
-Random maps
-Scenario editor
-Civs unique features (AOE2 civs are too standardised and undifferentiated)
-Strategic depth (cards, decks, homecities, trade routes, shipping points)
-Faster pace is better because slow pace is just boring and doesn't reward skills enough (it also wastes too much of your time if you need half an hour just to get to the third age) <<-- this is just based on preference, though
-Music
-UI
-Game options
-The hotkeys system

And it's a historical fact that AOE2 came out right at the nick of time, when RTS games were just becoming popular with the general public, which was something new. They just got lucky with AOE2, that's all. And AOE3 didn't have such luck and it had to work harder to reach the general public and to get its own fanbase. It was also harder because once the market evolves, people have much higher expectations: just like it happens with smartphones today, when nobody cares that the display looks great on your phone, when there are tens of other brands out there who can do the same thing for half the price.

And what about balance, glitches, unfair maps, etc?
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Re: Microsoft is putting an Age of Empires survey, make your voice heard!

Post by Imperial Noob »

Kaiserklein wrote: And what about balance, glitches, unfair maps, etc?

I bet there were/are more glitches in aoe2
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Re: Microsoft is putting an Age of Empires survey, make your voice heard!

Post by [Armag] diarouga »

Kaiserklein wrote:
Dolan wrote:@Goodspeed

AOE3 is a step-up over AOE2 in almost every category. However you want to define it. Even if you judge things only technically, not just based on personal preference:

-Game engine capacities
-Graphics
-Physics
-Random maps
-Scenario editor
-Civs unique features (AOE2 civs are too standardised and undifferentiated)
-Strategic depth (cards, decks, homecities, trade routes, shipping points)
-Faster pace is better because slow pace is just boring and doesn't reward skills enough (it also wastes too much of your time if you need half an hour just to get to the third age) <<-- this is just based on preference, though
-Music
-UI
-Game options
-The hotkeys system

And it's a historical fact that AOE2 came out right at the nick of time, when RTS games were just becoming popular with the general public, which was something new. They just got lucky with AOE2, that's all. And AOE3 didn't have such luck and it had to work harder to reach the general public and to get its own fanbase. It was also harder because once the market evolves, people have much higher expectations: just like it happens with smartphones today, when nobody cares that the display looks great on your phone, when there are tens of other brands out there who can do the same thing for half the price.

And what about balance, glitches, unfair maps, etc?

While I agree that aoe2 is overall a better game because strategy is more interesting (by the way, aoe2 requires much more apm so it does reward skills more although it's slow pace), balance is probably better on aoe3, and maps are about the same.
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Post by Dolan »

@Kaiserklein
Those really only matter to a super-small segment of a game's playerbase, which is competitive players.
No gamedev company ever makes a game specially developed to please first and foremost high-level players. They build the game to sell well or to become extremely popular (for free-to-play games, that make money from skins and other stuff).
Balance is eventually taken into consideration somewhat later, when a competitive scene develops and starts asking for gameplay optimisations. Sometimes, a company makes new imbalanced features/characters/civs on purpose, because they want players to buy it and abuse it, at least for a while. And then they nerf it and move on to bring new imba stuff, just to make more money. That's why TWC and TAD civs were so OP when they came out. If they weren't, nobody would have bought or played them.

AOE3 would have had way fewer bugs if it was still patched by a company employed by Microsoft. But, as we know, they stopped doing that a long time ago, when the last Robot patch was made.
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Post by Dolan »

[Armag] diarouga wrote:While I agree that aoe2 is overall a better game because strategy is more interesting (by the way, aoe2 requires much more apm so it does reward skills more although it's slow pace), balance is probably better on aoe3, and maps are about the same.

AOE2 requires more APM because its engine is so old, bad and unresponsive that you need to click more just to be sure the game engine will get enough input to respond.
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Post by EAGLEMUT »

Kaiserklein wrote:And what about balance, glitches, unfair maps, etc?

Maps in AoE2 are unfair to a point that it's just expected and they are generally not even checked by casters in tournaments. AoE3 maps in current times are held to higher standards.
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Post by iCourt »

Dolan wrote:AOE3 would have had way fewer bugs if it was still patched by a company employed by Microsoft. But, as we know, they stopped doing that a long time ago, when the last Robot patch was made.


Would it be? Maybe if the game was patched on a far more frequent basis. I always thought with bug fixes you could release minor update patches on a biweekly schedule. Would be far more efficient then the current method.

ES, BHG, and RE have just left bugs in the game since 2005. Even after 2 expansions they never even fixed some of the vanilla bugs. Some were blatanly obvious like Kalmuck and Ponies not having sound files. Also look at how many things just don't work properly such as formations etc.
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Post by Garja »

On the pathfinding: aoe3 doesn't even have bad pathfinding. It's more about the crazy amount of units of different types and what players want the units to do which make it look bad. Also the formation system which is not bad per se but it has rules which make unit movement different from what players want sometimes.
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Re: Microsoft is putting an Age of Empires survey, make your voice heard!

Post by kami_ryu »

musketeer925 wrote:Crazy that pathfinding is an entire position on the development team

Idk if you've ever heard of 0AD, but it's a nice indie/free game RTS that's being developped. I remember talking to the devs of that game; pathfinding is the demon of RTS games.

That said it's interesting because I feel like most RTS games do really well with pathfinding. AOE2, AOE3/AOM and the SC2 engine all do well in that regard.
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Post by Dolan »

iCourt wrote:Would it be? Maybe if the game was patched on a far more frequent basis. I always thought with bug fixes you could release minor update patches on a biweekly schedule. Would be far more efficient then the current method.

ES, BHG, and RE have just left bugs in the game since 2005. Even after 2 expansions they never even fixed some of the vanilla bugs. Some were blatanly obvious like Kalmuck and Ponies not having sound files. Also look at how many things just don't work properly such as formations etc.
It's probably because they just didn't have enough devs to fix all those bugs. And for stuff like missing sound files, there were no solutions, because the stage of development when they made recordings had been over and done with a long time ago. Bug-fixing devs weren't qualified to make new recordings for unit sounds.

Another reason why many bugs weren't fixed is because typically companies assign a small number of devs to work on fixes, but these devs are not familiar with the inner workings of each component of the game which was developed by separate teams. And, as it happened with AOE3 and its expansions, once the development stage was over, those companies and their devs moved on to other projects. Once Ensemble was disbanded, there were very few devs at Robot who used to be part of the original team and who were still familiar at least with how some parts of the game were developed. So probably a lot of that knowledge simply got lost, as people who got laid off had to find jobs elsewhere.

And if you got laid off by Microsoft, I imagine you don't really feel like answering that phonecall from the new devs who are trying to find a fix to a particularly difficult-to-solve bug.
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Post by iCourt »

Dolan wrote:
iCourt wrote:Would it be? Maybe if the game was patched on a far more frequent basis. I always thought with bug fixes you could release minor update patches on a biweekly schedule. Would be far more efficient then the current method.

ES, BHG, and RE have just left bugs in the game since 2005. Even after 2 expansions they never even fixed some of the vanilla bugs. Some were blatanly obvious like Kalmuck and Ponies not having sound files. Also look at how many things just don't work properly such as formations etc.
It's probably because they just didn't have enough devs to fix all those bugs. And for stuff like missing sound files, there were no solutions, because the stage of development when they made recordings had been over and done with a long time ago. Bug-fixing devs weren't qualified to make new recordings for unit sounds.


I fixed those sound bugs in like 5 minutes. The sound files for hand cav and ranged cav already exist for Russia. No recording studio needed... Just a line of code.

No sense in trying to figure out why it may or may not have been fixed in the past. I would just like to see an official patch fix those things now.
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Post by Dolan »

Well, yeah, and I fixed the missing Agra Fort hotkeys in just a few minutes too (without using Ekanta's old solutions, I found new ones).

You seemed to lay the blame for why there still are bugs in this old game on those companies which were tasked with providing support after Ensemble was dissolved. I explained what could have been the reasons why they weren't able or didn't have the resources to fix them all. It's also probably that the lack of certain sounds or animations were not considered to be game-breaking enough to justify spending time on them. Frankly, I didn't even notice that Kalmucks didn't have their own sounds, probably because these units were used so rarely in so few situations, that nobody was really bothered by it.

The community has asked for patches for ages. Microsoft just didn't think AOE3 was important enough to allocate resources for that. So it mattered less what we've all wished for to happen. Let's not forget that for a while, Microsoft was investing its resources into trying to make AOEO a viable model. For them, AOE3 was just a legacy game that didn't warrant spending more than to just keep the ESO servers up and the AgeComm forums running.
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Post by Goodspeed »

Dolan wrote:@Goodspeed

AOE3 is a step-up over AOE2 in almost every category. However you want to define it. Even if you judge things only technically, not just based on personal preference:
If you're talking about QoL/graphics improvements, yeah, but if that's really the extent of your thoughts on the matter I don't think you understand what makes a good game. I'm talking about game design, and I think the AoE3 team made some questionable choices there. And I know this is subjective, but note I'm just replying to your blanket statement that AoE2 is/was only popular due to timing which is just non sense. Some examples:

- AoE3 puts a lot of focus on military units. Defensive buildings are not really a thing, which I think is a shame because they should be a thing in any base-building RTS.
- The extent of AoE3's economy management is herding. In late game, it is entirely non-existent.
- There is infinite gold, removing the "scarcity" dynamic which created some interesting strategic choices in AoE2.
- Water design is an absolute mess. War ships fire randomly, have a build limit instead of pop cost, and whales are infinite which promotes abusive, passive play.
- The imperial age, and to a lesser extent the industrial age, is/are completely irrelevant in 1v1s.
- Almost all military units fit into predefined roles. Unique ones like "ruyters" are not really unique.
- And a lot of small things like the snare effect, minutemen, etc promote passive play styles and make it so that most games just come down to a single clash of 2 large armies, as opposed to the war of attrition (where buildings actually play a role) that is common in AoE2.

And ignoring design for a second, balance is a real mess in AoE3. The artillery foundry, more generally siege weapons, are not a thing. Some cards are clearly much stronger than others. Many units are OP, even more are never used, in late game a pr26 French can beat any other civ played by a top player, etc.
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Post by deleted_user »

Goodspeed wrote:
Dolan wrote:@Goodspeed

AOE3 is a step-up over AOE2 in almost every category. However you want to define it. Even if you judge things only technically, not just based on personal preference:
If you're talking about QoL/graphics improvements, yeah, but if that's really the extent of your thoughts on the matter I don't think you understand what makes a good game. I'm talking about game design, and I think the AoE3 team made some questionable choices there. And I know this is subjective, but note I'm just replying to your blanket statement that AoE2 is/was only popular due to timing which is just non sense. Some examples:

- AoE3 puts a lot of focus on military units. Defensive buildings are not really a thing, which I think is a shame because they should be a thing in any base-building RTS.
- The extent of AoE3's economy management is herding. In late game, it is entirely non-existent.
- There is infinite gold, removing the "scarcity" dynamic which created some interesting strategic choices in AoE2.
- Water design is an absolute mess. War ships fire randomly, have a build limit instead of pop cost, and whales are infinite which promotes abusive, passive play.
- The imperial age, and to a lesser extent the industrial age, is/are completely irrelevant in 1v1s.
- Almost all military units fit into predefined roles. Unique ones, like "ruyters" are not really unique.
- And a lot of small things like the snare effect, minutemen, etc promote passive play styles and make it so that most games just come down to a single clash of 2 large armies, as opposed to the war of attrition (where buildings actually play a role) that is common in AoE2.

And ignoring design for a second, balance is a real mess in AoE3. The artillery foundry, more generally siege weapons, are not a thing. Some cards are clearly much stronger than others. Many units are OP, even more are never used, etc.

Good points and agreed - except the art foundry has its place imo.
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Post by Goodspeed »

True, just not enough imo. It's built in maybe 5% of top level games.
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Re: Microsoft is putting an Age of Empires survey, make your voice heard!

Post by Cometk »

@Goodspeed nah that's off-base
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