Age of Empires 4 has a new roadmap – and not too many players anymore. That’s also because of what has (not) happened since release.
“Another victory like that and we’re doomed!” These are the traditional, somewhat terse words of Pyrrhos, King of Epirus, after a battle won in 279 BC against the Romans.
In 2021, we at GlobalESportNews described the release of Age of Empires 4 as the “decisive battle of real-time strategy”. A battle that the hopeful had quite obviously won with a test score of 86.
But now, half a year later, things no longer seem so clear-cut. The player numbers are in the basement, updates are a long time coming and even the brand new roadmap is not exactly causing jubilation (faction colours as season content?).
Will Age of Empires 4 end up like the Greek king Pyrrhos? Has it won its battles but lost the war? Our multiplayer expert gets to the bottom of the question and explains what Relic and Microsoft must do now to pull the cart out of the mud again.
Table of Contents
At release, everyone was happy
When Age of Empires 4 was released, everyone was generally agreed that they had a successful representative of the real-time strategy genre in front of them. The animations caused some displeasure, the campaign with its historical films was a bit divisive and there were also a few bugs. Nevertheless, we at GlobalESportNews, just like most gamers, were quite satisfied.
After what other big publishers had done to big game brands (including Age of Empires) over the years, everyone was glad that Relic Entertainment and Microsoft had remembered the basic virtues of the series. This was then also reflected in the satisfactory player numbers. Well-known streamers and pro gamers from Age of Empires 2 and Starcraft 2 switched to the new beacon of hope.
The first tournaments revealed major flaws
While ordinary people played the campaign and took their first steps in multiplayer, the best of the best went at each other’s virtual throats in the first high-paying tournaments – and of course exploits and balance problems were revealed.
But that’s the way it is with new strategy games. These were teething problems that Relic would quickly deal with – or so we thought. Stupidly, we thought wrong. Because even fixes for obviously fun-destroying strategies like the Mongolian Town Centre Rush or serious bugs (spearmen, prelates, animation cancelling, attack speed) were weeks and months in coming.
While the pure single-player players were slowly through with the game anyway (who plays skirmish against the AI in the long run?), the frustration of the multiplayer lovers increased with every week. Even the published roadmap did not promise any gigantic progress. The most notable feature for the future was the Ranked mode, which has still not appeared.
Players are running away – because too little is happening
Despite that, we weren’t worried. Relic wouldn’t want to rush anything and would polish the game at its leisure. But now, after several months, it looks more like the developers have fallen asleep or are busy with Company of Heroes 3. The latter was announced before the release of Age of Empires 4, which even then gave the disconcerting feeling that they actually preferred to work on their own house brand.
And so, over the course of the new year, AoE4’s player numbers have plummeted almost underground, at least for such an ambitious game. Normalos as well as streamers and professional players are turning their backs on the game, many are going back to Part 2.
This raises the question: Can Age of Empires 4 still be saved? And what does the flagship of the battered RTS armada need to pick up steam again?
The 2022 roadmap content is not enough
The developers are probably putting their planned leadership year updates. In this context, a new roadmap was presented at the beginning of March. In it, the first season of the Ranked Mode is finally promised as well as various overdue Quality of Life features. The latter refers to small improvements in the controls, the interface and the settings.
But is that enough to bring players back to Age of Empires 4? Will a global series, the patrolling command, selectable colours and a new “Art of War” challenge persuade anyone to give the game another chance?
Ranked mode is unlikely to get much traction either. It’s not like players are leaving for another game because they can’t get a rank in the ladder (besides, there’s already a rank chart on Age of Empires 4’s official website). Players quit because they don’t enjoy the game anymore. A ranked mode is just a candy on top of the cake and not part of the dough.
More relevant, on the other hand, could be the card selection system. After all, excluding unpopular maps from the outset might be a real argument for some.
Even more important, of course, are the modding tools. Exactly what these will look like and what opportunities will be available to the hard-working community members remains to be seen, but at least this announcement promises new content for the single-player faction.
It needs more game modes and a big announcement
Age of Empires 4 currently offers too little for solo players. There are still no alternative game modes like regicide, king of the hill, tower defence, miracle defence against the AI or similar.
Starcraft 2, for example, has shown that even a game that is much more focused on PvP can keep single-player players interested with successful co-op content. Besides, Blizzard has earned new money with it through microtransactions and mini-DLCs even years after release, even if one can of course be critical of this.
But Age of Empires 4 offers none of that so far. No wonder that players are returning to the Definitive Edition of the second part. For those people in particular, a big announcement would make sense. A bigger addon that they can look forward to and that keeps motivation high. The prospect of an improved unit selection doesn’t keep people up at night.
Minimap and map design need improvement
Another unsolved construction site are the maps. It was already noticeable in the beta that the minimap was unusable. Nevertheless, a first change came weeks after release.
The nautical maps are unpopular anyway because of the balance of the battleships and the boring and tedious tactics. Other maps like the Mongolian Heights have wayfinding from hell, with a line-of-sight system that didn’t work properly at altitude until the very end.
Especially in multiplayer, many maps have an unfortunate distribution of spawn points for the initial village centres. In the first months after release, for example, it happened time and again that in a “three-on-three” game four players started on one side of the river and only two on the other. And even now there are still maps on which individual players start closer to their opponents than to their own allies, which makes it all the more difficult to stop rush strategies.
Yet it should be clear to experienced real-time strategy developers that good map design is essential for a functioning multiplayer. It is perhaps Relic Entertainment’s most incomprehensible omission that so little attention continues to be paid to this aspect.
The decline of the game is no accident
So there are good reasons why Age of Empires is doing so badly. It can’t just be explained by an anti-attitude of fans who prefer the predecessor because it’s the ultimate.
If Age of Empires 4 is to be a long-term success, more needs to happen now. Too much initial credit has been wasted for the developers to simply carry on as before. This year will therefore decide whether there will be a future for the game that should determine the future of the entire genre. After all, if nothing happens in the next few months, player numbers will drop to a level that will make lively multiplayer impossible.
Interestingly, however, Age of Empires 4 still showed that there is potential in the genre. It sold well and got a lot of attention. So Age of Empires 4 has indeed won the decisive battle for real-time strategy. But the war for its own importance within the genre seems to be lost right now.
Editor’s verdict
My personal experience with Age of Empires 4’s multiplayer shows parallels to my forays into League of Legends. In both games, I don’t like the frustration-time ratio. That is, in both games a game costs a relatively large amount of time, but at the same time the chance of having little fun is relatively high. In League of Legends, this is the case when the opponent on my lane is simply significantly better than me (and then my own team also flames me).
In Age of Empires 4, the same effect occurs when, after ten minutes of the same build-up phase, a stupid cheese or the same combo of battering ram, longbowmen and spearmen runs over one of my allies.
The game hardly appeals to my love of single player content anyway, I haven’t even finished the campaigns. If I want to play against the AI, I start Age of Empires Online, at least there are plenty of different game modes.
On the one hand, the lack of content is to blame for this misery, which can still be forgiven for such a young game. But especially on the multiplayer level, the developers simply react too slowly to annoying problems. Relic Entertainment must therefore speed up in 2022 and announce new content that people can really look forward to. Only then will Age of Empires 4 still have a chance.
