hey guys spirit of the law here for any of you that haven't really been following age
of empires 4 recently i want to make a simple video summarizing a lot of big features added to
the game since release now i'm not here to sell you on the game or conversely to argue that aoe
2 is better but i realized i made a lot of videos about aoe4 leading up to its launch and like a lot
of players was disappointed with it initially in my case i moved back to age of empires 2
pretty quickly so far this year though aoe4 has seen a lot of improvements so we'll take a look
at those as well as why i think if it had been released in its current state it would have been
much better received to start with the catalyst for this there's a new preview for the second
major update coming to the game which if you own steam at least you can pretty easily opt into this
video is going to look at the highlights from that update and some of the earlier ones over the last
few months which when i counted them turn out to be 10 major changes and who doesn't love a top 10.
well apparently this guy but he doesn't have to watch starting off with the first big change you
can now set your color or if you prefer go with a random color it's not quite as fancy as aoe 3
letting you actually customize them but it's a big step forward lots of players have a favorite and
if it wasn't blue or red then you probably weren't getting it the majority of the time previously
the very pedantic side of me though has to correct them if this is much more of a cyan than a teal
but it's a common mistake and admittedly teal is a fun word to say so cyan fans will just have to
deal with it next up a second new big feature is the random civilization option has now been added
this is great for everyone from new players learning the game or even veterans who are testing
their game knowledge sometimes you just want to mix it up and it's a nice basic feature that has
now been added number three is hotkeys are now customizable by creating a new profile under
the fully remappable tab options include things like jumping to individual barracks selecting
all barracks and all of those sorts of shortcuts likewise you can ignore the grid pattern and set
individual buildings and unit hotkeys to whatever you like and will be easiest for you to remember
for example putting villagers on a or c instead of q i get the sense this was probably a big project
behind the scenes but definitely seems worth it i also like the warning about hotkey conflicts but
that those conflicts are still allowed to exist and you can disable the warning it just puts a
small yellow indicator if you map conflicting things to the same hotkey but for the most part
doesn't get in your way as you're trying to map them the grid system hotkeys and limited
remapping were my number one concern at release last year and trying to view the game through
the eyes of a new player again i think this would have made the biggest impact early on in how the
game felt to play number four is the camera zoom has been sort of addressed with a new camera mode
they've given the option now of a classic and a panoramic version and for comparison here's
the maximum zoom as it has been and here's the new maximum zoom with panoramic mode you can see it's
both further out and also more overhead personally i still think it's a little weird and almost feels
like the camera is swinging instead of zooming maybe you can see what i mean i already like the
panoramic better though i still don't think they quite understand what people have been asking for
which is the same camera angle but more control over how far back you can zoom number five is you
can now suggest your map preference in quick play and ranked you get multiple maps that you can tell
the matchmaking system to avoid and can even filter by types of maps in case you especially
don't like water chokepoint or open maps etc obviously in a 4v4 you may reach a situation
where every map has at least one thumbs down from someone in which case i assume it just picks from
the ones with the least so it's not strictly a band system like an av2 but i actually like
it a little better a system like this is probably the number one way to avoid people dropping games
early and while it doesn't completely eliminate that it's still a good feature and should lead to
more people getting the maps they want number 6 is a ranked ladder now exists in the game though it
is just for 1v1 this was added a while back and it's a little different than in other age games
as instead of an elo rating you rank up through tears of bronze silver gold platinum diamond and
finally conqueror this has some advantages over a static elo rating and gives players a fresh start
at the beginning of each season because it's still early days there's a very quickly shifting meta
undergoing rebalancing from almost month to month at number 7 we have the content editor and mods
this was added a few months back but unfortunately the content editor is not very intuitive and a lot
of work still needs to be done to bring it up to the standard of the rest of the franchise if it's
meant for a general audience to use even little kids can figure out the basics of previous games
editors in a pretty short amount of time whereas here you basically need a computer science degree
to create even a simple map by hand going through folders and subfolders just to reach basic items
i'm not exaggerating when i say it's obviously meant for developers and not a casual player
trying to make their own lord of the rings or game of thrones scenario to play with friends and i
don't want to oversell this as something you can just jump in and use without a lot of tutorials
it does have one very cool feature though where you can just draw the map you want in a microsoft
paint sort of interface and it'll generate it for you following your input here's my map of
central europe that i'm inputting which may not be perfect but it's roughly the right idea and
we can tweak it once it's generated taking a look at what it gives us you know it's not bad i can
at least tell it's trying to make the picture i gave it and even invented a new northern europe
since i didn't use a square canvas honestly it has some potential and i'll give it a thumbs
up though the editor as a whole is functionally unusable in my opinion for the majority of players
related to that there's also now a built-in way to access mods including maps alternate game modes
and tuning packs which allow for everything from quality of life fixes to crazy mechanic overhauls
again like a lot of things in the game though there's definitely still some work to be done
its sorting system for example has four options first you can sort by the most recently uploaded
which due to a limited number being shown only gives mods uploaded in about the last week
second you can sort by rating which at first sounds promising but you can see here the
number one entry is test001 which has one 5 star rating so it's not presenting popular
mods but just ones with the highest average in no obvious order third and probably the silliest
is you can sort alphabetically which in this case doesn't even make it down to the letter a finally
you can sort by date updated which just like date uploaded really only goes back a few days
whether they didn't think of or didn't get around to a popularity sort makes this i think a lot less
useful than it will be down the road even just a simple sort by total downloads like it is in
h2 would make finding good mods much easier but the point is at least mods and a content editor
are technically in the game number eight is the number of alerts has been cut down if you're like
me and we're missing events happening around the map or even your landmarks being destroyed in a
game i don't want to talk about this is great news they do seem to get it in the description
of the problem that important notifications were being missed by players because of all the text
sounds and red circles popping up on the map i think they could go even further and take away
the ally under attack ping but this is definitely a good start this is a look at the mini map in
real time from the perspective of blue while being raided prior to the new change and you
can see there's a lot of red circles throw in an ally being attacked and a secret site being taken
and very quickly it's obvious you can't jump around the map fast enough to check on all
of these notifications and it's one of those situations where less is more for number nine
i'll group a bunch of little ui changes it's two obvious examples they now have a global cue and
they've done a much more sensible thing with the chinese dynasty icon then having it in the middle
of the screen for anyone to accidentally click on there's probably a lot of other little things i'm
forgetting but the ui overall is just a little nicer in some small ways finally with number
10 i won't go into all the details as it would take literally hours but suffice to say there's
been tons of changes to units and civilization since the early days as just one example siege
is being completely overhauled to the point that torches aren't gonna be used against them anymore
and every civilization is also of course receiving balanced changes on top of what
they've already had over the last few months which is truly too many to list it's hard to even say
which civilizations are going to be stronger or weaker with all of the cross interactions i have
to say overall they've actually done a good job with balance so far at least in terms of parity
between civilizations also i have to shout out the website aoe4world.com which is absolutely crushing
it with everything from constantly updated win rates unit building and tech stats along
with organizing a bunch of really useful external tools for build orders and lots more they're going
to have a ton of work ahead updating things with all the changes but it's an insanely good resource
for people trying to keep up with the game getting back to aoe4 though of course there's still a long
list of bugs they're working on and tracking and like i said even some added features that are in
my opinion still not quite there an interesting question to pose then is what if aoe4 had been
released in this state as opposed to what it was like last october honestly i think it still would
receive criticism for being unfinished or at least unpolished i suspect though it would have
held on to a lot more of its initial height and it really is a shame they didn't delay it by a year
it's hard to say if the pace of development would have sped up or slowed down because of
all the extra feedback they received or if all of these things were already on their to-do list one
thing i find interesting is the graphic style doesn't really come up these days thinking back
to where we were a year ago it was really all that was discussed around the game it's funny to look
back at the old trailers and how disconnected it all seems to the discussions that are going on now
that'll do it for this one though and i hope this comes across as fair to the game as i
genuinely think they've made some solid progress thanks for watching and i'll see you next time