Age of Empires 4 DF Tech Review: A Great Game With Technical Issues To Address

Age of Empires 4 brings a range of excellent new features to the franchise - and is generally a superb RTS. However, a bunch of technical problems hold this game back from being everything it can be.

[kamwar]

No proper multi-core support in 2021 is ridiculous.

[mahavakyas]

man.. so nostalgic.. the good old days.. playing Rise of Nations, AoE 2 & 3 with friends for 100s of hours.

[JK-live]

A brand new game in 2021 utilizes a single core...my god

[gtotheunit]

That's so weird it's using a single are usually very CPU heavy. You'd think Relic would want to be using as much processing power as possible if your CPU is good enough

[seanflah]

I've never heard documentaries pronounced in that particular fashion.

[CharcharoExplorer]

It seems to be a good game but... 2021, DX12 game... hammers ONE core and uses at most 4 cores?
This thing has worse core usage than Wolfenstein 2009, a DX9 game from 2009 lol.

[Simte]

I try not to be biased with nostalgia but this game remained me the LAN parties of old AOE2 and my notebooks full of strategies to win hahah.

[WannaDJ]

Grew up playing AoE 2 and 3, will give this one a shot!

[--Anurag--]

0:53 Oh man! That AOE theme will never get old. Love it. First game I bought with my own money was AOE 1 and the Rise of Rome expansion.

[szihu]

I wish they upscaled building sizes (not footprints, just visually) by 20% and allowed to zoom out a bit further away, so that units are not actually larger than some buildings. Or a tradeoff of 10% buildings up and 10% units down, since they are cartoonish stylized anyway and lack many details. Hopefully there will be a mod for this if this isn't getting addressed at all.

[BrokenArrowX]

Oof that lack of multithreading hurts to look at.

[TAMKILL]

AOE2 had a very thick booklet going through the history of each unit and building. Anyone remember it? I used to read it all the time in the bathroom lol

[HaloXeon]

It's good to see the game at it's best on a 3090, but even an RTX 2060 is out of reach for most people. It would be nice to see more of an "everyman's" setup included in testing. Considering the GTX 1060 is still by far the most commonly owned GPU and the overwhelming majority of people still play at 1080p.

[LateNightHalo]

I really wish someone would make a high quality, sprite-based RTS game.


There’s something charming about seeing the little sprites moving about the map, using a bit of imagination to make them seem more lively and having a world that’s a bit “abstract” due to its technical style

[KRGraphicsCG]

I loved this game growing up and if the devs fixed the multi core CPU issues and REALLY used the hardware to it's maximum, it would be even better. Would I buy this game? Yes

[Beaut_Beau]

12:34 What a pathetic, impersonal response from the developers, basically "we already knew about the problems, we just didn't care enough to fix them"
Not good enough Relic.

[JM_Traslo]

Could we see a DF Retro for Ultima Underworld, the game that inspired Carmack to rewrite the Doom Engine in the 90s and heavily inspired the Elder Scrolls as a series?

[TechGamer-pqgu]

for a game that is meant to have hundreds if not thousands of units on-screen at the same time only working off a single thread does not makes sense especially here in 2021 what are the Devs thinking are rushing this game out with an outdated engine with updated features but it can't use those updated features very well.

[johngalactus]

They played it very safe with the game, nothing groundbreaking but it's definitely going to please long time AoE fans.

[sakib]

Nice review. I really do hope relic gets these issues fixed within this year. Just fixing the multithread issue alone should do a lot to make the game quite better than it is currently.