Wintergaming · @StarcraftWinter
19th Sep 2021 from TwitLonger
Age of Empires 4's UI/UX is a MAJOR turnoff as a competitive RTS player
I'll be going into much more depths with video & dramatic commentary later but I wanted to get my thoughts down after 24 hours now of AOE4 Open beta/stressful test
Overall I think the graphics are passable, the sound are good, the music is great and the gameplay (outside of everything below) is pretty solid, but the interface is becoming a huge turnoff for me
AOE 4 UI feels like an attempt to reinvent the wheel but comes up with a square
Some of these things are probably bugs, but many of them are clear design choices that ignore essentially decades of competitive RTS from Starcraft 1/2 & AOE2/AOE2:DE and make the game incredibly frustrating and unintuitive for someone of that background.
It truly feels like it was designed for a tablet or a console and then shoehorned onto PC, otherwise I'm hard pressed to explain why basic RTS things (like selecting one unit out of a group without it being in front of you on the screen) are not in the game.
*Big ass waypoint symbol that sometimes cant even click on sheep/trees because it is 3x as large
*No indicator of shift queue/no attack move shift Q
*Literally no patrol hotkey
Weird 4 selection box building setup instead of Basic/Advanced or Eco/Military
*Inability to select one unit without clicking on the screen, only box selction (shift/ctrl functionality only used for large groups)
No unit stances
Upgrades all look the same and are in inconsistent order
Age up building block screen and hard to distinguish at a glance
*When you select multiple units, some (not all) abilities disappear (longbow+pikemen ex)
Cant see market prices without hover, defeating half the purpose of hotkeys
Traders dont show up on army supply/idle worker hover
*Always health bars are transparent sometimes for units but not buildings
Selecting multiple buildings has seemingly random units able to build with some others/upgrades showing up in the box for completely different units
*Input lag in building things and issuing commands
No exclusive control groups, one unit can be hotkeyed to multiple control groups
*Alt key CANNOT BE UNBOUND and is forced to camera pan
*Clickable large box showing Chinese dynasty is nearly in middle of screen
Objectives are always visible even when irrelevant and take up too much space
*Minimap is ridiculously cluttered and unreadable past early game, especially in team games
No UI/minimap scaling
*No ability to bind to mouse buttons
No ability to garrison/ungarrison individual units
Canceling a building is stop command, not delete or esc
Hotkey functionality missing for Select all [Barracks, Stable, Archery, Market etc)
Only have production queue when clicking on building, no global queue
There is actually no button to bring up menu, only escape or f10
Escape also is how you cancel commands but if you click twice it brings up menu animation
Camera
Default camera is zoomed in from max (which is still way too low)
No camera locations/camera hotkeys
When you “focus” a selection, it averages the camera between them. If one vil is on each side of the map “focus” will show you empty space in the center
*Alt key is rotate camera – DEFAULT & UNCHANGEABLE/UNBINDABLE - alt tabbing for 2 seconds literally means your camera is off when you come back, let alone being functional for hotkeys/selection like AOE2/sc2
Observing/Out of Game
Production tab doesn't exist
Sounds are from player perspective, especially annoying in teams
Match ends and kicks you out of game immediately, no time to look over base etc
Replays don't exist (assume beta issue)
Info tabs take up way too much of the screen for what they are (20% of screen to say player 1 has 3 total landmarks)
No “everyone” cam, locked to player perspective
Following player view incredibly laggy, breaks on rotation
No upgrades, units or “army value” info
+ Dozens of other things I haven't remembered/aren't directly related to UI/UX decisions but more gameplay mechanics. I really want to like the game but as it stands if it didn't have the “Age of Empires” part in front of it I probably would have already moved on, especially with the $60 price point.