Age of Empires 3 Definitive Edition - The Digital Foundry PC Tech Review
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 16 ต.ค. 2020
- Join Alex Battaglia for an in-depth look at the new Age of Empires 3 Definitive Edition - plus a detailed look at the crucial 2D to 3D transition point for the real-time strategy game genre. The new Age of Empires certainly looks as though it retains the gameplay of the original and makes a number of impressive visual upgrades - but is performance everything it should be?
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9:34 I think the water shoreline looked better in 2005. 🤔
The fresnel in the water is completelly wrong! its too reflective, its hiding some awesome underwater details. Proper fresnel there would make a lot of difference.
Also, the depth decay is completelly missing from the original game, where the original had a believable transition from ground to water, the remaster has a harsh line, as the transparency is not properly absorbing energy in the shader, based on depth.
Yea I actually thought "Water - Low" looked the most beautiful since you see all the underwater details
I was thinking this exact thing
@@jamesstringerphoto yea weird I thought the same
Water on low looks objectively better than on high. Plus less memory thrashing since there's no screen space reflections.
I noticed that too.
The border with land is extremely abrupt now.
2020 has been such a weird year for Microsoft. In a year where they're releasing new console hardware, their PC efforts have been crazy. Gears Tactics, Flight Simulator and now a remaster of AoE3 with 4 also in the works.
What about MCC
Unlike their competitors, Microsoft makes money whether you buy on pc or console, so selling consoles isn't exactly their no1 priority
Game Pass is all. They are getting as many people as the can into the Xbox ecosystem.
@@ShubhamMishrabro I was thinking more PC first which we haven't seen from MS or a lot of devs tbh in quite some time.
Imagine a Freelancer remake and sequel... instant buy.
Wow PC RTS review on DF! What a day to be alive! Long live Age of Empires series and thx Alex!
I hope we eventually see stuff like total war on here
C&C remastered was on here earlier this year, granted I think that's everything else they have on RTS.
C&C remastered cries
At least he didn't use Tib Sun music this time.
Holy cow! AGOE (2005) still looks great after 15 years.
I thought it was released in 2008..it just looks so darn good, holy crap.
yeah what the hell, i kept thinking it was the remaster, especially the water.
this must be like the crysis of real time strategy games
I played it during pandemic and had no issue with old graphic.
It was hard to believe this game is 15 years old
Them Physx :* :* :*
the water looks more realistic on low than on high..
Like AC black flag water
I thought the same thing! It looked better than medium at least.
Wanted to post this. Maybe not more "realistic" but aesthetically it sure looks "better"
Definitely not more realistic. Maybe subjectively better, but not more realistic.
@@brandonjohnson4121 depends on where its located, caribean waters look like this in real life.
To be honest, a graphically impressive RTS is a great benchmark for CPUs and GPUs alike.
How about Universe at War? That game was BEAUTIFUL.
For benchmarking you can take anno 1800
As a Dutch man I find it strange when my villagers say Handelaar (Merchant) when mining. I hope they patch it so they say Verzamelaar (Collector) instead?
Handelaar (Merchant) doesn't make any sense when mining for ore...
contact developer to fix it
Literally unplayable
Evil tonic
@@ephphatha230 Dude just said it was weird, he wasn’t disparaging the game.
Why Merchant can't sell gold or gold ore?
I have to say... I much prefer the original water in every possible way.
I think the addition of boats' water trails is pretty good as is the general look of the water surface but yeah the rest looks like a downgrade, SSR just looks worse and they removed the water opacity gradient near the shore which makes the beaches not look like beaches anymore. Also now the color of the water seems to be more uniformly blue without any green shift that the original had which to me made it look far more realistic.
Technically superior, artistically inferior.
Yeah, kinda prefer the original look as well...the new one almost looks like a deformed mirror...it's loosing all the depth the original look had.
@@AFourEyedGeek Is it thou? Planar reflections that are removed are generally much better for water reflections, especially from this camera angle. In terms of water, i can even go as far as to claim that water is technically inferior aswell. With obvios exception of ship trails that are added of course, they are pretty nice.
@Esuard Leder i feel like there is no talent in shader art anymore. most if not all remasters improve texture resolution and particle effects, but the old shader effects look better, or they just straight up remove them without even replacing them. One example i can think of is the Halo MCC, particularly the original game on the original graphics mode, where the jackal shield shader effect is missing, the bump mapping was busted, decals were blurry. they all end up looking more crisp, but less detailed somehow.
I think that the water looked alot better in the original. Especially on the shores
Most definitely, that was a downgrade. Another disappointing aspect of these "definitive" editions of the AoE games which take steps back in certain ways.
Thanks! Exactly that's the point I was about to make - 10:12. Also the palette of colours used originally - for example bright shiny gold sandy beaches used originally rather the brown muddy one in the new version works better to give a feel of a tropical shore.
Absolutely.
@@TheLastLineLive Don't worry, I am sure there will be a mod out to fix this soon.
@@Hopkins955 I hope so, wheres the top modding places for this?
AOE was my intro into pc gaming. Room mate had a pentium 1 back in college and we'd sit up all night playing, taking turns as player and adviser. Still the only RTS series I have ever played.
Not even 1 minute in and I'm already seeing a $1500 RTX 3090 dropping below 60fps on a remake of a 15 year old game at 4k... Jesus Christ.
This game at 4k brings my 1080Ti to its knees. The old game ran fine at 4k ....
@referral madness The usual awful optimization from current day devs. Also ironic the 3090 is marketed as a "8k card" but can't maintain 60fps in a remaster of a 15 year old game. Quite obvious.
Btw you don't need to put a space between the last letter of a word and a question mark.
@@dave7244 yeah I am also 1080ti and play it all the time at 4k 60, well, over 60 but never below. Looks absolutely fantastic. No need to buy this new version at all sadly.
@referral madness New games (esp. Remasters) should be able to (at least partially) support arbitrary resolutions and framerate. They obviously had access to the source with the various non-texture "enhancements", and they massively botched it. Nobody is comparing this to theoretical console version, this is an apples to apples comparison of AoE3 and AoE3:DE on PC. This game was poorly coded, just like many of the other Remake/Remasters to come out recently.
@@Carrotsalesman It not like this edition is bad. But I have a pretty decent PC and it is killing it. Maybe this is the new Crysis? :)
I recently played age of empires 2 for the first time in like 10 years , I played it for 12 hours straight haha
"Oh, cool. AoE3 DE is out. Let me load it up to see what's different and then go to bed."
4AM, 6 hours later...
Happy to see this covered as well as a mention for Homeworld, I remember how incredible it looked on my Pentium III 600Mhz with a TNT2🤣
Same for me when I played it back in the day on my AMD K6-2 500 Mhz and Geforce 2 MX400. My jaw dropped for the first time when I saw the visuals for the first time when I played the homeworld 1 demo, I was in disbelief that my system could render something so beautiful.
Age of Empires 3 also looked very good when it was released. But the change in visuals meant a loss of the charm the original age of empires games had.
@@mihirchitnis905 Yup. I had almost the exact same setup as you did, except my cpu was K6-2 450. Good times, shitty cpu though, the thermals on that thing..
HW1 & HW2 were so far ahead of their time, hope they get HW3 right - trailer music gave me chills ;)
Seeing Alex talk about the visual features and quirks of the 2005 original really makes me want to see him and/or John do a dive into the original Company of Heroes. At the time, I was amazed by the level of detail they could fit into that game considering it was an RTS!
Water looks better on low, medium and high just reflects too much
Is it just me or does the water in the original look better than the new version? Looks sharper and more detailed to me minus the added extras such as interaction. Also, can Vsync being applied through Nvidia Control Panel solve the issue with non 60fps?
Thought the same here.
No, the game itself limits the framerate to below refresh rate. You couldn't force it to produce more frames with yet another limitation on framerate.
@@forasago I would try adaptive vsync at half refresh rate for a smoth 60 FPS experience on 120Hz monitor
The beaches look muuuch better in the original, but that might be an art direction choice
I was very fortunate to work on this project as a 3D artist.
Thanks for giving it an honest review :)
Wow the original 2005 version looks better than I remember. You can say, it “Aged” well. hur hur hur. I’ll see myself out.
True
first thing i thought when i head about the remaster
Destruction physics on the original version is better than the DE version, and the waves along the coastline is different now.
Seeing that Dawn of War footage made me realize how much i want a good remaster of it with every DLC and campaigns that come with them.
The worse looking water is really annoying me on the definitive edition. It looked far superior in the original. Why fix something that wasn't broken?
Yeah, only the interactivity is better, but everything else is worse in DE.
@@VargVikernes1488 Come on, models and most textures look better. Just water and ship destruction animation look worse.
Oof, when Alex hits us with that 0:49 ‘JOHNRAUGH’ - classy AF
This game was my jam in my early teens. I had an absolute potato of a computer so it ran terribly, but still loved it 😂
9:55 I think the water looked better in the original overall
Age of Empires 2 The Age of Kings and Diablo were the first PC and online games I ever played as a little kid and as much as I loved my N64 and the PS1 at that moment I realized that PC gaming provided a unique experience to gaming that the consoles didn't but they complimented one another nicely and to this day it is still my mindset.
1:55 Age of Mythology is the best RTS and the best out of all the Age of empires games.
100%
best campaign for sure
Age of Mythology (true history) fan here! I just checked my Steam library- still there- phew! Now if they give it a good treatment- and add it to game pass so I do not need to purchase it again for the 3rd time I will be soooo happy!!
Sad that the ships just sorta drop in on themselves now instead of actually sinking and breaking apart like the original. Still, if that’s the only thing I can find that is different and a bummer this is looking to be a great remastering.
The water also looks much worse on high then on low, problem is you lose all planar reflections on low.
The original game's water was better in every way. Truly a testament to Ensemble's prowess.
I think the water is looking worse now.
The transition from water to sand is too harsh. Looks worse imo
I'm glad to see you guys finally gave some love to the franchise! After the Definitive Edition came out last year and I didn't see any coverage I thought you just didn't know/enjoy the series. AoE2:DE will turn 1 year old on next month's 14th, and ofc I'd love if there was some sort of content for it, since it evolved quite a bit since it came out! In any case, good job, and congrats on the million subs!!!
This game was my childhood!
Thank you looking into this classic🙏
9:39 Notice how on the original the ship is a pirate ship and on the right it's Morgan's ship.
This is Amazing DF, one of the best videos I've seen on PC RTS. A genre I dearly love. I have played ALL the games you mentioned and was hit by a tsunami of nostalgia.
PSA: Homeworld 3 is under development right now, can't wait for it.
9:19 why is this animation worse on DE?
I remember while I was at the Guildhall hearing about how Graeme Devine spent a year working the original water for the game. Super impressive result for the time and I still think the original shorelines look much better in the transition to land.
I appreciate the boat trails but come on man, that water looks terrible compared to the original, more technically advanced as it is.
2005 was a great year for games. I remember getting this and Civ 4 on PC and xbox 360 launched.
Sheesh that looks rough. I remember my brother used to get a "computer buyer" magazine as part of his job in the 90s and 2000s and they came with a demo disc. So many memories of theme hospital, red alert cc, etc.
That sound track is really good.
Awesome a suprise DF video!
Wow, they really botched the ship destruction animation...
I'd love a DF retro video about Ground Control. Such an awesome game that was also visually stunning for its time
Great video Alex 👍🏻 I hope they fix the issues.
Wow, didn't expect a mention of Homeworld in this video. You earned my like just with that. So I guess you'll make a video dedicated to Homeworld 3 when it releases, and, maybe a DF retro video about the original Homeworld?
Absolutely loved Age of Mythology. My best friend and I spend so much time playing that game when we were teenagers. So much fun and the setting was so cool and different than other rts games.
Pfft, modern games don’t even do a great job of physics simulations, I feel like there was a point in time in the mid 2000s where lots of games started having really fun interactive environments, now everything is shiny and polished and static with not a lot of interactivity.
cpu limitations probably
League Of Legends “physics”
I am in the same boat. Nvidia physics was great. I recall the Batman games where the interaction was awesome.
Its because of modern PC/consoles architecture. Beautiful graphics do indeed use a lot of CPU even if those environments are completely static. Every texture, shadow, shader, geometry, etc, has to pass through the CPU and be processed in some way before reaching the GPU.
The jaguar cores in the XONE/PS4 were a big part of the issue too. 360/PS3 were pretty balanced in CPU to GPU power. meanwhile, the jaguar CPU cores, while being better than what 360/PS3 had, were not powerful enough to compensate the improvement in GPU power. The race for graphics meant that if developers were to take advantage of all available GPU power in PS4/XONE the CPU had to be used almost entirely to process graphics.
Luckily this is something that next gen consoles are supposed to address with a more balanced CPU/GPU configuration and dedicated decoding hardware with new I/O APIs to alleviate the CPU. so hopefully those dynamic and interactive worlds should have its comeback.
far cry series is the perfect example. Also borderlands 2 vs 3
I liked this game when it came out, best mapgen ive ever seen in an rts.
But just way too few ages, every skirmish feels very short, and it doesnt feel like you progressed at all through ages.
A mention of both Homeworld and Ground Control in the same video? What a time to be alive!
Do the vsync / locked fps issues persist if you force fast vsync through nvidia control pannel and leave fps unlocked in the game?
This brings back so much memories
The Age of Empire series is some of the best games ever made. Especially part 2. Age of Mythology was amazing also. Just fun and addictive.
2:51 "A bit like watching a Quake 2 level from afar." Needs Turok Man to pop his head in and say, "That's fine."
I'm having that frame rate issue too. Can't see any reason for it other than a bug.
Great game but got some technical issues. I was playing it yesterday with a friend online and a couple of times we both got kicked to Windows without any error message. We also couldn't see the lobbies created after a couple of games, so we changed over to Company of Heroes 2 instead since AoE was broken
DF Retro and a modern Tech Review in one video!
I think I played Age of Mythology the most actually, and I played a hell of a lot of AoE2. The Titan expansion really added a great play mechanic to the game. I really hope they do a definitive edition of AoM, I would buy it day 1 I think.
Havent they done that in a way already? AOM : Extended edition, released some years ago. Its not a full remaster but it is quite enchanced. I liked it alot.
@@Erikcleric Yeah I have the Extended Edition, but it isn't a full remaster like this. In fact I don't think they did anything but include all the expansion packs and make it compatible with newer video cards I guess. I don't think any reworking of anything was done.
@@vfplayer it wasnt a remaster yea :), just enchanced, textures were still original. But i copied this of the Steam store:
Improved Visuals
Time of Day
Improved water
Shadows
Bump / Specular maps
Global Lighting
Antialiasing & Ambient Occlusion
With all those little enchancements, i guess how it looked depended on what you had enabled.
@@Erikcleric more of a bump than I remember, I’ll have to play it again, but it definitely isn’t as big of a jump as AoE3:DE. I would still like to see them do a full remaster/upgrade/remake.
@@vfplayer Yes.
Back then i jumped from AOE 2 to AOE 3, i never bought AOM, so i liked EE, and a great way to finally play it but i noticed it was a nice blend of new and old i guess. :)
But yes, i mean, that AOE 2 remaster is so good, im barely finished with it, incredible work and now im onto the 3rd aswell, yea, a remaster done well does alot!
I'm curious, you didn't mention how variable refresh rate screens handle this game's particular performance bug. Say I'm on a 60hz screen that supports gsync, is it still skipping frames with vsync behaviour or are the frame times flat?
I was having similar thoughts about this issue. I believe, with the way g-sync works, the frame times would still be all over the shop but the refresh of the monitor would track with it. It could provide a smoother experience I would assume. I am also curious if a 120/144/240 Hz monitor could run it with Adaptive V-Sync (Half refresh rate) in the Nvidia control panel at a locked 60/72/120 Hz.
If you had a gsync monitor, you'd want to have vsync disabled, so you wouldn't have "skipping" frames because your monitor refresh and game framerate would be synchronized.
This issue is fixed now, they have released a patch
This is a fantastic video! I don't really have any interest in AoE 3: DE but this was really interesting and I loved the section on optimal settings. Great stuff!
at 11:30, this was actually a feature added in one of the original expansion packs.
Releasing a game these days that ISN'T full of bugs is illegal, didn't you all get the memo?
It does look quite nice, I'm enjoying it; though there are very odd frame drops out of nowhere. Plus the unit selection ring is bizarrely very low res. Some technical issues will hopefully get fixed come next update.
10:00 Serious talk.
What's your problem Alex, that sometimes you can't see glaring graphical downgrades even with someone strangling you with one hand while points at the screen screaming with the other?
It's baffling.
@Macdealerx that's actually worse.
Honesty is important in Tech Reviews, and I agree with Panino, it's pretty much a downgrade and should be mentioned.
Alex should try his hand at a DF Retro on PC classics (games that don't work well in a console environment) with other RTS games, Sims, roller coster series, simulators like farming sim, etc. Always like his work on PC games which are unique to the platform.
I used to play this underrated AoE title on a prebuilt office machine with no external GPU and a Celeron CPU, and somehow I still remember it being quite beautiful. This remaster does seem to remind me of the feel, but given how old it is at this point, I would expect a bit more. A remake, even.
I got a pc in 1998. It was our family’s first pc. 2002 was a hard year for me. As games like these and in particula black and white could not run on it any longer. In 2003 i was advised to buy a 64mb graphics card. I then discovered that my pc didnt have an AGP slot and therefore the graphics card was useless. Please bear in mind i was like 15 and this was before youtube days. I then didnt return to pc gaming until 2019. And now im having an absolute blast being able to play all these 3d games from the early 2000’s that i wanted to play.
Homeworld and Ground Control 1 :3 my favourite RTSes of 90s
waiting for new reworked artwork and perhaps hopefully have new compelling animated cutscene works for Age of Mythology 🤔
I played though the OSX port of AoE 3 in 2015 on a Mac Pro. Much to my surprise, it worked fine at full res with my newfangled ultrawide monitor while many current titles didn't - albeit with some oddities in cutscenes and the title screen. The game had some really strange performance issues and some stability problems though. Performance was more unstable on a Radeon 7970 and Xeon X5670 than I would've though.
Review starts at 7:30
~ You're welcome.
9:13 For me the original looked better.
I didn't notice the disappearing water in the corners of the screen.
But I wonder why Alex didn't notice the disappearing 3D waves in the corner of the screen.
e.g. 00:14 - There the waves are cut off. And I can tell you that it's even worse in 21:9.
Never the less I really like the look of the remaster. Especially the more detailed look of the cliffs - more 3D- detail and more foliage on them : )
good find
It's very subtle in the footage here but annoys me in 3440x1440 because it starts basically at the edge of the 16:9 ratio.
So the waves disappear in ~ 1/3 of the screen with 21:9 resolutions.
Seams as if the "fov" of the wave is hardcodes and does not scale with aspect ratio.
And I capped the framerate at 80 with river tuner. Perfect frametimes after that : )
Didn't expect to see Ground Control :O Blast from the past indeed.
Nah man if you look at the building/ ship destruction the old physics model was way more fun and satisfying. The game is kind of blurry aswell because of TAA. They should atleast give you an option for different AA
Alex and PC gaming, a match made in heaven.
I noticed some graphical issues in this review that i still encounter on the latest version of AoE3DE like the water edges in the cutscenes still not fully rendered and the weird water lines when you’re panning the camera around water surfaces like weird dark shadow spots that follow the camera in the water. Hard to explain but if you turn the graphics settings to high or very high these issues become apparent
Amazing review! I hope the developers see this and patch the game.
11:25 The passive ability was added by the expansions ;)
18:30 I didn't know there was a mod for that lol (pirate skin for Morgan's ship)
The only thing that shocks me is the lack of smoothness between land and see like in the original (10:08)
That's ma man right there. Mentioning, Ground Control 1 and Homeworld!
Very annoying when the full-screen option in games is not actually exclusive full screen.
Makes a huge difference for input lag and frame times.
The disappearing water mesh at the edges is most likely due to them using the projected grid approach to rendering water. Basically the water mesh grid is rendered only in screen space so there are no vertices beyond the screen edges, so because of this any large displacement value will reveal the under lying color which is most likely the clear color. Most games don't use this approach anymore and would rather prefer something in world-space like CDLOD terrain or geometry clip maps.
WATER !! This is the water comment you’re looking for. Feels much better in the original.
I like black bars on top and down to generate a cinematic feel. And I also like big UI. But I know, that is not the current norm.
I was hoping for a gears 5 analysis to compare it to what was shown in the demo
What if you use RTSS to cap to a number that's well under the refresh rate, say 100 fps on a 144Hz VRR monitor? Would that get rid of the inconsistent frame pacing?
True about the loading. I installed the the DE on the Samsung 97- NVME. and holy fck that was quick loading!
Just to mention, frame rate soft lock was fixed. I can now easily have frame rates >60 with a 1650 super at high settings at 1080p with a 60hz screen.
I'm curious if you can set the FPS limit to the perfect amount that you can adjust it to land on a steady 60 FPS. For example if you set a 70 FPS limit and the game is dropping 10 FPS, then through trickery you get to play your game at 60 FPS! I use FPS limits in all titles, I play to find out how well my graphics card can do, to get 60 FPS minimum, and then set my FPS to whatever my average is. That way I always get a fluid smooth gaming experience
Here's hoping they make a Definitive Edition of Age of Mythology aswell. Also, could you guys possibly go in depth on the SAGE engine from the CnC franchise? Would be awesome to hear your thoughts of its development over the years.
Yeah... They did something for Age of Mythology, but they did it in 2014 and it already looks dated again.
I wonder if they fixed the water issues yet? Like the transition at beaches being harsh, which needs to be soft/smooth like og.
Ugh, so glad you guys did a video on this. Was tried of seeing small brain steam reviews saying "hurrr all they did was change the saturation nothing else is different" when that's objectively not true.
I played aoe3 for the first time in 2010 and I remember still thinking it was gorgeous. Especially the shadows and water
Loved the units from those mercenary building... German Black Cavalry and Jaegars were my favorite unit and also that huge cannon... Hopefully Microsoft brings these games to Series X
I'm gonna go back and play through this again. The original was amazing at the time and this looks great.. assuming it gets some patches, but it obviously will.
Hi would really appreciate if you can check or make a video about if with the extra power of the series x you can now run the Witcher 3 in locked 60 FPS on preformance Mode thanks
Try to lock 60 fps with vsync with riva tuner. For my it works with some games with same problem
Can you trick it to lock to 60 Hz by doing 120Hz screen mode and then v-sync half refresh rate?
I experienced the exact issue with an MSI GE75 (RTX2080 150W) laptop and it no matter what the settings was locked at 55fps @ 4K and appeared to be running on borderless with no way to enable real fullscreen.
Why not one on age2de! Just one video, please!
back in 2005/2006, I played Empire Earth II more than Age Of Empires III, along with Warhammer 40K Dark Crusade, those were all amazing games that time
My old 970 isn't up for the task anymore dipping below 10 fps during battles even if I turn everything to low and play on 720p..