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Forums - Gaming - How come Age of Empires 4 isnt coming to Xbox One if Phill cares about Xbox?

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Carl on 24 August 2017

Because it doesn't have to be on Xbox One.

Age of Empires has a long, healthy history on PC. Relic Entertainment has a long, healthy history on PC and have specialized in developing RTS games for PC for over 10 Years. The current Age of Empires and RTS fanbase is thoroughly embedded in the PC market.

Furthermore, there's no real guarantee the extra money, time and effort spent on developing a version of the game that could work on Xbox One, would be worth the extra money, time and effort. Anyone really interested in playing an Age of Empires game in 2017 is going to buy it on PC, and is already playing multiple other RTS games on PC.



                            

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DonFerrari on 24 August 2017
Pemalite said:
Bofferbrauer2 said:

The CPU however is a design specifically meant for Netbooks and, by extension, Ultrathins (as Intel owns Ultrabook trademark, AMD has to name them Ultrathin) and even Tablets. These where never meant to be powerful, just energy efficient. Any modern Pentium dualcore can run circles around the 8 core Jaguar because of the latter's abysmally low IPC.

The Xbox One X's CPU is still based on Jaguar. It's 8-cores are roughly inline with a Core i3 Haswell @ 3.2ghz.

It is safe to say, that PC CPU's have outclassed consoles for generations, it's been the PC's consistent main strength, along with an abundance of Ram.

Bofferbrauer2 said:

Don't confuse CPU Power and GPU Power. On the GPU side the XOX is definitly stronger than many, if not most Gaming PCs out there.

The GPU is a little trickier.
The Xbox One X is only mid-range in terms of performance.

Basically it's competing with a Geforce 1060/Radeon RX 580.

Sure it certainly has the edge over the majority of PC's, but the majority of PC's aren't pretending to try and run at 4k.
But that doesn't mean it's performance is impressive by any stretch.

Bofferbrauer2 said:

If you want a more modern RTS game for comparision, just look up framerates in Starcraft II. The CPU is the limiting factor here, not the GPU as it is the case in vitually any other game and genre.

StarCraft 2 is a bad example.

When StarCraft 2 dropped onto the market we started getting a taste for 6-core processors with the Phenom 2 x6 and Core i7 990X/3930K and so on.
Quad-Cores were fully mainstream.

So what did Blizzard do?
They limited StarCraft 2's CPU load to only 2 cores, which means a Haswell Core i3 Dual-Core could be faster than a 6-core/12 thread Core i7 Sandy Bridge processor.

Thus the CPU being a limiting factor in SC2 was due to Blizzards own silly design decision/game engine... Granted, spreading out processing is no easy task as there is allot of issues you need to be mindful of, but this is Blizzard we are talking about, they have the resources.

DonFerrari said:

Understood. I really left RTS a long time ago, perhaps 15 years.

Considering graphics aren't demanding they could offload a good portion to GPU. But yes, if several sacrifices need to be made to run the game, then it isn't a good idea, we just can't really tell at the moment.


Physics processing could be done entirely on the GPU with an RTS, considering how CPU bound they typically are.

SvennoJ said:

Halo wars 2 has 80 population limit which you can raise to max 120. Age of Empires 2 had a limit of 200 per person back in 1999 on PC. Granted with over 1000 units moving around in 6 player lan play it slowed down to a crawl when an all out war broke out between the 6 of us. However 18 years later, max 120 units is pretty limited.

StarCraft 1 if you controlled all three races you could have a max population of 600... You do the math for an 8 player romp. :P

Total Annihilation had some pretty chunky population limits, I think there was a patch/mod that enabled you to have a population limit of several thousand.

Games like American Conquest or Cossacks can allow you to  have 16,000 units on a map at once...

Hey pema, I may have understood it wrong when you said it could be totally offloaded...

But from your understanding there wouldn't be a real "prohibition" on making a decent and capable port of AoE4 to X1 and X1X if they so decided right? Sure we will only be sure about it when they release the game, have minimum and recommended specs informed and all.



duduspace11 "Well, since we are estimating costs, Pokemon Red/Blue did cost Nintendo about $50m to make back in 1996"

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=8808363

Mr Puggsly: "Hehe, I said good profit. You said big profit. Frankly, not losing money is what I meant by good. Don't get hung up on semantics"

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=9008994

Azzanation: "PS5 wouldn't sold out at launch without scalpers."

Pemalite on 25 August 2017
DonFerrari said:

Hey pema, I may have understood it wrong when you said it could be totally offloaded...

But from your understanding there wouldn't be a real "prohibition" on making a decent and capable port of AoE4 to X1 and X1X if they so decided right? Sure we will only be sure about it when they release the game, have minimum and recommended specs informed and all.

The main limitation would indeed be the CPU as that is still the best place to do your A.I calculations. - So, you simply make the CPU do less work.
The Xbox One X has an advantage here as it has offloaded a heap of jobs typically done on the CPU and moved it onto the GPU's command processor block, but you still need to build the game with the base Xbox One in mind.

In most games the CPU is usually tasked with doing all the Physics, Particle effects and so on.. As the GPU is busy trying to push graphics quality as that is what gets thrown around in advertising and marketing angles to sell games.

But in an RTS the load is significantly different, the GPU isn't required to push cutting edge graphics effects, thus it has spare processing time to handle the Physics and Particle effects, leaving more cycles for A.I.

But what makes it more difficult is that A.I is very difficult to multi-thread.
Ashes of the Singularity managed to pull it off by making A.I asynchronous to the rest of the gameplay, giving it a job-like system, that does come with it's own caveats... But it paid off for Ashes of the Singularity.

In short, it really depends on how demanding Age of Empires 4 is on the CPU. And how many threads the engine can scale out towards.
If it's only sticking to 1-2 threads and will bring even a Core i3 to it's knees, then it's not likely an easy task shifting that to console.

We will have to wait and see when the game launches for a proper educated guess to see if it can scale downwards to consoles... But considering that it's Relic building the game, who gave us some of the best RTS games of all time with Homeworld, Company of Heroes and Warhammer...
And the fact they have only ported 3 consoles games (Two on Xbox 360 and one on PS3) I wouldn't have my hopes up.

I would personally like to see the game on the Playstation 4 and Xbox One and even Switch if possible, it's a great franchise that I hope more gamers get exposed to.




www.youtube.com/@Pemalite

sethnintendo on 25 August 2017
superchunk said:
I'd like to see RTS and turn based strategy hit consoles. I'm just done having to keep Windows around.

Though, the core audience of these types of games will more than likely only pick up PC versions as the controls offer far more precision and flexibility. I do wonder what new audience in the console market could be attracted to the genre.

TBS can easily be adapted to consoles but the market is somewhat niche regulated to hand helds and PC mainly.  I can see Fire Emblem breaking out even more on Switch.  RTS work best on PC but I suppose some console versions are well adapted.  I'm still a TBS fan but not too much into RTS although I have a few on PC. 

OT: Love the Age of Empires series but I'll just wait a few years until they release it on Steam. 



DonFerrari on 25 August 2017
Pemalite said:
DonFerrari said:

Hey pema, I may have understood it wrong when you said it could be totally offloaded...

But from your understanding there wouldn't be a real "prohibition" on making a decent and capable port of AoE4 to X1 and X1X if they so decided right? Sure we will only be sure about it when they release the game, have minimum and recommended specs informed and all.

The main limitation would indeed be the CPU as that is still the best place to do your A.I calculations. - So, you simply make the CPU do less work.
The Xbox One X has an advantage here as it has offloaded a heap of jobs typically done on the CPU and moved it onto the GPU's command processor block, but you still need to build the game with the base Xbox One in mind.

In most games the CPU is usually tasked with doing all the Physics, Particle effects and so on.. As the GPU is busy trying to push graphics quality as that is what gets thrown around in advertising and marketing angles to sell games.

But in an RTS the load is significantly different, the GPU isn't required to push cutting edge graphics effects, thus it has spare processing time to handle the Physics and Particle effects, leaving more cycles for A.I.

But what makes it more difficult is that A.I is very difficult to multi-thread.
Ashes of the Singularity managed to pull it off by making A.I asynchronous to the rest of the gameplay, giving it a job-like system, that does come with it's own caveats... But it paid off for Ashes of the Singularity.

In short, it really depends on how demanding Age of Empires 4 is on the CPU. And how many threads the engine can scale out towards.
If it's only sticking to 1-2 threads and will bring even a Core i3 to it's knees, then it's not likely an easy task shifting that to console.

We will have to wait and see when the game launches for a proper educated guess to see if it can scale downwards to consoles... But considering that it's Relic building the game, who gave us some of the best RTS games of all time with Homeworld, Company of Heroes and Warhammer...
And the fact they have only ported 3 consoles games (Two on Xbox 360 and one on PS3) I wouldn't have my hopes up.

I would personally like to see the game on the Playstation 4 and Xbox One and even Switch if possible, it's a great franchise that I hope more gamers get exposed to.

Thanks for the detailed explanation. It now depends on Microsoft to decide if they will see value on doing the port.



duduspace11 "Well, since we are estimating costs, Pokemon Red/Blue did cost Nintendo about $50m to make back in 1996"

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=8808363

Mr Puggsly: "Hehe, I said good profit. You said big profit. Frankly, not losing money is what I meant by good. Don't get hung up on semantics"

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=9008994

Azzanation: "PS5 wouldn't sold out at launch without scalpers."

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darkenergy on 27 August 2017

I don't know why this is such a big deal. The only people who care about this are people that aren't Xbox fans, just look at the Empire thread nobody is complaining that AOE4 isn't going to be available on Xbox One.



Proud to be a Californian.

okr on 27 August 2017

Do you own an Xbox?