Age of Empires IV: The Sultans Ascend - Campaign Review
Age of Empires IV: The Sultans Ascend - Campaign Review
A pretty good time, all in all
I finally got a decent sized break over the Christmas holiday, and I spent a good chunk of time playing through Age of Empires IV’s latest DLC campaign, The Sultans Ascend. I first wrote about this a few months back, offering some suggestions on how the developers could avoid the missteps of the original launch campaigns while preserving their positive elements. Now that I’ve finally played it, I’m happy to say that it turned out pretty decently.
A Creative Flourish
I was pleased to see the campaigns flex their creative muscles and put out some risky and original concepts. Egypt, Red Sea, and Mansurah, in particular, stand out as unique missions with compelling ideas behind them. Hattin feels like a substantially more polished version of the Mongol campaign’s Blockade at Lumen Shaw, while Ayn Jalut is an interesting idea that nonetheless feels a little lazy when you actually play it out. Five for eight is not bad at all, given the starting point of the original campaign missions and the fact that putting together a good pacing arguably dictates a more predictable approach to the first and last missions.
I was also quite happy that Sultans avoids many of the scripting and polish issues that plagued the original campaigns. There’s still some funny business around unit leashing and kiting behavior, which interacts poorly with the run-and-shoot horse archers that are the centerpiece of a couple missions. But in general, it’s much better than before, and I didn’t find myself constantly taken out of the experience by immersion breaking scripting problems.
I think a major factor that continues to hold these missions back is their smotheringly large scale. Red Sea is a good example - it’s a really interesting concept, tasking the player with establishing a water trade route while contending with multi-pronged attacks from raiders and the Franks. Unfortunately, it’s just too darn big, and the units are too slow - the mission drags as you order your ships back and forth to take engagements and rebuild lost trade ships. The core ideas of naval combat, positioning, and unit compositions get muddled by the sheer scale of the mission; how much stuff you need to build, how far it all needs to go to actually do anything, etc. It ends up just feeling like a brawl… but on the high seas, I guess.
This pattern shows up in a number of missions. I’ll give Tyre a pass because it’s the introductory mission, but there’s no good excuse for Acre or Cyprus. They’re too freaking big! It’s just not that interesting to build thousands upon thousands of units to grind through enemy AIs with seemingly limitless resources and armies. Setting aside the occasionally dopamine hit that comes with smashing an opposing army with 15 mangonels - which you’re happy to throw away because you have 100k resources - it’s honestly a little boring.
I’d love to see the designers tighten up their vision: smaller maps, fewer units, higher stakes. I get that there’s an accessibility benefit to scaling things out in size, in the sense that players who don’t know what they’re doing can just build a lot of stuff and throw it around everywhere. (I know this because that’s what I did in Red Sea, haha). But this dilutes the creative vision and reduces a potentially fantastic mission to a merely good one.
Missed Opportunities
I think it’s a shame that the new campaign leveraged an existing civilization, the Abbasids, over one of the new civs, like the Byzantines or Japanese. I get the challenge of building a campaign around a civ that’s still in the process of being built - like assembling a plane as it’s taking off - and perhaps the substantial improvement around gameplay polish is evidence enough that the developers made the right call here. But I do feel like it’s a missed opportunity to show off some new gameplay.
More generally, I think the most impactful critique I could make of these campaigns is that they treat the player civilization too much as a blank slate - a kind of overly generic starting point. While the mission design is frequently very creative, I felt that there were only half-hearted attempts to showcase the Abassid civilization itself. The only good example I can think of are the Turkic Horse Archers, which ironically are campaign-specific units that aren’t actually available in any other game mode.
This made missions feel a bit vanilla, and occasionally like interchangeable brawls. I rarely felt like I was strategizing around my unit composition or technology development, let alone exploring and appreciating the intricacies of the Abassid; I was just building up a ton of everything and deathballing across the map. This is made worse by the enemy AI producing seemingly limitless numbers of every different type of unit - even if you try to do something interesting (like a pure horse archer play I tried in one mission), you end up getting killed because the computer is guaranteed to have a ton of whatever counters your composition.
It’s similar feedback to the overscaling, honestly; I’d love to see the designers reign in their vision not just in terms of scale, but also in terms of breadth. Focus individual missions around specific unit compositions and unit interactions. Play around more with neat ideas like stealth, brush fires, unit abilities, etc. Jump off of Abbasid-unique aspects like their ultra-powerful trade, instead of treating it as just a great way to gather a lot of gold in otherwise standard missions. Don’t force players to put together a composition that can counter everything; instead, push them into specific directions, which is more satisfying from a strategic perspective and also mechanically more interesting and diverse.
Artwork and Story Telling
I’m a huge fan of the choice to illustrate the cutscenes; I think this ages really well. It’s grating to pull up an old game and see dated 3D renders; Grey Goo is a particularly bad example of this anti-pattern in action, although even StarCraft II doesn’t look that great anymore.
The storytelling itself is pretty meh. I found it to be a mildly melodramatic good vs. evil narrative that doesn’t do a particularly good job making the player identify with any of the major players or their motivations. Note that I don’t take any issue with the story being told from a particular perspective - I think that’s a natural thing to do, and I think the general idea of exploring the Crusades from the perspective of key Muslim players is a cool idea with a lot of potential. But it’s not executed well; it feels like an overly simplified children’s story, and I think the designers misread their target audience on this one.
I get that it’s challenging to present complex historical events in a video game - go into too much depth and players will start to tune out, but don’t go deep enough, and they might never tune in to begin with. I feel that these campaigns lean too far towards the latter category. Even just a few extra minutes sprinkled throughout offering context on the historical events - the key players, their motivations, their impact, and so on - would go a long way in connecting the player to the narrative.
I feel that the original launch campaigns did this quite well, and I think it’s accomplishable within the framework of illustrated cutscenes. I’m thinking, for example, of a particularly great cutscene in the Rus campaign, which showcases how Moscow develops from a barren field into a bustling metropolis. I think you could do something like this to showcase the progression of European and Muslim military advancements throughout the years; what they were aiming to do, who was leading them, and so forth. I mean I’m just spitballin’ here, maybe that particular idea wouldn’t work - I just think a little bit more context would pull the player into the shoes of the Sultans and enable the story to land a bit better.
Final Thoughts
I was really satisfied with The Sultans Ascend. It’s not a perfect campaign by any means, but it’s head and shoulders above the original launch campaigns. I love how the developers took more creative risks this time around, and still managed to pair it with some good polish. I do think that there’s several areas for improvement that prevent Sultans from being a truly unforgettable experience; but as it stands, it’s in a pretty decent spot, and that’s a great jumping off point to whatever the developers put together next.
Until next time,
brownbear
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