Am I the only one concerned/disliking the change of style and added "flashiness" in Retold? It completely misses the AoM vibe.
I know it has been said before. But it's not only that it looks like a mobile game. It looks like the development team are completely detached from the core design principles of AoM, and everything behind what that means (gameplay, music, UI, visuals, and overall flavour).
AoM was always about ancient cultures. Sure, it is a game that fantasizes about god powers and mythos a lot, and it definitely makes a lot of stuff up to stay fun, and sure, pantheons are not even a tiny bit accurate (how's Amon not a Major God?). But it tries to remain way more faithful to source material than you think. For many of us, this was our first contact with Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, etc. And in the game, the richness and contrast between the flavours of each of these cultures is very apparent. Part of it is due to the game being built upon research and documentation as much as they could:
https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/spoken-egyptian-in-age-of-mythology
This also shows in the visuals, UI, music, story... you name it. Visual style has a somewhat mute feel to it. Not too colourful, not too bright, not too flashy, but characterised by the colors and style of the culture. The motifs around UI are very different from culture to culture and it translates very well with their architecture and keeping things in theme.
AoM Retold, on the other hand, seems to not understand a single of these design principles and prioritizes the game looking flashy and "them laser crocs yeah". I will go deeper and say I really much doubt 20% of the developers in the project have completed the original campaign, not to say played the original game at all. This shows in the design and UI so far only, but let me bet that this will show in gameplay, music and story changes they made.
Remember, wait until release.
