Our Public Update Previews (PUPs) not only present a sneak peek to owners of the game but also provide an opportunity for passionate players to step up, give feedback, and help us squash potential issues ahead of our major updates. PUP builds will generally contain new features, content, or bug fixes. Take a step behind the curtain and preview everything that’s coming to the game in the weeks leading up to a major update!
Owners of Age of Empires IV on Steam are invited to join us for a public preview of this upcoming update. During the timeframes listed below, you can
access a preview branch of the game, and
provide feedback and bug reports here on the Steam forums.
Starting with this PUP session, when launching the preview, you will receive a pop-up confirming if you want to launch the preview version of either the main game
OR the Content Editor (trying to access the Content Editor outside this path will always take you to the LIVE version).
For this preview,
please concentrate your feedback on expected functionality, including major bugs, notable crashes and more. Players should submit bug and balance concerns in the Steam forums, as well as prepare to complete a survey regarding the experimental camera angle/zoom introduced in this PUP—survey coming soon!
Along with our standard Bug Fixes and Balance Changes, Season Two will introduce a handful of New Features which the community has been asking for:
- Customizable Player Colors
- Refined Hotkey options
- A Map Preference System for multiplayer
- And more!
A detailed list of changes can be found on our Release Notes, and a deeper look at the Map Preference System is below.
When
START - Tuesday, June 7th @ 1:00 pm PT (2100 UTC)
END - Monday, June 20th @ 10:00 am PT (1700 UTC)
FORUMS CLOSE - Tuesday, June 21st @ 10:00 am PT (1700 UTC)
Map Preference System
For some time, we have heard community requests for a way to give players a say over the maps they play in Quick Play and Ranked multiplayer matches. With this update, we are adding our first version of a Map Preference system that will give you influence over the maps that you will encounter in ladder play.
Each queue (Quick Play and Ranked) will provide players with a set of Downvotes that they can apply to maps that appear in the respective queues. In Quick Play, you will have up to 5 downvotes you can choose to apply; while in Ranked, you will have up to 3. Your downvote choices can be made in the search preference screen before you start your match search.
The map that ends up being chosen for the match will be selected from the subset of maps that receives the lowest collective number of downvotes amongst players in the match. Due to how many votes can be present in larger Team Games (up to 40 votes in a 4v4!), you may sometimes still load into a map that you individually downvoted, since that map could be tied for lowest number of overall downvotes in the lobby.
For example, in 1v1 Quickplay, if Player 1 decides they do not want to play any choke point maps during their play session, they can downvote maps like Black Forest, Mountain Pass, Confluence, Mongolian Heights and French Pass to be left with a selection of more open or hybrid maps. If Player 2 decides to downvote only water and hybrid maps, the two players will be left with open maps having received no downvotes, and the final map selection will be chosen from those maps only.
In order to help players quickly find maps that fit into various playstyles, we have added filter tabs to the Map Preference window. These will allow you to quickly see things like all naval maps in your queue. Categories showing a blue dot indicate that a map within that category has been downvoted, for quick at-a-glance reference.
If playing in a group for Team Games, the Map Preference selections of the group host will be used for the group search.
More Info
From all of us on the Age of Empires Team, we thank you for being a passionate member of the Age community. Together, we can build a better Age!
-The Age of Empires Team