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Might and Magic corner  "Heroes of Might and Magic too"

User is offline   Zaxx 

  • Banned

#31

I said " yuck" because well, just look at this:

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And when it comes to HOMM 5 this is just a lazy port of HOMM 3 with 3D standards (and even adding 3D where it is useless/pointless and just as expensive with 50% of budget drowned by graphics), especially if you remove the improvements of Tribes of the East, HOMM 6 is way more praiseworthy in its complete version !

So basically HoMM 5 is a piece of shit if you remove Tribes of the East BUT HoMM 6's deserves all the praise with all of its DLC. Even though the statement itself is horseshit it's not even a fair comparison.

First: HoMM 5 is not HoMM 3 in 3D. Sure, the foundation of its mechanics is HoMM 3 but it got expanded by a lot to the point where the system still keeps the original, slightly RNG-based system but adds enough options to it so that you have a lot more choice in your character progression. To simplify it in HoMM 3 you can choose between 2 "random" things when you level up, in HoMM 5 that number got expanded to 4: two traditional skills (most of them come from the old system) and two abilities so choosing from more things simply made it possible to avoid skills you didn't want to have, something that was simply not the case in HoMM 3. On top of this Nival found a fine line between making the hero more involed in combat and having a passive effect on his or her troops while in H3 apart from spell casting the hero was all passive.

Second: HoMM 5 introduced a different town construction mechanic where your buildings were put into different tiers instead of every building just requiring a few other structures to be built. This made building stuff deeper and it was no longer about getting to the best creature in the first week and then upgrading the population in the following.

Third: Nival always focused on expanding the core of the game instead of just adding a new race in the expansions and that's why Tribes of the East is so popular among fans. Hammers of Fate and TotE expanded so much on the core that some fans consider the final version to be a lot better game than Heroes 3.

Now when it comes to HoMM 6 the DLCs really didn't add much and the base game was already weak as fuck with a bunch of good ideas that needed to be fleshed out or simply balanced to geto a fan game. To me the cardinal sin of HoMM 6 is that the progression system is boring as hell: fully removing the randomness from the progression was a good idea but it was just executed in a very, very bad way. Progression is slow and the RPG system sucks so much that a specific hero can only really have one specific build because the rest doesn't make sense. Imagine an RPG where if you choose your race and class you won't have any other choices during the actual gameplay because it's always clear what the best stuff is. How fucking boring is that? In HoMM 6 there is no room for experimentation and exciting stuff never really happens. HoMM 3's RNG wasn't always fair because if you got the short end of the stick you could have ended up with a shitty character but when it worked it forced you to make strategic decisions, you had to make the best out of what you were given and that was exciting. HoMM 5 refined that into a more strategic, less random system that still had the same excitement, only you were punished less by the random shit happening. Then HoMM 6 removed the original system and replaced it with a predictable, shallow, boring one where you could even choose the spells for your spellbook but since the game was stingy with its skill points when levelling up you always went with the surely effective ones and stopped experimenting. Having 3-5 spells in your spellbook at level 10 was so fun.

On top of this the general gameplay became a lot more boring too. Again, the general idea of every town having an area of control was great but since they didn't flesh out the system the only thing that resulted in was more stalemates and useless delays in the gameplay. Having a game where you know you should have win hours ago from your economic advantage but simply can't do it because you have to sit in your castles and wait on your army to grow was just terrible, to some extent it could happen in previous HoMMs too (especially in HoMM 4... dear God, what a shitshow that game was) but in HoMM 6 it almost always fucking did.

So don't come and tell me that I should praise one of the worst games in the franchise simply because it was more different than HoMM 3 than HoMM 5 was because here's the thing: HoMM 5 was a wonderful game and HoMM 6 is just an unfinished, boring shitshow its audience hated. I'd love to have a new Heroes game that is very far from the established mechanics of HoMM 1-3 but still just as good and I'm glad that they tried that with HoMM 4 and 6 but both of those games were huge failures, they were unfinished or badly thought out. In this case trying doesn't worth any praise whatsoever, succeeding does.

This post has been edited by Zaxx: 06 April 2019 - 10:42 PM

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User is offline   gemeaux333 

#32

You're wrong HOMM 6 is the best with HOMM3, it is just misunderstood by the traditionnal players who don't reallize it is too thin to justify always growing cost, and you just have to learn to appreciate it, just as the majority of its players did !

The skill system in HOMM6 is great, just inaesthetic, but sure I had no problem with the mage guilds to get them, and you are wrong : there is rooms for experimentation, but you don't spend your life experimenting, you someday have made your experiments !

The hero with ability to attack is one of the improvements of HOMM5, but keep having random skills is still unfair as in no RPG or strategy games you will accept to get them imposed to you (even Sun Tzu would say : you go at war with the soldiers you have, so you make sure to have the soldiers you want/need) !

And HOMM6 story is way more interesting than HOMM5 with way better scenery (thank god they have also removed the "eternal griffin" world tour)

And of course, I am the first to say there are things to change in the HOMM6 gameplay : town conversion, portals, reputation and skill systems

This post has been edited by gemeaux333: 07 April 2019 - 10:42 AM

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User is offline   gemeaux333 

#33

And I will say : I hate HOMM 5 so much I am going to get back to it in a few days (once I will be done with the last missions of HOMM3 complete)

Are the improvements of Tribes of the East available in the original game (once all the expansions are installed ) ?
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User is offline   Zaxx 

  • Banned

#34

View Postgemeaux333, on 07 April 2019 - 09:31 AM, said:

You're wrong HOMM 6 is the best with HOMM3, it is just misunderstood by the traditionnal players who don't reallize it is too thin to justify always growing cost, and you just have to learn to appreciate it, just as the majority of its players did !

They sure did, man, that's why the user rating is so wonderful:
https://store.steamp...agic_Heroes_VI/
It's a piece of shit.

This post has been edited by Zaxx: 08 April 2019 - 09:56 PM

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User is offline   gemeaux333 

#35

Seriously/Honestly man, You should look at way more sources, steam ratings are not a reference and its a well known fact !

another one : http://www.jeuxvideo...c-heroes-vi.htm
http://www.jeuxvideo...of-darkness.htm

This post has been edited by gemeaux333: 09 April 2019 - 08:18 AM

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User is offline   MrFlibble 

#36

I've never played anything beyond HoMM3 honestly, so it's pretty interesting to know your opinions about the latter games (I heard the fourth was bad though, it was discussed much in the press back then).

Also what do you think about the new King's Bounty games? I only briefly played the Princess demo a while ago, and haven't gotten very far. I've just watched some gameplay videos from HoMM5 and I can't say I like the visuals, whereas in the new KBs at least the art seemed more appealing.

I wonder why the original King's Bounty isn't sold anywhere unlike the earlier HoMM and M&M games though.

And also, anyone here played Eador?
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User is offline   gemeaux333 

#37

For King's Bounty 91, you can find it for free on abandonware sites and play it on dosbox, but haven't played the latest installements...

You should love HOMM6 as a lot of efforts have been put in them, they have also worked with "Puppet Work" to add funny iddle animations to the units :



This post has been edited by gemeaux333: 13 April 2019 - 08:01 AM

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User is offline   Zaxx 

  • Banned

#38

View PostMrFlibble, on 13 April 2019 - 05:10 AM, said:

Also what do you think about the new King's Bounty games? I only briefly played the Princess demo a while ago, and haven't gotten very far.

The new KB games are pretty good, it's just that they have a tendency to get stale after a while. The campaigns are very-very long and the gameplay just can't really offer a lot of new stuff after a while.
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User is offline   MrFlibble 

#39

View Postgemeaux333, on 13 April 2019 - 08:00 AM, said:

For King's Bounty 91, you can find it for free on abandonware sites and play it on dosbox

That absolutely doesn't answer my question.

BTW, as an afterthought from watching a few HoMM5 gameplay vids I realised that the combat visuals reminded me of Etherlords II, and then I remembered that this game, too, was developed by Nival. I played demo versions of both Etherlords titles awhile ago and liked the second quite a bit (combat itself is very different from HoMM though). However I'm not sure if this style actually fits the original presentation of the first three games. Also what's with all the characters never opening their mouths in cinematics? are they all ventriloquists or what?

This post has been edited by MrFlibble: 13 April 2019 - 12:31 PM

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User is offline   gemeaux333 

#40

Then I don't know why you ask about King's Bounty if you don't seek to get it by the simplest/most obvious way...
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User is offline   MrFlibble 

#41

View Postgemeaux333, on 14 April 2019 - 08:15 AM, said:

Then I don't know why you ask about King's Bounty if you don't seek to get it by the simplest/most obvious way...

Why would I ask about something that is already obvious? My question was actually not even about where to get the game but about why a licensed copy is not sold digitally.

Anyways, a while ago I found a HoMM2 clone called Palm Kingdoms 2. As far as I can tell, it was originally an Android port/clone of the game (called Palm Heroes 2) which was then ported to Windows and Mac. I haven't gotten around to try it yet but the author claims that the game received praise from the original New World Computing people.

The same author also offers another game, Royal Bounty HD, which is a remake of King's Bounty and has more animations and higher-res graphics in the same HoMM2-esque style.

The former official website also contained information about Palm Kingdoms 3 (with better graphics but still in HoMM2 style), a campaign and other features (some screenshots shown here), and Battlehorn, which was supposed to be some kind of HoMM-like game too, but both projects are apparently abandoned.

There's a nice fan site called Blake's Sanctum (designed in the web 1.0 style) which covers various HoMM clones and similar games Blake has found.
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User is offline   gemeaux333 

#42

I always wondered if there wasn't an open source improved version of KB 91
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User is offline   MrFlibble 

#43

There's the OpenKB project which aims to recreate the game engine from scratch. Development doesn't seem to go along well though. They have a page listing KB clones though. I almost forgot about that Russian online version which I think follows the original mechanics as closely as possible (you can play in English too). There's also the unofficial King's Bounty 2.

BTW, I just remembered that Sergei Prokofiev who authored King's Bounty 2 then went on to create a series of HoMM-like games called Malgrimia. It looks like there's a bit of confusion about the titles because the first game which came out in 2006 was called Герои Мальгримии ("Heroes of Malgrimia") in Russia but apparently it's the second instalment (2007) that went by the title Heroes of Malgrimia in English-speaking countries. The second game also received a stand-alone expansion. You can grab a demo here but I'm afraid it might be in Russian only.

Critics panned the first game as clearly inferior to HoMM while most of the developer's attempts at originality turned out to be not particularly interesting. Apparently the second instalment and its add-on remedied some of these problems.

BTW, what do you think about Lords of Magic? I tried a couple of demos a while ago but wasn't particularly impressed by the graphics or the real-time combat system. It seems to at least in part follow the mechanics of Lords of the Realm.
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User is offline   gemeaux333 

#44

Might and Magic : Quest for the Dragonbone Staff is a 3D remake made in the early 2000s for PS2, too bad it can't be found on another support...
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User is offline   John Brown 

#45

Well I will just share that I finally got around to playing one of these games. I did start with HOMM 5, I beat the Haven campaign and the first three missions of the Inferno campaign, and I am having a great time with this game. Please do not tell me to buy HOMM 6 again.

I have never played any of these games before (save Dark Messiah which I love, even with its gigantic mountain of flaws). The closest to a HOMM game I've played is Ogre Battle 64, which is pretty dang different, so these games are a whole new experience for me. I can see why this series is held in such high regard.
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User is offline   gemeaux333 

#46

Then you can play HOMM 6 once you are done with HOMM 5 !
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User is offline   John Brown 

#47

Oh, just to share, I did finish HOMM V the base game, and Hammers of Fate. I have about 120 hours in it (GOG Galaxy counts the two together, but has Tribes of the East separate). I will say that I enjoyed the game way more than I was expecting given HOMM V's mixed reception from the cesspool of forum posts I googled before buying the series. Honestly I got more than enough gameplay value out of HOMM V alone to justify purchasing the whole series (hooray for GOG sales). Call it low standards or noobiness or whatever, but I genuinely enjoyed this game. If it's the "worst" one in the series then I can only imagine how mind-blowing the "good" ones will be (I do plan to eventually play 1-4 and Chronicles; 6 and 7 are maybes, and that depends on if Ubisoft allows them onto GOG).

Open question, are the non-campaign single player scenarios worth playing? I was going to skip over them and do campaigns only, until I randomly watched an LP of one due to curiosity and saw that it had voiced cutscenes and actual story content (I was expecting little more than simple skirmish maps).
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User is offline   gemeaux333 

#48

When it comes to 6 and 7 on GOG its a little bit delicate due to their specific integration to Uplay

handling 6 with uplay and the conflux is just one of the fun/interesting parts of the game ^^, ask me any question you want before taking any action/decision relative to these to be sure to make the best of it !

you can pass 7 as its defiitly the worst installement of the series, unless you really need to experience it all by yourself or simply don't want to hurt the feelings of the devs and Ubisoft...

This post has been edited by gemeaux333: 11 July 2019 - 05:29 AM

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User is offline   MrFlibble 

#49

A while ago I stumbled upon a game called Braveland (which is actually the first in a trilogy) in the GOG catalogue which seems to have similar gameplay to King's Bounty, but with rather crude/simplified visuals. Didn't get an urge to try this out, making a note here because I forgot the title and have just had to re-discover the game for s discussion in another forum.
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User is offline   gemeaux333 

#50

Kings Bounty 2 have been released 3 days ago and I am playing it since, the game is great so far even if its slower and have less fights than any KB game before, the exception is the keybinding that particularily angered me in he first place : made for qwerty keyboard and no way you can rebind
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User is offline   MrFlibble 

#51

Countryballs Heroes anyone?

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