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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.