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| Thread: What Really went Wrong with H5? |  This thread is pages long: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 · «PREV / NEXT» |
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Fauch
Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
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posted August 11, 2011 03:53 PM |
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yeah, not sure if it was much of an improvment in H5. before H5, you would rarely miss something because of the position of the camera.
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JollyJoker
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
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posted August 11, 2011 04:32 PM |
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Err, in H3 you could actually HIDE objects, and a couple of mapmakers created a lot of interesting maps that way, so no, that point doesn't work at all: you always had to look CLOSELY.
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Zenofex
Responsible
Legendary Hero
Kreegan-atheist
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posted August 11, 2011 04:35 PM |
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Yeah, you can hide objects intentionally. Quite unlikely to happen on its own, even on badly bugged random maps.
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Corribus
Hero of Order
The Abyss Staring Back at You
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posted August 11, 2011 04:35 PM |
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I made use of that trick a lot in H2, with some good results. One of my favorites was hiding a portal behind a town. Much harder to hide objects in H3, actually.
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I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask them where they're goin', and hook up with them later. -Mitch Hedberg
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Fauch
Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
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posted August 11, 2011 04:44 PM |
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I mean, unless it was done on purpose of course.
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B0rsuk
Promising
Famous Hero
DooM prophet
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posted August 11, 2011 05:50 PM |
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Edited by B0rsuk at 17:52, 11 Aug 2011.
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Hmm yes, I recently played through the whole Heroes 1 and Heroes 2 campaigns. It's pretty funny actually - they're full of path errors. Things that shouldn't be accessible, but are. Treasures supposed to be guarded, but aren't. There are guards at the passage to the next area... except there's another one right next to it, if you examine trees closely. Or even better, AI heroes show the way.
If they had some helper tools like those in Heroes 3 editor, it would never happen. But they had to learn it the hard way :-).
After all these years, it seems Heroes 1 and 2 graphics aged most gracefully. I no longer think 3D is the way to go, by default. However, I think 3D would be very good if it was used to do what Heroes 4 attempted to do. Adaptable town screens. I mean, create a model for each building. Then arrange those blocks as needed in different towns on different terrains, making each city look truly unique.
On a second thought I'm not sure what Heroes 4 tried to do should be attempted at all. No, no bullsnow about hand-drawn towns looking best. See, town screen is not just a picture - it's an interface. You click on various buildings to recruit various creatures, etc. If you make their locations differ from city to city, you're messing up with player and his habits. Imagine having to search for Mage Guild each time you enter a new city.
Although, I would love to see each town type look different on different terrain... That could be done in 2D too. After all, adventure map locations can be placed on different terrain and still look good. There are some specific cases like snow-covered Alchemist Lab, snow covered objects in general. But otherwise anything goes.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5um8QWWRvo RSA Animate - Smile or die
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Doomforge
Admirable
Undefeatable Hero
Retired Hero
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posted August 11, 2011 07:51 PM |
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Many game developers think 3D is a lot more convenient to work with, which is understandable.
This is very true. Creating 2D graphics that follow the laws of physics/look natural in animation compared to RL is actually hell. Much harder than 3D...
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We reached to the stars and everything is now ours
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MattII
Legendary Hero
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posted September 23, 2012 10:22 PM |
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Edited by MattII at 09:41, 24 Sep 2012.
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Blizzard managed it with Starcraft, as did Westwood, with Tiberian Sun.
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Avirosb
Promising
Legendary Hero
No longer on vacation
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posted September 23, 2012 11:08 PM |
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I may be wrong, but isn't the Starcraft sprites 3D-turned-2D?
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darkprince
Adventuring Hero
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posted December 10, 2012 09:17 PM |
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Elvin, one of the elders in the H5 community, I am sorry for your unsatisfactory experience with the so-called "uneven" part of the game.
I concur with you that the fun of H5 depends TOTALLY on the map of choice.
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Week 2-3 maps? Rush-able, unlikely to be balanced. Over week 6 maps? Sylvan, dwarves etc dominate.
This shows that you have not found good maps to play.
There are 2-3 week maps that are quite balanced, with Deleb of Inferno having a fair chance beating the Dungeon faction (an easy rush-able faction by your definition) while Barbarians dominating Lethos.
There are also 10-week maps that 7 out of the 8 factions can play with each other at a similar level (Dwarf is an exception, but that can be balanced with rules). For a game of 8 factions, let's focus on the forest rather than the trees.
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For a game that tries so hard to give the illusion of choice, the reality was so cold and unforgiving. So many skills or alternative upgrades were simply not viable compared to certain standard strategies or required very unconventional and risky play. But many were more or less useless.
Again, I am sorry for your not being able to come by a good map to play.
In my opinion, H5 suffers all the problems that turn-based games suffer. And the rest...is in the maps. Please don't blame the game before you ever running into a good map.
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okrane
Famous Hero
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posted December 26, 2012 09:02 PM |
- penalty applied by Elvin on 27 Dec 2012. |
Edited by okrane at 21:03, 26 Dec 2012.
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lol... coming back after like 4 years of not touching heroes 5 and seing that this f@gget JollyJoker is still sprouting his bullsh!t around here. I'm so f!cking sad, that idiots like him and that @sshole company Ubisoft, completely destroyed one of the best game titles of the late 90s.
I never played Heroes 6 and I probably won't even bother. I might try it if I manage to pirate it, if impossible, I won't give a crap. Heroes 3 was awesome, Heroes 4 was an ever more awesome but rough gem.
Heroes 5's main fault was the poor software quality. Game was sluggish. It slowed down, low fps even on high end machines. Gameplay had some good parts, as Elvin said, but it was all too rough, too unpolished. The single player experience was a total failure - AI was sooo dumb and predictible, campaigns were boring and uninteresting to play - and we all know that the core of these games is Single Player and HotSeat fun. If you fail at those two nobody is gonna bother too much.
I played some multiplayer, it wasn't really my kind of fun (I still play H4 single player from time to time btw). Spending ~7 hours on a 3 week map is just silly and should not be the core concern of a game, in my opinion.
Make the game fun for single player and hot seat and players will come and will like it. But how can it be fun when the AI is so retarded? Like on every difficulty lower than the hardest, AI runs around like a headless chicken, you kill his only hero and it's over. In the hardest, AI runs around like a headless chicken while cheating as hell (full upgraded max army attack in week 3), survive that, then it just sits in town while taking ~5 minute turns.
Huge maps are impossible to play, due to performance issues (very low frames, sluggish,etc) and horrid AI (after a couple weeks, AIs take ~5 minute turns while standing in castle). In H3 I used to have a blast playing XL maps solo or with my bro. Here, I never even dared to try a map harder than M, because it will be a horribly painful experience.
In any case, just dropping by to say how sad I am that this franchise has been completely raped by Ubisoft and their incompetent Nival/Blackhole developpers. Heroes 1-4 was one of the series that entertained me so much in my high school years, it was the source of many hours of fun with my friends and I am sad that it is gone.
I hope that another developper can start a Heroes Clone game and get it right this time by remaining faithful to the legacy of those old games. Also, here's to hoping that fans will smarten up and withhold their money and stop purchasing trash products such as Heroes 6, in order to incentivise developpers to deliver higher quality products.
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Vindicator
Supreme Hero
Right Back Extraordinaire
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posted December 26, 2012 09:15 PM |
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lol... coming back after like 4 years of not touching heroes 5 and seing that this f@gget JollyJoker is still sprouting his bullsh!t around here. I'm so f!cking sad, that idiots like him and that @sshole company Ubisoft, completely destroyed one of the best game titles of the late 90s.
You do realize people can have a different opinion than you, right? No need to badmouth other people for that.
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okrane
Famous Hero
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posted December 26, 2012 11:49 PM |
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Edited by okrane at 23:53, 26 Dec 2012.
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Quote:
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lol... coming back after like 4 years of not touching heroes 5 and seing that this f@gget JollyJoker is still sprouting his bullsh!t around here. I'm so f!cking sad, that idiots like him and that @sshole company Ubisoft, completely destroyed one of the best game titles of the late 90s.
You do realize people can have a different opinion than you, right? No need to badmouth other people for that.
Opinions are indeed subjective.
What is objective on the other hand is the fact that almost all community sites of the game are nearly empty with no activity: this means Heroes as a franchise is basically dead.
What is also objective is that Ubisoft and friends made the past two games and are directly responsible for this state of the game.
What is also hard fact is that this nimrod - JollyJoker - has been defending and posting things in behalf of Ubi for more than 4 years now. Nothing but far fetched ideas, arguing with everyone, telling everyone that his opinion is better, that Ubi is making a good game and the same kind of sh!t as I read in this thread.
So all in all, Ubi raped the game and Jolly is the face of Ubi: therefore, my statement, although an opinion is not that far away from the truth. The fact that people inside Ubi, completely lack vision about the game, fail to listen to the fans even though they have people participating on the forums and that continually defend the bullsh!t they have put in the past two games thus ruining the franchise is the reason I am calling him such names.
Honestly OpenSource-Heroes would have been miles better than what we got in the last two installments. Look at Equilibris: they begged for the source code of Heroes 4 ( a game which Ubi had 0 forseeable profits incoming), they got nothing of course and despite that, they made a very good mod. Compare that to the crap we got the last past 5 years and you'll see that the community itself would build a far better game - and I'm talking modders and developpers working for free here.
It's astonishing that this game has built such passion around it (user mods, lore, maps, campaigns, drawings, forums, community) to be @ss-r@ped by a bunch of cheap-tards Ubisoft.
Even sadder is that people are still playing Heroes 3 and 4... name 10 other games that old still being played... Also name 1 good game of Ubisoft please? I know none.
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Vindicator
Supreme Hero
Right Back Extraordinaire
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posted December 26, 2012 11:59 PM |
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Name 1 good game of Ubisoft please? I know none.
Assassins Creed series, Tom Clancy series, Far Cry 3, H5 TOTE...
Wait, what?!
Somebody likes a heroes game made by Ubisoft?! Surely impossible!
Yes, most fan websites are relatively inactive. A lot of people don't like the new games; however, a lot do. This website, for one, is by no means inactive, and there is quite a lot of hope/discussion about H6 still, despite there not being sim turns, a poor map editor, and so on. Fans have managed to overcome these difficulties, host tournaments, and there's a whole lot of discussion about H6; just go to the H6 section if you don't believe me.
And, in my opinion, H4 sucks. Quite a few people agree with me there.
I won't even talk about your rather irrational hate for JJ (for one, he's not even the face of Ubi, just an insider who I guess happens to like their games).
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okrane
Famous Hero
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posted December 27, 2012 12:33 AM |
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Quote:
Quote:
Name 1 good game of Ubisoft please? I know none.
Assassins Creed series, Tom Clancy series, Far Cry 3, H5 TOTE...
Wait, what?!
Somebody likes a heroes game made by Ubisoft?! Surely impossible!
Yes, most fan websites are relatively inactive. A lot of people don't like the new games; however, a lot do. This website, for one, is by no means inactive, and there is quite a lot of hope/discussion about H6 still, despite there not being sim turns, a poor map editor, and so on. Fans have managed to overcome these difficulties, host tournaments, and there's a whole lot of discussion about H6; just go to the H6 section if you don't believe me.
And, in my opinion, H4 sucks. Quite a few people agree with me there.
I won't even talk about your rather irrational hate for JJ (for one, he's not even the face of Ubi, just an insider who I guess happens to like their games).
[Havent played those games, I prefer strategy games.]
Hm 
You remind me of the things the community was talking about when Heroes 5 got released in the same state (no editor, bad performance, etc). Everyone was about the same delusional things: hopes about the expansions, hopes put into mods, et cetera. None of these happened by the way. TOTE was barely decent and it should have been the state of the game at 1.0 not after 2 expansions.
It's not irrational hate, we go a long way back (flame wars back in 2007 around Heroes 5) and now I come back and read his posts from 2011 and see the same bullsnow all over again, except this time, Ubi Nival and BlackHole proved what they are about. They delivered exactly what I said they will deliver: a sad mediocre game.
Overcomming difficulties... that's when you know the game is 1 foot into the grave. There were no "difficulties" about Heroes 3. The game worked and it was wonderful. The single player experience and replayability was wonderful on that game, straight out of the box. The editor was so simple that even a 14yo (me at that time) could make maps and have fun on them with friends.
Heroes 4... I understand why most don't like the game, because it was basically an unfinished game by a company near bankruptcy. However, the sad part is that the game is more fun to play and is more replayable than Heroes 5 in his initial release state. Heck it's even more replayable than TOTE.
In any case, we got nothing to argue about. I lit up Heroes 3 this afternoon after a long time ( ~4 years of not playing Heroes 5, ~2 years of not playing Heroes 4, a lot more for Heroes 3) and remembered how fun the game was. Christmas nostalgia maybe, so I came by the forums to see what's going on and I saw this deserted place with JJ still sprouting the same things as usual, then I remembered me predicting 4 years ago that the community will die and Ubi will not deliver. It's f!ucking sad to be right on this one, I tell you that...
Basically, if I am here to try to convince you of something it would be two things:
1) Stop giving Ubi money (in the hopes that next expansion, patches, mods will fix it), they will just put their greasy hands on them and deliver you Heroes 7 - the same bullsnow as before.
2) The actual value of a Heroes game and NWC's legacy was the replayability of the games. Heroes(2-3-4) had awesome and easy to use map editors, had good performance (never lagged, low-fps etc) and the AI was fun to play against (except H4 - but as I said before that was not a finished game). All these simple elements made the game FUN to play, FUN to build maps and create a community around. That's where the magic was. Multiplayer and all rest were just afterthoughts by passioned fans (because you must be passionate to endure 7 hour for one multiplayer game, right).
So in a nutshell: the magic is in the REPLAYABILITY: maps+editor+ai+performance.
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Elvin
Admirable
Omnipresent Hero
Endless Revival
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posted December 27, 2012 02:02 AM |
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Hello okrane, it's been a while. You are right about more than a few things but you are taking it too far, there is no need to insult anyone nor is it allowed. JJ may have some.. eccentric ideas but I can tell you from first hand experience that the state of heroes has nothing to do with him. Some of his ideas are brilliant and others are plain weird, he's not a conventional mind Certainly what killed H6 was the lack of replayability and misguided vision, the activity has slumped and the interest is not what it used to. Unsurprising but there have been a few very good reasons.. Ubi could not afford to listen to us, things were already set in motion and it was already a race to avoid the release of a broken game. They only changed a few things according to our feedback, they did not consult us early enough and when they did it was too late to make significant changes. Black Hole went bankrupt soon after the release of H6 and it took some time till Limbic took over the task of patching a pretty much broken game. Overall the patching process was good as both the ubi and the dev team were cooperative and willing to listen - yet not being fully familiar with the game's code they could not avoid a number of bugs. But with Limbic not being a big company, another had to be hired for the addon. The whole game has been a slippery slope, it did not have a stable beginning and then it could just not get back on track. But that does not mean everything is lost. Not for the series anyway. I believe we have developed an understanding with the ubi team on how heroes should be handled and I have hope in the future. Not because I am fond of heroes but because of what I have seen and the people we have talked to. Ubi is a big company with different people on different fields but some really care about what they do and they are trying to change the way the series is handled.
Aanyway, let's not further derail this thread
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H5 is still alive and kicking, join us in the Duel Map discord server!
Map also hosted on Moddb
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okrane
Famous Hero
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posted December 27, 2012 02:22 AM |
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Hi Elvin, nice to see you here. Thanks for the updates, I did not know all those details. And sorry about the overboard, maybe it's the sadness talking.
Anyway, we can only hope that things will get better and that we will finally play a game worthy of being a sequel to the ones we loved.
I would donate money to any Kickstarter company building a Heroes-like project and promising to deliver something as deep and strategic as heroes with the proper polish worthy of this game ... just saying ... in case you know people ...
Until then, we can only hope and expect the expansion, or Heroes 7, or anything else beyond.
Peace dude.
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Elvin
Admirable
Omnipresent Hero
Endless Revival
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posted December 30, 2012 02:09 PM |
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This shows that you have not found good maps to play.
There are 2-3 week maps that are quite balanced, with Deleb of Inferno having a fair chance beating the Dungeon faction (an easy rush-able faction by your definition) while Barbarians dominating Lethos.
There are also 10-week maps that 7 out of the 8 factions can play with each other at a similar level (Dwarf is an exception, but that can be balanced with rules). For a game of 8 factions, let's focus on the forest rather than the trees.
In my opinion, H5 suffers all the problems that turn-based games suffer. And the rest...is in the maps. Please don't blame the game before you ever running into a good map.
I was addressing the universal balance. I know the specifics and exceptions well enough, in single or competive level. A few exceptions cannot make a rule and it is a given that in 2-3 week maps warmachines are just as if not better than destructive. That does not make a game balanced as the rest of the heroes are screwed over by comparison. Case in point a typical sylvan hero against a triple flaming ballista orc rush or just about any hero against a week 2 Havez. Odds minimal to nonexistent.
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H5 is still alive and kicking, join us in the Duel Map discord server!
Map also hosted on Moddb
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VOKIALBG
Honorable
Legendary Hero
First in line
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posted December 30, 2012 09:00 PM |
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Edited by VOKIALBG at 21:13, 30 Dec 2012.
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Then they are responsible for the worst sin of the series:
Isabel
That's right. I rank her inclusion in the series worse than New World Computing caving-in to the whiny anti-forge crowd, which ultimately resulted in the awful release state of Heroes 4 and the death of the company (I may be skipping a few steps here but you get the idea... hopefully), the uninspired, clichéd "dragon god" lore of Heroes 5, and even the ridiculously stupid depiction of the Dungeon faction in Heroes 5.
And I agree with all this. And it it was the major and only real problem.
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Even sadder is that people are still playing Heroes 3 and 4... name 10 other games that old still being played... Also name 1 good game of Ubisoft please? I know none.
I agree. I still play H3 form time to time. But H5 too, it's fun.
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mvassilev
Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
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posted January 02, 2013 04:38 AM |
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Three things went wrong with H5.
The first was abilities, namely leveling up. You want to get some higher-level ability, for example Empathy or your hero's Ultimate. How do you do that? Who knows? There's no in-game indication of what abilities lead to what. An in-game skill wheel would have helped.
The second was racial abilities. There was great variety in how useful each ability was. Gating was very good. Training was broken until it was nerfed. Artificer was pretty good. But Elemental Chains was weak and Avenger was basically useless.
The third is the clunky interface. When a small creature is standing by a big creature, you sometimes have to rotate the camera a lot just to select the smaller creature. Also, you have to click and drag creatures to move them from army to army, and if you misclick, they go back to where they were.
It would also have been useful to have some graphical representation of expected initiative changes in battle, for example, how creature move order would change if you cast Mass Haste.
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Eccentric Opinion
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