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| Thread: ~ Heroes 6 patch 1.2 - Discussion thread ~ |  This thread is pages long: 1 10 ... 12 13 14 15 16 ... 20 30 · «PREV / NEXT» |
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Pitlord
Known Hero
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posted December 27, 2011 08:43 PM |
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I also have been pretty optimistic with this game. But slowly, my hopes are dying.
First of all, let us ignore the bugs. Yeah, they are game breakers and numerous and whatnot. But imagine this game if it didn't have any bug, non at all. Would the community love this game then?
Speaking for myself, I wouldn't. I think I have written every possible place that H5-ToE is my favourite. Because all the factions and all the units are unique, they are so different which other. The skill tree and the skills in it, the sub-skills, the requirements for each, their effects and all was very interesting.
Now I look at this game. Let me begin with saying I support most of the changes they made. Resource reduction makes the game more challengin as everyone needs the same resource and fight for it. Area of Control made all those irritating "hero with 1 unit of tier 1 creature has captured your mine" thing disappear. Your units can be hired from any town you own; goodbye to waiting for caravans to reach you for turns and praying for them not to get attacked. Blood and Tears is genius. Dynasty Weapons which gain experience with you and unlocks new abilities, the whole Dynasty thing, Bestiary, Achievements, Traits, all of them are great.
But... True they have put very good new things, but they have messed up the good old things. Heroes is a game that gives a strange feel of serenity to me. I enjoyed watching my townscreens, go to some distant spot on the adventure map, zoom in, and look around, go to the ground level, etc. Battles were exciting and fun. I would think for minutes before every move. I would enjoy the creatures' interactions with each other, their abilities clashing with each other. A level up was a "hoooray!" and I couldn't choose which ones to pick when I draw my ability tree before every hot seat. Seing the effects of the skills I've chosen, altough when they are little would give me pleasure.
Now, in this game, I'm sick of seeing some lifeless figures located on the grass. I don't even look at the places in the adventure map, cause they are all the same. Every bit of it seems the same, feels the same. The adventure map locations are all give +X stat for the next turn. There are not place you want to go like Dragon Utopia, Syphinx, Arcane Library, Cartographer, Eye Of the Magis around, Seer Hut, Vault Of the Mages, etc. The graphics can be better in technology, but they are dead-like. The battles are mere burdens. They are so mechanic, so boring. And the skill tree... It is the worst thing for me:
The creature abilities are very alike and unoriginal. They do some damage and don't get retaliated; most of them are like that. I can honestly say that with the creatures we, as HC members have created in our factions, we have done an unbelievably better job, with all their interesting and original abilities.
How can some Heroes fan like a skill system that is seperated into 3 and you can choose one from that, one from that, whatever you like. What's the fun in that? There are no hard choices, no restrictions (like you can choose 5 main skills and 5 of their abilities) You can choose some luck thing, then morale, the pathfinding, than defense, then attack, then some magic, whatever you like. It is so not-Heroes-like. And the skills themselves are again mechanic like the whole game. Nearly all of the Might abilities are "add+X to that stat", the whole Paragon tree goes like that. The Realm has only 3 abilities at its base and they are "see further", "build cheaper" "+1 to creature growth". And all of them go like that, only there are some old favourites put in the middles.
Then we come to Magic. This is the tree that you feel the stupidity of "choose whatever you like". Imagine in older Heroes games that you could choose Dark, Destructive, Summoning and Light all at the same time and can cast whatever you want. This is it now. You can have "Chain Lightning", "Frenzy", "Poison Cloud", "Circle Of Winter", "Blindness", "Puppet Master" and "Implosion" altogether, all from 7 different Magic Schools and you would only waste 8 Hero points. How can this be fun? Let them all be in seperate ways again and restrict the numbers, or let only Blood heroes have Blood abilities and Tears have Tears or whatever. But right now its a mess they couldn't figure out how to clear and decided on not clear it but give it to us just in this messy state.
So , all in all, this game cannot be any good in this state. Unless they make a new skill system, add town screens, fix multiplayer, add sim. turns, fix all the bugs, add many new map locations and map items that would save the map from remaining as the endless untouched big garden it is, add some other skills to creatures, then I think this game will remain hopeless. At least for me.
i fully agree with you
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Zenofex
Responsible
Legendary Hero
Kreegan-atheist
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posted December 27, 2011 09:10 PM |
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Ubisoft is an epic company and did alot of blockbusters it's just they messed this game up big time.
This is their only game that I care about so even if all the other products are awesomeOMGIcantbreathe, they have zero influence on my opinion.
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alcibiades
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
of Gold Dragons
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posted December 27, 2011 10:30 PM |
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@Quantomas:
That was a very enlightening post. I was not aware that you had been involved with Fabrice on the work for 3.2.
Besides being an interesting read and once again giving us some thoughts on what might have been, however, I also think that your post (and Nocturnal's post a couple of post above) highlights some of the points that makes the case of Heroes 5 and 6 - and what is success and what is fail - so complicated. Because truely, there seems to be a number of diverging interests at play here, and is it even possible to satisfy them all, or are some of them mutually exclusive? When some fans cry for my control over the strategic aspects of the game, others favor the random element that makes the strategic choices different for each game, and yet others want to focus on the RPG element of the game rather than the strategic aspect, truely the developers are faced with an almost impossible task.
I greatly dislike Heroes 6, and like Nocturnal feel that even if they get all the bugs ironed out, there will be little left for me to like, but that does not mean that Heroes 6 is necessarily a horrible game - it's just a game that focused on an entirely different aspect of the previous games than I enjoyed. I rarely ever played the campaigns, so the whole story-thing is worthless for me, and I only play single-player, so the liberty in skill-picking is not that important for me (I would even call it a bad thing, as it makes the game predictable, which reduces replayability). But I'm just one fan among many, and one who was unlucky with the direction they chose to take. Of they managed to satisfy the others, they might still have done a good job.
But to return to your post, ironically the things you highlight as your wishes for a patch 3.2 don't really appeal to me either. From my pow, those things are not really the greatest problems with Heroes 5. Not that I don't appreciate a better AI, but to be honest, I didn't experience the AI to be that bad (perhaps because I favored maps where encounters happened relatively late game?). To me a much bigger problem was the horrible technical performance of the game (something I think you've also improved?) which made playing big maps literally impossible.
On the gameplay level, the lack of ability to travel between towns Heroes 3 Town Portal style was another important issue - something I find necessary to play huge epic maps, where TP'ing is not so much a strategic aspect as a way to save time to cover huge amounts of ground. I don't even understand why the TP thing was ever so hard for them to figure out, if there is a division among the fans on being pro or against TP, why not just make it optional in the menu (Town Portal Yes/No), and people could get it like they wanted ... but alas. The ironic thing was they even got it right with the adventure magic spells being available to all and not dependant on a skill, they just needed to make the Town Gate spell level 4 and add a proper Town Portal spell at level 5.
On a grander level, there were a number of changes to the skill and spell system I would really love to play with. Adding some more spells and skill and changing the way Ultimate Abilities worked would for me probably make Heroes 5 as close to perfect as could be expected. Heroes 5 already had a great skill system, which could be improved to something fantastic, another reason why Heroes 6 fails so epicly in comparison. If they had changed it so that you chose abilities (but not skills!) freely once the skill was learned, I think that would have made a huge step in finding a middle ground between the "pro random" and "pro choice" fans without loosing the classic "Heroes" feel. The leveling curve also needed some tweaking, something BAD from this forum already made a good first step at fixing!
Anyway, before I continue too far down the "what could have been" road, I just want to finish off by saying that I think it's important to remember that where you end up when developing a game like this depends on the vision you have from start. It seems that the developers truely felt that they were creating a good game, and the reaction from the fanbase gives a completely different impression. It is easy to say that had they just listened to the insider group, things would have been better, but with many people pulling in many different directions, things are not quite that easy. That being said, I've also heard reports that the developers have been so blinded by their own vision that they more or less completely ignored repeated shouts of concern from the VIP members, which should have made them think twice.
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What will happen now?
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xerox
Promising
Undefeatable Hero
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posted December 27, 2011 11:06 PM |
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Edited by xerox at 00:04, 28 Dec 2011.
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I really don't get how they from the very start of development did not find it nescessary for things like town screens, modding and sim turns to be in release. I wonder what a H6 developed by Nival would have looked like.
What I am mostly worried about now is not how H6 will turn out after patches and stuff, but the whole future of the Might and Magic TBS franchise. If H6 fails and nobody wants to buy the franchise, then there won't be a H7.
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Over himself, over his own
body and
mind, the individual is
sovereign.
- John Stuart Mill
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x-ecutionner
Known Hero
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posted December 27, 2011 11:43 PM |
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Quote:
Might and Magic RTS franchise.
Heroes of Might & Magic is a turn-based strategy game, called TBS.
Starcraft 2 is an Real time strategy game, called RTS.
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xerox
Promising
Undefeatable Hero
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posted December 28, 2011 12:04 AM |
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typo...
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Over himself, over his own
body and
mind, the individual is
sovereign.
- John Stuart Mill
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OmegaDestroyer
Hero of Order
Fox or Chicken?
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posted December 28, 2011 12:12 AM |
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If H6 fails and nobody wants to buy the franchise, then there won't be a H7.
As of right now, I doubt there will be a seventh game. I don't think sales met their expectations (basing that on absolutely nothing) and I think a good chunk of fans are upset with the direction the series is headed.
On the plus side, Heroes of Might & Magic 7 has a Hell of a lot better chance of getting made than Disciples 4.
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The giant has awakened
You drink my blood and drown
Wrath and raving I will not stop
You'll never take me down
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Fraudatio
Famous Hero
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posted December 28, 2011 12:53 AM |
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Nocturnal, completely spot on. For me the town screens are of no conserns, but everything else is just the core of the problems. I feel like crying when i see the skill tree, remember back to H5, and think about how great H6 could have been (can be?). Cause so many changes are for the better, they just made some totally horrible desicions that undermines it all. The most annoying part of it all is the potential that we see there, if it was just rubbish i could just forget about it i guess, but its Heroes, i`ve waited for it for months and months, and then..
Some (many!) skills are now take 100 % of the games, that was, at least for me, never even close to the case in H5.
This christmas i found myself installing Civ 4 and played now for 2 days. So sad.
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kodial79
Promising
Supreme Hero
How'd Phi's Lov't
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posted December 28, 2011 09:09 AM |
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I really hope there won't be a Heroes 7. Not by UbiHole at least, cause they have proved in the worst way possible that they're not up to the task.
Ideal for me would be for Ubi to sell the rights of M&M to someone else. A couple years ago this would be considered high treason but now I am trying to imagine how a Blizzard Heroes would be like... 
Anyway, I won't buy a Heroes 7 by Ubi and whichever devs would they hire next time, unless radical changes will be introduced into Heroes 6 first. And I do mean radical. I want the final product not remind me at all of anything of what we got now.
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Signature? I don't need no stinking signature!
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Zenofex
Responsible
Legendary Hero
Kreegan-atheist
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posted December 28, 2011 09:17 AM |
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Quote:
I think a good chunk of fans are upset with the direction the series is headed.
The direction is something that can be changed at any moment if the producer wants it, that's not a huge issue. The behaviour of this producer however is the big problem, they make Heroes look like some poor cousin of Tetris. I am more and more convinced that this is among the franchises with lowest priorities for them, something completely expendable in the long run. Apart from Marzhin, there doesn't seem to be a single person in the whole team with any knowledge about the series and if there is, he/she seems to be silenced by some incredibly incompetent superior.
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alcibiades
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
of Gold Dragons
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posted December 28, 2011 09:33 AM |
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What exactly is Erwan's background, and how much of a key role has he played in pulling the strings with this game? He does say himself that he's a long time fan of the series, and he is the chief designer on this chapter as I understand it. It might deffinitely have been a problem if one guy was left with the whole grand design task, not because he did a bad job (which one may or may not think), but because you have a great risk of loosing the multi-perspective view on the game in that way.
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What will happen now?
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Pitlord
Known Hero
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posted December 28, 2011 12:24 PM |
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Edited by Pitlord at 12:25, 28 Dec 2011.
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normally im not a guy who cries but ubihole is just doing snow, first of all we had to wait almost 3(!) months for patch 1.2 , and moreover it only fixed just a few things (and created new bugs...). furthermore why are things missing which have been in the previous heroes? like replays, simturns, town screens, custom maps for multiplayer etc.
if these things wont appear in the next patch i will surely NOT buy any upcoming add-ons, and i think many others too. i already regret that i bought heroes 6, but i have never regret the buy of h5:toe because it was a good game
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JollyJoker
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
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posted December 28, 2011 01:31 PM |
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Since VIP was mentioned. This is gthe last post I made there a couple of hours ago. I'll repeat it here, and if you read it, you will notice that I see the general problem ELSEWHERE.
Quote:
I bought Disciples 3 Resurrection, and I have to say, I'm really, really ****ed with the way, strategy games have developed.
For explanation: Disciples 3 Renaissance came with TWO standalone maps; Resurrection added ZERO to that count.
Etherlords 2 had ZERO sstandalone maps.
Heroes 5 and 6 don't had many standalone maps either.
Something is wrong here, and it's not difficult to see what it is.
The games are centered around campaigns, and that's a really bad mistake: not only is it costly to make all this stuff, it's also dumb, because players are basically lead on a leash. It's like an adventure game, except the riddles and puzzles are solved on a tactical battlefield.
Then the graphics: sure, it's nice to zoom in on a Snow Maiden and watch her in stunning detail - but it's also impractical, because you can't see the battlefield when you do. In short, we need high resolution detail graphics of creatures as urgently as wall hangings in a surgery.
What we need instead are bugfree and complete releases of strategy games with 40-50 maps, a simple map editor and a campaign as a bonus feature with small extras. For HoMM 6 such an extra might have been the Boss fight (available only in campaigns). Which would have been enough, if a campaign had been centered around the actual game, not around running in circles from one scene to the next, battling for the sake of battling (and not because you need to battle a stack to get access to a resource you need for building or a spell).
Stories are fine, but a drawn picture is sufficient. This is not a movie rendering of Lord of the Rings, and strategy players are not keen on watching a movie, if the rest of the game suffers. Because, let's face it, the replay value of a campaign is invers proportional to the "fleshed-out-ness" of a campaign STORY: How often do you watch a movie, read a book and so on, that always develops the same way?
If you want to see the way campaigns should be, look no further than Heroes of Might and Magic TWO: bonus maps, alternate development depending on player progress, and bonus features like "Dwarven Alliance" or bonus heroes to play.
Sure, carryover heroes sound like a good idea - but they are darn POWERFUL, so if you have carryover heroes you basically play not a campaign, but a really, really big map in portions. All nice and well - but also boring in its very own way.
Boss fights are a NICE bonus, to be sure.
All that means, that the attention in strategy gaming has switched from content to package, from the cake to the icing.
Add to that online requirement and server downtimes, as seen on 26th, and we get something that, well, NO ONE NEEDS, simply because it's neither fish nor flesh.
We need to switch attention back to the actual GAMING; to one more TURN, as opposed to one more CUT-SCENE.
Also, it's cheaper to produce.
So what I would really like Ubisoft to do is this: Redo Etherlords within the HoMM universe. No cut-scenes. No FANCY campaigns. Just a tight game with unimposing, not too fancy graphics, bug-free, complete at release, that comes with a tight, easy-to-use map editor, and 40-50 custom maps. Very limited zooming and resolution tricks. A gamers's game.
This should NOT be Might & Magic: Heroes 7 or something, but something like "Might & Magic: Masters of Mana".
After that redo NWC's Spaceward Ho!, in it's full epic simplicity, albeit with better graphics and one or two added features.
Then compare financial bottom lines.
Thanks.
So the problem, isn't Black Hole or the fact that they made the ability tree with free picks. The problem is, that they puit so much ressources into the campaigns instead into the actual GAME (that is, the workings; Disciples has the same problem). The problem with the ability tree isn't the METHOD, but the fact that it's badly done, with unimaginative abilities that are unbalanced; the thing could have been so much better.
Which is true for every other area of the game.
So GENERALLY you might say, the game isn't made or broken with this or that design decision, on the contrary: BOTH Disciples AND HoMM 6 have a lot of good things. But the "potential" has been thoroughly wasted by concentrating on the silly CAMPAIGNS, ionstead of making the darn game with all the changes WORK, (relatively) bug-free and complete, thought-out, and with a practical map-editor.
Simpler said, the budget was wasted with crap.
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alcibiades
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
of Gold Dragons
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posted December 28, 2011 01:55 PM |
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Quote:
The problem with the ability tree isn't the METHOD, but the fact that it's badly done, with unimaginative abilities that are unbalanced; the thing could have been so much better.
Which is true for every other area of the game.
While I'm not sure I agree with you on that specific point about the ability tree, I agree with the general conclusion that putting so much emphasis on the campaigns is idiotic. Even if they pride themselves that there are now two alternative outcomes of the campaigns, depending on whether you choose tears or blood, that still only doubles the time you can use on campaigns, whereas single-player maps with a good map engine allows for literally endless amounts of replay.
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What will happen now?
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pitsu
Adventuring Hero
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posted December 28, 2011 02:28 PM |
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Quote:
The problem is, that they puit so much ressources into the campaigns instead into the actual GAME .
As VIP you might know that for H5 Fabrice said very clearly that the campaign was the top priority. Luckily we got MP modes and a few standalone SP maps as a bonus. They want to sell lore. Probably because selling Michael figurines is easier cash than reinventing chess. The campaigns and lore are what lead to Infernopolis style of abominations. Civilization has no more lore than the real world history. A game full of known fantasy creatures can relay on myths and mapmakers fantasy. Bringing in blazing glories and shrines of seventh dragons is already a challenge for anyone who has not graduated in Ashan history. Add there so-so gameplay and problems with mapmaking+modding and no wonder people look elsewhere. Homm should not be a story, but a platform where everyone can tell its own story.
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War-overlord
Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
Presidente of Isla del Tropico
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posted December 28, 2011 03:41 PM |
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You are blaming campaigns now? Realy? Are you realy grabbing every barnyard animal you lay your eyes upon to make scapegoats out of them?
I know I am going to be hated for what I am going to say, but this is getting embarrassing.
The reason why Heroes 6 is what it is in inconcievably simple. Time and money. Why, you ask? I will tell you why. For the simple reason that Heroes 6 was too ambitious a project to complete in the given time with the given budget. Heroes 6 is rushed, there is no doubt about that. Why was Heroes 6 rushed? To save any profit it might turn out. If Heroes 6 was given more time and more money, it would have undoubtable better.
And guess what? The chances of that happening in the future are low at best. Why, because TBS is a niche market which limits it's potential revenue. Ubisoft is behaving like a publisher, which being a publisher is understandable. If they do not make profit, they cannot continue what they are doing. That is not to say that Ubisoft is without blame. In fact many things should be blamed on Ubisoft, but I am not going in on this here and now. There are many things wrong with the Games-industry and I highly reccomend the watching of Extra Credits if you want some more insight on this.
Another part of the problem is what Alcibiades said a while back.
Many fans want even more things, those things often are contradictory to each other and it is impossible to please everyone. In fact there are so many differences in the wishes for direction of this franchise that it is already a tough enough job to please most. So there will always be fans who will not agree with the direction taken. Expectations are alway high among fans, which makes for easy dissapointment.
Back to campaigns. Campaigns are not the problem. Also there are heaps full of fans who like the campaigns, me included. Why is there a great emphasis on campaigns? Good stories sell, because good stories get great word of mouth. And word-of-mouth does not need to rely on the hype of pre-release that so many games and marketing seems to focus on nowadays. TBS is not a genre that hypes well. Heroes of Might and Magic campaigns have great potential, yet the end result has so far enjoyable, but overall so-so.
That is not to say that there should not be focus on single maps and map editors and the such. But what I want to say is that I find this focus understandable and not the root of the problem.
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Vote El Presidente! Or Else!
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markkur
Honorable
Legendary Hero
Once upon a time
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posted December 28, 2011 03:46 PM |
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Homm should not be a story, but a platform where everyone can tell its own story.
You stated it perfectly.
Considering the age of HoMM, by this time we should have had a 5th generation Map-Editor that made it very easy to tell very advanced and elaborate tales with "ease". And (remembering our brother-warriors...they should have taken care of the Multiplayer fans as well with a state-of-the-art Turbo-RMG etc.
H6 could have been awesome in many ways including the groundbreaking A.I.from Quantomas.
OK, I'm still dreaming.
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alcibiades
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
of Gold Dragons
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posted December 28, 2011 04:09 PM |
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Quote:
Back to campaigns. Campaigns are not the problem. Also there are heaps full of fans who like the campaigns, me included. Why is there a great emphasis on campaigns? Good stories sell, because good stories get great word of mouth. And word-of-mouth does not need to rely on the hype of pre-release that so many games and marketing seems to focus on nowadays. TBS is not a genre that hypes well. Heroes of Might and Magic campaigns have great potential, yet the end result has so far enjoyable, but overall so-so.
I just plain disagree with you, perhaps not with your evaluation of the situation (TBS doesn't hype well), but with the solution. It may be that TBS is niche and that good stories are hype. Well here's the problem: With a few minor exceptions, Heroes has never really had a good story. Some of the chapters have been passable, but many have been plain cliché or even worse - just look at Heroes 5.
If you have a game that's good within a niche area and (at best) mediocre within the mainstream area, I don't think the best solution is to try to sell it in the mainstream market - it's going to fluke, because this is not the main strengths of the game, and there will be better alternatives out there. Instead, they should have played to the strengths of the game, made it a great TBS game. It may be a niche area, but it could have been dominant within that niche.
So I very much do agree with JJ that putting so much focus on the campaigns was a bad move. It took away ressources from the part that I considered the most important of the game, and I think a larger part of the fans did. It accomplished something that I don't really care for, and that I ironically don't think is that great either. And what's left of the TBS stategy aspect is just so watered down that it's become mediocre on that part also.
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What will happen now?
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feluniozbunio
Promising
Supreme Hero
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posted December 28, 2011 04:11 PM |
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Id prefer people playing the game still (h3) rather then word of mouth about campaign(??).
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JollyJoker
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
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posted December 28, 2011 04:13 PM |
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Quote:
1) The reason why Heroes 6 is what it is in inconcievably simple. Time and money...
2) If Heroes 6 was given more time and more money, it would have undoubtable better...
3) TBS is a niche market which limits it's potential revenue...
4) Back to campaigns. Campaigns are not the problem.
Question: what is wrong with the above 4 sentences?
Answer: 3) is actually what should be No. 1):
Yes, TBS is a niche market which limits potential revenue.
Therefore the actual No. 1): The reason for Heroes 6 being what it is is time and money, and 2) If Heroes was given more time and money..., is actually not existing. The truth is, that Heroes 6 got MORE time and MORE money that was considered reasonable from a revenue point of view.
That leaves, YES, it was too ambitious a project, but 4) is wrong, because CAMPAIGNS ARE THE PROBLEM, because in terms of game value campaigns are expensive without actually MAKING the game.
I have no problem with campaigns as such - or with a story. BUT the GAME must be done first, THEN the campaign within the limits of the actual game - fine. Not the other way round.
In short, you can't have everything with a game from a niche market.
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