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| Thread: ~ Heroes 6 patch 1.2 - Discussion thread ~ |  This thread is pages long: 1 10 ... 14 15 16 17 18 ... 20 30 · «PREV / NEXT» |
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yasmiel
Supreme Hero
Former Chessmaster
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posted December 29, 2011 01:20 AM |
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Quote:
Quote:
You people have wrong ideas of how these things work.
I'm not going to bother and explain the obvious again. I'd just like to actually put forth a question that you may answer yourself.
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I know what, I would prefer.
Can you be less arrogant than that ?
And yes, everybody would prefer better mechanisms over a dull&narrated campaign.
You play campaign once, You play scenarios & RMG & Custom maps 1000 times. Obviously.
I see no arrogance in JJs post. Unlike some that tend to pose their opinion as the only valid one - he actually tries to communicate with the other camp.
I am also in the camp that would NOT buy the game without any campaign.
In my opinion conflux, achievements and reinventing some parts of the wheel (like making map bonuses legacy related) only syphoned resources that could have been used for either more content, or polishing current one.
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JollyJoker
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
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posted December 29, 2011 10:58 AM |
bonus applied by alcibiades on 29 Dec 2011. |
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The main point is, that the most effort has been put into the campaigns. Voice acting, story writing, cut scenes, map-making, Bosses... However, the game plays DIFFERENTLY in the campaigns than in regular play. I've played 7 of the 24 campaign maps up to this point, and not one of them did allow me to build everything. Campaigns are probably supposed to work differently - you have a story you follow and why do everything the same way than on a regular map, anyway? -, but then you are obviously supposed to learn the game playing them. However, I didn't have ANY kind of ressource problem in the campaigns until now. Which is rather different in regular play.
To make it short, the impression is this: the effort was put into making the campaigns work. The campaigns, however, have not that much to do with the actual game, and they are worlds apart from MP play. Also, you don't need any kind of balance at all - everything is scripted, on every campaign map there is only one player position, and every enemy action is basically "controlled". Which means, that "balance" more often than not by adjusting troop strength.
An easy example is in the Sanctuary 1 map: you get 15 or so Kenshis, just like that. And you can easily adjust that number to change MAP balance - but that has nothing to do with GAME balance.
In my opinion these games STOP WORKING once you do them that way. To make them WORK WELL, you have to develop the game first - the BASIC game -, so that regular play stands like a rock. THEN you can go ahead and make campaigns, trying to make them special - or not, depending on your goals.
However, with all the stuff involved in making a campaign, that way of working is impossible - the campaigns wouldn't be finished in time.
So, consequentially, if you want to make this kind of game right, you must either make down-to-earth campaigns without voice-acting, fancy cut-scenes and movie effects and so on, but simple stuff, the way it was done in 2, 3 or 4, or you must deliver fancy campaigns as an add-on.
Now, it is the other way round: we get fancy campaigns as the main game, while the actual game is still under development and WIP.
This had to be obvious just by looking back to Heroes 5 and what happened with Necromancy.
I mean, it was different, if the game would have been an evolution of 5: you'd have been on "safe ground". But 6 changes a couple of key elements of the game, and when you do that, you have to put extra care into making the new things work and making them interact with the unchanged game elements in the "right" way.
So in a way, yes, you can probably say that they simply put themselves TOO MUCH onto their plates to make everything work fine with the available budget (money as well as time).
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feluniozbunio
Promising
Supreme Hero
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posted December 29, 2011 11:06 AM |
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I think you all overthink all of this. For me its simple, put as much content as cheap as possible(including the campaign, which I dont think was expensive tbh), give it good package (graphics)and its good to go. Most important thing is that its working and its playable and there there are revenues. Nobody cares about making really good game because its not cost effective to make a good game as v1.0, well, at least short term. You want to have something that everybody wants in expansions, don't you. This is the mentality of many companies, ubihole included and i doubt any discussion will change that. I have played many many many games that all had potential but developers did all but what was necessary to ressurrect their dying game. Maybe it was not worth it, I dont know.
On the other hand I played that one game that developers seem to be really in touch with players dawn of fantasy I played it just after the launch. It had ton of bugs and not too much content at that point but the developers seemed to be really determined to fix them and expand the game . Not sure how it looks now as i have not played it since, but it sure had the potential and I will revisit it one day(even tho its mmo you pay for it just once).
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DoubleDeck
Promising
Legendary Hero
Look into my eyes...
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posted December 29, 2011 11:57 AM |
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Quote:
I rarely ever played the campaigns, so the whole story-thing is worthless for me, and I only play single-player
You should....the campaigns are beautiful and the graphics are very different from single player maps (like Inferno maps one and two).
Besides, stories sell and Hollywood make movies out of computer game stories.....
Anyway, the main reason why I liked H5 was the diversity of the skill/ability system....especially in Elvin's TOH duel maps where you built your hero up to level 21 and fought each other on day 1....there were so many strategies to think about before you build your hero...only a few were necessarily predictable, eg. for H5 Stronghold faction you must get leadership and attack skills. For H6, everything seems predictable even though we are given the freedom of choice of skills/abilities.
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Elvin
Admirable
Omnipresent Hero
Endless Revival
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posted December 29, 2011 01:36 PM |
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I plan to continue the tradition in H6 but that will have to wait a bit, till the game is in a better state, there are more factions/skills/spells and I gain enough experience so that I can deliver a properly balanced map  One does not need to be an expert to enjoy this game and that was the message I tried to convey when I started the friendly temple tourneys.
I've done some reading from the point I last checked this thread, I am glad to see meaningful discussions. Keep it up, I will do my best to make it count.
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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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Quantomas
Responsible
Famous Hero
AI Wizard
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posted December 29, 2011 03:34 PM |
bonus applied by alcibiades on 29 Dec 2011. |
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Quote:
The main point is, that the most effort has been put into the campaigns. Voice acting, story writing, cut scenes, map-making, Bosses...
That's fair. You have identified what matters. But more work is required to clarify how the different constituents work together. These are two concepts: the main focus of the production (i.e. campaign or core game) on the one hand and the resource allocation on the other. More often than not these appear to be correlated, but a good producer can keep these apart and strengthen the product substantially.
There is no doubt that Heroes 6 was produced with a strong focus on the campaigns. It shows that there was a creative vision of a world and a story, and then go top-down to divide the story into chapters, into missions and campaign maps, and then develop the game elements that fill up the campaign maps. You can do that IF you have already mastered the core game. There lies the pitfall for the producer who is not a true fan, i.e. has only a cursory understanding of the gameplay, but is a pretender for PR's sake. Considering that Heroes is the world's most complex TBS (the traditionally most complex genre), going the route of putting the main focus on the campaign and assuming that getting the core game right subsequently can't be that hard, is a sure way to invite disaster. That Black Hole had no TBS experience compounded this, so they marched down this road in unison. The problem with this approach is only partly resource allocation (after all Ubisoft has money), once you hit the wall, you realize that you don't have the people with the right skills and mindset on board. It must have been incredibly hard for them after they hit the wall to move forward. All the while true fans had a hard time to be heard at all.
On the other hand resource allocation can be independent of the focus on individual elements. It all boils down to what costs how much. The most expensive items by far are cutscenes, 3D animations are expensive as well, voice acting costs but not necessarily that much. Once you realize that the core game is the biggest part of the effort, you will start to hire the people with the right skills, and balancing the budget will require automatically to strip the most expensive elements if these are not necessary. This means, making the production a success requires a solid grip on ALL elements of the game. What JollyJoker says is right, do the core game first, create a rocksolid map editor, and use these components to implement the campaign and your creative vision bottom-up. A good lead should have figured that out, that the top-down approach has to be matched, and have rung the alarm bells that the bottom-up part is lacking. This makes it a leadership (management) failure doubly so.
Essentially, it's not a question about the costs of the campaigns, or whether to do these at all. If you look back at Heroes III you can see that these were mostly regular maps, but they were honed to perfection. This is why campaigns are a big draw, to provide a core set of maps on which you can spent an exceptional amount of beta testing and tuning, because you can rightly assume that mostly every player will get to see these. If you are smart, and choose the game mechanics in the campaign and stand-alone maps to be the same, you have the additional benefit of using the campaign and the beta tests for these to hone the core game.
But all this is already in the past. My advice to your VIPs is to follow through with the lobbying effort I lined out earlier to salvage H6 if possible.
Publishers have a tendency not to listen to simple reasoning like explained above and simply know better. It really needs a massive wake-up call like a throng of a million playing DotA and their competitor Valve comes aboard.
This said, I don't believe we can talk sense into Ubisoft, what we need to do is to show them. This is exactly what we are doing at Eternal Essence. We follow very much what JollyJoker recommended. We start out with an AI core to refine and get the core mechanics right, technically to create a core game that is rocksolid and where each element can interact with each other seamlessly and make for a greater whole. We do not redesign the game from scratch but start out with Heroes V TotE, and then transform the game step by step into something highly original with much more depth, like a totally open researchable magic and crafting system, magic terrain, threedimensional battle arenas (think castles, gorges etc), overland spells and the like.
There are some posters here who pointed out that the campaign is not fun for everybody. This is one point where we really need innovation. We tackle this as well, by producing a completely non-linear campaign mode, that makes the choices on the strategic world map (from which you can select missions) totally open and gives the player a wealth of options how to proceed, with which faction, with which mission, against what opponents and so on. I believe the current Heroes campaigns are just too flat and lead the player on a leash, and that there is room for very big improvement.
We are producing our non-linear campaigns currently with a minimum budget, but to standards that are higher than Heroes 6 aspired too. We even have a plan to redo the original H5 campaigns, to produce these in a multi-faceted highly polished format with a revamped background story. Cepheus is in charge of this project, but it appears that this effort will falter because of lack of support. Here is the chance for everybody to do something actively, and participate in evolving the game.
@Alcibiades
You are right we also dramatically improved the performance of TotE on epic maps. If you want only for a slick and fast game, just turn the lookahead depth slider all the way to easy.
@Cepheus
BTW, I changed your title at EE. 
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Do you love strategy games? Join us on Discord: discord.gg/JKU6tey
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Zenofex
Responsible
Legendary Hero
Kreegan-atheist
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posted December 29, 2011 04:20 PM |
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Quote:
Heroes is the world's most complex TBS
This I disagree with. You may be right from a programmer's perspective - I know nothing about programming - but gameplay-wise HoMM is hardly the most complex TBS. The most addictive, the most fun, the most popular - sure. Maybe it's even the most complex among the mainstream TBS games. The genre is larger than it seems though and certain "smaller" games (low-budget, small developer, etc.) are far more complex than their big cousins. Take Dominions 3 - an indie game but many, many times more sophisticated than Heroes, especially its strategical aspect. You have Europa Universalis, even the somewhat famous Age of Wonders which can rival Heroes in complexity, the TBS part of the Total War games (not "true" TBS games indeed) is very rich and is getting improved with every next installment, etc. Heroes III turned the series into the flagship of the genre but that's not true any more, especially given that the trend is to cut and not to add content (or at least to add it later and ultimately have as much as you had in Heroes III... at most) for 3 games now.
I agree with everything else though. If, however, Heroes appears to be a backwater project for Ubisoft, I doubt that any actions or inactions will change the situation. I mean - if their reasoning is "we plan to sell 200k copies and everything above that is a bonus", then there's no point to hope that there will be any improvement as that would mean that the game is condemned to be small and cheap.
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Quantomas
Responsible
Famous Hero
AI Wizard
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posted December 29, 2011 05:00 PM |
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What I meant with complexity is not strategic depth, you are right there are games with more strategic depth. What I referred to is rather the sheer number of mathematical rules that define Heroes games. Like the movement costs for inidividual heroes and different terrain, the skills and abilities that can modify it. Heroes and creatures traits, the buildings and costs and so on.
I played Dominions III just yesterday, it has not the same amount of rules, but yes it has more strategic depth through other factors like the large number of diverse factions, the magic system and the world map mechanics. That is exactly a thing that has inspired us for our own non-linear campaign mode, to have a world map of strategic importance, where you can conquer territories for the resources and other benefits.
But again, the sheer amount of mathematically exact defined rules in Heroes make the development effort so expensive from a programming point of view. On top of this, it requires the most capable AI to use all these elements for good.
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Do you love strategy games? Join us on Discord: discord.gg/JKU6tey
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DoubleDeck
Promising
Legendary Hero
Look into my eyes...
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posted December 30, 2011 09:33 AM |
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I'm wondering if Ubisoft would have put more budget into Heroes VI if it was made for consoles too.....
This said, I am still enjoying Heroes VI and think there are some great innovations, like the racial abilities, they are cool, just tone down Necromancy, pa-leeaaaaseee!
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mike80d
Famous Hero
Map Maker
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posted December 30, 2011 03:01 PM |
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How do I unlock the last two slots for the the empire bonuses? I have 3/5 so far, but can't find in the mydynasty where to get the other 2. Help would be appreciated
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x-ecutionner
Known Hero
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posted December 30, 2011 06:46 PM |
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mike80d
Famous Hero
Map Maker
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posted December 30, 2011 06:57 PM |
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Thanks X-ecutionner! I actually figured they were for expansions, but wanted to make sure. That kind of stinks since there's a lot of different ones I'd like to use, but with only 3 spots I find myself picking the same ones over and over hehe.
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x-ecutionner
Known Hero
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posted December 30, 2011 07:00 PM |
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Quote:
Thanks X-ecutionner! I actually figured they were for expansions, but wanted to make sure. That kind of stinks since there's a lot of different ones I'd like to use, but with only 3 spots I find myself picking the same ones over and over hehe.
+3 attack +3 defense +observation eye (+movement on land & see).
These 3 are abit too strong compare to others and give an immense advantage throughout the map.
Almost no point picking others, these 3 are far too versatile.
EDIT: Yeah, +2 Core / +2 Elite too.
Anyway if you play with Dynasties Weapons, you pick Arachne and don't need much to reflect about with these +150% lifesteal lol.
That's why Heroes should absolutely be played without dynasties to balance things out.
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mike80d
Famous Hero
Map Maker
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posted December 30, 2011 07:08 PM |
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Hmmm, I find myself always picking the additional core unit growth one. Have more core units, especially early, has been a big help.
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Kivo
Famous Hero
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posted January 01, 2012 12:46 PM |
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Has anyone seen this? It was posted on facebook on the 26th of December. So after so long they only seen the list of bugs from hc?
****** *******: Ubisoft please look at that huge list of bugs... - http://heroescommunity.com/viewthread.php3?TID=36932&pagenumber=1
Might & Magic: Hello @****** *******: thank you! good job! The list will be transfered to the dev team!
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Elvin
Admirable
Omnipresent Hero
Endless Revival
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posted January 01, 2012 01:01 PM |
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The list has long been given to the devs as was the case with the previous patch.
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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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Momo
Promising
Famous Hero
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posted January 01, 2012 01:08 PM |
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I'm not too convinced by the structure of this debate.
First off, just because the game is a strategy game, doesn't mean it can't benefit from good storyline, lore and scripted events. If anything, the point lies in how these elements are made part of the game rather than being just accessory to it. I'm hardly saying anything new, incorporating story and gameplay is what the vast majority of games tries to do nowadays. Keeping the two strictly detatched - like HoMM4 when you were basically rewarded for your gameplay with some pages of entirely independent novels - wouldn't probably work nowadays no matter how well written the story is. There are multiple routes to take and some are quite tested and true, HoMM3 used the campaigns to develop the storyline but also as a way to innest a tutorial session as did Starcraft. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Starcraft 2 uses campaigns to expand the gameplay by incorporating elements (enhanced troops, game-relevant choices, high customizations, "champion" units, an alliance system) that wouldn't work in the balance of multiplay but can only add variety, fun and depth in a sandbox-like mod like campaign mod is.
In essence, there are just so many things one can do for a strategy game using story, lore and such, that I just couldn't approve if the developers just decided to throw all the possibilities away and focused only on solidity of gameplay.
That said, I do know that JollyJoker's dilemma was provocatory and on a general standpoint I agree with him that the devs worked with the wrong focus in mind.
Plus, I find this mindset quite forgiving to developers: "Oh well I see, you couldn't do a good gameplay 'cause you were trying to make a good campaign. Poor you. Well, next time free yourself of such unbearable burden and make no campaign so you have your time to develop good gameplay." Who said they can't do both? In fact they ARE paid to do both and when we buy the game we give them our credit and faith than they did.
But, you'd say, you don't have enough resources to focus on both aspect. WHAT?? Suffice to say that the whole HoMM6 is (like HoMM5) realized in a fancy 3D graphics. Who requested the fancy 3D graphics? Well, not me for sure. I can appreciate the new art direction with egyptian lammasus rather than generic black knights, but I don't need 3D to do so. But, you say, the market requires 3D nowadays! Well I don't think so. I am willing to bet that lots of 2D strategy games - on top of my mind: Starcraft, HoMM3, Travian, Revenge of the Titans - are played in the world zounds of times more than HoMM5, even right now as we speak; dang! Even Clash of Heroes is 2D and it was pretty good!
3D graphics add N-O-T-H-I-N-G to the game and I challenge whoever wishes to do so to tell me that Ubisoft didn't spend resources on making the game 3D (probably MOST resources). I can accept that not every companys is Blizzard with a nearly unlimited budget, but if that's the case let's be frank, 3D is the biggest and most blatant waste in the game to date. Then there are plenty others like the whole Conflux system.
In conclusion - yes, they put all their eggs in the campaign basket and yes, that is a core problem. But they could have done a vastly different job, even with the budget they had.
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OmegaDestroyer
Hero of Order
Fox or Chicken?
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posted January 01, 2012 06:10 PM |
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Anybody else fear this is the last entry in the series?
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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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odium
Known Hero
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posted January 01, 2012 06:28 PM |
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I don't know about that, but if the franchise remains in Ubisoft's hands I really hope it will be the last one.
btw: Conflux is down so no playing in my days off from work 
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Kivo
Famous Hero
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posted January 01, 2012 07:09 PM |
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I really feel like MMH6 is the last of the series :/ Its a shame that many dont like it...
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