Players feedback/reviews

[Vilk]

I cannot find the thread collecting players feedback/reviews. So I open this thread until I find the original one.

It's obvious that this game is near to the top of the best games of all time. The amazing gameplay is is based on a nice simple RPG mood, a good class system, some strategy elements coming from the management of movements and troops. But the core of its gameplay is mainly the tactical elements of the combats:

• The magic system is one of the most diversified and balanced I ever saw, the number of spells useful in some cases is amazing.
• The rage system as less diversity but is a nice addition anyway.
• The troops diversity is another element that adds a lot of depth and diversity to the tactical combats.
• One detail but not that minor I really enjoyed to not have to bother with resources managements too much.
• Another detail, the item design is quite amazing, a lot of diversity in their design, morale, various stuff given after n combats like runes or attributes points, gremlins fights, items improving through gremlins fights, each item get personalized description, and so on.

The RPG parts are quite far to best standards in the genre, the story is very schematic and non original, the only distinctive point about it is the numerous touch of humour but for my taste too many are pure reference to modern world. Among RPG elements only the class system match standards quality of the the genre but this RPG setup gives a nice mood to a tactical game.

The sounds didn't catch my attention but the shiny graphics did, they add a lot to the charm of the game and are a quite pleasant change to modern mode to do dirty and/or dark graphics.

The replay value is excellent and based of the extreme diversity and the excellent depth of the tactical combats but also on the subtle differences between the classes.

I should close my feedback here but I like whining so I cannot resist to give few more details about some details I didn't like:

• The score based on game time is a little stressing once you start take care of that. But I admit I have no better solution.
• The game has some strong unbalance that become a little unpleasant when you start take care of your score. The partial list could be Time Back, Cardinal, Anga's Ruby, Dryad, Griffin, Demon, Sacrifice, Gift, Resurrect, Black Hole, Chargers, Emerald Dragon.
• The importance of time in the score breaks too many elements of the gameplay diversity. The game balances hasn't been tuned enough with that point in consideration. The balance tuning forgot a lot the time factor that is major in the score.
• The difficulty level also reduce the diversity of the game. The main problem of higher difficulty level is to be based only on bigger enemy stacks and that breaks many points.
• One weird detail, I hate this knight camp you get soon in game, making very tempting a tedious if not boring little gameplay element. And that point also reduce a lot the game diversity of the first areas, once you have taste it it's hard to not exploit it.
• I am shared about the high random in the game. It's clearly a significant part of the replay value but that breaks a bit too much planned strategy approach. I think some solution could be find but I have no clear suggestion about that.

[ArkhanTheBlack]

I agree for the most parts. I'd also say that the music is top-notch.

I'm not sure if I agree on everything balancing-wise, but I also think that the randomness of units and spells could be improved.

In my first game I got a lot of undead stuff like black knights, cursed ghosts and sacrifice very early, but since I made some bad decisions (my first game!), I decided to restart on hard and focus on playing a 'Necromancer'. Unfortunately, the game seems to have other plans with my character and I now find the whole 'greater peace' equipment like phoenix spells, unicorns(!!!), etc. I neither got black knights nor cursed ghosts and it was even necessary to send the furious Paladin to the undead afterlife to get access to a bunch of simple skeletons. However, I can't even fill half of my LD with them, so they are pointless anyway. The only undead unit with some reserves are zombies. I also have access to basic ghosts, but on hard difficulty they are very problematic, since they attack my army as soon as I loose control over them. And without sacrifice, my limited vampires and skeleton archers from some coffins are pretty much pointless. My whole treasure, about 150 decaying zombies, also won't last very long without sacrifice. I also never got inquistors to ressurect, although I don't even know if it's possible to ressurect undead. I never got the spell, and in my first game the Inquisitors died very fast since I didn't know their value at that time.

I think it should be possible to get decent amounts of basic units for several ways of playing the game. For example, solving the Paladin quest in the 'undead' way offers the basic undead units like skeletons, zombies and skeleton archers in usable numbers.
On the other side, I get some great units far too often. I have access to ~200 bears, but the druid runs an assembly line of almost 2000 ancient bears, WTH?!? I can get only about 400 swamp snakes, but it's not a problem to get 1000+ royal snakes in both my games, which are pretty much the best unit in the game.
I think the basic units of a certain type (undead, snake, spider, etc.) should be always available in decent numbers, maybe even bound to xor quest types (either one or the other...). The special types of a certain kind of creature like royal snakes, ancient bears, fire spiders, decaying zombies, cursed ghosts, etc. should be randomized bonus units.

Some spells should also be not randomized. Ressurection is okay since the Paladin has it as home spell, but sacrifice is a bit too important to be just randomized. All mini stacks of great units are pretty much dependent on this spell. Though, I'd agree that sacrifice should not necessarily be available in the early game (= 1st isle). Another solution could be a time or progress dependent 'grow' of creatures in a HOMM way, with maybe a max amount available at a certain time.

For a King's Bounty 2 I'd love to get prestige classes like Necromancer, Druid, etc. with a home castle...

There should also be a way to get rid of money. Maybe a buy random creature/item with a chance of a rare in a Diablo way.

[Vilk]

I agree with your suggestion to improve some random aspects. But in fact it seems you haven't yet take in count the time element which is major for the final score.

[OGKingsBounty92]

I love most of the game but THEY HAVE TO FIX THE PATHETIC RANDOM ITEMS AND WEAPON GARBAGE!

Screw the random crap, let me buy what "I" want to buy so I can plan which units to go with. What is this garbage of having a set of items and weapons (to look forward to), reading in the descriptions ALL the great benefits..to find out you can only get 2-3 of the entire set..WTF is that?

FIX IT dammit! Or someone come up with a trainer, cheat or mod to get ALL the items we want if we want a certain set etc.

Rest of the game is exellent.

[Metathron]

I love the randomness, it's one of the main reasons I've played the game 5 times through, and am now playing my 6th game as paladin on impossible.

[Vilk]

The random is quite complicate problem, I think ArkhanTheBlack suggestions about this are good and won't break game diversity and in fact some will help by offering you more units choices.

Also it's right that there's a set problem. For small set that's ok but for large sets like the knight sets, it's almost impossible to get them. But yes some random are also a point of the game.

[DigitalForm]

Great Game except for the problem with the randomness as stated before. I started a Paladin and Mage at the same time and played with both to see the differences. The Paladin got the short end of the stick for sure. Items that didn't help, low on cash from constantly hiring regardless of the Paladin skills for money.

Options are always better than restrictions. Have everything available but have them in random locations and for random costs. Not completing a set is disappointing. The random objects/pickups could be weighted towards the players class a bit too to be more useful.

This game has terrible flow:
Move - Stop - Too Strong - Go a different way - Stop - Dead End - Read Quest - Can't go that way because the enemies are too strong - Read another quest - Try that route hoping to not find too strong of enemies.

Starting characters have less tools to work with which should be kept in mind (which it isn't). The quests should be in a general area where progress can me sustained in a smooth manner. This game is better than HOMM V in my opinion but at least I made constant progress in HOMM.

Can we get a patch to smooth things out? I will hold off on the expansion even though it plays different but with the same basics like it sounds.

[OGKingsBounty92]

Originally Posted by DigitalForm

Great Game except for the problem with the randomness as stated before. I started a Paladin and Mage at the same time and played with both to see the differences. The Paladin got the short end of the stick for sure. Items that didn't help, low on cash from constantly hiring regardless of the Paladin skills for money.

Options are always better than restrictions. Have everything available but have them in random locations and for random costs. Not completing a set is disappointing. The random objects/pickups could be weighted towards the players class a bit too to be more useful.

This game has terrible flow:
Move - Stop - Too Strong - Go a different way - Stop - Dead End - Read Quest - Can't go that way because the enemies are too strong - Read another quest - Try that route hoping to not find too strong of enemies.

Starting characters have less tools to work with which should be kept in mind (which it isn't). The quests should be in a general area where progress can me sustained in a smooth manner. This game is better than HOMM V in my opinion but at least I made constant progress in HOMM.

Can we get a patch to smooth things out? I will hold off on the expansion even though it plays different but with the same basics like it sounds.

I'm not even thinking about the expansion or buying it until they fix the random and item imbalance in this game.

I just stopped playing it last week going with undead because I couldn't find the vampire items and the Elven Bow for the skeleton archers..I just said screw it and stopped playing. It's freaking annoying KNOWING there's some items there but you just can't have them.

[Vilk]

Originally Posted by DigitalForm

This game has terrible flow:
Move - Stop - Too Strong - Go a different way - Stop - Dead End - Read Quest - Can't go that way because the enemies are too strong - Read another quest - Try that route hoping to not find too strong of enemies.

Starting characters have less tools to work with which should be kept in mind (which it isn't). The quests should be in a general area where progress can me sustained in a smooth manner. This game is better than HOMM V in my opinion but at least I made constant progress in HOMM.

I saw that more like making you search the best path. For me the problem with that is more that this doesn't match the importance of time in the final record. A too obvious path could be a little tedious but having a non direct path and well setup can be difficult with random factor. I think the goal was to make the player have to dodge some rude enemy to add some diversity.

[bigslimyblob]

I'll start by saying that this is a surprisingly good game, but one that I feel could be made into a truly great one if not for a couple very huge flaws, one of which is easily fixed and the one I'm going to be talking about here.

I'll mention this once more: this first flaw is not only huge, but easily fixed.

Personally, the one thing that annoys me the most, by far, is having to ride to creature dwellings to recruit them when you already have some in your army. Throughout the game you find flags, equip items that increase Leadership, get promotions, and of course lose creatures during battles. The need to restock creatures is constant, and over the time I've played King's Bounty, several hours have been spent just riding around restocking.

Before someone mentions Reserves... there's only two Reserve slots, they need to be bought, and you may want to keep them to transport alternative creatures. There's even a couple special situations where you need to keep one open for "quest" creatures like, say, a cyclops for the magic school, or even just to hold your normal creatures while you feed venomous things to your swamp Spirit, or maybe hold Priests to upgrade because there's no more Inquisitors available in vendors.

Proposal: enable some option to hire creatures (assuming that you already have some of that exact type in your army, of course) from anywhere on the world map, for twice their normal hiring cost. This could also solve the problem of absurdly small creature availability (three Royal Thorns, four Arctic Bears, two Black Knights, etc. from some obscure vendors) without having to resort to the Sacrifice spell to "grow" those unit stacks, because that spell is too rare to rely upon and often will only be found halfway through the game. This is something that could be done with KB and AP with little difficulty.

Huge flaw, easy solution, immense game improvement.

A friend of mine also mentioned one flaw to me. He hasn't finished the game yet, but the thing he hates most is the totally random difficulty levels. When he tried doing the mage tower in Arlania and beating Enemen in the swamps, he faced a ridiculously powerful opponent without any warning whatsoever.

His suggestion was to balance things better, but in my opinion it would be sufficient to simply put a "suggested hero level" value on quests. That'd also be fairly easy to add, so I'm mentioning it here along with my own suggestion.

The other flaw of the game is, as many people have been complaining about, the absurd level of randomness when it comes to creature/item/spell generation. That however is not so easily fixed and so I'm not going to go into any detail. I will however mention that, yes, it's pretty ridiculous, and while I understand that most of the replay value relies on this very randomness, there would have been other ways to go about it. As things are now it's impossible to "plan" a character; completing a particular set is highly unlikely, and like most players I really don't like the game telling me what it wants me to be, especially based on some dumb random number generator.

So there you go. From my point of view KB is a good game that could easily be made into a great game, and the designers/developers knowing about the randomness issue just makes it possible to look forward to future games! Not that I'm not looking forward to AP already.