Thoughts on coming back to King's Bounty

[MattCaspermeyer]

I did not play the original King's Bounty, but did play HoMM1-3 and I have never played HoMM4-6.

I think my brother got me HoMM4&5 on GoG, but I have not even tried to play them, yet.

The first HoMM trilogy is just fun and awesome with 3 being the pinnacle of the series! 4 changed things to be quite a bit different from 3 and so I'm not surprised you didn't care for 4 because it turned a lot of people away from the series.

I enjoyed 3 so much that when I played King's Bounty - The Legend (my favorite in the series) that I created a whole mod (HoMM3 Babies) to weave aspects of it into King's Bounty.

The hero system was so rich - each hero had their own brief story (I alluded to some aspects of their story with keywords when you look at their description in my mod) and naturally you develop your favorites (kind of like playing Warrax in Master of Magic for those who played that game) and you hope you can recruit them instead of the computer.

With King's Bounty, the graphics are simply gorgeous and the hexagonal-based gameplay for me is an optimization problem with respect to minimizing losses. That's why I find it so addictive. Plus, with my mod and TL there is a desire to get a wife and see what HoMM3 heroes you and your wife will have so I find that as long as there are mini goals (like 10 battles to your next child or getting one of those artifacts that give you runes after 50 fights or the medals somewhat) then that helps reduce the grinding feel.

I think it has been widely discussed that the WotN battles were too much Undead. I hope I&F has changed this because once I got to the Dwarven area and had to fight more Undead I was really tired of fighting The Undead at that point and didn't want to fight them any more. I ended up finishing WotN, but I went weeks without playing it before I'd come back and slog through more Undead battles and will probably not play it again until I (if ever) mod it. I&F gives me some hope, but one thing I've learned (I was late playing TL - 2 years after it came out) is that you have to wait 6 months to a year after a new KB game comes out for it to be playable because they are so buggy. As a modder, I know how hard it is to squish bugs because I still find bugs in my HoMM3 Babies mod to this day so you really have to be on top of going through your code and checking it to ensure that you've covered all different scenarios and sometimes it's not practical to imagine all the different ways this spell or that ability may be used.

WotN should have been Undead Vikings, Undead Humans, Undead Elves, Undead Dwarves, etc. so that each race had their Undead variant (like Red Sands' Undead Lizards) so that when you went into the area you were facing Undead variants of the normal units. This would have made it much more fun, because playing the whole game against the Undead was tiresome. But if I would have had to fight Undead Peasants, Bowmen, Swordsmen, Priests, Miners, Dwarves, Giants, Sprites, Fairies, Dryads, Ents (think Tree of Death in TL), Wolves, Black Dragons, etc., etc. you can see how varied and awesome a game it could have been. That would have been a neat way to dramatically increase the number of units with very minor changes to their appearance (plus I bet the developers would have had a lot of fun making different units into Undead variants) and it would have been fun thinking of anti-talents (imagine Undead Inquisitors with Rage Drain).

AP / CW were fun because you got to fight varied enemies throughout the entire game as has been mentioned and TL is the same way and so I think the point is that it is okay to have a theme (i.e. Undead), but you've got to carry out that theme such that the game still has variety of battles - especially if there are 500 of them!

/C\/C\

[Fatt_Shade]

@impy s for your advice for Zhuangzi to try out HoMM3, it`s hard in today time for some1 to accept game that old and passed over in every aspect by modern standards. I was and still am fan of that series but only play it 2-3/year when arrange internet play with some friends, and almost never finish it because each one is time consuming.

@Matt Nice ideas for undead parallels for each race to play in WotN, but your comment that developer wold have fun making undead elves (Drow`s) undead dwarves etc you forgot that this game was made with least possible effort for highest achiavable gold coins inflow. Proof for this is easy to find in many game mechanics that were 100% functional in the Legend and Ap/Cw but didnt work in WotN. Only possible explanation is that devs were lazy to even copy/paste old functional game files, but instead made their own halfassed not-functional.
Release of Ice&Fire before full working WotN, only shows that certain developing studios want to drain last possible drop of profit from this franchise before throwing it in trash
Their selling points for this DLS were :
1) NEW creature skill system
2) NEW Necro lizards
3) Over 20 NEW creatures
4) NEW items
All this is over 3 years old news from Red sands mod, and they sell it for 9,99 as NEW ???
Play 100 hours of old material to have 20% of new locations.

This Ice&Fire is NOT EXPANSION, it`s simply mod for WotN. And they charge for it. In that case every moder should ask some % of price as compensation for their own work done from love toward this game and not profit.
I deleted WotN before finishing it, and i think i never will so i`m not fammiliar for size of I&F dls, but Red sands mod had 160MB installation, and 350MB of working files and it was FREE no charge and had all this material in it (new race, locations, items, creature skill system and more) 3 YEARS AGO. 3 years is ancient in digital era, and they had nerve to sell it as NEW. Pardon me but what a load of s..t.
I`m not impressed and am sorry to see great game as Kings Bounty butchered by bad decisions from developers

[travelingoz]

Originally Posted by camelotcrusade

In that case, definitely give them some time to fix the bugs we're finding first. Just today I heard back from 1C support and I'm corresponding with them on my bug report. Hopefully this will result in a decent list of fixes.

Once those are ironed out it will be a matter of whether you like the new style of game play or not. It's not worlds apart from the first version, so if you disliked it strongly then stay away because you're not getting a new game. That said, I think the changes make it more interesting and also easier (which some players, not necessarily you grognards, will appreciate). Playing a game myself and comparing it to my friend's game has shown me just how different your start can be depending on your supply of level 4's -- which is a key feature it wasn't leveraging in the original early game.

A new downside is that without your flying horse the fedex quests are especially aggravating as sometimes "go here, report back, repeat" is a long ways away.

Gameplay was never the problem. The rage that comes after the joy of finding super cool/rare artifacts/units/spells early in the game (you all know the kinda stuff i'm talking about!), then coming across a game breaking bug that required a restart and never finding those items again was what killed it for me.

[Zhuangzi]

Sigh. Up to level 13 in Ice and Fire now and I am getting frustrated, sadly. The game is JUST fun enough for me to play, but only because I'm cruising through pretty easily on Impossible Mage. Not no losses.

The main problem of WoTN, tedium, is NOT fixed in the early stages of Ice and Fire. Nordlig is actually quite fun but Vestlig not so much and Fastland is even worse. Fastland is a perfect example of everything that is wrong with WoTN. The island is almost completely linear and without a flying horse you basically just have to grind your way through it. Then when you're finished with that you can start grinding your way through Istering. Oh, and all the enemy stacks are undead. WTF!

To make matters even more frustrating, I'm finding it hard to find more supplies of certain high level troops, such as Warrior Maidens and Mystics. I'm nearly out of Soothsayers too. I thought I was going to have to use Slingers until I found more Berserkers. The creature xp system is good, but of course it rewards you for using the same units over and over. For some reason the Berserkers seem to level up faster than the other Viking units.

A team of Berserkers, Vikings, Soothsayers, Jarls and Mystics or Warrior Maidens is a fine team, but why must I use the exact same units for 93 fights now? Against the exact same enemies? Christ.

[Darkeonz]

Oh god I regret buying the DLC. While it improved warriors of the north a little bit, it just wasn't enough. I am level 43 now and the main land from legend is repopulated once again and I have to fight my way through it, once again!! I forgot this would happen.

I mean not only did they reuse the land from King's Bounty legend, but they actually went ahead and reused it TWICE!!!! I mean jesus christ it is lazy.

[Zhuangzi]

Originally Posted by Darkeonz

Oh god I regret buying the DLC. While it improved warriors of the north a little bit, it just wasn't enough. I am level 43 now and the main land from legend is repopulated once again and I have to fight my way through it, once again!! I forgot this would happen.

I mean not only did they reuse the land from King's Bounty legend, but they actually went ahead and reused it TWICE!!!! I mean jesus christ it is lazy.

Crap, I really don't think I can bothered with this. I'm level 17, just up to being back in Greenwort. I mean, the Viking lands aren't the best but at least they were new areas in WoTN. Being back in Darion just...sucks. Greenwort was SO much fun in TL (and I've replayed it recently so I remember) and now it's just utter fail in WoTN. Really, what were the devs thinking in making all the enemies undead? So boring, so dull. Greenwort is raped, the magic tower broken, and I can't help but feel like that's what WoTN did to KB as well

[KarlosCV]

Originally Posted by Zhuangzi

The creature xp system is good, but of course it rewards you for using the same units over and over....why must I use the exact same units for 93 fights now? Against the exact same enemies? Christ.

I think you rebutted yourself here

I personally strongly dislike the unit levelling system precisely because it nudges you to use the same units over and over again.

Btw maxed out Slingers are beastly but then you want to try something else, replace them with the new Scouts or Avengers and OMG, it seems the new shooters aren't doing any damage at all. Or you run out of the amazing Jarls and it takes about 50 fights before you get your Knights or Horsemen on the same level of dmg output.

On the plus side, they did solve the worst tedium - i.e. on the Nordling island. Yes the following islands are still bad but it wasn't that big a problem for me anymore.

And the new Ice Gardens island is quite interesting, although buggy and crashes a lot.

But on the whole, this is my second and last playthrough of WotN and in the future I'll only replay TL and CW.