Players feedback/reviews

[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.

[jake21]

While I would agree that there are some balance issues; the other two flaws you mention I find disagreement; and strongly dislike the idea of being able to hire creatures anywhere on the playing field. While perhaps a minor aspect of the game; one aspect is to decide if you should go into battle as you are or seek reinforcement; if you seek reinforcement should you drop a current recruitment that is not readily available; at perhaps quite a loss of $$$ (and on impossible; early in the game; $$$ is a scarce resource to be tightly managed).

Originally Posted by 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.