despite all the problems I do love wotn! anyone else agree?

[tiberiu]

Originally Posted by Pilnystudent

I dislike many things in WotN.
What i would want to see
- end of infinite combos, why they are adding more and more of them?

Let me answer this one : because most people like them and it's all about money.

- better AI, seriusly is it so hard to do something more complex then random number generator?

It's not hard but investing in AI lowers the total profit. Good AI require much money. And again, most people that buy the game find it hard on Normal difficulty. This is gold for the game companies, to have dumb customers.

[Avo]

I like the game. Already spent 150 hours in it. Some of the bugs do drive me crazy though!

[Bhruic]

Originally Posted by fastjaw24

I am going to have to disagree that wotn is the best in the series. I feel their copy pasting job with all the bugs and imbalance is making this series go downhill. If you tell them this is the best in the series the next game you get is going to have even more bugs and be more rushed then this was and this one was pretty bad. I still feel like The Legend was by far the best in the series and they need to go back and look at what they did before the game becomes too stale.

I mostly agree with you, but I found AP to be better (subjectively) than KL. Beyond that, WotN definitely seems like a step in the wrong direction. In fact, it seems like it's an incomplete game. I'm not sure if they were under some pressure to release it early, didn't have the money to finish it, or what happened, but there are too many things that scream "unfinished". I'm sure eventually most of the bugs and bad text translations will be fixed, but there are so many instances of units and unit abilities that don't function the way they are described. So many bad balance issues. So many potential exploits to be taken advantage of. There are pacing issues, really poor map unlocking systems. Despite the fact that I enjoy the game, it a lot of ways it's a really poorly done game.

At the end of the day, I've got my money's worth out of playing it, but at the same time, it could have been a lot better than it's turned out to be.

[Zhuangzi]

Originally Posted by fastjaw24

I am going to have to disagree that wotn is the best in the series. I feel their copy pasting job with all the bugs and imbalance is making this series go downhill. If you tell them this is the best in the series the next game you get is going to have even more bugs and be more rushed then this was and this one was pretty bad. I still feel like The Legend was by far the best in the series and they need to go back and look at what they did before the game becomes too stale.

The Legend
-Games feels 100 percent complete
-Rage box I thought was the best pet idea(some may like the dragon better)
-Liked the idea of having wives
-Game length was very good for the money(very long game took me around 140 hours)
-Story was interesting all the way through(I actually read almost all dialogue in the first one, the rest I just skip through cause its boring and puts me to sleep)
-Game felt by far the most balanced(very important here the game had a nice smooth flow in difficulty and the units all felt balanced with each other)
-Lots of fun boss fights and a story that builds up to the boss fights

Armored Princess
-Game did feel 100 percent complete
-Dragon was a nice idea but felt the rage box was just a little better
-Companions replace wives which is fine basically the same thing
-Felt the story was kinda lackluster here started just skipping through it
-Game was only half as long cause it originally started as an expansion then they held it back and made a full game.
-Game still had good balance I thought
-Still good on the boss fights here too
-Overall did not regret buying this and had almost as much fun as The Legend

Crossworlds
-Game felt about 95 percent complete
-Game was extremely short with its 2 short campaigns and a little added feature to make you play Armored Princess all the way through again to get it see a tiny bit of content added.
-Felt the content was kinda a rip off for what they charged
-Felt like the orc add on should have been in the original Armored Princess and not made an entire game and charge us almost full price for it
-Kinda regretted buying this after I found out what it contained, kinda expected a full length campaign(but that is partially my fault for not doing a full check on it before buying)

Warriors of the North
-Game feels about 80 percent complete
-bugs,bugs and more bugs on this rushed and unfinished game
-Probably over 50 empty buildings that they did not finished and bother to put any npc in
-Entire maps not accessible cause of unfinished game
-Very bad balance on some of the new mobs causing basically huge exploits
-Story was crap and basically non existent, nor did any side quest have literally any story too it.
-Too very few boss fights and most boss fights crashed for most people randomly
-Mistypes, Spells that did not work right, things that were not explained properly, and just plain wrong item,spell or talent ability descriptions
-Valkyries were kinda lame imo and taking away the companion I thought was the wrong thing too do. Made a lot item sets not very accessible
-Kinda felt ripped off for anyone to charge money for the condition this game got released in
-Progression bugs for some making some people have to completely restart the game(this is very bad and makes a lot of people quit and never come back or buy another game in the future from this series)

I could go on and on about wotn but most people know and feel this was not the best in the series and a lot of hard core fans were very disappointed and I am sure this company alienated a lot of new customers. It really feels like the game needed another 6 months to get it ready and they choose to push it out 2 weeks before all the big name releases that come out in november. Everyone needs to stand together here and tell them this was a crap effort and they need to do better next time. Not tell them this was the best in the series after the condition they released the game in cause you just going to get another buggy crappy unfinished release again if you say this game was awesome.

Very good summation and I agree with 90% of what you said. Looking back now, I actually think Armored Princess is my favourite in the series (partly because the campaign was shorter). TL and WoTN are massive grindfests, but at least with TL it was new (I think I completed the game four times, which is a massive time sink of course). Don't get me wrong, I'm still playing WoTN pretty compulsively, and I certainly got my $27 value out of it already, but it's definitely a step back for the KB franchise. Unfortunately, this will be seen by most gamers as a 'B list' game where the potential is for so much more. Sad, but true. The best days of KB are in the past, it seems. Prove me wrong, Katauri.

[Fatt_Shade]

It's not hard but investing in AI lowers the total profit. Good AI require much money. And again, most people that buy the game find it hard on Normal difficulty. This is gold for the game companies, to have dumb customers.

Who said good AI cost much ? Look at HoMM3-babies mod for theLegend and you`ll see 1 man made great changes into how AI acts (it`s not perfect, but is MUCH better then what game devs implemented in original settings. All done by single person, without game studio, or professional programing skills.
And gold for gaming companies isnt having dumb customers, but to have lots of players. Just look at WoW(and similar games) success, millions of players for how many years already. Variety of choices (class, alliances, items, quests ...), functional game enviroment and just lots of things to do.
In KB series there is one way to go, and story is very linear and it`s cool. But at least in that placement let us have game that works what it`s supposed to do : no retaliation units except vs spider boss, bunch of broken quests/translations/ingame mechanics ... Not to list all of game problems (would take too much time), i love KB series so far but they made rushed release and there is just to much bugs/errors for this game to be called polished product ready for market.

[Zechnophobe]

I've put in about 70 hours now on the game. Some of that was working on mods and bug fixes. But not too much of it. I've been pretty exhaustive in working through every bit of the content, and I still haven't finished my first play through.

And... it feels like a grind. I don't FEEL like i've gotten very far, because I've only completely, thematically, 5 areas: One viking, one Human, One PIrate/Orc, One Elf, One Demon (And the Elf and Demon ones were very short compared to the others).

I've been trying to put my finger on the real core problem I've been having with the game compared to its predecessors. Yeah, it has bugs, but nothing game stopping for me. Sure the tooltips are off and the dialogue is weird... but that's just a mild aesthetic, and has been true in the past.

The issue? The real issue?

Pacing. 100 times this. You spend far too much of the game repeating roughly the same play pattern. The rewards are not paticularly well distributed over the play experience, and so some areas are a deluge of knew things, while others are completely monotonous and repetitive. At one point, I checked my awards, and I had 250 No loss fights, and 150 Undead armies slain. Considering 99% of my fights were no loss, this means about 40% of the game at that point had been versus Undead armies!

The difficulty range between Greenwort, merlessar, and the Isles of Freedom was very small, but the total experience gained takes you from like level 20ish to level 45! The only reason you do all that content is to be high enough level to do some of the huge Demon fights in Demonis/Hades. So you grind through a bunch of super easy fights, using them just to level up your medals/self/rage skills.

Further more, we've removed 2 entire races of units. Just to hit home the 'there is not enough unit selection woes', the lizardmen and undead are basically not playable. And wanderer scrolls are super rare.

The idea of making the Winged Horse appear early was terrible. I know this feels like "Give them their candy early", but in reality in trivializes so much of the layout of the levels. You have two pirate, three human, and one elf area to explore. If you are just scouring them for goodies, you could, if you wanted, spend HOURS doing nothing but picking up things via flight. Armored Princess introduced this only very late in the game, and after the point you could have investigated most islands. You should be using flight as a big bonus that lets you clean up the last few islands easier, not as a status quo that makes you wonder why they bothered making 'paths' for units.

Ugh. I'm not sure what happened, and I still wish 1C and Katauri the best... but something went really wrong with this game. It needs more Tender Love and Care before being truly palatable by the masses, and has all the earmarks of something rushed out the door before it is ready.

Release a game 3 months late, and it's late for 3 months.
Release a game 3 months early, and it's bad, forevermore.

[DennisBergkamp]

I'm really enjoying WotN, but I think they should've kept the companions from AP/CW, they made building certain army compositions a lot more fun with the extra unique talents and item slots they provided. Also, it shipped with way too many bugs, which are luckily getting fixed.

Other than that, the game is more of the same from AP/CW, which is not a bad thing at all!

[blacklegionary]

Originally Posted by Zechnophobe

The issue? The real issue?

Pacing. 100 times this. You spend far too much of the game repeating roughly the same play pattern. The rewards are not paticularly well distributed over the play experience, and so some areas are a deluge of knew things, while others are completely monotonous and repetitive. At one point, I checked my awards, and I had 250 No loss fights, and 150 Undead armies slain. Considering 99% of my fights were no loss, this means about 40% of the game at that point had been versus Undead armies!

The difficulty range between Greenwort, merlessar, and the Isles of Freedom was very small, but the total experience gained takes you from like level 20ish to level 45! The only reason you do all that content is to be high enough level to do some of the huge Demon fights in Demonis/Hades. So you grind through a bunch of super easy fights, using them just to level up your medals/self/rage skills.

I agree with you here. The time I finished everthing in Darion, I saw the enemy in Isles of Freedom and Merlessar mostly weak, too much grind for little reward. But those stacks in Demonis are still deadly/Invincible by the time I finish them all. This can be fixed however.

I don't mind the lack of Lizardmen that much, never a fan of them. The lack of Undead I can understand but I still want to use some of them. In fact skeleton archer once save me in KB:TL when I fought Karador.

I think with luck people can get to the Temple of Love in AP even before starting a fight. The early flying horse is not really a big deal for me, at least.

[fastjaw24]

It's not hard but investing in AI lowers the total profit. Good AI require much money. And again, most people that buy the game find it hard on Normal difficulty. This is gold for the game companies, to have dumb customers.

This is why games sell like crap too. You think you going to make more and more profit with a crappy game or you going to make more with a game that gets improved every time. Not to reuse an example from another post but lets take for instance Skyrim. Skyrim is the fifth game in the series and they gave each game a new story and added new features as they went along and they they have one of the best selling single player games of all time. What if the game never added anything from Arena(the first Elder Scrolls game) which was pretty much crap. You think Skyrim would be selling 10 million copies with a copy paste of Arena? Of course not but as the game went on they made good improvements to it and improving AI was one of the big ones for the series. The AI they brag about in Elder Scrolls is called "radiant AI" but you do not have to put that much work into a game that is based on a hex grid.

You ever configured your characters tactics in DragonAge so they do what you want under certain conditions? It takes me a couple hours to fully configure every character in the game to do certain things when I want them too. That is how easy it is to program better AI for a game that is based on a hex grid system. This is not Skyrim that has infinite possibilities this is exactly what Ill say again "a hex grid game" extremely easy almost any one person could reprogram every units behavior in under a weeks time and have a way better AI.

I mean seriously when every unit blows their run right away as soon as you start combat how lazy is that? That too me is extremely lazy AI job and so basic a 5 year old could have coded that AI. At least change it so units do not use their run till they have an available target to attack. That right there is not rocket science and would be just a small improvement in the AI.

I could go on and give more examples but people know this is a copy paste job and a poor one at that. I doubt this game even sold 10000 copies on steam which is pretty poor sales imo(saw less than 1000 people playing on release day on steam usually players playing times 10 tends to get close to total units sold but is only apx) Look at the game FTL which came out about a month before it so simple 2d game that sold probably 100000 copies at least considering I saw over 20000 people playing it on release day.

Bottom line their copy paste job is not going to cut it in anymore and I hope the sales reflect that and they wake up and realize they have a pretty good game here and don't drive it into the ground.

[Zechnophobe]

Originally Posted by blacklegionary

I agree with you here. The time I finished everthing in Darion, I saw the enemy in Isles of Freedom and Merlessar mostly weak, too much grind for little reward. But those stacks in Demonis are still deadly/Invincible by the time I finish them all. This can be fixed however.

I don't mind the lack of Lizardmen that much, never a fan of them. The lack of Undead I can understand but I still want to use some of them. In fact skeleton archer once save me in KB:TL when I fought Karador.

I think with luck people can get to the Temple of Love in AP even before starting a fight. The early flying horse is not really a big deal for me, at least.

Temple of Love, sure, but you also had to kill the high level Lizard army in the Dwarven Capital. That was a pretty sizeable thing to do. Also you had to kill the army on the bridge (though it is a pretty easy fight with good tactics).