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

[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.

[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.

[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).

[blacklegionary]

Originally Posted by Zechnophobe

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).

My bad, I totally forgot those lizards