OT: HOMM V

[DonCorazon]

Thanks for the feedback. For me, most old games seem like they were much more fun than newer games. I don't know if that is because older games were truly better, or just newer/innovative at the time, or if I have just become jaded and cranky with 30+ years of age.

But if you go to a website like Gamespot and look at Game rankings, most of the highest ranked games are from the late 90s. I remember playing the first Might and Magic and having a blast, and not that long ago I got one of the Might and Magic RPGs I had missed (I think 7 or 8) and thought it was a lot more enjoyable than Neverwinter Nights, despite the polish and graphics. The older HOMMs seemed better too than my experience with the HOMM5 demo anyway.

I often judge a game by the amount of fan-based activity and content, which was what eventually led me to Dom3 - when I saw the Wiki. Some games just come out and die almost immediately - not even an FAQ on the web to herald their passing. While I had some fun with AoW2:SM, I don't see much of a community around that game, maybe I am just not looking in the right spot.

Also, though not much of a real-time strategy game player (too much stress in real-life; no need to supplement it with frantic clicking and scrolling around) - I did find Warlords Battlecry 2 to be a game that stayed on my hard drive for a long time. It had that touch of old school humor often missing in newer games (the voices for the quasits come to mind)...

[Agrajag]

Maybe you'd enjoy Warlords: Battlecry 3 then
I had a lot of fun with both 2 and 3, but ultimately I'm just not an RTS guy, so I stopped having fun with them

[Hoplosternum]

B0rsuk - I agree with you about HOMM4. there were some really nice ideas in there. But I think 3DO was dieing at the time and there was hardly an AI at all. In single player skirmish while HOMM3 AIs would at least expand and fight the HOMM4 AI was completely passive. I haven't got in to HOMM5 but it seems similar to HOMM3 but far more demanding systemwise. My pc struggles to play it at any sort of pace.

I really liked M&M 6 & 7 and still play them occasionally. I agree that they are much more fun than NWN despite the graphics. But I think for me that is because I like the party system. I liked the Balders Gate games, especially the first.

Age of Wonders iteslf was a great game. I stopped playing pbem mp a few years ago, but it had a decent community going many years after it was released. AoW2 just never really grabbed me at all. Even when both were 'out' AoW seemed to have more dedicated fans.

[Zeldor]

Hoplosternum:

In HOMM5 AI just gets money and resources. It isn't playing the same game as you are at all. You get into enemy territory and see monsters killed but treasure left. It simply does not need it.

They also decided to make that kitchy approach: good elves, dark elves, humans, dwarves. Good thing they couldn't invent whole castle of hobbits.

For most series fans HOMM3 Wake of Gods was the best version of the game ever [though you could argue that some things in WoG went too far]. What all hoped for was that game in 3d settings. And instead they created an abomination that couldn't run smoothly on new computers.

[Agrajag]

Zeldor said:
[though you could argue that some things in WoG went too far]

No you can't () because pretty much everything can be turned off

[Edi]

HoMM4 became a good game once they got both expansions out and patched it to version 3.0, but at release it was an unplayable piece of crap that tried and failed spectacularly to steal a lot of features from Age of Wonders 1. Get the H3 & H4 Complete DVD. The experience with the new HoMM4 is light years removed from the first release crapware. I can vouch for that from experience.

HoMM5 has the biggest problem with the AI being slow and the graphics engine being slow. The AI is probably because the damn thing sees the entire map and evaluates everything on it before making moves, whether it can reach stuff or not. Load up an impossible sized Tribes of the East map and you can't play them with AI on, because turn resolution takes 20+ minutes.

The skill system in HoMM5 is pretty revolutionary compared to the old ones in the series, with much more choices. The problem with the original release was that you only had certain limited must-have choices and you only had one or two viable heroes for most factions. Tribes of the East revamped the skill system and enriched it a lot.

H5 does still have the same old killer stack and critical mass problems of earlier Heroes games, but they're not necessarily as bad anymore. A well designed hero, especially with the right spells if a caster, can wreak absolute havoc on even a large enemy army. I've gotten wiped out several times against the AI that way when I had the edge numerically and ran into something that had just the right things stacked on it.

[Agema]

HoMMIV was a bit of a disaster if you ask me. The new creation of heroes being in the battle was gruesomely misimplemented. It led to all sorts of problems.

HoMMV got rid of it, more of a rollback to HoMMIII. However, it still had several problems. Firstly, there are missions which send you all the way across the map, then you get a new mission which sends to back to another side of the map, and, well, let's just say spending turns doing nothing but traipsing an army from one side of them to another is frustrating.

The AI is crummy. It chucks a lot of units at you by way of compensation, but it's just slightly disappointing. Also, the game tends to devolve into going backwards and forwards until one massive battle between your biggest army and the enemy's decides the whole thing. Usually, considering the slightly cheaty AI, this means chucking small armies to grab castles whilst dodging his massive monlithic army(-ies). Eventually, you'll cause enough disruption to his troop building that you can build a huge army bigger than his. But to a large extent this means you've done nothing but spend hours - literally hours - running around not doing very much. All in all, the various level design weaknesses and gameplay problems make finishing every level seem like a chore that must be endured to get onto the next tedious task, rather than a satisfying attempt to fulfil an objective.

HoMM's problem is that ever since 2 they've been obsolete; the gameplay ancient, the AI effectively nonexistent. This can also be said of Age of Wonders, but AoW had a much better system - it's hard to justify HoMM4/5 in the light of what AoW achieved.