Heroes of Might & Magic 7

Well 5 wasn't good at all either before patches and expansions. Unfortunately it seams that 7 is unlikely to get any expansions at all.

 

5 was pretty good at launch imo.

 

That's only if you played singleplayer. Multiplayer with AI was impossible due to synchronization errors. In ToTE most of it was fixed though.

 

If VII retains the three unit tiers with hp bloat, grindy combat and high level units having negligible impact then all other things hardly matter.

And yeah, ubi gives no fucks about this franchise, those screens reek of cheap-ass/non-retail/borderline mobile crap.

 

This is all well and good but no one's asking the most important question: Is the soundtrack still by Rob King and PAR? If so does it live up to their standards?

 

I agree wholeheartedly, but splitting the stats is a 5 second fix.

You're right, I forgot about the few combat improvements H4 had. I'm usually a defender of H4, but I felt its combat was absolutely butchered. Fucking simultaneous ranged retaliation.

None of these things are problems in a vacuum. I only thought less of megaSpeed because in the context of which units tended to benefit from high Speed, it could've been done better. Also I'm on a phone ergo too lazy to check, but didn't H5 have a Counterstrike spell? Retaliation abuse had always been a HoMM problem, as you could just split your Imps into suicide stacks of 1 to waste enemy strikes.

In fact, now that you mention retaliation, it springs to mind that this shit will be exacerbated in H7 since you can split stacks on the fly in tactics phase.

That's funny, I never managed to finish a H5 mp game due to desync or crashes, no matter which expansion or fan patch I was using.

 

Actually, now thinking about it, I only finished 1 match. I was playing with a buddy and the rest was AI controlled. Heroes 5 vanilla was utterly impossible. In Hammers of Fate we got much farther in the match but it also desynced at a certain point. In TOTE we achieved one full session without errors. We could hardly believe it and thought everything was fixed. The next map we tried went good for quite a long time (including saving and loading the game) - and then at a certain point it always crashed. That however wasn't because it was asynchronous, but that a neutral army exceeded the maximum amount of creatures and crashed the game - totally ridiculous. But yeah, TOTE is the best attempt and at least I haven't experienced it getting asynchronous.

The sad thing with the Heroes' games is, that Multiplayer was always a pain in the ass. I also recall HOMM3 and that it needed the latest Addon/Patch to work in MP without major issues. And HOMM4... I can't remember anymore if it was asynchronous or not, but the AI turn in multiplayer took 10 minutes. For 1 AI opponent... now imagine you had 4 AIs opponents. That was unbearable. HOMM was always a tightrope walk between "will the game go nuts again or not?". Needless to say it caused lots of frustration and hairloss. A Hate-Love relationship.

I still don't like what I see in Heroes 7, but if they manage to fix speed and synchronisation issues... well it would be at least something...

 

On paper these are cool. It gives each faction it's own flavor. In reality these abilities really slow down the gameplay. My friend refuses to play HoMM5 with me just for this reason alone- incredibly long downtime between turns. If you want to play Inferno optimally, for example, you will spend minutes at a time abusing Gating in every fight to minimise your losses.

They said in that interview that HoMM7 will be faster paced. Can I expect shorter turns?

Yeah, no. Good luck playing longer that few hours without an inevitable crash. Good luck playing biggest maps with max number of AIs without waiting 10-15 minutes for your turn. Good luck having decent multiplayer experience. Good luck having any basic replayability, because there is no map editor or random map generator, lel.

I do agree that on the whole HoMM5 isn't as bad as people make it out to be, there are tons of fun mechanics to enjoy. It's just that the presentation is shite and absolutely jarring in contrast to beautiful static adventure maps of previous games. That and it being coded through absolute fucking ass.

 

Could do this in H5 too. I don't mind tbh. Even if it is a bit degenerate.

 

Can you flank them as well, or do the arbitrary map corners make them immune?

 

Arbitrary map corners tend to make archery units immune from flanking, at least from the first strike.

 

Dang. If only I watched the gameplay streams of H5 when it came out to learn of this OP feature. Would've won me some duels in hindsight.

 

I liked simultaneous retaliations, it could help to fix alpha strike issue that series had since its first iteration. But yea, it was stupid on ranged units, maybe all ranged units should simply had that first strike ability.

Well with some balancing and caps things could have been fixed, for example max possible initiative moves 2x faster than min possible initiative, so that someone moving twice for your one move would be very rare sight. Splitting I didn't mind in older HoMMs since it was viable only at the beginning, later you simply wouldn't have enough army slots for those tricks. I don't remember how it worked in 5 (and how it does work in 7), does it allow you to start battle with, for example, 8 stacks?

 

Yeah simultaneous retaliations in melee are reasonable. Like you pointed out, it gives more room for strategies like First Strike units, or units with 2x/Unlimited Retaliation to chip away at attackers more.

Apparently it does allow it, but I just found out from friend Jaedar so I can't offer any info about it.

 

Hmm. I'm pretty sure in 5 you could not make more stacks than you were allowed off the battlefield(which is 7 iirc). I would assume Heroes 7 is the same.

 

Aaaaaactually, check this out around 14:15, he starts with 8 stacks. This was the vid that initially lead me to believe in this super-splitting.

Show Spoiler Hide Spoiler

Also, I just read somewhere that H5 tried to balance for stack splitters, in fact: they made some abilities' trigger chances (like Bash) depend on attacker stack HP vs defender stack HP, so you can't unleash your frontline of unicorns to permablind some poor stack.

 

That's because the game bugs out and clears a slot without removing a creature around 14:07.

 

Which is weird if you think about it.

The world of Ashan imo. leaves no chance for this franchise to have well-received RPG games for mass audience. Assuming you'd make a reboot, not continuation of the series(I mean - I like blobbers, but shady businessman part of me says it won't sell really well - ubi is a company composed of such shady businessmen, shady businessman will talk in green, like $$$).

The Heroes franchise however... To extent whole series but, let's focus on 3rd part - it is one of the most recognisable PC games ever created. It has everything sorted out - it's very easy on easier difficulties and extremely hard on higher(and the gameplay is the epitome of easy to learn, hard to master), it ran on relative toasters back then(Pentium 133 MHz was like 4 years old when it was released? This is in its minimal spec) and nowadays it's total 100% toaster-friendly game, had decent campaigns(outside of the base game), was reasonably balanced(with obvious exceptions such as Inferno) for low-to-mid engaged competitive play(later on it becomes pain in the ass), the artstyle makes the game look beautiful years after it was released...

Ubi... I don't know what ubi thinks.

I mean let's point major issues both HoMM5 and HoMM6 had:

• 3d camera that contributed nothing to the game
• low amount of content + huge amount of bugs
• poor campaigns
• poor artstyle
• poor map design
• square grid(a minor problem)
• adding close to no depth to the base gameplay
• "expansions will fix it" approach
• absolutely horrible balance(I assume it's a problem with QA)

A lot of this comes from the games being under budgeted for the scope. Which is a red flag - you're making a continuation to extremely popular and highly regarded game which graphics didn't really aged that much, and you don't want to invest in it? It's going to end in "oh it's decent but III was better imho.". 6th obviously suffers a lot more from it.

Map design can only be helped by hmmm... hiring people who made good fan-maps to previous games? But then see above - they don't want to invest a lot into it.

Artstyle and 3d deserve a longer explanation because it's obviously Ubi's job. There was a time when everybody was like 2D WON'T SELL, but this time is over. 3d brings nothing but confusion(resources hidden behind mountains and such) and higher hardware requirements - which mind you - is important in a game that aims to replace its predecessor which is often an important application on many craptops. High end 2d art won't chug even half of the computing resources their(failed) attempts at making sort-of-decently looking 3d game do and it will inevitably look better(my brother's old PC struggled to run Divinity:Original Sin but it did great with Pillars of Eternity and Pillars looked much better imo. despite being worse game). WoW artstyle is another case of the same retardation - who the hell keeps pushing it, everybody thinks it looks like shit. If it's Warhammer - I understand - it started the trend, but why would anybody ape it is something I don't understand.

Basically - Ubi underestimates potential in Heroes of Might and Magic franchise. It's perfect for making toaster friendly game with option to port it to tablets(without any changes but the control scheme - just like, you know - HoMM3), the core gameplay has more than enough casual appeal(seriously, if there's any series that never needed streamlining for a wider appeal it's Heroes and Worms) all you have to do is to provide good, complete game because the moment people realise that it needs few expansions before being good, the sales will plummet.

At the same time Ubi seems to act like - "oh, this is a series we won't be able to sell on consoles(no shit, sherlock) it must be niche, we're not giving it too much money but have high expectations".

They will kill the series if VII flops and they have huge chance to flop because people in beta are already like "well it won't be as good as 3, but after few expacs it will be as good as 5" so the initial sales will be shit.

I'm really sorry for all people involved with development of every Ubisoft-published Might and Magic franchise games(maybe excluding shovelware like that DS game whatever its name was), it feels like most of the time they really wanted to do it right but there were some thick-skulled people on they way that made it impossible.

 

Discredit where discredit is due, HOMM3 has a weak endgame; the mopup phase.

 

I can't think of a single lengthy strategy game that doesn't have a boring end-game consisting of mop-up, except in case of auto-win conditions which any way lots of people hate.

 

See, I thought that too, But then you see shit like this. Just a run of the mill gaming video with HoMM trivia. Let's look at the comments:

117 likes

Maybe HoMM is just a slav thing.

Well, Ubi dipped their toes in that market with tablet friendly HoMM3HD. Of course it was as half-assed as you could imagine: no expansions, no random map generator, technical issues, multiplayer issues, more expensive than complete editions on GoG. The works.

Honestly, if I was in charge, I wouldn't even bother topping the classic that is HoMM3. The franchise needs AoE2 approach. Release a proper, full HD version and a new expansion pack. Hire those crazy talented russians who made Horn of The Abyss. There, you keep shipping copies with next to no investment- any jew's wet dream.

How do you kill that which has been dead? The core fanbase will just shrug their shoulders same as they did after HoMM4 ,5 and 6 releases and get back to HoMM3. Bro mods will keep polishing HD and WoG versions, and releasing professional quality stuff like HoTA.

 

There's apparently some people who like the mop-up phase, because it's how they feel victorious: A screen saying "you won" is not as meaningful as walking around, stomping every last enemy into the ground with your overwhelming force.

To be clear, I do not agree, but to each their own.

 

All of Yurop loves their homms; finding Shackles of War in a 1v1 forcing enemy ragequit transcends the language barrier.

 

I blame it on the fact that Homm 3 came out 16 years ago. Which means some of the jewtube faggots weren't even born yet.
Now let that sink in.

You know what's funny?
Back in the day Homm was considered a casual strategy title, well suited for womyn.
And surprisingly enough, I've met quite a few that played it, and it was well before this whole gamer grl fad became a thing.