King's Bounty: Dark Side

[ScubaV]

This came out a few days ago, has anyone picked it up? I really like the KB games, but they haven't really done much to change up the formula. If it's like Warriors of the North it may be worth waiting for some inevitable bug-fixing patches.

 

[Metro]

Pretty sure there's some thread on it; not that it needs one. More of the same.

 

[Spectacle]

I really liked the first king's bounty games, but haven't been able to finish warriors of the north, even though feature wise it's the best in the series. Just too repetitive in the end.

 

[Renegen]

I've been playing Dark Side and I was pleasantly surprised, it's one of the best in the series.

Most similar to Armored Princess, you jump from island to island and do stuff, but what makes it so good? You're playing the bad guys. Your job is to steal away princesses, convince good people to go bad, kidnap dogooders and overthrow kings. There's a lot of choices you get to make and has pretty good illusion of being open world, the first island I conquered I had the choice to either exile the king, take him as prisoner or behead him. And the choices matter because there are more resources to manage now, you need to build your evil base of operations in different ways, gather good spells for your evil mage to research evil spells, sacrifice artifacts for stats, get people to write propaganda for you to lower leadership costs etc

I also had fun sneaking around in really harder areas just buying items and monsters, previous games the world was locked to you. Every unit also has been changed a bit, overall the game feels much more open and the questing is way more fun. The game continues to have those small improvements each game is known to bring.

Downside is that the balance is worse, I got access to Sacrfice, demonologists and black dragons within the first 5 hours of the game. Also the first hour of the game is complete shit.

 

[Xeon]

Did not play any of the previous titles.

Game is pretty good but a little buggy I think, a lot of the areas has a lot of ways to complete I think which is pretty great and I am not sure but I think there are a lot of easily missable flavor steps to quests which is really great probably for a replay. There are couple of areas which is kinda empty and mostly only has fights. Impossible is really hard, I just couldn't do it and decided to restart on normal.

The Journal is really bad IMO, its kinda like DOS's but much worse or something. Not enough information and after you ask an NPC something you better have a fantastic memory or wrote it down because they don't allow you to ask for the information again and the journal doesn't record most of it, I had a few quests by the end with no clue of what is the quest about since I took the quest days before. example, Clown's quest, I only have one objective, Size Matter, that's about it. no other information is known and if you talk to the clown you only get to buy mimics from him or leave.

I kinda wish they took stats into account during dialog and quests. still most quests were pretty good I think and there are some options with hidden rewards like stats or items or something like that. Ending was kinda of a meh, especially with the plot of the last boss. money doesn't seem to be an issue. Level 73 at the end and I had 16m and probably the best items and units money can buy. I did not fight every enemy I encountered and I did fail and not finish a few quests.

One thing I really hope they allow is the ability to sell stuff and be able to buy them back later or a storage or something. I had to drop a lot of scrolls because I did not have enough space and was not able to sell them, some of those scrolls were needed for a quest later which I was not able to complete because I couldn't mange to find/buy them.

 

[Raghar]

I've been playing Dark Side and I was pleasantly surprised, it's one of the best in the series.

How are bugs? I wanted to finish Legend and CW first before going into my favorite settings, should I hurry and finish both and then getting into this, or should I take time and when I finish CW there would be a version that would have much less bugs?

 

[Renegen]

If you sell scrolls or items they stay with the castle you sold them to. And I haven't encountered any bugs besides maybe 1 crash, Warriors of the North was the buggiest but that was mostly at the end, can't confirm Dark Side is bug free till the end.

On second analysis the difficulty is there, I did a few things early game to give me advantage but it's getting harder. Playing on Hard. It's still stupid how you get the best units quite early.

 

[Shannow]

"Dark Side"?
Wasn't there an add-in for Warriors of the North in EA just a while ago? I is confused...

 

[Metro]

Nothing confusing about it -- they just milk this shit into the ground.

 

[baturinsky]

I feel inadequate :/ I can't win against any of three Dark Spirit guards in the very beginning of game as vampire on Normal. With demoness it was way easier. Any suggestions?

 

[Raghar]

Git gut.

 

[Kayerts]

This is pretty fun!

Gameplay: Same as the rest of the series, with the open world design of Armored Princess. I play with the no-loss challenge (i.e., player-enforced requirement that all battles be won with no casualties), and it definitely stays interesting for a while if you do that. Eventually you become such a juggernaut that even that ceases to be challenging, though. I made a mod to speed up all animations by 15x, which definitely makes the game more playable. (Waiting for the animation for stoneskin to finish every few turns of every . . . single . . . fight was easily my least favorite part of the game.) Like all the KB games, there is a ridiculous amount of grind on the table, but you have options to either quickly power through it or skip it entirely.

Atmosphere: Shockingly good! That is "shocking" in the context of some low expectations, but it's pretty good even independently of that. It's an interesting mix of the sort of simplistic faerie tale atmosphere of the other KB games and a pretty fucked up storyline. E.g., the main quest is to bring misery to the three happiest women in the world, seduce the three most faithful men, and corrupt the three purest souls. Your character's pretty subversive; for example, he takes steps to ensure that the three women are truly, blissfully happy before bringing ruin on them. Then there's weirdly out-of-place elements like a vampire who looks like Snow White, who assigns you to hunt down and kill seven dwarves heroes who abused her when she was alive. It's especially strange because the aesthetics of the game are the polar opposite of grimdarkness--graphics and music are all very colorful and happy, and the general impression I get is that you're supposed to be treating the story as a light, tongue-in-cheek thing. The mix of villainy and lightheartedness is cool, and the protagonist comes off more as a hilariously moustache-twirling asshole than someone you're actually supposed to take seriously or identify with.

The story has a lot of variety in terms of the forms of evil your character perpetrates, which can be charmingly incongruous if you do things out of the intended order.

Spoiler

E.g., I skipped one early game island and came back to it later, when my army was strong enough to steamroll everything on the map. My character then proceeded to concoct an elaborate scheme of infiltrating the royal palace by impersonating a fencing instructor and exploiting weaknesses in the castle's security system, with the goal of gaining the trust of the prince. He arranges a plot with you via messages in bottles to meet up while he's outside the castle grounds with the prince, whereupon which you can kidnap him, and then gain access to the castle while he's your hostage. All of this is happening while my character is an overpowered vampire lord with a flying horse, who could have conceivably just flown in, landed in the castle courtyard, and murdered everyone there with a total of two spells. This would normally feel contrived, but your protagonist is written as such a conniving bastard that it seems plausible that he'd spent weeks concocting an elaborate scheme so that he could feel like he outwitted the enemy, as well as defeating them.

 

[Kayerts]

I feel inadequate :/ I can't win against any of three Dark Spirit guards in the very beginning of game as vampire on Normal. With demoness it was way easier. Any suggestions?

Demoness is by far the easiest start. I'm not sure how you're supposed to do it for vampire; doing it without losses requires you to find one of two spells in the early game, each of which only appear rarely. I'd guess the intended method would be to whittle down the enemy archers with poison skull and your own archers while tanking with your (replenishable) zombies. If you're just trying to win, it's probably easiest to bench your vampires and ghosts and use some troops from other races.

 

[Spectacle]

I feel inadequate :/ I can't win against any of three Dark Spirit guards in the very beginning of game as vampire on Normal. With demoness it was way easier. Any suggestions?

Ask Putin for reinforcements.

 

[CrimsonAngel]

I feel inadequate :/ I can't win against any of three Dark Spirit guards in the very beginning of game as vampire on Normal. With demoness it was way easier. Any suggestions?

Demoness is by far the easiest start. I'm not sure how you're supposed to do it for vampire; doing it without losses requires you to find one of two spells in the early game, each of which only appear rarely. I'd guess the intended method would be to whittle down the enemy archers with poison skull and your own archers while tanking with your (replenishable) zombies. If you're just trying to win, it's probably easiest to bench your vampires and ghosts and use some troops from other races.

That what i did. The imps and there fireballs is what i used together with the Chaos orb thingy majing spell.

 

[baturinsky]

Downside is that the balance is worse, I got access to Sacrfice, demonologists and black dragons within the first 5 hours of the game. Also the first hour of the game is complete shit.

Are demonologists good? I tried them, but priestess seems more useful, at least until I max my own Sacrifice. Other slots are filled with Imps(x2), Demons and Devils.

 

[Renegen]

Demonologists are broken, they can summon Demon or Imps deep in the battlefield to serve as meat fodder and they also have a resurrect spell of sorts that can be recharged with charge and that can heal lvl 5 units. I remember using them in the very first KB game until the end, I don't know why I bother to still have them in my party, too boring to use them.

 

[Dickie]

This game was on sale at GamersGate for $7.50, so I picked it up. All the text in the game is so blurry that it's hard to read. I haven't had this problem in The Legend, Armored Princess, Crossworlds, Warriors of the North nor Ice and Fire. Do they ever patch these games, or should I wait for the inevitable expansion and hope it's fixed by then? The game also looks very stretched out and weird if I play on a 16:10 resolution. This also wasn't something I saw in the other iterations of this series. I thought all of these games were just made with a level editor, so I'm very confused why this one has more problems than the other ones I've played.

 

[Spectacle]

Has anyone made a mana regen mod for this like there are for the other KB games? waiting for mana to slowly regenerate between fights is awfully boring.