Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

King's Bounty II

DeepOcean

Arcane
Joined
Nov 8, 2012
Messages
7,394
This game looks alot like Legends of Eisenwald, pretty cool game and I think this will be a pretty cool game too but a King's Bounty game? I'm not against they moving from the cartoony graphics, HoMM 3 is less cartoony than Homm 2 but a great game, I just don't like the idea of realism. Having 10000 under a swordsman looks cooler than that being represented by 6 soldiers. In terms of gameplay, it wont change much but looking to stock cavalrymen, stock swordsmen and a golem that looks like coming straight from an asset store is kinda disappointing, still, I will play the crap of this game.

Kings Bounty was always goofy high fantasy, in the end of the first one you kill the villain on the back of a giant turtle for fucks sake, this gritty realism because "muh game of thrones" is just not fitting here. Of course, if the gameplay is good, I will play it for what it is but it is a pity that a true sequel wont come.
 

Space Satan

Arcane
Vatnik
Joined
May 13, 2013
Messages
6,216
Location
Space Hell
Article about the game, use translation
  • Tralier is intirely based on game engine
  • Entirely different setting, no relation to KB1 and addons
  • Some jokes present but not wacky or childish like KB1
  • Every NPC is voiced
  • You can't level all skills
  • 4 passive skill branches
  • it seems units could level up too
  • ~60 creatures, 10 races
  • Undead could be hired
 
Self-Ejected

Carls Barkley

Safav Hamon
The Real Fanboy
Joined
Aug 21, 2019
Messages
173
I wasn't sold at first, but that gameplay looks excellent. This could be the bridge needed between AAA games and turn based strategy.

Only criticisms I have is with the awful faces, running animations, and exclamation points above quest givers heads. All look very amatuer.
 

Mazisky

Magister
Joined
Mar 8, 2015
Messages
2,082
Location
Rome, IT
Rpg parts look too obsolete, seems like The Witcher 1 in terms of facial animations and general polish.

Tactical parts look absolutely gorgeous.

I have faith.
 

Mazisky

Magister
Joined
Mar 8, 2015
Messages
2,082
Location
Rome, IT
I translated a dev message who said a notorious writer is working on the game but they don't want to reveal it yet. Maybe Avellone? This would explain the shift to a more serious vibe
 

Citizen

Guest
:mixedemotions:

Behind-the-shoulder view sucks, I was hoping for more of the same cheesy top down running from enemies gameplay
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,228
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth

King's Bounty 2 is a Bold Mix of Poor-man's RPG and Strategy
Developers from 1C Entertainment apparently took to heart the old truth stating that perfect is the enemy of good, and with the continuation of King's Bounty, they've decided to do everything much worse just in case.

Slated for release: 2020.

This text was based on the PC version.

Four years have passed since the release of the last installment of Heroes of Might & Magic, and over a decade since the last truly successful one. Apparently, Ubisoft hasn't got a good idea of what to do with the franchise, and its fans slowly begin to feel a certain emptiness – some of them may have even forgotten about the series. And so, this is the perfect time to enter the fray – preferably with a game that already has an established position in the genre, and a noble pedigree, but hasn’t yet overstayed its welcome. The creators of King's Bounty II felt they could fill the market niche... but for some reason, they did that with an overcomplicated game that squanders a few opportunities.

BIRTH CERTIFICATE

88899343.jpg

Many players refer to Heroes of Might & Magic III as the game of their childhood, but without King's Bounty, the series would have never been created. Both games were designed by the same man, Jon Van Caneghem, the founder of New World Computing. The developers of that studio never denied that the “Heroes” were in many respects a reiteration of ideas first implemented in King's Bounty.

In what respects? Things like the eponymous heroes, capturing and maintaining castles, searching for map fragments that reveal the location of artifacts. The 2008 remake, subtitled Legend and developed by Katauri Interactive studio turned out to be a worthy successor to this classic. We have doubts whether the same thing could be accomplished with the sequel.



Could someone tell me what's going on here?
The most surprising thing for someone who spent some time with the first installment of the renewed series (and half their school years on various Heroes of Might & Magic games) is how hard it is to find bearings around this game. Our greatest enemy are not the powerful trolls or armed skeletons, but mostly the gameplay design. Although I do not generally approve of repetitiveness in video games, I found myself thinking that King's Bounty II could have been so cool if only the developers went along the line of least resistance. There is virtually no trace of transparency, which was usually the hallmark of other games of the genre. The turn-based battle mode is where this is most obvious – instead of a single figure representing the whole unit, we actually see the entire units, which results in the battlefield being pretty stuffed with units.



To add insult to injury, most of the units look identical. In the tested fragment of the game, my army consisted of crossbowmen, archers, spearmen, swordsmen and knights, and until the very end, I wasn’t able to visually discriminate between them, and had to hover the cursor above a unit to make sure what it was. It was a little better in the case of opponents, because at least once in a while you could get an ogre or a warlike angel. Even worse, the enlargement of units caused that instead of neat, small tiles we got huge hexagons, packed with a dozen or so creatures. On the battlefield, there’s a maximum of a dozen of these – some are occupied by obstacles, some by opponents. As a result, tactical options are scarce, and the whole tactical element of troop positioning goes down the drain.

King's Bounty is not a fairy tale
In my opinion, giving up the fairy-tale setting was a cruel shot to the knee. In the previous King's Bounty (and the good installments of Heroes of Might & Magic), colorful visuals were not just a stylistic measure — colorful, distinctive characters, monsters and elements of environment were highly distinguishable and made the game extremely clear. The latest work of 1C Entertainment does not have any of these advantages. Archers are difficult to distinguish from knights, key NPC differ little from ordinary passers-by, and loot chests do not differ in appearance from all the other containers. I spent half the time with my eyes pinned to the minimap, which reveals important items and persons, as the game doesn’t otherwise highlight them.

But I can't really complain – at least it spared me from looking at the graphics for too long. For some reason, the developers decided to present the action from third-person perspective, like in a full-fledged action-RPG, but the only thing they have achieved with this is highlighting budget constraints. King's Bounty 2 looks mediocre when we look at still frames, and god-awful when we see the game in action. Everything is marked by extreme ruggedness, the open world turns out to be empty and not very interesting, our character moves with the grace of a block of reinforced concrete, and the cut-scenes — running in stunning less-than-30-fps — look just phoney. And I know that some of you will probably say that you’re willing to forgive a certain degree of stiffness, as long as it gives you as much fun as the predecessor. But I bet dollars to doughnuts that if 1C Entertainment sticks to the current release date (which is not far away), it won't be very much fun.



Waiter, this game doesn't cut it for me
It's just a poorly designed game. Things that worked well in earlier parts of the series were reworked here as part of a strange mission to create a new face for the franchise. For example, recruiting troops — previously they could be recruited in different locations; in the second part, we deal with everything through interaction with a single merchant who gives you access to five different units: from barely trained swordsmen to killer knights. Where's the challenge in that? Where's the feeling of overcoming difficulties, when the enemies are nice enough to face us in open field, when they have a fortified castle (and a visibly weaker army) at their disposal? Where are enemy units using any tactics other than attacking a random unit from our army?



And there are things here that could work well. The complex equipment and weapons system of our hero, a variety of possible development paths, an extensive and well-designed universe, and finally, the widely-advertised choices that will affect the story — King's Bounty 2, beneath that short-coming facade, hides a few solutions that might have been really interesting. In each of the tasks I managed to complete, I had to choose between helping one or the other character (or even an entire faction), between negotiations and combat. On the other hand, however, we have an extreme lack of transparency, ugly visuals, a pointless decision to go towards realism... There's just too many flaws here. And all that image change of King's Bounty seems like a revolution for the sake revolution.

Maybe I'm jumping into conclusions here — I spent just over half an hour with the second installment. However, I have the impression that the Russian studio involuntarily sabotages this series. Transplanting the beating heart of the franchise is a delicate matter, requiring good instincts and minds of the best gamedev professionals. In the case of this production, it looks as if the developers decided to perform an operation on a living patient after having spent two sessions with Surgeon Simulator. The results are not yet known, but it doesn’t look good.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,228
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.rpgwatch.com/articles/kings-bounty-ii-gamescom-preview-492.html

King's Bounty II Gamescom Preview
by Joost "Myrthos" Mans, 2019-09-16

banner-1616.jpg


With some anticipation I was going to spent some hands-on time with King's Bounty II at the 1C booth and it turned out to be an experience that didn't completely match my anticipation, but it was well worth the hour I spent on the game.

There is no escaping comparing King's Bounty II with its predecessor and from what I've learned while playing the game, King's Bounty II has several of the elements that its predecessor have, or at least the elements I've tried, but it changes the way how these elements come to you.


I started the game with an existing character, but in the final game you can select from one of three heroes, each with their own background story.

I was told that the story of the game can be influenced by your actions. These actions will also influence how NPCs react to you and will have an impact on the world and the quests you are able to do, as sometimes you have to take sides. This sounds familiar as it is something that could be done in the previous King's Bounty games as well. The obvious difference with King's Bounty is that it now plays out in 3D using a 3rd person camera, just like many other RPGs and that the story is told via cut-scenes and interactions with the NPCs, where you get to see the NPC talking to you. The graphics are not on the level of a game like Kingdom Come, but they are good enough. At least they are to me. They are however very different from the colorful graphics we got to know from the previous games.


The King's Bounty games are open world games, but that doesn't mean I could go in any direction I wanted. I could go everywhere but was basically confined to the paths. If I tried to leave the path, I found myself blocked by natural objects, such as trees, rocks or a cliff that stopped me from going any further. On some occasions when i tried that, something odd happened, resulting in my character being shifted and rotated a bit, which was somewhat disorienting.

In the version I've played, I had no horse, but there will be one in the final game. The character sheet even showed my character with a horse.

At various spots there are also chests to be found that contain some goodies. The chests I saw all look the same, so you won't miss them. Next to the main story quests there are also side quests. The quest givers for these quests are marked with a question mark above them, which is something I personally hope you can turn off. But even if you could, just like in the previous games, the mini map shows quite a lot of information, like where you have to go for each of the quests you have received, quest givers and other points of interest.

From what I could try of the role-playing and exploration part, it resembles what I remember of the previous King's Bounty game, but with a very different look.


If you zoom in, it is easier to differentiate between the troops

Combat has changed quite a bit from King's Bounty, although some things are similar. First of all, the combat now takes place at the same location as where the encounter started. In the 3D world a hex grid map is placed on the existing terrain and all the units are placed on one side of the grid. After that I could move my units around, so that they were located where I wanted them to be. That presented something of an issue though. The number of soldiers each unit has, are now also present on the grid. This means that if you have six archers in your unit, there are six figures on the grid. The advantage was that I could quickly see what the strength of each unit was, as a unit with a lower strength has less than six figures. However all the soldiers in the units are dressed the same. In one way that makes sense as they are all soldiers of the same army, but they are rather small, as otherwise the tiles in the grid would probably become too big and would need a lot of screen space. But as I like to zoom out to get an overview of the entire battlefield, the soldiers in the units get a size that makes it even more difficult to discriminate between each unit. It is possible to zoom in to get a closer look, or select the unit to get feedback on what type of unit it is, but it somehow diminishes the advantage of showing unit sizes in a more visual way. It is actually more of a problem when facing an army of soldiers, as they all look alike as well. That said, I must say that at my third battle I noticed, because the soldiers are moving a bit, that some had spears, some had bows and some had swords, but it could also be due to the fact that my units were a bit smaller because of the unfortunate dead of some of them. Also the larger size of the grid results in less tiles being available in that grid and could potentially result in less tactical options to place the units. although there is a strategically bonus in using the existing terrain for combat as it also makes it possible to use parts of that terrain to your advantage, like height difference and natural obstacles. Next to that, line of sight, now also plays a role.


All this is a big change from the game's predecessors where the soldiers in a unit were all combined into one figure, with a number indicating the size of the unit. Also in hose games, they were larger and more colorful, so it was easier to distinguish units. This change also means that in King's Bounty II the size of the units is limited, as in the previous games I could have units that were much larger than what can be represented on a tile in King's Bounty II. Then again, with the proper balance this could be made to work as well.

I also haven't seen some of the more weirder creatures that were in the previous games. All I had to fight now in that area are trolls and some angelic creatures. These were so big that only one of them could be placed on a tile. Somehow I doubt we are going to see something like a T-Rex or a droid in this game, or some of the other weird things the previous King's Bounty games had. Neither does it look like we are going to have a companion, like Drako, helping out in combat. This new King's Bounty game looks to be a fantasy RPG with a more realistic and serious note.


With all that said, I should also say that the combat itself behaved, for the large part, like I remember it from the previous King's Bounty games, which is a good thing. Next to that, I was also told that none of the encounters will be random, which is a good thing as well.

King's Bounty II is graphically a very different game and it comes with quite a bit of changes. Some of those changes I personally think are fine, but some of the changes, especially in combat, appear to me to be sub-optimal and I do hope they improve before release. Also the added realism, for a fantasy game, takes away some of the charm the previous King's Bounty games had. That said, if I would have been unaware of its predecessors, I might have valued some things differently.

I've only spent an hour on the game and there are quite a lot of things I could not try out in that hour, like character development, but I did enjoy the time I've played it and would definitely like to try it out again at a later stage as it does, at times, feel like a King's Bounty game.
 

cvv

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 30, 2013
Messages
18,071
Location
Kingdom of Bohemia
Codex+ Now Streaming!
-It tries hard to have modern rpg graphcis but it's shit in comparison

Graphix whore BS.

-All units look the same

Graphix whore BS.

-The more serious tone is worse than cartoony

Retarded manchild BS.

-The battlefield is tiny and all units cramped

That could be bad.

-Open world empty and boring

"Gaem is boring". Game journalism in action.
 

cvv

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 30, 2013
Messages
18,071
Location
Kingdom of Bohemia
Codex+ Now Streaming!
They could've taken a chance to jump on the niche left after ubi raeped homm into the ground.

Alas...

:negative:
There is a game being developed that's trying to do exactly that and it looks just like nu-gen Homam. Sadly I can't recall the name, I just remember I saw a few screenshots and it looked great.
 

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom