Honestly 2 and 3 mostly just feature creeped something that actually had less design space than it looked like it had. And transitioned the graphics from symbolic and cartoony to semi-realistic. That last bit is what made 3 so beloved, because taste in visual presentation tends to go from cartoony at yound age to realistic at adolescence (because cartoons are for kids, dooh), and it hit it's dempgraphic at just the right time. And for most people the taste kinda stops evolving around adolescence, too, so it stayed their favourite.
Yes, we never saw this discussion before and it's not like HoMM III is pretty much a definition of an ideal sequel in how it improves on almost every important aspect of its predecessor while perfectly maintaining the distinctive features that made the series famous and loved. And it's not like it's the last game in the series to offer the full package of improved mechanics, tight design that makes it a perfect hot seat tb game, perfectly functional multiplayer, a variety of campaigns and scenarios, good number of iconic factions and so on. No, you saw through all the lies and propaganda and guessed the truth - it's teh graphics!!!
And it's not like your, frankly very stupid, theory holds any water anyway, since II being the best game in the series graphic and atmosphere wise is a pretty common opinion among older fans.
You're quite wrong. The problem is that having this discussion on the internet among people emotionally invested in the series is pointless. So I'm not debating you here as you're clearly missing the point.
But for anyone else: There's an unprecedented amount of casual gamer opinion on the Heroes franchise. This is because the series, and especially Heroes 3, were played by more people than usually played anything. Especially in East European countries where PC was the dominant platform and where rampant software piracy meant nobody ever had to pay for a game in order to play it. So I could walk out on the street right now, pretend to be a journalist and stop anyone my age and ask if they've played any HOMM games, and it will turn out everybody has. It was probably the first big franchise which had a huge female gamer community, too, and when it came to video games most women at the time were complete casuals. The first two games, especially the first one, had huge appeal to kids due to the graphics, and kids are, well, kids, what do they know? This is very rarely acknowledged or recognized, or rather, the impact of this or the reasons for this are very rarely discussed. In part because what the appeal of the Heroes games was is that they were very simple, yet presented themselves as complicated. They're casual/kid games which present themselves as mature.
Heroes III did this incredibly well. The gameplay is not significantly different than that of Heroes II (or Heroes 1 for that matter) and those were games for kids. But it looks like a game for adults. You got angels and devils, stuff looks more realistic, etc.
But what you wrote sounds like paid promotion. It didn't improve every aspect, or really much of any aspect.
- The spell system which puts the most powerful spells at the bottom of the mage guild (mass haste, mass slow) means that the spellcasting game is laughable in Heroes 3, arguably the worst in the series
- - But do note that this boosts its appeal to the casual crowd, because they don't think they're doing something gamebreaking (I'm casting a lvl 1 spell!) while doing something gamebreaking (Mass slow!).
- The need to recruit heroes to do chores looks laughable compared to the ability to just use monsters, flag weekly resource dwellings and caravan troops from external dwellings
- The combat system where everyone effectively had first strike on offense reduces both tactical depth and design space (for creature abilities, spells, etc).
- - Note also that this is probably the main reason why lvl 1 spells were gamebreaking.
- - - Note also that this is the main reason why the AI seems a lot better in 1-3 than in 4. It simply needs a lower IQ (so to speak) to play optimally.
- The primary attribute system didn't change, except the addition of spell points lowered the power of of knowledge, and the raw power creep (moar units) coupled with the simplistic "everyone has first strike" combat made low-level buffs outpower the higher level spells (especially when you factor in the turn/resource cost of mage guild upgrading) which cause spellpower to become somewhat insignificant. Which means it just continued on with something that wasn't necessarily an improvement going from heroes 1 to heroes 2.
- Inflated number of skills meant an inflated number of overly situational or useless skills which in turn made for an inflated number of useless or strictly worse hero classess, most of whom were just flavor related padding
- - While on the other hand having clearly casual friendly heroes meant people were thrilled to... start the game with a high level spell which just won battles for them so that they didn't have to actually know how to play to go places
- - - For a lot of people "being an expert" at Heroes 3 meant "knowing that you have to start with the chain lightning genie guy" or rather knowing what the name of that guy IS, and a huge fault of H4 was "you couldn't start with the chain lightning genie guy". I actually had this explained to me IRL by more than one person. I tried to lie to myself that folks I was talking to weren't just stupid by telling myself that what they were really complaining about was that H4 heroes were too indistinct and blank slate when you recruit them, but eh... (Don't confuse this with that being an expert at Heroes 3 actually is for a hardcore gamer)
- - The skill inflation meant the routine padding of having a skill associated with every numerical value you could possibly associate a skill with, whether it made sense or not. So you have Sorcery which is just strictly worse spellower, you have EDIT: Learning which is objectively a waste of a skill slot, you have Eagle Eye which isn't terrible per se, but is not worth a slot, you have Artillery which is just wtf, you have First Aid which isn't wtf but is just too niche compared to most other choices you could take, you have Mysticism (which isn't bad at all, it's just that wells are generally everywhere) and so on and so forth. A guy over at a HOMM specific forum made a comparison between H2 and H3 and too much of H3 skills turned out to be bloat.
- - - This also extends to the might hero specialties which are a cute gimmick, but since most troops are somewhat indistinct it ends up being mostly bloat
- Inflated number of pointless artifacts is inflated. There's just way too many +Eagle Eye items to begin with.
- The way luck and morale work is silly on multiple levels.
- - First of all they do more or less the same thing, and both push the whole "strike first ftw" inherent idiocy even harder.
- - - Then you have the skills which boost them, which are quite powerful, but since the ceiling for how far you can boost them has to be low (due to how they work), those obsolete artifacts which boost them, creating even more useless artifacts
- The way growth boosting artifact work is ridiculous and plays into the "I have a hero who's job is to not do anything that couldn't just be automated" mentality.
- The way marketplace works is completely silly, simply because you have to build it. The higher the difficulty, the more you need the marketplace, but since it costs resources you have to cut into other development in order to build it.
- - It also rewards you significantly for being ahead, for flavor reasons (Of course if you have more markets everything will be easier to get!)
- More castles and more units looked great until you realize that there's just not much these uints do to really set them apart, so it's basically just spam
- - Not to mention upgrades. Everything (or even anything) having an upgrade is clunky because the new troops don't fit in with the old troops.
I could go on, but the thing was that most stuff in Heroes 3 (or even 2) wasn't really a significant enough improvement over heroes 1 to begin with. Arguably, Heroes 2 and 3 were complete cashgrabs, just very sucessful ones. When you go in depth, and explore how H4 handled most issues and areas that could be improved from Heroes 1, it's difficult not to conclude that what was there to be liked about H3 (and also 2) was graphics (because if your taste goes that way it's an obvious improvement) and feature creep (which you can like if you don't actually understand what's going on too well). Heroes 5 was a complete cashgrab - when it came out it was one of the most declarative statements of "THIS! IS! POPAMOLE!" I've ever seen in gaming, with even caravans (a feature not even the most blinded of fanboys could rally bash) initially not making it in because "Everything about Heroes IV sucked!". But it's not, it's mostly that the interface was confusing people and the color scheeme was too bright. Really, they made you able to trade resources without building anything, but they moved it to a text based menu, and then folks couln't find it and there was raging about how "Heroes IV doesn't have a marketplace, wtf is this!?". Actual fact.
If you go a bit in-depth it's quite possible that changing the Heroes 1 original spell memorization to mana points broke the system mechanically making magic heroes inherently weaker (or indistinct as it were).
Or you could not go in-depth and see that it was the fact that level 1-2 spells are generally more useful that did that and it had nothing to do with switching to mana? Also it was actually the horrible III that introduced distinction between heroes and some of the magic ones that had certain spells as a special (another horrible idea from III) are very good.
Err, you really are not worth paying any attention to, I didn't even notice this when I wrote the up above, but yes, for a lot of very casual people, like you seem to be, one of the greatest things about Heroes 3 was "being able to start with the chain lightning genie guy" which is a significant improvement over any Heroes game where you couldn't. It's also pretty ridiculous.
The low level spells ridiculousness I've already covered, that + the noticeable gold and growth creep which inflated army sizes put spellpower into the grave but is unrelated to the spell points issue. The move from vancean spell memorization to mana points which happened between Heroes 1 and Heroes 2 lowered the power of the Kowledge primary stat but also kind of broke the system with moving spell memorisation ability to the domain of hero skills.
What this means is that what the Knowledge stat originally stood for was how many copies of an individual spell you could cast before having to go back to a shrine (for individual spells) or a city (for all the spells in the guild), and there was no such thing as wells everywhere refreshing all your spellcasting power practically at will. Having a high knowledge in that system is significantly more powerful than having a high knowledge in a system of universal mana points (especially ones which can be refreshed at will). Especially when you consider that originally creatures could only have one buff or debuff on them, so having more spells to cast meant being able to counter more enemy spell effects. I'm not sure that system couldn't have been developed and that moving to spell points wasn't a rather lousy move. Cheap spells being so strong in Heroes 3 didn't help this, but the mana point system quietly relies on widely available wells and ways to effortlessly refill the universal spell points, which adds the mana point system to the list of stuff that's only there to look like a functioning mechanic while not actually being one. To the point that on long-time HOMM boards you always have random people bashing the Mysticism skill and holding it up as the embodiment of a useless skill. Notice that I don't, a skill that refreshes you mana points in a game where low-cost spells rule can't be bad in theory and if it IS bad something is deeply wrong somewhere.
The other problem is moving spell memorisation ability to the Wisdom skill. EDIT: Skipped this, but the essence is that this created a semi-moronic situation where a spellcaster needs one of it's skill slots taken up to function by design, while also having one of his primary attributes growth be emphasized because, well, he's a spellcaster.
All this isn't discussed very often because folks generally started playing with Heroes II rather than I and just took mp for granted (and there was never opportunity to reverse engineer the old system into a later engine to see what happens).
Heroes IV you can actually trace every single thing they did to someone stating that something stupid and clunky was stupid and clunky all along and folks trying their best to come up with a solution.
Did you really just write that after calling III a "bloated mess"?
IV is pretty much a textbook definition of a game where developers had no time and money and so they had some ideas, but completely failed to introduce them in a convincing way. But what's even worse, they also completely failed (or simply couldn't) separate the good ideas from the obviously stupid ones. In short: IV was a broken cashgrab by a company that wanted to save itself using established franchises. Saying otherwise is just living in self-denial. I am a huge fanboy of the series. I perfectly remember running IV on the release day and seeing that some genius decided to implement a fog of war with how strategic movement works. And it didn't really improve from there.
Yes, you are indeed the fanboy of the series, the shining example.
This isn't for you.
- Mage guild upgrades which take into account that spending turns to build up the mage guild is a fine tradeoff and that additional resources are not necessary.
- Spell system which made playing different castles actually feel different.
- Instead of having loads of samey creatures, having fewer but distinct ones.
- Instead of upgrades, strategic choice.
- Free marketplace
- No need for Heroes who's purpose is just logistics. (Not that you can't have support / economy heroes, but you don't NEED them)
- Being able to flag weekly external dwellings, reducing tedious click inflation.
- Caravans, same thing.
- Simultaneous retaliation in combat - this should have been in Heroes 2 and makes it impossible to apply "tactis" from Heroes 3 where nothing at all matters or compares to being the guy who lands the first blow. This was a huge sore point because this alone makes Heroes IV way more difficult to play well than the previous entries. This is also why talking about Heroes IV without "bashing" Heroes 3 (or any other ones) isn't possible, the thing is that they're all kid's games because all dudes have offensive first strike on all the time and this really reduces the complexity to an absurd level. This makes combat tactics in Heroes 3 (and lower) 90% about counting the number of hexes between units and I've seen people feel bad about themselves or visibly angry when they couldn't get anywhere in Heroes IV because that was meaningless. A lot of Heroes 5 design philosophy boils down to "People demand that their ability to count up to about 10 be the key deciding factor in who wins a battle". I'm not even bashing 3 here, they did improve things over 2 in that fliers couldn't fly max range and shooters had penalties, but going back to that state of affairs was just awful.
- Ability to move and detach troops from the hero. Really, having to rely on heroes was mostly about engine limitations.
- Mixed creeps on the map. This allows for tactical depth that can't be achieved with the traditional creep camps where everything is the same unit (or with the upgraded stuff).
- Consumable / one shot items
- Proper spellcasting units, with spellbooks, further creating distinction between units
- Terrain and obstacles on it having actual impact in combat. There was never a Heroes game where this was as much of a factor as IV or where stuff like Quicksand actually mattered.
- Ability to use troops as cover, significantly reducing enemy sniping power from just having ranged troops, reducing the impact of the other "genious" traditional tactic of "I'll slow them and shoot at them, durr"
- Archers with shots count low enough for the stat to matter.
- Morale and Luck with actual, sensible purpose, goes quite deep in multiple directions.
- - Morale which lets troops act twice in a row in a game where striking first is usually the most important thing, as well as luck which just doubles the impact of that already hugely favored first strike, is actually pretty dumb. Combine it with the fact that whoever moves the most also moves first (and thus has the most chance to strike first hex wise) this just creates situations where the obviously favored guys are obviously favored. My Archangel goes first, kills (or irreparably damages) one of your stacks because it does damage first, gets morale boost, kills another one of your stacks, loses nothing, probably makes your shooters unable to shoot, your move.
- - - So they made Moral the offensive stat, one which determines sequence (also helps with not having the guys who move the furthest also the guys who move first), and luck be the defensive stat (making it more than semi-strictly worse morale and making negative luck actually do something).
- - - Also, you can collect more than +3 of each, because previously they were so powerful that you couldn't really be allowed to, and there was a large morale and luck boost overflow making plenty of features which just grant them just bloat.
And those are just ones that come to mind immediately and should be enough for anybody. I've got plenty of greivances with 4, or rather, there were plenty of choices which were obviously wrong, but those are mostly not mechanical ones, but rather interface, visuals and flavor ones. There are mechanical issues, too, of course, but those weren't the actual dealbreakers.
t's way deepest of the bunch, but by the point it rolled around what the audience was expecting from their Heroes game wasn't depth - it was the same old borked and simple thing with lots of feature creep that doesn't do anything. They got something much closer to an actual interesting and strategic game (really, this is why the campaigns which feel great feel great, there just aren't enough meaningful features to make a scenario out of in earlier heroe's games, or in the later ones to be honest).
But then I played it a big bunch in college, and when 5 came out everyone who was taking a break from heroes because of "how awful 4 was" became overjoyed. "This is the real heroes! This is an actual strategic game!" they said. "4 didn't have a grid, how can you even plan your moves if you don't have a grid!?". I tried to tell them 4 was way more strategic, but they told me I was a noob who doesn't know how to play.
Unique skills and mechanics for every faction and their implications, skill wheel - how it works and what it offers, branching upgrades from TotE - each of these things
alone offers way more depth, choice and "strategy" than the whole package of new things from IV. But then again, V had absolutely horrible graphics so perhaps that's the reason you dislike it.
The skill wheel of Heroes V is completely pointless when applied to the lacklustre combat of Heroes 3. There's not enough game there to support it or for it tom make much difference. Without simultaneous retaliation it's not a strategy game, it's a glorified game of "tag". Also, this applies to way too many things, they really shouldn't have added the caravan in the expansion, it goes against the design philosophy. That game was the definition of cashgrab. The difference in playability and quality between it and Kings Bounty: the legend was staggering (which went all the way back to the source material instead of the most overrated iteration).
As for the graphics - Heroes 5 graphics were one of the biggest "wtf" moments in the history of gaming for me. In the history of humanty even. They added nothing but hardware requirements and animation bloat to heroes 3. Heroes 3 is just not a game which gains anything from full 3d, and the models just all look more generic and indistinct with the kitchy art direction that they took. But the crowning moment of "I was alive to see this happen" sheer wtfuckery is when you realize that there was a bunch of guys making a game, right, to be as exactly a clone of Heroes 3 as possible, right, but Heroes IV alienated the playerbase by introducing actual 3d to the game mechanics, like, in a seemingly meaningful way, so the game they were making now had to be 100% not 3d in any meaningful way whatsoever, while it's main distinguisihing feature was it being full 3d. That has got to be the most shallow and superficial human endeavor in the history of humanity, by quite a margin. I played it up and down, it was strangely fine and a bit meh and casual after IV, but the brutal, epic conceptual idiocy of it's art direction (and design philosophy) makes me chuckle to this day.
I don't like the art direction of Heroes IV, mind you, and I think they screwed up there the most. They severaly overrated their audience, and they thought the superficial stuff wouldn't be as big of a deal, but it was. The game would probably have worked in the old 2d format, too.
And then I never lost a match or setpiece battle of Heroes 5 to them ever. It was just a very casual game in comparison.
Big news at eleven - HoMM is as "casual" as full fledged tb strategies go and no one in their right mind ever denied it. And sorry, but you've already rolled 1 in your HoMM street cred check. V had a very active multiplayer community (don't know if it still has since I'm out of the loop) and there were a lot of nasty tricks and strategies involved and it took a good time to git gud.
It was a game of tag. And your mind would be blown about how many dedicated fans of Heroes 3 don't (or didn't) think it's a casual game. The majority of the enormous HOMM fanbase has never played anything more complicated in their life. Usually the one HOMM game they're attached to is basically the only game they played a lot, and the extent of their understanding of it is their hot-seat experience with their siblings/neighbours. In east european countries where there was a large popular chess tradition, basically everyone of a certain age played Heroes 3. The vast majority of fans are actually completely casual, which is why most "conventional wisdom" about the franchise is usually hilariously off the mark. And also why "popular" in this franchise doesn't mean good by any stretch.
As time went on it turned out many of the more hardcore players kind of ended up appreciating IV as the highest point in the series and now consider 3 to be overrated.
Yup, hence the vibrant community of crazily devoted players that develop not only scenarios or fixes, but also excellent mods and even full fledged addons for IV, instead of mostly III, but often also II and V. Wait, what.
Get a life. Heroes IV was developed to the point it needed to be developed. A lot of modifications for Heroes III are ports of Heroes IV stuff that could reasonably be ported. Also, Heroes III has a huge casual fanbase, and it's much easier to be a competent coder + casual gamer than a competent coder + competent gamer. Both of those things are just too time consuming. So there is a larger number of people who have the technical aptitude needed to do something with Heroes 3 (or even 2) who're willing to bother than there is people who'd both be able to and actually do the same for heroes 4. As with most gaming, the kind of person who'd know what needs to be done to improve Heroes IV is not the kind of person with any ammount of technical knowhow, and the kind of person with the technical knowhow generally wouldn't be able to follow the conversation.
And again, I'm more of a HOMM1 fan than anything.
