Why no love for Warlords 3 Darklords Rising?

[MRY]

Bane may or may not have been good in some grand strategy sense, but my recollection is the same as RuySan's. At a minimum, Bane was boring as heck to play compared to the western races where you got to mix things up early on.

 

[Makabb]

IMO Warlords peaked at 3 just like Homm, 3 is just a proper evolution of the series.


GOG where is muh warlords 3 DR?

 

[MRY]

Just read RuySan's blog post, and it brought back many memories -- losing your hero on the first ruin was grounds for a restart under the house rules my friends and I played. I definitely remember the music from the start of the game, although perhaps on a Mac it was more memorable. "Intense Combat" simply changed the probabilities (1d24 rather than 1d20, I believe it made weaker units more viable vis-a-vis strong ones).

 

[markec]

I do love both simplicity of the first two games and added elements of W3 even if some of those elements are underwhelming. One thing I really disliked about W3 was vectoring which in my opinion had no place in the game.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Loved the first two games, especially the second for its variety and the Monty Pythonesque sense of humor. The third Warlords game didn't hold any charm for me.

 

[Makabb]

Loved the first two games, especially the second for its variety and the Monty Pythonesque sense of humor. The third Warlords game didn't hold any charm for me.

why not? 3 is just expanded two

 

[Karellen]

I've played only a little bit of Warlords III, so I have very shallow reasons for preferring the second game over it. For one thing, Warlords II is such a pretty game. It's not on the same level as HoMM3, but the map graphics are nothing to scoff at. The thing I mainly remember from Warlords III was that the cities were boring rectangles with little circles for towers, which struck me immediately as unforgivable. In comparison, I mean, just look at this Goddamn city:

Warlords II also has a really good soundtrack, and I honestly can't quite imagine playing a Warlords game without it. I am of course biased, since it's probably the first game I ever played that had a good soundtrack, but still, there's so many PC games that basically have one good track, while Warlords II has so many gloriously memorable MIDI tracks for every kind of situation - the Temple music, unit promotion, hero level-up, rejecting your enemies' pleas for mercy and sticking their heads on spikes and so on. It's entirely possible that Steve Fawkner is a better composer than a game designer. I guess what I'm saying is that I always liked the general atmosphere Warcraft II has, and when I happen to take it for a spin, I do it to a large extent to bask in said atmosphere.

Beyond that, the strength of Warlords is (in my opinion) the remarkable speed of play which, in turn, allows the game a great deal of scope. It's not deep or anything, but it is the kind of game in which you can lose a bunch of cities, a hero or two and a whole army of dragons, and it might very well be only a temporary setback, because you still have a dozen cities left. It doesn't really need a lot of fiddly systems, because the excitement lies in how dynamic the game is, which is an emergent quality. A lot of modern strategy games seem to have a lot less room for error, which arguably makes them more difficult (Warlords II isn't difficult or anything) but also gives less room for interesting emergent situations. I don't think the game was really designed that way, so it's probably a coincidence, but that's all the more reason to suspect that adding new stuff is more likely to mess with the things that make the game fun.

 

[Makabb]

When is this gem getting released ?

 

[MilesBeyond]

The first two Warlords games reminded me of the old Empire game.
The problem with these games was that the combat is so simplistic, just one unit against another with no modifiers, which was just too boring for me.
Did later Warlord games make combat more interesting?

Never played W1, but W2 had plenty of modifiers, though I agree the combat was still simplistic. Cavalry get a bonus on open fields, Spiders and Gryphons a bonus in cities (which was ridiculously powerful and made them two of the best units in the game), units like Pegasi and Unicorns could confer a bonus to your entire stack, but Devils could cancel out that bonus. Unless you meant something else.

It actually had some pretty interesting stack building mechanics, and pushed you to mix and match troops to try and get those really high stack bonuses.

I do love both simplicity of the first two games and added elements of W3 even if some of those elements are underwhelming. One thing I really disliked about W3 was vectoring which in my opinion had no place in the game.

Vectoring was in W2 as well (maybe W1?), and I actually think it's one of the very best things about the game, and again, one of those mechanics that I wish other series would adopt. For those who don't know, vectoring allows a city to add 2 turns to a unit's production time to have the unit actually show up in another city. A city could only be the target of four vectors at once, and if the target city was captured, those vectors would disappear, and any units in that extra two turns transport time would be lost. This was an amazing system because it cut out on one of the most tedious aspects of TBS games, which is bringing your units up to the front. Just lengthen their production time and your units would magically pop up nice and nearby. It also substantially increased the importance of establishing and holding a beachead. If AoW 1 had this, I'd be in heaven (though AoW 3 has a similar-ish feature that lets you set rally points for your cities. Still bogs down the game a bit but significantly cuts down on the tedium).

Unless you meant that they changed vectoring in W3 for the worse.

 

[markec]

I do love both simplicity of the first two games and added elements of W3 even if some of those elements are underwhelming. One thing I really disliked about W3 was vectoring which in my opinion had no place in the game.

Vectoring was in W2 as well (maybe W1?), and I actually think it's one of the very best things about the game, and again, one of those mechanics that I wish other series would adopt. For those who don't know, vectoring allows a city to add 2 turns to a unit's production time to have the unit actually show up in another city. A city could only be the target of four vectors at once, and if the target city was captured, those vectors would disappear, and any units in that extra two turns transport time would be lost. This was an amazing system because it cut out on one of the most tedious aspects of TBS games, which is bringing your units up to the front. Just lengthen their production time and your units would magically pop up nice and nearby. It also substantially increased the importance of establishing and holding a beachead. If AoW 1 had this, I'd be in heaven (though AoW 3 has a similar-ish feature that lets you set rally points for your cities. Still bogs down the game a bit but significantly cuts down on the tedium).

Unless you meant that they changed vectoring in W3 for the worse.

My memory of the first two games are fuzzy so I honestly didnt remember vectoring being in the games. To be honest I dont even remember using vectoring in first two games, maybe I even didnt use it, seeing how in W3 it took me some time to realize its even there.

While it removes a lot of micromanaging and overall making your life a lot easier, personally I thought it removed a lot of strategy from the game. For a price of few turns you would make a map far smaller then it is. Isolated cities in a middle of a swamps, mountains, islands, or simply far away from rest of your cities could be easily and safely reinforced for far smaller time then it would take them to go on foot where their movement is limited by terrain and can get attacked by enemy.

So no longer will you have a desperate situation of a stretegically important city on a far away island or in a middle of a rough terrain that would force you to calculate what units to build that will have a best chance of reaching the city while also being useful in the fight.

It might be just my personal perference but seeing my units rushing to help a city in need trough poor terrain and fog of war weary of ambushes was a lot more entertaining then simply vectoring them in the city.

 

[MilesBeyond]

While it removes a lot of micromanaging and overall making your life a lot easier, personally I thought it removed a lot of strategy from the game. For a price of few turns you would make a map far smaller then it is. Isolated cities in a middle of a swamps, mountains, islands, or simply far away from rest of your cities could be easily and safely reinforced for far smaller time then it would take them to go on foot where their movement is limited by terrain and can get attacked by enemy.

So no longer will you have a desperate situation of a stretegically important city on a far away island or in a middle of a rough terrain that would force you to calculate what units to build that will have a best chance of reaching the city while also being useful in the fight.

It might be just my personal perference but seeing my units rushing to help a city in need trough poor terrain and fog of war weary of ambushes was a lot more entertaining then simply vectoring them in the city.

That's a fair point for sure. In the second one I never really found it an issue because you often couldn't change vectors in time to save a city - especially since the wonky AI meant that there were decent odds that they'd just walk right up to your city, change their minds, and go on walking somewhere else, leaving your vectors popping up somewhere useless. Still, I think you make a good point, and in a way I may prefer AoW 3's RTS-style rally points to vectoring.

 

[Archibald]

Well WL games were fast paced so in that respect in made perfect sense to have vectoring system. How well it was implemented could be obviously argued thou.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Someone should finally re-release those games, for example instead of some of the ridiculous shit GOG is putting up lately.

It also gave birth to one of my other favourite franchises, Age of Wonders. People always think of Age of Wonders as being a spiritual successor to MoM, but AoW 1 was Warlords all the way.

Don't really agree with this, considering AoW is and always was mostly about tactical combat.

 

[MilesBeyond]

Don't really agree with this, considering AoW is and always was mostly about tactical combat.

True, but the production, empire management, heroes, and even spellcasting were very Warlords-y (in AoW 1). It was essentially Warlords with tactical combat. Obviously later instalments would become more heavy on the empire building and as a result end up feeling more MoM-y.

That's actually a fair point, though, the more I think about it. There are similarities, but the focuses of the two games are almost entirely different.

 

[RuySan]

I have no doubts that warlords was the main influence on age of wonders designers. When aow was released it felt really like a warlords expansion, with the tactical battle tacked on.

The mom influence comes probably from the magic system

 

[catfood]

AOW was a mish-mash of MOM and WL, maybe even a bit of HOMMo.

 

[catfood]

Vectoring was in W2 as well (maybe W1?), and I actually think it's one of the very best things about the game, and again, one of those mechanics that I wish other series would adopt. For those who don't know, vectoring allows a city to add 2 turns to a unit's production time to have the unit actually show up in another city. A city could only be the target of four vectors at once, and if the target city was captured, those vectors would disappear, and any units in that extra two turns transport time would be lost. This was an amazing system because it cut out on one of the most tedious aspects of TBS games, which is bringing your units up to the front. Just lengthen their production time and your units would magically pop up nice and nearby. It also substantially increased the importance of establishing and holding a beachead. If AoW 1 had this, I'd be in heaven (though AoW 3 has a similar-ish feature that lets you set rally points for your cities. Still bogs down the game a bit but significantly cuts down on the tedium).

Unless you meant that they changed vectoring in W3 for the worse.

Vectoring works the same in W3.

 

[Makabb]

Why GOG won't release this ?

 

[MilesBeyond]

Why GOG won't release this ?

I know! It's driving me nuts. I would happily pay money for Warlords 2 even though I've already got it. And I'd love to be able to really try out Darklords Rising. And it's a bit bizarre considering the RTS spinoff Warlords Battlecry is on there.

Did some quick research and I've seen two issues mentioned. The first is that Ubisoft owns the rights to Warlords but not Warlords Battlecry, so getting Warlords on there might take a fair bit of negotiating. I'd take this one with a grain of salt, because it seems to be flat out wrong: Ubisoft definitely owns the rights to Warlords Battlecry, and there are tons of Ubi games on GOG. As shit a company as they are, I can't imagine they would just sit on the Warlords franchise for the sake of it.

As far as I can tell, Warlords 4 is definitely owned by Ubisoft, I'm pretty sure Ubisoft also owns Warlords 3, but it seems SSG still owns Warlords 1 and 2. And that could be causing some of the hold-up. When an IP is partially owned by multiple entities I could imagine that creating some drama.

The second explanation comes from Steve Fawkner himself. Apparently the source code for all versions of Darklords Rising past 1.0 has been lost, and his company isn't particularly interesting in repatching it. So, that kinda sucks. Means that Darklords Rising ever appearing on GOG is pretty unlikely. Note, however, that I couldn't find a source for this statement. I saw people talking about Steve saying it, but I couldn't find Steve actually saying it. So... Who knows. But even if it's true, that still doesn't explain why the others haven't been released.

Of course, it's also possible that GOG has the rights and is still fiddling around with the games. They sometimes have a thing where they'll sit on a game for ages until they're reasonably confident it can smoothly run on the majority of modern systems. But that shouldn't be too difficult with the Warlords games, especially the first 2, as just your bog standard DosBox setup will run it just fine.

 

[Archibald]

I'm 100% certain that I have read Steve saying that about them not having source code any more so I went to read their old forum ( http://www.infinite-interactive.com/forum/ ) and didn't find it... Now I'm thinking maybe some of the old guys said it who communicate (or used to) with Steve directly, like for example the guy who is distributing WBC3 source code (or used to), so everyone took it at face value.

Anyway, while reading forum I found some other things that maybe might be interesting/relevant to folks here.

On possibility of new WLB or WLBC game:

Sadly, no publisher is interested in funding a Warlords or Battlecry game because the analytics tell us those kind of games don't really sell in today's marketplace. Turn it into a Tower Defense or a MOBA, maybe they'd be interested, but that's not Warlords.

We DO intend to revisit these games, and WE believe (as does everyone here) that there ARE people willing to play/buy a good strategy game (RTS or TBS), but we need money to do that - not Kickstarter money - that would never earn us what we need. We're talking about $1.5 million for a TBS, $2.5 million for an RTS. We need a good solid financial base to start their development, and that's what we're working to build right now, but it takes time.

Some thoughts about WL in general:

As a basis for the gameplay I would be looking to start with a design like W3 and build on it. That was what I had hoped to do, and I'm getting a pretty good vibe from this thread that it's what you folks want too. So we're on the same page there, I think.
I recognize W4 as an inferior effort (though I'm still pretty proud that we got it completed to the standard we did from scratch in 6 months... it's a long story... for another time), and so I wouldn't be looking to build on that.

W3 has some features that I feel define it:

1) It's turn-based (d'oh!)
2) Simultaneous turn-based play in multiplayer
3) Support for ansynchronous play (pbem... though we would do that through the cloud now)
4) Army set customization
5) Heroes & Classes
6) That feeling of building an A-Grade stack that was very powerful
7) It places "convenience" ahead of "reality". As an example, consider 2 elements of W4 - the way vectoring worked with troops "walking" across the map, and the addition of a small tactical level to the combat system. Both of these features were poor, but in the first case we were badgered into it by the press, who called our vectoring system in W3 "unrealistic", and in the second case we were pressured into it from the publisher who were promised tactical combat by the previous team.

Now that's a basis for the design. But I would also be looking to modernize some elements of the game. I don't believe that in its 1998 incarnation, the gameplay would be palatable to a modern audience, and I'm not just talking graphics, I'm actually talking design:

1) We would need to make the average game a little shorter - individual turns probably need to be shortened, and overall games need to be shortened too. That doesn't mean we can't have epic maps that take hours, but a meaningful game needs to be able to be played in well under an hour.

2) We need to add some community & social features. That means cool stuff like ladders & rankings. Friends lists. Clans.

3) I think there needs to be some meta-game. My use of "meta" is a little different to what you would find in a MOBA. By "meta" I'm talking about having a game "account" where you collect achievements & stuff.

That's where my brain is at right now.

About vectoring in WL4

We removed it from Warlords IV because it was the one area in W3 that most reviewers cited as being "lame/unrealistic/cheap", even though WE really liked it.
It totally backfired on us, made the game less fun to play, and caused no end of issues and cheap tricks.

I think the lesson I learned was that automation - the removal of drudgery - is GOOD! If it doesn't make sense lore-wise, then we should think up some reason (e.g. Magic Portals) to explain it. But we should never be removing it.

We should be doing two things repeatedly:
* Automating drudge tasks to push them through faster, and with less clicks
* Delivering more exciting & rewarding tasks/choices more often

On split with SSG:

Infinite & SSG had been happily working on games together for about 14 years (1989-2003) and we really just wanted to go in different directions. SSG wanted to return to the hardcore military strategy games, and I wanted to keep all my cool magic swords, dragons & unicorns.

No animosity, or bad feelings, in fact I have nothing but great admiration for the SSG team (Roger Keating, Gregor Whiley & the late Ian Trout) because they spent 14 years "showing me the ropes" of the games industry.

On how they almost became a part of EA:

Firemint never actually bought Infinite... the arrangement was more along the lines of merging two companies to jointly work on some projects. Can't give any more details than that, sorry.
So when EA acquired Firemint, they never actually acquired Infinite or any of its major properties.

Well, it involved some pitchforks, the waving of torches, and a lot of yelling "¡Viva la Revolución!"

Seriously though, our arrangement was more of a merger than an acquisition. The Firemint folks are a great bunch of people, but after Firemint was acquired by Electronic Arts, we just felt that the "big publisher" environment wasn't somewhere we could produce OUR kinds of games and do our best work, so everybody agreed that it was best to go our separate ways.

Also as I understood from other posts parts of Puzzle Quest related software/build set up ended up at EA so maybe something similar happened with their older games too.

 

[thesheeep]

I'm 100% certain that I have read Steve saying that about them not having source code any more so I went to read their old forum ( http://www.infinite-interactive.com/forum/ ) and didn't find it... Now I'm thinking maybe some of the old guys said it who communicate (or used to) with Steve directly, like for example the guy who is distributing WBC3 source code (or used to), so everyone took it at face value.

That's not the old forum, though. There was a much older forum, before.

The website itself is still there:
http://www.enlight.com/wbc3/
The forum, however, can't be reached any more.

Edit:
If you really feel like digging up the past:
https://web.archive.org/web/20030423142437/http://www.infinite-interactive.com/forums.shtml
https://web.archive.org/web/20050308035754/http://www.infinite-interactive.com/forums.shtml
But not even the archive has the old WBC3 forum any more, it seems.

Too bad, I wish I could find some posts of mine from before I even registered here

 

[Archibald]

Well yeah, but I think I have read it on this one and was too lazy to clarify that there were other forums too.

 

[Dr Skeleton]

but we need money to do that - not Kickstarter money - that would never earn us what we need. We're talking about $1.5 million for a TBS, $2.5 million for an RTS. We need a good solid financial base to start their development, and that's what we're working to build right now, but it takes time.

I'm a little sad they didn't try the kickstarter, they've probably done their research and know better than a random guy on the internet but still. Would it get funded today? Probably not, Warlords is nowhere near as popular as the big kickstarter names but back when crowdfunding exploded? With shoutouts from other devs using kickstarter? Who knows, people were throwing money at everything under the "the (spiritual) sequel that evil publishers keep from you" banner, I bet a lot of them never even heard of the original games before getting caught in the crowdfunding hype machine.

in the first case we were badgered into it by the press, who called our vectoring system in W3 "unrealistic"

 

[markec]

They should try to contact Notch seeing how he already resurrected AoW and he has money to burn.

 

[SkeleTony]

Great game, I do hope we will see it on GoG with the rest of the series.

Its about damn time we get some more good old strategy games on GoG.

Not likely unfortunately. Game is all but ignored in their 'requests' threads (whereas Diablo and shit like that has like thousands of requests/hits) and Faulkner losing the source to the patch (which fixed many issues and added a bunch of features) means the GoG guys won't be able to get it running on modern Windows OS. Right now if you have any Windows OS after XP you can only run W3 through a very complicated and difficult VMware set up and even that is hit and miss.