The bubble burst earlier today, shortly before the GamesCon reveal by Ubisoft themselves. So far a IGN preview (here), some screenshots [1][2] and a trailer.
I’m wickedly excited - heck, I even loved V! Black Hole entertainment, who are helming the game, seems to have understood that this isn’t a formula to deviate from. (Unlike the Dragon Age devs. sigh) While their previous games (Armies of Exigo and Warhammer: Mark of Chaos) weren’t anything to write home about, they also weren’t bad. In some ways, they were quite a lot of fun, actually. And it’s hopefully given them a deep understanding of both fantasy worlds as well as respecting an established brand.
Also, one can hope that they’ve gotten firm orders to hire a) a good writer and b) good voice actors. One can only hope.
I’ll, as I did with the last installment, hold off at least until some patches are out the door. I got badly burned on IV after I bought it on release day (which, as it turned out, was enjoyable for what it was, but at launch ugggh was the word). Plus VI appears to be yet another example of Incremental Game Design; eventually we’ll get the Civ equivalent of a fantasy TBS game, including huge awe-inspiriing battle scenes (I’m pretty much bored with the tight chess-like battleboards which have been a staple of the series). The biggest thing for me will be the concept of army upkeep: once you bought something in the earlier games you paid zilch to feed it or give it a living wage, which meant game balance often was a chimera that you (as a scenario designer) was constantly trying to chase down.
The preview doesn’t really go into how VI differs from the rest, besides converting towns to your own factions. Age of Wonders does that before. It seems that you can bring your army across.
I just hope this game doesn’t end up like Disciples II. If your superhero stack dies, that’s it, end of mission. With army progression, it may means that if you slack off and not build up your forces in the first few missions, you are screwed later on.
Anyway it’s too early to tell how’s the game will be like. Lack of information
Sorry, I wasn’t clear - I meant the sequel. They are allegedly turning it into an action game, with button-presses for actions, combos and so forth. At least, that’s the picture Joystiq paint here: Video Game News & Reviews | Engadget
While it appears there will still be pause-action positioning and so on, they are clearly “streamlining” it to become more accessible. Whether they’re good enough developers to avoid essentially dumbing it down remains to be seen. But, I digress!
I don’t quite get what they’re saying. Does this mean no more flagging of mines? That’s a fundamental part of HoMM: the challenge of locating critical resources, and hanging on to all of your various mines. If you automatically gain resources just by owning a town, what’s the point in having different resources? And where is the fun in that?
They also talk about the initiative bar in combat as though it’s a new thing. Have they forgotten HoMM5 already?
It appears that the resource in the game are Gold, Stone, Lumber and Gems. That probably means:
Gold to buy units.
Gold + Stone + Lumber to build buildings.
Gold + Gems to buy special units, heroes, spells, etc.
However, only one segment/level of the game has been demoed so far. It might just be a tutorial aspect to simplify the learning curve. It wouldn’t make any sense to take away multiple resources just in order to streamline it - unless they’re focusing far more on the battle aspect than the strategy side. With all the resources linked to towns, there wouldn’t be any reason to harass enemy lands to draw out their heroes. And that’s one of the big strategic tools of the previous games.
I’m going to keep my fingers’ crossed that they aren’t looking to make this a console-level RTS.
Personally ,I wouldn’t call having 7 resource types as ‘depth’. To me is more like width. Civilization remains a deep series with only 2 collectible resource types, though there are many other ones which you can own. I always find having many resource types a clumsy way of restricting player’s options and ‘gating’ his process, though your mileage may vary.
Sometimes it’s easy to mistake tediousness for depth. I for one would prefer either less resource types or less flagging of mines. It just constantly annoying to be micromanaging your mines while the AI has infinite resources and patience to always play peek a poo.
Maybe those small resource nodes still exist, but I believe it may be an ‘influence’ system like Civilization where castles have a radius and if it affects the nodes, it will contribute to the castle’s income (doesn’t make sense you can bring income in from a gold mine half way around the map just because you flag it).
I’m rather jaded about the series, to be honest, but there’s one silver lining for me. Checking out the preview screenshots, the writing does look decent.
Oh, and lol @ Ubisoft claiming that the story for Heroes 6 will resemble “something like the Song of Ice and Fire series…” Is that what we have to look forward to from every fantasy-type game released in the next 5 years?
I afraid so. Bandwagons everywhere. But whether they’ll live up to it is another matter.
Disciples III left me…well, sadden. I have been looking forward to this game for ages, and now it is just another HoMM clone. Its tactical combat system is more in-depth than its previous two games’ Final Fantasy style combat, but it was what made it unique.
There’s a preview at GameSpot that shows the high octane combat sequence happens when a dwarf retells the main character’s story. Then later down when the character himself narrates the same segment of combat, the combat switches to a style closer to DA:O.
