I’ve been playing “Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era” for a few days and it is pretty great.
I almost always avoid Early Access title but this one is good if you were a fan of HOMM3.
This is that successor we always wanted and, I think, they finally got right.
Again, it is early access so keep that in mind. It has some issues but mostly plays well.
I should also add it is -25% off the purchase price for a limited time. I am not here to promote or push any game. This is not free or even cheap. Just FYI.
For me, it is worth it. HOMM3 was a favorite of mine and, while I do own it, I have been wanting a worthy successor. It’s taken 20 years but, I think, this is that.
The original HOMM is something I’d play with a buddy in college. It was a lot of fun. I never played the sequels. That new game looks gorgeous though, with the same spirit as the old games. Really cool.
I played a lot of HOMM3 back in the day, but I don’t know if I have the attention span nowadays.
Has anyone here played the game Dead As Disco? It’s a fighting game where the fights are kind of like the boss fights from one of the Batman Arkham games, but you’re fighting and dodging to the beat of a song like Crypt of the Necrodancer or the like. The music and the look are really stylish.
Anyone playing Crimson Desert? It’s a fantasy-themed, open-world game with fighting, puzzles, exploration, quests, crafting, mini-games, etc.
It’s unbelievably good. I am amazed at how much is packed into the game and I’m only on Chapter 2.
There’s no hand-holding and the quests are very loose which really encourages playing it as an open-world. It’s fun just to walk around and explore.
The graphics are amazing too. The detail, rendering distance, complexity of the towns and castles.
One of the reviews I watched on YouTube was spot-on: The first 8 hours are effectively a tutorial because there are so many systems that they have to feed you bits and pieces of it. During that time I kept thinking “This is all really amazing, but am I having fun?”. Then, without realizing, it all clicked and I was having a blast.
There are 4 difficulty settings and you can change them at any time. I started on the easiest and didn’t really die at all. Once I got the hang of the controls, I moved it up one step to normal difficulty which is perfect for an old man like me.
I’ve heard the gameplay is great fun but the story is shockingly bad. I’ll be waiting for the price to come down but am definitely interested.
I got a a dozen hours in Crimson Desert and it is overwhelming with interaction. I’m gonna wait for more updates since updates are big and consistent. (making the jump button and the interact button the same was a poor choice. Especially when you have to pick up coins individually).
Also yeah the story is garbage.
It’s made by the same people who made that overhyped trash game Black Desert Online, which made it a hard pass for me.
That was pretty dumb. I didn’t start playing until after the input patches, but it’s still a little wonky. My keyboard and mouse have their own key mapping that works around most of the limitations. Yesterday I created a few macros to deal with the left-shift annoyances.
The story in the first two chapters are pretty generic and there isn’t any characterization. Story-wise, it’s more GTA5 than BG3.
Gender roles are traditional, thus most of the NPCs are males. It actually seemed odd to me subconsciously. I didn’t realize how much my mindset has shifted around the fantasy milieu. Since the story is an afterthought, it’s not the end of the world.
I haven’t been playing new games until recently. What was the issue? Was it pay-to-play?
It was a game where you had to pay a base price then heavily incentivized you to pay to progress. I hated the gameplay; the combat was a boring combo-based set up, where you had to hit 20 different abilities in a particular order. You were overwhelmed with too much crap to do pretty quickly, and gear progression involved that terrible cliche Asian MMO feature where you “upgrade” gear through a gambling system; it could go up, stay the same, or break.
But to me the fatal blow was how the game had zero UI customization. It would have light-colored text on a transparent background, so if you are trying to read something in a bright area it was unreadable. And they released a console version, charged players for it, then almost immediately abandoned it and left all those players in the lurch.
It’s a bad company and they’re never getting a dime from me.
I enjoyed BDO up to the PvE ceiling but really one of its best features was the character creator. Which made it ironic that Crimson Desert is a set protagonist.
I do agree that the character creator was excellent. It’s kind of the gold standard IMHO.
New Cycle is pretty great if you like the City-building/Frostpunk-like genre.
The story: in the future, extreme solar flares hit the earth which destroy all electronics and plunge the world into chaos. 50 years later you’re the leader of a band of people looking to settle down and recreate ‘civilization.’ You still have people in your group old enough to remember the old technology, but you need to rediscover it, and make it work without computers. Just in case a ‘New Cycle’ of solar flares start up.
It’s still in early access, and I ran into game-breaking bugs toward the end. But what I got to play was great. A bit easier than Frostpunk but the difficultly is adjustable.
I don’t like these kind of city-builders, but this concept seems really good to me.