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> All campaign missions have nonlinear events that allow hero choices, like encouraging a cowardly knight to fight alongside you or letting him flee," says Golu
by jncfhnb 2y ago
> All campaign missions have nonlinear events that allow hero choices, like encouraging a cowardly knight to fight alongside you or letting him flee," says Golubeva. "These choices will have consequences down the line. But the grander non-linearity comes from choosing the missions themselves - some of them are mutually exclusive. Do you support Sylvans or Temple in a conflict? Your choice will change the map of Jadame, the standing of factions, and fates of certain characters."
Ugh. Shut up Ubisoft. No, you’re not going to have meaningful non linear choices in a game like this.
I have a jaded sort of opinion that games like HOMM 2/3 and civ 2 and aoe 2 were really popular at the time because multiplayer was mostly about low skill LAN matches with your friends. On some level the presence of online multiplayer, discussion boards that layout meta ideas, and more common balance patches make strategy games much less fun. Because most people don’t really want to play them proficiently. They want to roll the dice and experiment and try and get an advantage and then give up and restart before finishing 2/3 of the game when the other player starts to snowball.
- zeroonetwothree 2y agoThere were many strategy boards and meta discussion at that time. Also, I really enjoyed those games as single player as well. Civ is still very popular. RTS has died out, which is kind of sad. I’m not sure exactly why, I think we can make various speculations but it seems it just doesn’t have a proper niche anymore.
- SSLy 2y agoRTS were just eaten up by MOBAs
- jncfhnb 2y agoThere may have been but they weren’t prominent in most people’s play. And they were just not nearly as competent. That was back in the day when people were arguing about controllers vs mouse for fps aiming. These games are just not great for multiplayer. The gameplay of effective, competitive multiplayer is the opposite of what people enjoyed. Grinding out a few seconds off of your aoe 2 feudal age research time sucks. But it’s what matters. Orienting on serious multiplayer sucks but casual is hard to encourage
- bombcar 2y agoFor an example of this see some recorded online modern HOMM3 games. it’s all about the “break” and one battle with the enemy - which may be simply conceded and the game over. Competitive RTS and variants has always been much different than the average player plodding along - my StarCraft games were closer to comp stomps or tower defense than anything featured online. And the tower defense genre covers that more completely for many people.
- zelphirkalt 2y agoNot really competitive, but I once had a game, where I found 50 mighty gorgons and went on to defeat the main army of a friend, but the issue was, that he had town portal and I did not. So he could scratch together armies from every single castle he had and defeat me in the second battle. After that, I saw clearly, how pointless it is, when you don't get important spells like that. But then playing against 6 bots on "king" or similar in a team became a great fun. Oh how they cheat ... or are "lucky". I swear, every single time I play the swamp folk, the computer players end up having more wyverns then I have, because they get all the neutral buildings around their castles. Infuriating!
- bombcar 2y agoYeah, the existence of town pornhole is so important that either you need to guarantee starting towns get it, or you need to ban it outright. I believe most competitive play has it banned because of how powerful it is - but sometimes a scroll of town portal still appears ... or a shrine. That was always one of the balance problems; the spells are either insanely powerful or absolutely useless. Summons boat