I forgot Paradox was involved now. Well I’ll worry about any DLC weirdness later. It’s still baking.
AoW3 had silly cosmetic looks for the leaders if you wanted to create some zany looking characters, but the game itself (and the campaign) were entirely* serious and on flavor with it’s theme, I expect this is the same thing here. It’s also probably why these are “extra” cosmetics that aren’t shipping with the vanilla version of the game - they are just a little something extra for the hardcore fans.
*Obviously not “entirely”, I mean there are Dire Penguins.
You fail to take dire penguins seriously at your peril, sir!
LOL too true!
Okay, just like @AGameOfJoes foretold, some sites are putting up written previews, I see on my gaming news aggregate. I haven’t read them yet (I always think of you guys first) but here are the two I saw first.
RPS
Eurogamer
From the RPS write-up it sounds like the author really dug it, but was a bit dismayed that racial tech trees had some common/shared tech. That seems obvious to me though, but it will factor greatly into if this game has the vanilla AoW3 problem of all the races feeling a bit too similar. However, I feel this will be less likely of a problem with Planetfall, given the factions are both race/class combined this time?
From the Eurogamer write up (which was more of an interview), this sounded great:
So the casus belli system essentially integrates these ideas that, as you do various things, it’s going to make people dislike you, and as that builds up, they’re more likely to go to war with you. The more casus belli that someone has against you, the easier it is to declare war on them. If you have no casus belli and you declare war on them, everyone else is going to hate you.
But you can trade casus belli - you can say to someone ‘if you give me 200 energy I’ll forget about the time you trespassed, or the time you placed a city next to mine’. I believe it’s even possible to use a spy to create a fake casus belli and then sell it to the person. You can create the casus belli and then say ‘give us some money and we’ll forget about this, that you totally did, and I didn’t just make up’.
Gamespot has a 14 minute video up.
What I really like about this video is the guy playing (there is no narration) clearly knows Age of Wonders. He’s doing little things that tells me he’s played a lot, like when he lands his army stack adjacent to an enemy, he knows to pull one unit with remaining movement points out to attack alone, bringing the rest of the army into the fight. Or when he’s moving he knows to double-click to speed up the animation. It’s cool to see an AoW fan play this so far, and I wish I had more than just a few minutes of video left.
Fantastic, thanks man. I love the look of the combat shown in the shorter Gamespot clip.
re: steam forum, is enabling paradox dlc hecklers really a good thing? Do they really need your help?
One the one hand, there is plenty to dislike with the preorder and the dlc policy.
Otoh, if they are just heckling…I tend to give ppl the benefit of the doubt and assume they are engaging in good faith discussions.
You’ll have to help steer me towards where these “good faith” discussions are taking place in steam game forums.
Can someone explain what people hate so much about ongoing DLC for games like CC2, HOI 4, Stellaris etc?
Each DLC also comes with tons of new free features for the base game than never would have been added if the DLC had not funded the work.
Developers dont have unlimited budgets and if DLC helps expand and also improve the base game I am all for it.
I actually feel more frustrated when a game doesn’t get updated content.
Paradox goes a little too far, like just tons of them. It’s a pain in the ass for modding as well as multi-player. And while it’s nice to get more content for a game you love, Paradox has a habit of drastically changing their games with their updates which can be good or bad depending on how much you like the original release.
It’s not just new content, they introduce new systems, just kind of stack them on top of existing ones, sometimes not smoothly. Stellaris seems to be a poster child for breaking existing mods when they do updates too which is not as much of a problem for say CK2.
Sometimes a good, solidly released game doesn’t need 100 new features, and then there is Stellaris that just has… needs.
This isn’t a Paradox Development Studio title so I don’t see what the relevance of all the DLC panic is anyway.
I wouldn’t call concern panic, but I don’t know what the Steam forums are saying. I just know about MP and where the mod issues are.
Besides, he asked.
That was directed at the general discussion of the topic, not you specifically. :)
I completely agree that the PDS DLC model is, at best, a mixed bag. As you say, it’s a mess for modding, and the compulsive need to always be adding more doesn’t necessarily lead to the best changes. I just don’t see any reason to suspect this game will be following that model, unless there’s something I’ve missed.
The nice thing is AOW hasn’t really had feature creep but they did get expansions. If they get a tiny bit more i don’t see that would be a huge problem. The games felt pretty solid to me to begin with and when they added like new factions/races, whatever they call it now, it was meaningful and added variety, and some of that was optional, like win conditions and there were no issues with telling a new person to the group, yeah buy the complete edition, it’s great.
The original AoW3 only had two expansions due to limitations with the 32-bit engine, but this new engine is 64-bit and I for one am going to be happy to have all the content they care to shower me with over the years, because they have historically done a great job just adding more stuff, rather than making sweeping, systemic changes.
The season pass for Planetfall has already stated 3 DLC’s though, so that’s probably all we can expect unless the game does very well. If anything, we should all be hoping we get as much DLC as we can as that indicates Triumph has a hit on their hands, and I think it looks like something I’m going to be playing on and off for years to come, maybe finally displacing AoW3.
I appreciate the desire to want more of something you love, but i am not a fan of the everything but the kitchen sink approach. At this point though, there’s no reason to not trust them. The concern is because Paradox is involved at all, but they have a long, long, long way to go until they wind up with pages of DLC like Paradox titles get.
Triumph has shown a tendency to do meaningful and unique and interesting updates, not just, piles of stuff, so yeah if they want to do a few more, okay. Their games have been pretty tight too. I’ve never felt AOW got additional features and content to hide the fact they had weak features to begin with. It was, I don’t know, exciting to see more options not oh well they added this to fix the fact this other thing didn’t work.
I am largely optimistic just… cautiously so. I have no reason to expect a weak release from them. If I miss release date, it’s going to be because of other games not likely because this title is lacking. I don’t even like their theme here, or the look of it, but it still looks like the gameplay I enjoy so it’s on the list.
AoW3’s expansions were outstanding and I certainly would have liked one more. The DLC treadmill is troublesome but, again, I see no reason to expect that here. Paradox has published many, many 3rd party games at this point without any of them falling into the PDS development model.
Modding yes, but multiplayer? The host shares all DLC they own, which is significantly better than most other games that require everyone to buy the expansions.
The host might share DLC but they don’t have a way to share experience which means, at least for our group, you kind of get the basics playing solo, especially when everyone has jobs, kids and different time zones to deal with so when you do play MP you don’t spend the entire time explaining every button and spreadsheet on the screen. The “basics” will completely change based on the DLC you have.