Plus, and I know this is kind of prejudicial of me, it’s being made with Unity. So far, my experience with Unity has been a lot of early access indie projects with a bunch of similar jank thanks to Unity.
Connectivity issues and load times are the two red flags for me. I will want to see some neutral player footage before my watch status can drift towards buy.
Unity isn’t bad, per se. Wastelands 2 is a Unity game, for instance. Unity has the benefit of being cross-platform friendly, as well as a lot easier to develop in (up to a point) than, say, Unreal 4. It doesn’t, perhaps, have the raw power of U4, in the right hands, but it seems to allow good developers to do a lot. There are some camera things and related stuff that is janky, I agree.
I wasn’t as thrilled with Wasteland 2 as others.
And to be sure, some of the issues with the game as released seemed to be linked to the way Unity handles the camera I think.
The thing with Unity is people tend to not talk about the good games made with it (Endless Legend, Hearthstone, Hitman GO, The Forest (janky in atypical ways)), but they do tend to talk about the many janky indie games made with it. I think it’s mostly because the less-then-perfect games wear Unity on their sleeves more for whatever reason.
True. From what I’ve observed, Unity is a lot like the early days of third-party Unreal Engine games. If you pour enough money and work into it, you can make something great. If you just rely on stock assets and don’t take the time to really make it yours, you get a lot of jank.
Unfortunately, I think a lot of people underestimate how much work they need to put into Unity and they just take all the shortcuts.
Eh, it’s not like early days Unreal. Unreal is exactly the same, even nowadays. But Unreal has multimillion dollar games being made with the engine, while Unity has few, if any +$20m game. Good results are always need to have time and money invested in them. I still see janky Unreal games now (mostly early access and Kickstarter alphas). And with the new price of UE we are going to face an onslaught of janky Unreal games soon.
Unity does, however, allow for shortcuts in development that allow for some games to be made on a tighter budget, but this implies sacrificing final quality. The difference between Unity and other,more complex, engines is that Unity allows for a lot of these shortcuts, thus allowing games to be made with waaaay smaller budgets than in other engines. But this doesn’t change the fact that these cheaper games are going to feel cheaper. Unity is not popular because it allows to hide the lack of money (only veeery slightly with tiny budgets), but because it allows multi-platform low budget game prodution at all.
Right. My point is that the less work you put into making Unity your own thing and just leaving it at default means relying on the inherent jank that Unity has. This has the added disadvantage of making Unity easy to spot.
Take as a small example, The Long Dark. Gorgeous game. Nary a Unity Store asset in sight. If you didn’t look at the credits, you’d never know it was made with Unity.
In contrast, I knew Wasteland 2 was Unity with about ten minutes of play. It felt very janky and had an undefinable Unity quality to it. Just the animations and camera controls, made it obvious.
Am i correct in that this game is the same as Mechwarrior Online : 99% multiplayer with single serving as tutorial, for fanboys only, not fanboys need not apply ?
the new price of UE
I thought recently UE was free below certain profit mark ? Or was it just UE3…
You know, watching the gameplay video up on Steam, it looks like they are setting this up to be XCOM in the WHFB universe. Turn-based, action points, and an interesting way to handle movement thresholds. If they can make it half as much fun as XCOM, I’m sold. I’m not willing to shell out $30 for an early access game, but I’ll be keeping an eye out for this one when it’s fully released.
I was a big Necromunda fan back in the day, but I was kind of leaving the hobby when Morheim came out and I never really got too far into it.
By the way, anyone enjoying the End Times? Rare to see such upheaval and change in the Warhammer world.
That’s what I meant by the “new price”. Up till now developing in Unreal incurred a significant licensing cost (out of the range of many indies whole budgets) or a huge revenue share (which made it very unatractive, and that was a paired dwon version).
Not so much anymore (the price is reasonable and the revenue share acceptable), so once indies start learning the framework (and a community develops to solve problems, so it’s easy to use) we are going to start seeing really low budget UE games again.
First Impressions/Beta Review
How Beta Is It?
[ul]Its not finished yet. Don’t buy it now unless you’re sure you will be buying it on release day and want to take advantage of the 20% Early Access discount.
[/ul]
How does it compare to the Boardgame?
[ul]
Its not a literal conversion of the boardgame rules. I can’t help but be disappointed that it isn’t a faithful Bloodbowl style implementation of the rules, but it does make a certain amount of sense, because some of the boardgame rules exist because there isn’t a computer/referee to keep track of all the variables.
[li]Warhammers brutal “one hit and you’re down” combat has been replaced with a more Dungeons and Dragons style hitpoint system.
[/li][li]The movement/action system is also different to the boardgame, but feels faithful to the spirit of the rules, if not to the letter.
[/li][li]The game also features Line-of-Sight Fog-Of-War. All terrain is visible, but you can’t see enemies who are not in LOS of one of your own soldiers. Thats a solid improvement over the boardgame.
[/li][li]Many of the other Boardgame rules are present and correct. Morale, Fear, Terror, scenario objectives, ranged attacks, magic and more.
[/li][li]Overall, it feels faithful to the spirit of the boardgame rules, but the developers certainly don’t see the ruleset as sacrosanct. They have made many changes to try and improve the game or make it more computer friendly.
[/li][/ul]
Controls
[ul]The controls and UI are clunky. It feels like a clumsy console port designed to be played with a controller. Hopefully that will be improved as the beta progresses.
[li]You control each soldier in third person, like an action game, but movement and attacks cost action points. Theres a high-up directly overhead strategic view, but you can’t play the game from there.
[/li][li]You can’t adjust the camera height/angle from either the third person or overhead view. So wargamings distinctive “isometric” viewpoint over the table is not available.
[/li][/ul]
Bling
[ul]The character models look great.
[li]Animations are crude. You’ll quickly want to speed them up. I dearly hope thats an option in the final release.
[/li][li]The terrain is gothic/ruined and very monotone colored in a Fallout 3 way. You’ll either think it looks “gritty” or “dull” depending on your reaction to color in games generally.
[/li][li]The different factions look very distinctive. I immediately wanted to play all of them. Theres 4 factions to try in the tutorial: Skaven, Mercenaries, Sisters of Sigmar and Cult. They are all badass.
[/li][li]Each warband has one “Big Guy” (eg Ogre) similar to Bloodbowl. Other units have special abilities, spells, or weapons.
[/li][/ul]
Variety
[ul]Each unit in your warband is distinctive in their appearance, gear and abilities. I suspect we are all going to get very attached to the soldiers in our warband. This is the heart of the games appeal (for both the boardgame and the computer game). For that reason alone, I suspect I’m going to greatly enjoy this game, regardless of any rough edges.
[li]I can’t speak to the variety of missions or lack-thereof. It feels like thats the last big piece waiting to be implemented into the beta version (along with persistent squads).
[/li][/ul]
Overall
[ul]Mordheim: City of the Damned is clunky, but also promising. Some may be disappointed that its not a literal conversion of the boardgame rules, others may be put off by the lack of AAA polish. But the persistent characters and squad level tactics will be compelling to hardcore turn-based-strategy gamers.
[/ul]
Thanks for the details, TonyM. This looks like a game to keep an eye on.
You had me at turn-based tactical.
They added Sisters warband and the beginnings of squad equipment management according to their latest update. I haven’t bit yet, but am mightily tempted.
Thanks Tony. I wish I could find posts like that for every game.
Are there going to be campaigns for the different factions?
This is 33% off right now. I bought in, $22.