Totally agreed. I don’t know what Rob Merritt has been smoking.
I can’t see this as a make or break game, given that Ubisoft has already committed themselves to remaking the franchise over a long series of games. Granted, not all of the games are normal HOMM-style games–Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, for instance–but Ubisoft clearly has a direction they want to go in with this thing. They’re not just tossing a game out there and hoping it will sell so they can do it all over again for HOMM VI.
Has anyone above mentioned (sorry if I missed it) that the game has already been delayed beyond the March 31 deadline before the petition was launched? It just wasn’t publically mentioned…apparantly. Oh, articles probably abound, but here’s the one at GameSpot, also mentioned on the front page of the saveheroes website, although the don’t necessarily believe it to be true without ‘official’ word (probably a good thing).
Dude, my point (which you and others keep ignoring) is that it’s not a last minute miracle. I know that you–and probably many other people–think that games are pretty much done at that point, and the developers just spend the last few months playtesting and squashing bugs. I’m telling you that you are mistaken. And I’m sure that any of the other game writers (or developers*) on this forum who see a lot of unfinished code will back me up on that. Two to three months out, the majority of games look a lot like Heroes 5 does now. Some look considerably worse. And most games (though obviously not all) pull together by the end. No miracles or unusual resources are required (well… don’t say that around developers who are working a crunch schedule). Which doesn’t mean that this game will pull together, obviously, but the state of the multiplayer beta hardly spells certain (or even probable) doom. So take a deep breath and relax.
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*Brian R. and Soren J. are notable exceptions–their games generally are very playable months (or sometimes even longer) before ship, though I’m sure they realize that their development process is atypical for the industry.[/SIZE]
Fuck MP. MP has always been a sticky wicket with TBS. Didn’t Heroes III take a lot of post-release time and patches and fan made patches to get where it ended up?
For all we know they have single player A.I. laying around and perfected and are just trying out some MP crap since it is notoriously hard to do. A good 50-60 hours of SP and some moderate replayability and expansions is all I am asking for. Decent MP would just be icing. And icing I can take or leave.
I stand corrected. Maybe I just remember my brief attempts at playing in one of those early Heroes III leagues, waiting on my dial up connection, and proceeding to get trounced in 30 turns. Good times.
Now that you mention II, I recall that the review of Heroes II and acompanying screenshots in CGS+ is what convinced me to buy my first PC, btw. I guess that explains my unholy love for even IV.
Though this Heroes V beta is … just a beta… there does seem to be a feeling of incompleteness to it if we expect it to be released two months from now… stuff like you cant see what you type in mp chat, getting stuck in the ‘cant join a full game’ screen in mp, the REALLY SLOW turns in multi… no inspecting while others are on there turns… there just seems to be a lot of missing things. Although it feels incomplete there is a gem inside of it all. The graphics are truly awesome… just play a duel and watch the Titan animations in particular. The tactical combat seems solid, the city building is just like Heroes III.
I just hope they don’t release it broken because there is some definite creative juices despite all the bugs and incompleteness I’ve seen in this mp beta…
I’m kind of suprised they released the beta with a no sp skirmish map … because Heroes really isn’t known as a popular mp game… even with the persistent turns and inspecting in the other types of games… I never saw much players. A game like BFME II mp only makes more sense (rts games its a given). But for a tbs game it’s all about the campaigns, scenarios, sp skirmish… and maybe in this version we will get a MTG like duel mode… i could definitely see that being cool (will be hard to balance though).
I think the whole problem was… why release a public beta in such bad shape? Releasing a bad beta is not going to help your sales effort. The fears were that this was a testing ground to see if it was releasable on the old schedule… without a lot of outcry they may have deemed they had more in place than people expected.
Some of you may not… but I really like UBIsoft. I have a lot of excellent games I wouldn’t have if UBISoft had not bankrolled them.
I meant that it makes more sense to release a mp beta with BFMEII because its an rts. Whereas not nearly as many people play TBS online… its mainly a solitary game pursuit… imo. Meaning, they really should have released a couple skirmish maps for the Heroes V beta, at least to test UI and bugs and gameplay speed and whatnut.
The AI in the HoMaM series was never very impressive. The overworld AI relied heavily on its complete knowledge of the map (no dealing with the fog of war), and the battlefield AI simply prioritized your units with a simplistic scheme that heavily favored attacking ranged units. Frankly, it’d take a week to pull an AI together for HoMaM V that would be as good or better than previous installments in the series.
What I want to know is if the tactical grid map overlay is making a return. It was woefully absent in IV.
It was added in a patch to 4 after loud user complaints, so I’d guess they’ll keep it in 5. Or at least the moveable range of units was. I believe an actual grid wasn’t possible because it used tiny squares rather than large hexes.
The problem with the AI in 4 was that it was noticeably worse than the AI in 2 and 3. On occasions, for reasons no-one could work out, it would sit in its home castle and not even claim nearby resources. People weren’t complaining about it being predictable and easily exploited; they were complaining about it being occasionally brain dead.
Seriously, Mike Hussey is absolutely right. After the one compaign’s scenario where I’ve spend several hours working my map through the huge map, I finally came to the gates of the enemy capiltal just to discover that AI has never left the fucking castle! >:(
At that point I’ve wiped all traces of HOMM4 from my harddrive.
I bought the game based on the glowing reviews from sites I normally trust, but ended up returning it after only a few days. I don’t recall running into that particular bug, or maybe I just repressed it. Considering how long one game of HoMaM can take, that’s one helluva flaw.
Though, say what else you will for HoMaM IV, the way those leprechauns walked…good for a chuckle.
