Hmm, that does sound like it has potential, but there are probably too many little details that will prevent it from working including the RMG most likely using features the base game didn’t even have.
Our other option could be to start a kickstarter campaign for Gus to build it again. I am only mostly kidding :).
they probably took a screenshot just like the one you posted and zoomed in to the unit. Sneaky bastards.
Funny you should say that, because I had the same thought originally. “Wow, I don’t remember the resolution being that terrible the last time I played. But I guess it’s rose-tinted glasses.”
Or maybe not.
I think even now the original game looks lovely and charming, but part of me wants to support bringing this to new audiences, so I’ll likely buy it anyway. ;)
Really, if they had just released the original with expansions on the iPad, I would have been all over it. Now it’s wait and see until it’s clear exactly what’s going to be in the game.
I clicked this topic expecting to find the dev had basically done the same work as the guys who made the high-res patch for HoMM3 (which you should get in the meantime if you play HoMM3 because it rocks).
Now I’m kind of excited. Will the OST be remastered too? The original is a bit low-fi and sounds too much like someone’s cheap-ass YAMAHA keyboard at times.
As far as I know the composers lost their masters a long time ago.
My ideal scenario would be if they scrapped the Heroes 3 music and subbed in the Heroes 2 music instead.
A lot of people like Heroes 2 better than Heroes 3 but I bet the reason in most cases is the art style and music rather than the actual game play. Because at least to me Heroes 3 has much better game play.
Yeah, that’s always been my feeling. 3 refined the mechanics to near-perfection, but was a step backwards in art and music (charming 2d sprites and beautiful operatic score to merely adequate prerendered models and music)
I did the test, I took an uncompressed image from the original game, upscaled it to 1440x1080 (closest thing to 1920x1080 while maintaining the old 4:3 ratio) and while it lost some quality looking a bit less defined, in no way it looked that pixellated. Game originally was 800x600, but those sprites looked like taken from a 320x200 game.
Busted!
Sneaky advertising, but what about a comparison between the real old game art and the redo? A noticable improvement when the resolution is normalised? To be honest I can’t really tell from the above images.
The new version looks better, sure.
This is the image, resized
Obviously it looks better than the fake “old” sprites. But if you look just a bit close to the screen, the HD version looks more defined. The classic version has also some problems given a limited color palette that creates artifacts when they are upsized to bigeer screens.
I’ve always found Age of Wonders a better game than HoMM. In HoMM there are too many trash fights, you’re constantly fighting mobs and mobs for every little resources and dwelling on the map, and there lots of them. Also, you can not auto battle, so you must fight everything. Plus stacking hundreds of units is pretty wonky, and there is no upkeep so you can just spam stuff as much as you want. Also the battle maps and battle mechanics are much simpler, and also cant involve several armies. Plus units are always tied to heroes, and heroes cant take part in battle. And there is no diplomacy. And there are a bazillion resources for no reason whatsoever. And there no global spells affecting the world and terrain.
Etc etc.
HoMM is fun, collecting a bunch of shiny stuff and spamming monsters and fighting quick simple battles, but Age of Wonders is a superior game.
You can’t just “spam as much as you want,” since you’re limited both by available resources, the availability of creature dwellings, and the production limits of creature dwellings.
Upkeep’s a valuable concept, but you have to understand why some games have upkeep rather than just assume it should apply willy-nilly to every game. The primary purpose of upkeep is to put a curb on expansion rate. A lot of 4X games have a potentially exponential expansion rate - the larger your army, the faster you conquer production sources, the faster your army grows. Upkeep retards that by increasing costs as your army size increases. That’s not a particular problem with the HOMM series since there are a number of other curbs on growth.
By “bazillion resources” I assume you mean the variety of resource types. While I agree it’s a bit excessive, you don’t understand the game if you think they don’t exist for a reason. You can group them in tiers, with wood and ore at the bottom and crystal and gems at the top. High level creatures require the upper tiers. Both for the creature dwellings and to purchase the creatures. An intelligent map design will often restrict access to upper level level creatures by restricting production of upper level resources. Further, some resources are tied to some factions, which can restrict what you can build.
This is important, because one of the serious problems with Heroes II was that the highest difficulty level gave a flat per-week production bonus to AI players. This broke a number of maps, because those maps were balanced around the difficulty of obtaining resources like gems. One of the significant improvements from II to III was that III used a multiplier for production bonuses, rather than a flat addition. If the AI had no gem mines, it didn’t get additional gems at any difficulty.
A number of your other comments, such as stacking being “wonky,” are just a way of stating that you like one game better than the other, rather than actual points.
I wouldn’t say the Heroes series is particularly deep. Certainly it was never as complex as Civilization. There are a number of significant flaws, such as the number of near-useless skills and spells, such as the infamous Eagle Eye. It suffers from a certain seat-of-the-pants, kitchen sink design, which I understood better after working with JVC. Jon didn’t really grok numbers or balance, and tended to just throw stuff that looked good into a game. For the most part, though, this worked out pretty well with Heroes.
I personally never much cared for the original Age of Wonders, which I first encountered when I was working at Interplay, at least a year before I moved on to New World and got to work on the Heroes series. I can’t give you a detailed analysis now, because unlike contemporary games like Civ I and Heroes II, I only spent dozen hours or so with it before deleting it. It may have been expectations, since it tried to present itself as a Civ-type game rather than a Heroes-type game, and it suffered badly in that comparison.
Its a mixture really, and doesn’t suffer for it, but its a strength. It’s a gem of a game. The reason why I commented was that I tried playing Heroes again aftar I finished with AoW and just couldn’t do it because of all the things I listed. Its a fun time waster Heroes, but there really is no depth to it.
I also liked Age of Wonders more, the higher depth is more my style, but Heroes III have a corner of my heart forever. And that doesn’t mean Heroes III is a lesser game, it’s just a more beer & pretzels game imo. Sometimes you want to play something lighter and with immediate fun than other more complex stuff.
It may have been expectations, since it tried to present itself as a Civ-type game rather than a Heroes-type game, and it suffered badly in that comparison.
Age of Wonders doesn’t really try to present itself like a Civ type game. Only in comparison with Heroes it could be argued it has a pair of Civ-like features more, but that’s it.
I enjoyed Heroes so much that I went into Age of Wonders with a lot of skepticism. But the gameplay is different enough that I have a tough time comparing the two. The moment I fell in love with Age of Wonders is when I saw my friend give his hero the wall climbing ability, then watched him march his hero over the city walls and wreck havoc in the city with minimal help from his archers. That was some great stuff. Age of Wonders was a much better co-op hot seat game, while Heroes I enjoyed more in single player than AoW.
Wait, wait, wait. This is the new version? Weren’t Faerie Dragons (purple) introduced in the Armageddon’s Blade expansion?
