That would have made you and the 10 other people who actually bought the first Kohan happy. It also would have done wonders for it on the review sites.
Wasn’t KAG a significantly better seller than Kohan 2?
Dear God what is it with this Kohan/Warcraft bullshit? I haven’t played the original Kohan, but I have played the sequel and a hell of a lot of Warcraft III.
Kohan II is nothing like Warcraft III. NOTHING. It’s nothing like Warcraft I or II either. In fact I’m struggling to think of many RTSs that could be described as LESS like Warcraft III than Kohan II.
Some people just have no idea what they’re talking about.
Uh, actually, much of the game was, on a very basic level - graphics, themes, storylines - lifted right out of Warcraft 3.
Well, I would disagree with you on all three counts. I mean, Christ, the Warcraft III story is as old as time in the fantasy world.
However, I was responding to the criticisms of the gameplay.
The original Kohan has the distinction of being the last game I truly fell in love with. It was a day one purchase for me, and I played the shit out of that game in multiplayer. The community was pretty small, and it seemed to me that most players were familiar with the others that were playing. (I played under the nickname “Stronmaus”.) People who worked on the game were semi-regular players, and it was fun to go up against them.
For a little while I tested patches for them, and let me tell you, they had their act together. It was the most professional game-testing I’ve ever been a part of, and I’ve done it for a few. My life/work schedule became unwieldy, and I had to cut back on gaming before the Ahriman’s Gift expansion was out.
I’d be interested in picking up Kohan II and playing some games. I have to agree with other posters that it looks like it’s been ripped straight out of Warcraft 3…but what do I know…
That’s like saying it’s just a coincidence that Braveheart, the movie based off a story that 800 years old (known by anyone who likes Scottish history) is released just before Age of Empires 2 is published, which includes the Woad covered Celts.
What the hell? I just started replaying Kohan2’s campaign last week. Damn, subliminal Qt3 mind control.
I think the problem with K2’s campaign is that it got good. It started out feeling very hokey and stilted, but it grew on you. The voice acting was always “oh-so-Tolkien-esque” dramatic, but still very good quality. After a while you start to agree with Melchior or respect Naava’s formality. Though in the end, the campaign story never got good enough to be more than an RTS story. GFW’s recent article on game writing would apply here.
As for the gameplay, the only similarity between WC3 and K2 is that they are both semi-generic fantasy settings. If there were a World of Kohan, I’d imagine it would be quite different than WoW. I didn’t like the interface change to a more typical ‘click more buttons in this lower right hand box’ but one nice touch was having your unit groupings creatable and selectable in a bar at the top.
The Elves and Undead art sets may owe a debt to Warcraft III, and sure, they’re both RTS games, but holy tapdancing christ! Kohan II models morale, and flanking, and re-supply, and doesn’t mire the player in micro hell. Kohan II is one of the best games I’ve ever played, of any genre - it understands that you want to be a General, not a bloody Quartermaster (I think that may be a line from Tom’s CGW review, if so: sorry).
I played Kohan II recently, enjoyed it thoroughly (though it took a while to understand this different model), and thought it felt rather different from any other RTS I’d played.
And Kohan 2 is nothing like Kohan/KAG. Kohan 2 has several WC3 features – giant portraits eating up interface real-estate, tiny-ass less-than-epic maps, a greater emphasis on heroes, and space for only a few towns per map. It also has a lot of the strategic depth removed from the KAG in favor of a greater emphasis on “classic” RTS_style rock-paper-scissors matchups and three-dee visuals. In KAG, on a big map, you had to COMMIT to a campaign, and most likely invade terrain that was barely scouted. In K2, I had the map scouted in minutes and could pretty much mass-and-click WC3-style, stopping only to consider unit matchups.
The thing I miss the most from KAG is the massive, epic slogs across giant maps, trying desperately to keep the primary army in supply and scanning each inch of terrain for potential ambushes. K2 had none of that epic feel – in fact, I rarely even bothered with formations, much less terrain, since my opponent’s key town was probably less than thirty seconds away.
I’m not thrilled with the smaller maps either, but I can still get some long epic battles going in K2.
Given how much I liked Kohan 2, I put Kohan 1 on my list of games to try out sometime…glad to hear it should be interesting.
Man, Kohan II was like this perfect storm of lousy luck converging on one poor game and kicking the holy hell out of it. It’s a wonder the folks at Timegate weren’t flinging themselves from the tallest buildings in Texas.
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There was the fact that it came out the same year as Dawn of War, which really raised the bar on graphics, and with its smaller scale, the sense of connection you felt to individual units. Dawn of War also made tactical fiddling sexy again, after years of tactical fiddling being merely annoying in the C&C games. And here comes Kohan solving the problem in a more cerebral way.
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Kohan also had no real mythology beyond Timegate’s funky fantasy pastiche that, frankly, I don’t remember the first thing about. At least the Rise of Legends universe was different in a memorable way. You guys talk about the Ceeyah, and I’m like, ‘Were those the dudes who rode on birds, or the dudes who were really good at defense?’
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When it was released, there were problems with distribution during the crucial early week or so. I remember it was hard to find in stores. 2K hadn’t done any real marketing for it in advance, so it was essentially orphaned by its publishers and retailers.
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There were all sorts of supposed fans of the series who had beta tested it, only to merrily violate their NDAs by grousing loud and wide about stuff that wasn’t even in the retail release. What’s more, many of them proudly crowed about how they weren’t even going to try the final version. With fans like those, who needs enemies?
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To top it off, you have guys like Doug, who nitpick it to death because of the changes from Kohan I (almost all for the better, IMO) that the average RTS player isn’t even going to notice.
Poor Kohan II. The phrase ‘star-crossed’ comes to mind.
-Tom
Poor Kohan II indeed.
I don’t see how it can be so similar to Warcraft III when it seems obvious it’s just cosmetic in similarity. I mean Warcraft is like the mother of all RTS games in micromanagement, whereas Kohan II is much more streamlined in building settlements, companies, and controlling of units, where you can’t even give orders for spells to be cast by specific spellcasters.
More emphasis on heroes? It’s not Warcraft specific, given that it’s used in Age of Mythology, BFME, Dawn of War, and several others. Why not borrow a new (relatively), interesting mechanic? Your pet RTS need not remain frozen in time as its sequels churn out more of the same as if the genre has reached a standstill. I don’t see any deep similarities that make it a Warcraft ripoff.
EDIT: For Warcraft ripoff, please see Armies of Exigo.
You make your first game. It’s critically popular because it really stands out from the field in design, fixing lots of things people hate about RTS games keeps the mechanics people like. It doesn’t sell, though, because it has a boring fictional gameworld and no marketing.
I don’t see how the second game should then get more popular by keeping the stuff that sucked the first time (gameworld, marketing), and chucking out parts of the good stuff (design).
Fixing the bad marketing, distribution, and gameworld background design would have raised to the exalted heights of being yet another run of the mill RTS, no? Hoo boy, real fun.
What, exactly, did Kohan 2 do better than Kohan/KAG that wasn’t cosmetic? Most of the game was a complete step back in terms of depth and complexity.
The separation of faction and race is a nice step forward I thought.
Actually, it was much worse than that: it came out the same week as both Dawn of War and Rome Total War.
Ouch.
I liked the limited city locations. Liked it in BFME, too (and the removal of that mechanic was one of the things I hated most about BFME2).
Aside from that, though, I tend to agree with you.