Older games that deserve a second chance

I know nothing about redemption. I guess it was bloodlines that I was talking about.

I hate 3 part titles.

Redemption is a Diablo clone which does weird, weird shit with the original tabletop game’s mechanics. It’s not completely awful, but Bloodlines is definitely a lot better.

Anarchy Online? I’m kidding I have no idea if it’s still around. But launch was a horrorshow.

It is. It’s F2P.

I feel like Civ 5 got better with the expansions and DLCs, but outside of QT3, people like it. Sadly, it doesn’t have the mod support of Civilization 4, with Fall from Heaven 2 and Dune Wars.

There are two TBS games that came out to not great reviews, but had a later stand alone expansion pack that really made a difference.

Age of Wonders 2, when it came out, was not nearly as good as it’s predecessor, but the Shadow Magic expansion pack really fixed a lot of it’s problems.

In a similar vain, Heroes of Might and Magic 5 was a not as well received as 3 (and no one talks about 4) but I found that the ‘Tribes of the East’ expansion pack was outstanding, since it gave you access to all 8 factions as well as gave every faction 2 creatures to upgrade their units into, instead of the traditional 1 upgrade of earlier Heroes of might and Magic.

Oh wow. You’re going to make me reinstall HoMM5 aren’t you? The demo they released months before the game came out was really good, I thought. I tried the campaign in the base game (I’m huge HOMM fan, and pre-ordered HOMM5 months in advance and got the collector’s edition box with lots of doodads). And it was terrible. I finished the first scenario and never went back.

I only ever played the free play games (no campaign, few if any scenarios). If you have Tribes of the East, it’s kind of cool having the extra upgrade options. Not all the choices are distinct (Storm Titans versus regular Titans) but some really are

I tried playing HoMM 3 once, but it just did not grab me. (I know, I am a bad person. ☹)

HoMM 3 is pretty hard to get into. The art and music style make it hard to love. But it makes up for it in unit variety and scenario variety. But it is hard to love when you first get into it.

HoMM 2 is a much better gateway drug into the HoMM series. Great art, great music (much better than HoMM3), and excellent dual campaigns (one light, and one dark). I highly recommend it, even today. And then, once you fall in love with it, THEN you can try HoMM3 and appreciate everything they’ve added.

HoMM2 all the way!

Whatever you do, stay away from HOMM4. It is an absolute waste of time if you value your sanity: you’ll think you have a great time and then notice you were playing alone with no way of losing.
To go against the purpose of this thread: even with extensive community modding, HOMM4’s AI is so absent it would lose to Civ 6’s chieftain.

Elder Scrolls Online got pretty savaged at launch, much of which I believe was pile-on from those that barely played.

It did have issues, but they have been addressed and it is now a very solid game.

I barely played 2, but 3 was great. It just plays odd, with the focus on giant stacks of armies.

HOM&M 5 has present MP heroes that you play single battles with. I have always wanted to give that a try

How is Dark Messiah of Might and Magic?

I think I missed this one.

I played on the 360 it a couple years back and liked it well enough. A lot more FPS than RPG (although I understand the PC version has more RPG elements).

I was curious because it was the game that Arkane made before Dishonored and I wanted to see how far they had come (which was quite a bit). There were some neat ideas and art, but the mechanics were definitely rougher than Dishonored, which was polished to a high gloss by comparison. Some of that may have been due to using Source instead of Unreal Engine.

I played through on PC and had a blast. I could just not get enough of kicking orcs off cliffs. Some of its other gimmicks didn’t work as well for me but overall I remember it being a pretty well constructed game.

Elder Scrolls Online is a game everyone should play, for at least a month or 2. It’s a fantastic single player experience, if you just follow the main questline. The world building is top notch, and the combat and class building is very different from anything else.

Anarchy Online for me, would definitely be the game that went from literally unplayable, to pretty good. It’s a huge rabbit hole to get down, but once you are there, it’s got a lot of great ideas, and the character and class building is incredibly complex, if that’s your thing.

Was not aware of this mod, but it’s on my radar to try thanks to you! Looks interesting.

I guess I’ll be a contrarian voice on that. I just got through playing through most of the HOMM4 campaigns and I had a blast with it. The music is some of the best in the series. The writing and stories in the campaigns are quite good. I don’t think the AI in the version I played (GOG) is any worse than the others in the series. Maybe GOG did something with it. Certainly the AI players were very aggressive in the campaigns and quick to attack you or take one of your towns if they weren’t adequately defended.

HOMM4 was released too soon by the admission of NWC themselves. 3DO was about to go under and there was no choice at the time but release. However, with the following NWC patches I think it actually turned into a fun game. I think a lot of folks went into the game expecting more HOMM3 and it’s got some major differences which was regarded as somewhat heretical at the time. As long as you accept the differences from the other games in the series, it’s a good game.

In fact. I think I’d say HOMM4 fits the criteria for this thread. Panned on release and reviled but it’s actually pretty fun today.

That’s good to hear. I thought the art and music were much better than HoMM3. But I only played one scenario on HoMM4 launch (I got it on release day, of course). We were playing 3 players vs one AI opponent on a scenario. We played on the hardest difficulty setting. Like you said, the music was lovely. Like @Left_Empty said, we had a great time defeating the huge stacks of armies on the map that were block our way to resources and to the one AI enemy.

After 36 hours of play, we finally got to the AI opponent who had had a corner of the map to himself for those 36 hours. We planned for an epic showdown. His hero saw us and retreated back to his castly. Uh-oh. That meant we would have to attack him when he had that defensive advantage. I went in.

The hero’s army consisted of about 10 units. We destroyed him in one turn and the game was over.

And we were just left utterly confused. What had the AI been doing for all those hours that we’d been slowly killing huge stacks of armies and gathering resources, and building up our army stacks?