HoMM6 & Space Mariner

[IskatuMesk]

Two games coming up I am going to share my THOUGHTS about.

HoMM 6

A lot of people that were once a part of the community but have all passed away in horrible car crashes were religious HoMM3 players. Well, there's now a fucking number 6 just out of NOWHERE like all that and he's the talk of the town with his tomboy overalls and cowboy hat. But how does he compare to the tried and true?

Well, the interface is almost exactly the same as 5, if that's any indication of how bad the interface design is. It feels like a console port, with noticable jumpiness between menu transitions at points. If anything, the youtube-esque spinner you get while it loads the town video is something to shit bricks about.


I THOUGHT I LEFT YOU BEHIND ON KORHAL YOU FAGGOT

The game has notably struck with the Casual plague. As you can see, a chunk of resources are gone - Crystal, Murcery, and my sunday favorite, Sulfur, are all gone. Instead of Gems you've got BLOOD CRYSTALS, which are still blue, even though Crystals before were red, and weren't blood. Or some shit like that.

The buying interface needs some cockslapping - double clicking doesn't buy SHIT and it looks like you can drag-drop buy but you can't. Fucking dirty, filthy console peasants.

It isn't terribly obvious what everything is like at first - I didn't realize there was still initiative until I actually saw some bonuses to it from items and abilities.



Graphics remain similar to HoMM5 which isn't a bad thing. However, the textures are still fairly low resolution and feet slide all over the place like they hired Blizzard's dumbass sc2 animation interns. The animations otherwise are respectable, given HoMM5 as a reference. I don't like playing on increased animation speeds because I am here for the shiny. Yes, I'm a CGI masturbation marathoner. Five-time champion! Some attack animations look incredibly clumsy, like the Ravager's, which remind me of the wc3 yetis. Some are awesome like the Pit Fiend's.

The particles exhibit some incredible strangeness, though. They seem to be displaying at a very low FPS. It's like how sc2 was in alpha. I suspect this is a major bug of some nature and will get fixed on released. It is incredibly unnerving, because a lot of spells and effects make it feel like the game is lagging when it isn't.

Notable - the game spends 20-40 seconds "reloading resources" when you alt tab. This isn't because it flushed memory, but because it's badly programmed. A lot of impacts are missing sound effects.

The sound effects are lacking, in fact about half the game seems to be missing SFX still, including fireball hits. I expect this to be resolved in release. The music on the other hand seems to be really, really good.

Aha, the gameplay! I knew there was something I was forgetting.

The gameplay is very different. They changed some things enormously. Here's some quick bulletpoints.

- The combat is a mix between 3 and 5. You have initiative still, but there are now turns. So the initiative is relative to turns, making it much less powerful than in 5. Combat maps seem smaller than 5? Monsters seem to be able to cross them very fast...
- Spellbooks and towers are gone. Instead you have a talent point system. This talent point system replaces every single skill and spell you otherwise get in the entire game. Yes, as Inferno you can grab nature spells right away if you want.
- Direct damage skills seem largely nerfed and have turn-based cooldowns. Siege defenses have been colossally nerfed and are now basically useless. Dudes can attack gates/walls. Stuff like Gating has been massively nerfed and is now based on what is best described as a rage bar. Haven't tried Necropolis yet. Stronghold rage only slightly boosts initiative in your current turn and a bit of attack.
- Units tend to have a lot more unique abilities. Some of them are rather terrifying - the Pit Fiend retaliates against everyone who has ever attacked him.
- Normal difficulty computers seem to massively cheat. I think they get a fuckton of free money. They always have 3-4x my army size.
- The one skirmish map you get is classified as "very large" but is in fact blood bath level. It doesn't even have underground. As to be expected under such circumstances, cpu turns don't take very long. The CPU's are extremely dumb, though. I can freely take their towns and loot without them seeming to really give a shit in most cases. Their combat AI is good, though. Auto combat tends to waste your units as usual.

I actually like the new skill system, it removes the irritation out of trying to fuck around with RNG. The spell cooldowns and such are ho hum, it seems very difficult to make a decent spellcaster hero. My experience so far is that it's best to invest into buffs instead, but I have not played much. Also, luck (now known as DESTINY) seems to be far less effective than before. It actually sucks when I stacked it to huge levels. I had something like 70 destiny and it very rarely went off. Morale is still decent.

I did not think badly of HoMM5 except for the incredibly late RMG and the extremely slow ass CPU turns. It always felt a bit sluggish, which 6 seems to have improved on. However, I think the game needs a massive UI re-design and the town halls need their 3d view craziness from 5 back. Without fucking spinners. 6 has potential, but currently that's all it has.

wtf why did they remove dungeon? I want my dark elveses and hydras and dragons aaaaaaaargh

- There is no RMG currently. This means no buy from me. When one gets added I'll think about setting sail and determining if it's worth buying.

Space Mariner

The title is Space Marine but I like to call it Space Mariner because it feels like you're a mariner, swimming amongst a sea of lard. Movement is clunky, and the mandatory screen shaking on sprinting is nothing short of casually brain damaging.

This is another God of War clone, except the combat system has no depth to it at all, the enemy AI is exceedingly badly designed, and the graphics are xbox 360 level - e.g. quite bad on the PC. They are passable, but the gameplay is basically mashing mouse buttons and winning. Basically, it's just there to stroke wh40k cock some more. Not necessarily a bad thing, but I wouldn't drop money into it.

I'll probably LP it when it comes out, so there's no point in anyone here buying it.

PRESS ENTER TO CONTINUE "no I want to click" PRESS ENTER "dude I have a fucking mouse" PRESS ENTER "FUCK YOU RELIC"

[Falchion]

wtf why did they remove dungeon? I want my dark elveses and hydras and dragons aaaaaaaargh

Welcome to Ubisoft, Mesk... ¬¬

[RazorclawX]

I haven't paid any attention to HoMM after 4... 3 was my favorite. I hated 4, and I never got around to playing 5, even though I somewhat feel like I should.

For the record, I primarily played the Necropolis, the Dungeon, and the Conflux. Conflux kind of sucked, but whatever. Nothing I liked better than to throw all my Zombies into the Skeleton Transformer.

[Ricky_Honejasi]

I haven't paid any attention to HoMM after 4... 3 was my favorite. I hated 4, and I never got around to playing 5, even though I somewhat feel like I should.

Heroes 5 was "okay" if you only played singleplayer and can tolerate long AI turns. However multiplayer was too crippled even after 2 expansions.

I remember the following issues in Heroes 5 :

- Multi. There was that bug that when it occurred, there was a desynchronization of the worst kind, the game STILL goes on but as soon that logically there is a difference, the game don't even notice it and tend to jam only at the key moment. Worse you can't even reload a save to fix it (think both sides saves and loads their own saves).

Example : Bug occurs, your friend has 13 cavaliers but you see him having 14 cavaliers. Things goes wrong when you finally 1v1 in that fated battle after 6-8 hours of gameplay. You kill 13 cavaliers in the first round but not the 14th or if he first-strike you with cavaliers (damage difference off 13 instead of 14,etc.). Finally the battle "jams" and both of you go WTF believing it's the other player not playing their combat turns, etc.


That was the most crippling bug of all that made me give up HMM5. Could have "tolerated" the rest ...

- Multi with X-Pack. RMG (Random Map Generator) did tend to go very wrong. You could easily only have 25% of the map reasonably made and the 75% as a barren with a few treasure pieces and that's it.

- Multi with X-Pack. Worst implementation of simultaneous turns I even seen of any game. It's simultaneous until one of your heroes becomes in attacking range of another enemy hero (yep even your scout hero seeing his scout hero) and it STAYS non-simultaneous for the rest of the game no matter what.

Oh did I forget to mention that simultaneous turns break on turn 1 if you have any ally with vision (ex : 2v2 games)?

[IskatuMesk]

Sins of a Solar Empire has the same desync issue. It has happened through every single patch and expansion the game has ever had. They supposedly "fixed" it numerous times, but every time they claimed to fix it we would desync anyways.

I don't know what the fuck is hard about having sim turns like they were in AoW2. That seemed to work fine. I also don't know why AI turns have to be any longer than HoMM3. There is no extra calculations to be made from 3. Yes, the graphics are 3d, but the game is still a 2d board and there is NO new sophistication that would entail such stupidly long turns - except for the abstraction of bad code by dumb interns.

HoMM5 had such potential to be a true successor of 3 if only they had put some damn effort into it.

[Ricky_Honejasi]

I believe the only real problem with multiplayer programming-wise is having to cover every case since a single missing case is enough for the desync in multiplayer.

I presume if the conception guys had no solid plan (hence changes WAY too often) or the programmers were too random in coding (ex : many fixes to half-broken code which tried to fix other half-broken code, etc.) with a lack of structure then it reflects into desyncs into multiplayer.

[IskatuMesk]

It is of my personal belief that you don't just force out expansions when there is colossal issues like desyncing present in a game. D2 had tons of desyncing but not nearly as bad as HoMM5 or SoaSE. Those two games are literally unplayable in multiplayer because of those bugs. :\

[IskatuMesk]

I have completed my hard difficulty LP of Space Marine and here are my conclusionary thoughts;

There are two incredibly bad games I've played this year that stand out from the rest. The first is Supreme Commander 2 and the second is Space Marine. The problems they exhibit are much in the same.

Both games exhibit undescribable amounts of laziness. Space Marine has so many AI-related bugs, collision issues, desyncing, graphical sloppiness, and overall rushed design that it's absolutely fucking astounding I am playing a released game and not some kind of conceptual alpha. This is laziness on the scale of Sc2. Except, even Sc2 shines above Space Marine in several respects such as the quality of particle systems and textures. Yes, even sc2's glossy as shit, disproportionate junk is still often more appealing than much of Space Marine. Which isn't to say that Space Marine is entirely ugly as shit, but rather that the ugly parts stand out so much it is impossible to miss them. Most fire effects seem to be the same 10 frame textures cycling at 5fps, they look completely horrible and out of place. Almost all explosion-related effects have that Relic blandness and flatness that completely obliterates any hope of having some semblance of realism involved. Artillery manned by the IG has no recoil when it fires, and their operators stand around staring at computers that aren't even on while not animating.

The laziness extends to the audio work. You'd think that in a game where you're killing the exact same monsters nonstop for 90% of its duration you'd have some audio variety for those monsters. You don't. The other audio is all pulled straight out of Dawn of War 2.

Where the game truly falls apart, of course, is the gameplay. I left the demo/beta/press alpha with a mixed opinion. On one hand I was horrified how bad the game was. On the other, I felt it had the potential to be decent if it was polished. As things have a habit of slapping me, though, the demo was the final product 1:1.

Ranged combat is bearable. It's not even really that bad if you consider it on its own. Movement is clunky and unresponsive, and melee combat remains as casualized as it first appeared. Click, click, click, f, click, f, click. There's your melee combat. Swing around and hope you don't die. Most deaths will come as unexpected or surprising. This will likely be because you've accidentally clipped an explosive object. Space Marine is littered with the western Red Barrel and its cohorts, the Red Pipes and Red Testicles. Touching these is usually instant death on hard. You will learn to fear them, as it's not always obvious that they are infesting random corners of the geometry. Sometimes, Red Pipes disguise themselves as Geometry Pipes! AAAaaiieee!

Outside of throwing yourself into melee and dying horribly, the game plays like any other third person/first person shooter. Remember that amazing kill to gain health system? It doesn't work. Relic knew it doesn't work. So they added Fury, and 3 fucking levels of it at that, which gives you health. You will use it for this purpose exclusively at least several times, as you will find that 1/2 way through the game and beyond it is incredibly dangerous and unwise to approach enemies in any shape or form unless they are alone. You will die to most enemies in the game very fast at this point, such as the armored nobs and the dual-wielding orks. Don't get near them. They hurt.

As an added bonus, Red Barrel and his cohorts don't reduce any damage reduction when Fury is active. Happy dying from random wtf explosion!

I found myself abusing several mechanics a fair bit to get by these fights.

- Your bullets don't originate from your muzzle. You can be totally obscured behind cover but still kill enemies if your crosshair can see them. The only exception is some poles, which have a huge invisible collision radius around them.
- Enemy AI likes to randomly deactivate and allow you to kill them with impunity.
- Enemies like to focus on your indestructible allies, allowing you to casually pick them apart with your slingshot or do whatever else. This is a nice break from FME.

The game has no true genuine difficulty. The difficulty comes from situational events and being in bad places. Positioning is everything. Out of place? Prepare to get 2 shotted by plasma guns or instagibbed by rockets. Got caught in a corner? Those dual wielding orks will tear you a new asshole in half a second.

The final boss is a quick time event. There, I said it. It's a fucking horrible, button mashing quick time event. Fuck you Relic. Fuck you.

[GnaReffotsirk]

I like space marine's combat, thought it could be improved if I were the lead:

1. Blocking as an addition to the armor attribute -- Good for Hardcore gamers. I've thought about two ways how this would work.

a. The lazy "just hold the block button and penalize attackers". Add some modifiers to this aspect depending on difficulty level. Things like other layers of character attributes.

b. A variation of the kind the Batman game provided. But instead of a slow-mo that interrupts your "hacking", a notifier is presented, where a key is to be pressed to enter parry mode. In parry mode (a sort of mini-game while combat is going wild) you will then execute certain commands. The Player character would block the attack as parry mode begins, then you have a choice to break from parry, or counter attack. While in Parry mode with an opponent, a priority attack from behind can prompt the player to enter into parry mode with that attacker or dodge the attack (which is like breaking from parry).

So two levels: First, a dodge prompt is given, when that expires, a parry prompt. So depending on your character's attributes, these prompts and their duration would change.

This I think would help multiplayer melee, as well.

With regards to multiple attackers (since we're fighting hordes), only dodge or "quick repulse" would be offered. Quick repulse would cost stats of some kind, say Fury, but will cause the Player character to counter those multiple attackers in one move, causing them penalty like stun, or knockback.

All these will have limits of course, say a specific character attribute or stat value, like Fury.

Overall, my thoughts on Space Marine is that it's a hack and slash viewed at that perspective.

Even so, I'm enjoying it. The lack of variety though is something of an issue. No real tactical maneuvering, strategy, etc. It's just a hack and slash.

[IskatuMesk]

The problem with introducing ARPG controls into the PC is mapping their controls in a way that is intuitive. This is the sole advantage that consoles have over the PC as far as I'm concerned - it's much easier and more fluid to develop a combat system's keybindings in a way that is natural to use. Darksiders had it mostly right, save for some unusual key combinations.

I think if you wanted to add a parry system it would work like guard impact works in Soul Calibur or God of War - block at just the right time and it deflects the attack and enables the opportunity to enter a counter attack. That seems the most fluid way to introduce blocking/parrying, and add a little extra to your offensive options as well.

[GnaReffotsirk]

Oh, yes right. I totally forgot the combat mechanics of GoW. I've never gotten to spend a lot of time with it. Darksiders though, yes. It was a bit hardcore though. I had a hard time with DS.

There was also that ninja game. Forgot the title.

[IskatuMesk]

Hardcore? You had difficulty with Darksiders? In what way?

[Falchion]

Oh, yes right. I totally forgot the combat mechanics of GoW. I've never gotten to spend a lot of time with it. Darksiders though, yes. It was a bit hardcore though. I had a hard time with DS.

There was also that ninja game. Forgot the title.

Hardcore? You had difficulty with Darksiders? In what way?

Funny, the ONLY difficulty I had with Darksiders melee system was when fighting those demon brutes whose name I can't even remember, but even then it was my lack of skill the most responsible.

Still, I think Darksiders' melee system is a thousand times superior to that of Space Marine, as it provided a more effective dodging and blocking system than that of Relic, as Darksiders didn't have any Fury-press-to-win button, killing those brutes did have some return if done right, strategics on how to defeat them, as Mesk intended on his game development posts. Variety was also a menu which provided respect on Madurera's game.

Space Marine, on the other hand, depends too much on it's Fury, stun and execution systems and that's it's flaw, when Relic intended that, to regenerate health, you had to dive deeper into battle and obtain health per kill, not per classy execution, and that, along with sloppy AI and a ridiculous final boss fight, was what ruined gameplay. Even God of War was far more developed than Space Marine at that term.

[IskatuMesk]

Darksiders combat system is probably the best ARPG system on the PC so far, I think, with Alice: Madness Returns in close pursuit. The best on the console is a toss between God of War and Viking actually, which had a good base system but horrible everything else. I'll let you know how I feel about Heavenly Sword when I get to it. Dante's Inferno suffered from really bad monster design.

The thing about Darksiders is you need to aggressively use dash to avoid damage. If you don't do that, some things can be very hard. This makes it very reflex oriented. I loved that about it. If you try to roll a lot in space marine a lot of weapons have a huge delay before you can reload or do anything with them when the roll animation ends. It screwed me in a few places.

[GnaReffotsirk]

I think I played one step above normal in DarkSiders.

I very much enjoy the combat, especially those females and those armored guys. What I dislike about it is the puzzles. I enjoyed Soul Reaver, but puzzles make me tired at best. But the combat was cool.

I'm playing Space Marines with just a pistol and a chain sword. Seems a bit fun.