Homm4 - the Good, the Bad, the Ugly

[moomin]

So, having played Homm4 for a couple of hours, I feel I need to vent a bit. Bear with me.

The Good:

- The magic system is really a step up. This is a consistent trend
in the series - every installment has had better magic the the
previous one. This one forces some really interesting choises
on the player. No more Earth magic is a must for your main
hero.

- The hero leveling system is very nice too. Interesting choises,
no forcing the player to choose between two trash traits.
Powerful combinations.

- Free armies. Finally! I so enjoyed ferrying artifacts between
my heroes with a single quick sprite "courier".

- Might stands a chance - the integration of potions and a magic
resistance worthy of the name has made playing the might
faction a viable option.

The Bad:

- The overland map is cluttered, difficult to navigate and it seems
way to crowded, somehow. I still don't recognise most of the
buildings and dwellings, and I had no such problems with
Homm3. The Castles are butt-ugly.

- The combat scene. There is no option to turn on hexes and
distance shadowing. The backgrounds look barren and
uniteresting compared to Homm3. I still haven't figured out
the activation sequence when different stacks have the same
speed - it seem quite random, but I'm sure there's some
reason to it.

- Does the copy protection really need to trash my CD for
a minute before the game starts, NWO?

The Downright Ugly:

- No multiplayer (except hotseat, which I didn't test yet). A free
patch is said to be forthcoming.

- No random maps.

- _One_ XL map included? Surely you jest, NWO?

- Homm always had brutally good music, right? Well, no more.
The overland music is clipping and looping - I had to turn it off
after ten minutes. It's not my rig either, there's plenty of people
complaining about it on the Homm boards.

- I get a persistent, repeatable crash bug if I close the
confirmation pop-up after a battle too soon - before it starts
playing the victory (or defeat) animation. Since we're talking
almost five seconds here, this rapidly becomes old. I have an
Athlon 2000+ with 512 MB DDR ram and a GForce 2 card, btw,
so it probably isn't like my box is underpowered for this game.

All in all, it seems promising. While there's "rush" written all over
this game to an extent we're not accustomed to from NWO, it's
mostly on the fringes - the game itself seems solid, and a few
patches should set the interface quirks and the bug right.

[Eli]

Another great game goes in the way of Civ3.

What do we have left? MoO3? SimCity 4?

[General Ludd]

I agree with all your points, but I just have to say that the graphics are terrible, they are bland, simple, and just plain ugh.

I felt the same way about HoMM3 graphics compared ot the second, but not anywhere near to the degree the fourth has brought it to.

[chronocrator]

And everything sounded so good in the previews...

I was really looking forward to HoMM4 - so would you still recommend it?

[Leonidas]

For me, alarm bells started going off about H0M&M 4 when I heard they changed the game engine.

The Heroes 3 game engine worked just fine for me.

Then they changed the combat screen to an isometric view. Again, the Heroes 3 combat screen worked best for me. In fact, it was one of the best things about the game. Why change it?

In Heroes 3 I loved the music, combat system, city view screens, etc.

They only really needed to tweak the game and get rid of some of the cartoonish graphics and tedious activities.

With a tried and true game system like the Heroes series, they didn't need to re-invent the wheel. . .

When will developers ever learn?

[FrustratedPoet]

Re: Homm4 - the Good, the Bad, the Ugly

i agree with all the good points you described, it's great to see that a lot of thought has gone into improving the game in this way.

i would also like to add the scenario editor is one of the best around. not many games get a decent editor (i think we can all think of one that promised and didn't deliver ), but the one for HOMM4 is very comprehensive. i'm not sure i have the patience to make a full campaign, but i'm sure some people will, and when they do i'll be there to download them

The Bad:

- The overland map is cluttered, difficult to navigate and it seems
way to crowded, somehow. I still don't recognise most of the
buildings and dwellings, and I had no such problems with
Homm3. The Castles are butt-ugly.

- The combat scene. There is no option to turn on hexes and
distance shadowing. The backgrounds look barren and
uniteresting compared to Homm3. I still haven't figured out
the activation sequence when different stacks have the same
speed - it seem quite random, but I'm sure there's some
reason to it.

i haven't found the map to be a problem, to be honest. i don't recognise most of the buildings either, but they do look very diferent in the isometric view. surely once you've played it more you'll recognise them just fine.
i agree that the lack of distance shadowing is annoying and its disappearence seems needless. hopefully it'll be patched back in if the fans complain enough.

The Downright Ugly:

- No multiplayer (except hotseat, which I didn't test yet). A free
patch is said to be forthcoming.

- No random maps.

- _One_ XL map included? Surely you jest, NWO?

- Homm always had brutally good music, right? Well, no more.
The overland music is clipping and looping - I had to turn it off
after ten minutes. It's not my rig either, there's plenty of people
complaining about it on the Homm boards

the hotseat is fine i suppose, but it's only good for allying with a friend. if you play against each other then you can see exactly what each other is doing and it's a bit pointless. there aren't many human-ally scenarios packaged with the game, but it only takes 2 minutes to go into the editor and change the settings.

the music is a bit dodgy, certainly. i turned it off too, but i always turn the music off in computer games if i can because they are always terrible. wait ... except Tony Hawk's 3, the soundtrack on that rocks!

i would like to see random maps, but i'm sure that before too long there will be plenty of player-made scenarios and campaigns on the net to play around with.
the missing multiplayer is very annoying. why release an unfinished game? hopefully we won't have to wait too long for it to be activated.

[moomin]

Well, an update 14 or so play-hours later:

Most of the things I mentioned are indeed workable. While I still don't like the looks of the overland map at least I find my way around it now. The are *lots* of small improvement along the major ones - the whole game has shifted from stack building to hero management, which is fine by me.

Still hate the battle screen with a passion. Even more so, because while I'm slowly adjusting to the overland screen, there just can't be no reconcilliation between the battle screen and me - a fact that grows more painful as the rest of the game grows on me.

I hope NWO puts a lot of patch effort into the battle screen - it needs it.

The editor, I'm happy to report, is up to the usual high Heroes standard.

[FrustratedPoet]

i'm impressed with the way that the hero development has been handled in this game. in the previous versions you would usually be forced to choose rubbish skills because the options were limiting, but it didn't matter too much since the success of an army depended far more on the quality of units than on the quality of the hero.
the emphasis has shifted now.

every time you play you MUST get a spellcaster hero to high levels because they will be more useful to you than a stack of black dragons.
i thought at first that the 'fighter'-type heroes where underpowered compared to the mages, but i realise now that i was wrong. given the choice of one or the other i'd still choose to have a mage, but of course we don't have to make that choice now. i always put a spellcaster and a fighter hero into my armies because then you get the best of both worlds. at lower levels the fighters are almost useless, but having played it more i can see how super strong they can get.
i've been playing the Lysander campaign and i failed it twice through not really appreciating how puny he was to begin with, but now i've leveled him over 20 he is a monster-mincing machine. the bonuses he give to my units attack and defense are significant, too.

i'm looking forward to the multiplayer patch very much, but it'll take me a long time to beat all the campaigns anyway, so i can wait a little bit. but only a little.

[CapTVK]

Time to go back to the original Homm's based on: Kings Bounty

After 10 years it's still good fun, build up your armies, lay siege to various fortresses, find spells, collect puzzle pieces, travel to new maps to combat increasingly tougher opponents, enlist new races and...wait a minute...does HOMM actually offer anything new!?

[Leonidas]

How do the city screen shots look?

Do they look as good as those in Heroes 3?

I haven't been able to find any pics about them on the web.

For those of you who have the game, many of us would appreciate you posting some pics of the city screens in Heroes 4.

Thanks.

[FrustratedPoet]

Originally posted by Leonidas

For those of you who have the game, many of us would appreciate you posting some pics of the city screens in Heroes 4.

click this text for pics the city screens look pretty much the same as they did in the third game. whether that is a good or bad thing is upto the individual player to decide.

CapTK - no, HOMM4 doesn't offer anything radically new, and if system specs/money are a problem for anyone then they could easily pick up a copy of an earlier version and have lots of fun.

however, the main changes i can think of right now are:

1. ability to have more than hero in an army

2. have your heroes as moveable units on the combat screen

3. the ability to automatically caravan units from one town/dwelling to another

4. allowed to have an army without any hero in it at all

maybe these don't sound like much, but they really dramatically alter the gameplay and strategy IMHO. some people might feel that this is more of an expansion than a sequel, and i wouldn't necessarily disagree with them about that, but all i can say is that the changes made to the game engine are almost universally beneficial and prolly change the game more than people might think.

i said 'almost' in the above paragraph, didn't I?
well ... the change to an isometric viewpoint is a good one (moominparatrooper disagrees with me on this, though, which is fine ) but the way the combat screen has been changed to the pseudo-3D view amkes it even more important that there should be a movement radius shadow, but there isn't.

oh well, i'm glad i bought the game and although i prolly won't be still playing it a year from now (i don't have too much time to play games, and good ones come out all the time ) i'm certain i'll get my £30 worth from it. not the best game ever made, certainly, but a good one IMHO, and worth a look.

[Eli]

I should have the game, in the worst case, in thursday.

[Leonidas]

FrustratedPoet: Many thanks for the link to the pics.

Are those pictures really what the city screens look like?

I think the Heroes 3 city screens are far more dramatic and visually appealling. It explains why I never saw any castle screen pictures in the reviews.


Compare the Heroes 4 city screen shots, with the



Heroes 3 city screen shots:








And what's up with the system requirements? It's a turn based game:

The minimums requirements:

Processor: P2 or AMD 400MHz, recomended P3 or AMD 500MHz
RAM: 128MB, recomended 256MB
Graphics/Video card: 8MB, recomended 16MB graphics accelerator, and supports Directx 8.0
Rezolution: the game is built for 1024X768 rezolution, but will work on 800X600 rezolution as well
All the other requirements are thew usual(mouse, keyboard, etc')

[FrustratedPoet]

Originally posted by Leonidas
FrustratedPoet: Many thanks for the link to the pics.

Are those pictures really what the city screens look like?

yes, those are what they really look like. having compared them side-by-side with the Heroes 3 pics you posted i can see that the new ones are less dramatic and visually appealing. they are also less cluttered i think, but perhaps they are a step backwards.
i'm not bothered by it because it doesn't effect gameplay, the graphical refit in Heroes 4 is just eye-candy.

[chronocrator]

Originally posted by FrustratedPoet
however, the main changes i can think of right now are:

1. ability to have more than hero in an army

2. have your heroes as moveable units on the combat screen

3. the ability to automatically caravan units from one town/dwelling to another

4. allowed to have an army without any hero in it at all

I'd like to add a point:

5. Every city can just recruit one of two fourth (the fourth level ist the highest) level creatures. So if the player decides to build the bone dragon dwelling in his necromancer town he cannot build devils there anymore.


I'm still wating for the game to come out in Germany.