Thoughts on coming back to King's Bounty

[MattCaspermeyer]

I did not play the original King's Bounty, but did play HoMM1-3 and I have never played HoMM4-6.

I think my brother got me HoMM4&5 on GoG, but I have not even tried to play them, yet.

The first HoMM trilogy is just fun and awesome with 3 being the pinnacle of the series! 4 changed things to be quite a bit different from 3 and so I'm not surprised you didn't care for 4 because it turned a lot of people away from the series.

I enjoyed 3 so much that when I played King's Bounty - The Legend (my favorite in the series) that I created a whole mod (HoMM3 Babies) to weave aspects of it into King's Bounty.

The hero system was so rich - each hero had their own brief story (I alluded to some aspects of their story with keywords when you look at their description in my mod) and naturally you develop your favorites (kind of like playing Warrax in Master of Magic for those who played that game) and you hope you can recruit them instead of the computer.

With King's Bounty, the graphics are simply gorgeous and the hexagonal-based gameplay for me is an optimization problem with respect to minimizing losses. That's why I find it so addictive. Plus, with my mod and TL there is a desire to get a wife and see what HoMM3 heroes you and your wife will have so I find that as long as there are mini goals (like 10 battles to your next child or getting one of those artifacts that give you runes after 50 fights or the medals somewhat) then that helps reduce the grinding feel.

I think it has been widely discussed that the WotN battles were too much Undead. I hope I&F has changed this because once I got to the Dwarven area and had to fight more Undead I was really tired of fighting The Undead at that point and didn't want to fight them any more. I ended up finishing WotN, but I went weeks without playing it before I'd come back and slog through more Undead battles and will probably not play it again until I (if ever) mod it. I&F gives me some hope, but one thing I've learned (I was late playing TL - 2 years after it came out) is that you have to wait 6 months to a year after a new KB game comes out for it to be playable because they are so buggy. As a modder, I know how hard it is to squish bugs because I still find bugs in my HoMM3 Babies mod to this day so you really have to be on top of going through your code and checking it to ensure that you've covered all different scenarios and sometimes it's not practical to imagine all the different ways this spell or that ability may be used.

WotN should have been Undead Vikings, Undead Humans, Undead Elves, Undead Dwarves, etc. so that each race had their Undead variant (like Red Sands' Undead Lizards) so that when you went into the area you were facing Undead variants of the normal units. This would have made it much more fun, because playing the whole game against the Undead was tiresome. But if I would have had to fight Undead Peasants, Bowmen, Swordsmen, Priests, Miners, Dwarves, Giants, Sprites, Fairies, Dryads, Ents (think Tree of Death in TL), Wolves, Black Dragons, etc., etc. you can see how varied and awesome a game it could have been. That would have been a neat way to dramatically increase the number of units with very minor changes to their appearance (plus I bet the developers would have had a lot of fun making different units into Undead variants) and it would have been fun thinking of anti-talents (imagine Undead Inquisitors with Rage Drain).

AP / CW were fun because you got to fight varied enemies throughout the entire game as has been mentioned and TL is the same way and so I think the point is that it is okay to have a theme (i.e. Undead), but you've got to carry out that theme such that the game still has variety of battles - especially if there are 500 of them!

/C\/C\