Is Heroes V really so bad? A more detailed examination

[cjlee]

When you look at the overall disaster that was Heroes V storyline, many people get all dismissive without considering individual campaigns. But individual campaigns had to be sufficiently tolerable to make gamers play on! If ALL of Heroes V, all campaigns, were uniformly bad, many people who hit campaign snafus (as we all did, including me, thanks to a buggy game) wouldn’t care anymore and move on to a next game. But practically everyone, including the anti-H5 pro-H6 folks on this forum, played on. Why?

Firstly, it was the expansions that ruined Heroes V.

Secondly, the morons who wrote the storyline for Ubival succeeded in a unique achievement: making Heroes V MUCH LESS than the sum of its parts!

Firstly, Isabel started out Fine. You didn’t know she would be a moron, that’s for later. The game had a very promising starting where Isabel is a nineteen year old, sheltered and inexperienced and recently married, desperate to defend her realm and get her husband back. Her story was engaging and interesting and you wanted to take her side (pretty young woman with no experience, much like Catherine in Restoration of Erathia) and take down those horrible demons (which thanks to Warhammer’s influence, looked really freaking ugly and despicable).

You were definitely willing to forgive Isabel’s flaws when she was a level 1 teenager. Not to mention, they didn’t show up anyway, at least not in Heroes V Campaign I. The only warning signs were the Big, Nasty Spoilers inherent in the titles. Fortunately, many gamers are not big readers and probably didn’t notice The Trap; The Fall of The King, etc.

Secondly, subsequent campaigns were not absolute disasters either.

I didn’t like The Cultist, and it featured a very annoyingly arrogant guy who should be properly renamed The Jerk. The Jerk started out a lustful besotted creep betraying his master and ended up killing everything in his path, including his former colleagues. Interesting, fascinating, but utterly dislikeable.

Still, The Jerk’s campaign was very much in character. He’s a believable character. If you were a worshipper of demons, it would be precisely in your messed-up character to spy on pretty little girls for two decades, decide that you had to have her (regardless of whether she gives consent), betray your satanic master, kill everybody including the elves whom you should be trying to ally with, etc. Even if Ubihole engaged a talented, brilliant author to rewrite The Jerk, he should not make The Jerk any less of a Jerk. If you played a Demonist who was NOT a Jerk or a Villain in some way, it would come off wrong.

The Jerk wasn’t a great campaign, but not so bad that we would throw down the mouse and tear our hair. So we all played on.

Then we came to The Necromancer. Not fantastically memorable, but everything was in character. All 5 maps of Markal’s tale held together like one of those SFF books that sell for 25cents in a big cardboard box. You knew he was a bad guy; he stayed bad throughout and steadily expanded his power in stages while making use of Isabel and Godric. It’s a tale like the competently written fiction any SFF writer can produce.

I was not impressed by Markal’s story, and probably no one was. But there were no jarring potholes in the form of plot holes. Markal was methodical, systematic, cold blooded and every map fitted his personality and the necromancer faction well. You didn’t play Markal as a guerilla or hit and run or anything un-necromancer like. You didn’t have unbelievable plot points like Markal trying to make friends with the elves. Anyone could see Isabel wasn’t emotionally balanced at this point and she was being manipulated by a cold, cunning Necro. All still plausible. So we continued playing the campaigns.

Then we came to The Kerj. The Kerj is really the Jerk trying for a career change. By this time I’m starting to get bored but I’m just playing on because this is HOMM V and I was so afraid there would not be a HOMM V that I was willing to give Ubival a chance. The storyline for this campaign was mediocre and forgettable, but once again, not so utterly implausible that you would throw down your mouse and erase the game. The Kerj is still a nasty character trying to rule other dark, nasty characters in a dungeon. Even a genius writer would have difficulty making us like him or identify with him. Dark Elf, kill other Dark Elf in internecine warfare. Standard ‘evil faction’ hero.

I thought there was something weird about Shadya, but never clued in about Biara. I just assumed she was another of those attractive women that male heroes must be paired with in your standard genre-bound penny fiction. Having Shadya around was like meeting Grawl for the xth battle - very typically cheap low end fiction with a repeat villain who never beats your protagonist but who nonetheless always comes back for more.

I yawned, but played on. Typical B-grade movie fare; lots of computer games probably have the same plot. (These tend to be the same games that wind up going for $1.99 on the discount pile.)

The fifth campaign probably injected life right back for most gamers and made us look forward to playing again. It certainly made me stay up until 7am in the morning (I forgot the time).

Findan was a sound hero with very sound objectives. Defend his borders, reconcile with old allies the Emerald Dragons, save his capital, look for a seer to save the elves... his first and third maps in particular really gave us all a sense of purpose and menace. You had no time to nit-pick the plot.

I liked this campaign, and I think most people did. It’s quite in line with traditional Elven tales - you’re a peaceful ranger who gets assaulted by brutal necs and demons and must retaliate and drive them out.

Findan’s finale was one of the best maps and missions in the entire Heroes series. You had a fearsome atmosphere (the greenish night was extra dark on my old monitor). You had this creepy vampire lord who can’t be killed. You had really powerful enemies with lots of castles, and literal legions of undead. Findan really had to utilize light magic (resurrection spell) to the max. I really felt relieved that as a ranger, he had plenty of mana to resurrect and his shooting specialty which reduced the dangers of fighting a big skeleton archer army. This is really the climax of ‘fight the undead’ tales, planned to mesh well with Findan’s abilities!

The end was really enjoyable, down to Nival’s little trick in scripting Nicholai’s death. (The other heroes don’t turn into ashes when defeated.) What was particularly awesome for me was that I had stayed up to help Findan, and Nicholai’s death occurred just as the morning sun was rising for me at 7.10-7.20am. I was amazed at how it all fitted together - daybreak in the fantasy world as eternal darkness is lifted and the vampire burnt away; daybreak in my real-world gamer’s room!

The only problem is with Findan’s haikus. They didn’t match well with his character and missions being that of a man of action saving the elves. This is the kind of unexplained inconsistency that hurts authors - unless they make an effort to reconcile haikus with Storm of Arrows, it gives us the impression that Findan is eccentric.

Buoyed by the fifth campaign, I went on to the last. Zehir’s tale was pretty mediocre, especially with the lack of character development, the lack of an Academy town and the fact that the titular mage is also the weakest in a triumvirate of heroes from Maps 3 to 5. This sixth campaign was carried by the interesting heroes Godric and Findan and their powerful foes (Markal, Isabel and Satan aka Demon Sovereign.) We played not for the storyline or for the character, whom we probably didn’t like thanks to his horrible voice. We played because of the challenge of the boss fights. These required planning and teamwork, especially working around Zehir’s weaknesses. We were kept engaged throughout Zehir’s campaign. I was too fixated on practical concerns like how to survive Isabel’s paladin army.

Zehir’s campaign was not abysmal or off-putting. This is an example of a tale carried not by the titular character, but by the events in the last three maps facing three boss enemies with multiple battles for each enemy. The ending was ok also - a seemingly happy ending with a dark twist.

At this point, HOMM V ended. I would call the storyline mediocre. It wasn’t particularly good but it was no worse than standard genre fiction or the average computer game on the market. I could easily write a better story, but lots of mapmakers out there (Timothy Duncan, Charley Watkins, Jeff, Ururuam Tururuam, salamandre, etc.) already have a solid history of producing better stories.

XXX

Thanks to Ubival’s incompetence in HOMM V, I didn’t care about the game and wasn’t paying attention when they produced an expansion. I bought HoF long after it came out, something totally unlike my behavior in Heroes III where I preordered every version.

The start with Freyda was pretty good, deceiving me into thinking that Ubival had improved. Again we had a pretty girl with a nice personality being victimized by what seemed to be larger, menacing political forces. The background of religious fanaticism, together with the red coloring and the massacres of peasants, really created an interesting backdrop. The challenges handed out to Freyda also came off well, with her main enemy an ugly religious fanatic that of course we all want to kill.

Then we came to map 3, the Duncan map. It was boring to methodically occupy barely-defended castles and the ‘rebel’ looked boring too. No character, not at all like a boss enemy. Your average badly-planned map, courtesy of Ubival’s programmers.

Map 4 was much better, a multi stage map with different challenges. I liked it.

Map 5 was another multi-stage map with different things to do in stages. I would have liked it, if not for Duncan. This is a woman who started out needing to free herself from religious fanaticism and save/ avenge her saintly father. I was 100% for Freyda at first. In the end? She wound up having to rescue a totally unworthy man and put up with his horny comments? That was not a good ending to a campaign. There was no sense of closure, no suitable conclusion. Neither was there a good villain to kill - it was just another red Haven hero who had not offended Freyda previously. Why didn’t the writer at least set up Map 5’s Irina to be a mean, nasty woman? It’s not nice to kill an attractive woman who happens to be in your way!

It seems that Ubival’s writers are not even readers. Please, you don’t need to read giants of fantasy literature to get enough inspiration for a great ending. I’m not asking you to plow through Robert Jordan’s books. Even cheap paperbacks that you can get from a garage sale will NOT have such lousy endings. I get the impression Ubival hired the first literate immigrant they could get, someone who had spent his life in refugee camps and therefore had never read a decent fantasy tale in his life.

The ‘love’ part with Duncan was ridiculous. These two are totally mismatched. Duncan also does not look macho, despite his macho joking with Wulfstan. He comes off as a horny loser and I felt as irritated as Freyda.

Overall, Freyda’s campaign was disappointing. The writers probably had no coherent vision for what they wanted their character to do - I started out enthusiastically supporting this Freyda heroine; in the end like my heroine I was stuck in a place far from home with no clear direction.

Wulfstan’s campaign was more solid. It started positively and ended ok, much like the average game which ends up on the discount pile within a year. We were introduced to Wulfstan as a defender of his homeland, and the first dwarf map perfectly showcased Dwarven defensive capabilities. The second and third maps were also interesting, with its exploration of the Dwarven underground environment and the ‘liberate our side from enemy invader’ theme which reinforced Wulfstan’s story as a defender of his people.

The fourth Wulfstan map had Wulfstan preparing to fight his brother. Unfortunately, after wandering the countryside recruiting armies, I found Rolf easier than many neutral stacks. This was very disappointing. I think Ubival either planned it badly or made a mistake setting Rolf as level 15 rather than 25.

The final Wulfstan map was a battle against Laszlo. By this time most gamers should be tired of snowy maps. Especially snowy maps that we’ve already played before. It came off ok, forgettable but not ridiculously bad. By this time I was tired of HoF, so it was some time before I came back to play.

The last campaign was the worst of all. Ylaya’s. I bet most people cannot remember what battles she fought, don’t care for this character, and can’t even remember her specialty. (Seriously, I don’t!)

When it came to map 3 and I saw Raelag with Isabel, my worst fears came true. The story was really THAT bad! Come on, we all know Isabel was raped by the devil (it’s an ugly thought, but it’s true). Now she’s in an underground love nest with the devil’s former right hand man who trapped her and delivered her over to the bad guys? Please, even if she was not raped and forced to bear the devil’s child, I don’t think any attractive young woman would enjoy living in an underground cavern love nest, eating nothing but mushrooms. Ubival’s writers are obviously not female (or else they are very weird females).

Maps 4 and 5 were fine, with interesting challenges and situations. They were quite nicely designed actually. But the poor quality storywriting continued to hamper the gamer’s experience. King Tolghar is basically a decent, legitimate king and killing him was no fun. (The writer should have established Tolghar as a villain and somebody worth hating.)

In the end playing the same Horncrest map again as a campaign finale, together with the regicide by a supposedly patriotic dwarf Wulfstan and the sexual harassment by the beta-male Duncan who couldn’t fight a good battle, didn’t come off right. When HoF ended, I would NOT have bought TOTE... if not for a little problem...

XXX

HoF ended so poorly that I would not have bought Tribes of the East if I hadn’t already gotten it. You see, the shop was getting rid of this unpopular game called Heroes of Might and Magic, so it had a discount if I bought both expansions together...

This expansion started with the Necromancers. Once again, Ubival’s writers screwed things up big time.

Hello Ubival Writers, in Heroes III and IV, you always knew which hero you were representing. In your HOMM TOTE campaigns, did you know who was the intended protagonist? Do you guys even know how to create characters?

Who’s really the main character of the Necro campaign? Ornella or Arantir?

You introduced Ornella and she seemed so mysterious, so seductive. There was even a scenario map about Ornella. I was interested in her relationship with Giovanni and her motivations. Then her campaign was abruptly taken from her in the Map 1 cutscene. Arantir took over the campaign and Ornella became his servant, without at least some kind of chemistry between them. And then Arantir sacrificed her! You mean this ‘sensual countess’ (your own words, Ubival!) gave up even her eternal life because her new master called for it? How believeable is this? What’s the point of making her a Vampire Princess?

And who likes it when they played a hero, leveled her like mad and sent her to a very ignominious death on a necromancer’s altar?

If you guys think you are so smart, why not contact JK Rowling and suggest a Harry Potter sequel where the all-powerful adult Harry Potter wizard gets sacrificed on some altar for the Greater Good? Yeah, right, I’m sure it will sell 60 million copies and get rave reviews from critics. (More like some adult fan of Harry Potter with no life will take it into his head to kill JKRowling.)

After a very cold and wet-blankety first campaign, I was seriously considering selling my game online if not for the fact that I hadn’t played the orcs yet. (Ubival did the right thing in introducing a new faction in the prologue with very new ways of fighting, so even if people didn’t like the Necromancer campaign they still wanted to play on.)

I was hooked on the orcs’ campaign. I found it challenging and was forced to lower the difficulty twice. Map 2, One Khan One Clan, was probably the map I played the most/ restarted the most in the entire Heroes franchise!

The orc campaign plot was sound when taken on its own, without considering the subsequent campaign. We could see Gotai go through the stages of his development - winning his warchief position, gathering the tribes to support him, and finally regaining Kunyak’s stuff and taking revenge on Alaric. It felt very good to wipe out that nasty religious nutcase; like Gotai we probably felt quite righteous killing Alaric!

But did Kujin and Gotai really get together or not? And is Gotai the main character of this campaign, or Kujin? Why did Ubival not give Gotai the opportunity to fight the demons at the end?

Once again, Ubival’s writers demonstrate their incompetence in making Heroes V worse than the sum of its parts. Normally when you pay most attention to a character and level him up to very high stats and get great perks like we all did for Gotai, we EXPECT this character to be a hero in future as well. Why give this role to Kujin? And if Ubival did it because Kujin has an anti-demon specialty, then they planned the campaign all wrong. They should have focused more on Kujin then, leveled her, developed her so that we all like this character and maybe have some explanation for her anti-demon specialty so that Kujin gets revenge on the demons at the end.

As it was, the badly written story made us think that Gotai’s quest to be No. 1 in the Orc world was the focus of the campaign, but by the end it was his right hand woman who got to fight the demons in the final campaign. It doesn’t come off right.

Finally it was Zehir’s turn again. Zehir was less annoying in this expansion (and had a decent haircut). But once again, we don’t get a full taste of the Academy faction. Not only were we given fewer maps, we had lots of other heroes involved in maps 2, 3 and 4. Much of the time you are not playing Zehir or else playing Zehir using non-Academy units. Is it because Ubival had messed up and made the Academy faction so weak that Academy can’t hold its own even with artifacts? That was the impression I got. Totally not at all like the powerful Wizards in Heroes II.

Once again, Zehir had no story to speak of. No character development, nothing that keeps you going. You even had him losing experience in exchange for a few measly units that he didn’t need to use. The titular character is just being carried along by the events, acting as an assistant in Map 2 to help Freyda kick demons of out her homeland; a servant for Wulfstan in Map 3 to become Dwarf King; a general parasite in Map 4 who depends on everybody else’s top troops to face Biara.

This is ridiculous. Ian Fleming never made James Bond an assistant to other people; Conan Doyle never made Sherlock Holmes so weak he needed others’ support to face down Moriarty. Yet Zehir, ‘first of the circle’, is once again a lousy sissy mage. He’s not the right hero to wipe out evil in a climactic finale. He’s not even the guy who takes down Biara at the ending cutscene (Isabel is).

After my Heroes V experience, I had no intention of preordering Heroes VI. A decision I am not regretting. Not as if I expect Heroes VI to be sold out on October 14.

[parcaleste]

One totally unnecessary rant. You cal this topic "Is Heroes V really so bad? A more detailed examination" and than do nothing but bashing the campaign maps/stories. No word about the creatures, the heroes skill system and how it did interacted with the creatures of the representative faction, the spells, whatever?

No, seriously!

[Torur]

I don't really get this rant, you just walkthrough the campaign stories and the maps?
And to agree with parcaleste, where's the critical detailed examination of the game?

[XEL II]

(pretty young woman with no experience, much like Catherine in Restoration of Erathia)

What? WHAT???? Um, what the heck, man? In RoE Catherine is 30 years old and has been a warrior since she was 16, taking part in real battles and even quelling an uprising in Harmondale. Calling this young woman "inexperienced" is a gross misstatement.

[Corlagon]

I was not impressed by Markal’s story, and probably no one was. But there were no jarring potholes in the form of plot holes

To the contrary, I could create a mile-long list of the jarring plotholes it contained. I'd say it introduced by far the biggest plothole in Might and Magic's history: Isabel's complete and utter ignorance of the nature of necromancy in a world where necromancy is a reality, seen all over the place and being peformed before her eyes by the man she's working with. Not once, apparently, did she ask her pet necromancer, distrusted by everyone, whether he was planning to use necromancy to revive Nicolai. Markal's entire plan literally hinged on the stupidity of Isabel. The lead character's stupidity is a major plot device. How you can possibly brush that away and suggest that it isn't jarring is amazing to me.

I could call out the rest of the dubious positives you mention, but to me, you're fighting an uncalled-for, automatically-losing battle. Any comparison between Might and Magic storylines that's favourable to H5 is doomed from the outset and should go completely unindulged, unless you're pitting it against Crusaders of Might and Magic or something. It is simply not tenable to argue on the merits of slime (H5 plot) which follows perfectly edible dessert (H4 plot).

[XEL II]

unless you're pitting it against Crusaders of Might and Magic or something

Same as with other MMs here. Crusaders and its sequels actually had nice plot withquite a few interesing ideas and moment. At the very least, those games' storyline were nowhere near as bad as many reviewers went out of their way to make them out to be. Well, maybe the GBC port of WoMM. And certainly, Crusaders, Warriors and Shifters seemed much more plausible to me than HoMM V.

[Corlagon]

I mean the PC version of course.

[Avonu]

???

PC verison wasn't so bad - if you forget about running same loooooong dungeon 10th time ofc.

[Bandobras Took]

Now, please review H4 Vanilla's Nature Campaign.

No . . . really.

[ShadowLiberal]

The others are right that you mostly just bash heroes 5 instead of defending it like the title implies.

Still, I agree with one thing you mention, the expansions to Heroes 5 were definitely weaker then the original game.

In the original while a few stages were hell to play through and win (like Agrael mission #3, and Findan mission #1) the gameplay generally kept you going. The game did end weak on the gameplay side however in the original.

I think the original heroes 5 would have been better off giving Zehir his own 5 levels of campaign to play through, then having a shorter merged campaign (similar to the last 3 levels of the campaign) where you start off as one of Godric/Raelag/Findan/Zehir and get the rest to join you later.

The one problem I've noticed with how Ubisoft ends Heroes 5 is it feels so rushed at the end, as if Ubisoft suddenly realized after stage 2 of Zehir "oh shoot, we've got to start to conclude the story and end the campaign with Zehir, we need to speed things up fast".

As for the two heroes expansions, that weren't quite as good as the original.

What felt like a rush to finish the campaign story at the end of HOF was much greater then the original, and it didn't even conclude the entire story either. In my opinion they should have just ended the false queen storyline in HOF and had a story about something else in TOTE.

Also HOF annoyed me how many maps were basically in the same place as previous stages. I know they did the same thing with Lorekeep in Markal's campaign, but they did it much better with Markal. Lorekeep was always at a different edge of the map the couple of appearances it made in Markal's campaign, between missions #2 and #3 only a very small area of the map overlapped with each other, and most of mission #3 was fought to the north capturing academy towns. Then in mission #5, while the map was a lot like a zoomed in version of map #2 there were some key differences, like the added islands, and Isabelle's Haven town that wasn't there in mission #2. Compare that to HOF and the Dwarf town, all 3 times it makes an appearance the surface map is EXACTLY the same.

TOTE however is definitely my least favorite, so much so that I've never made it past stage #2 of the Orc campaign. Mission #1 drove me crazy because I couldn't collect 1,000 heads first, and it took me 15+ minutes to figure out in my 3rd run through the mission how to get the dumb goblins to steal skulls from the enemy hero. (Nothing was happening whenever I clicked on the stupid goblins). Then when mission #2 started and I wasn't even playing as the same hero I was like "what was the point of that last mission if I don't get to play as Gotai here?", and I was already not liking the orc campaign, so I just stopped and haven't gone back to TOTE. If they wanted you to play as two different heroes in one campaign then they should have done what they did with Raelag & Shadya, had both heroes play the same maps together.

HOF's new Haven units also caused problems in a few missions where the Haven towns you captures are SUPPOSED to produce the red haven creatures, but really produce the originals, until you end your turn and the computer converts the originals into their red counter parts. That made it impossible to stockpile a large garrison at their towns of all 7 haven units without a hero to hold the red haven units until the originals are converted to red units.

But back to the title of this thread.

Heroes 5 original certainly has great gameplay that helps it outshine some of the other heroes games. I found the campaigns generally better and generally more balanced then Heroes 3.

In heroes 3, before Shadow's of Death, the difficulty started out easy, but then got insane since you weren't allowed to adjust it. I mean take Restoration of Erathia for example. The first three campaigns were easy (the enemy towns often weren't even allowed to build higher than tier 4 or 5 creatures). Once you got to the middle set of campaigns however, things were hopelessly rigged against you, to the point that about the only way to win was by cheating. By hopelessly rigged, I mean things like the neutral stacks near the enemy heroes towns being so few in number that almost anyone could beat them with just about zero losses. Your half of the map however tended to have so many large stacks of neutrals that you had to lose a decent number of troops killing them off. The result? By month #2 when you meet the enemy hero the enemy hero has a month's worth of troops in their army, while your army is at best 2 weeks worth of troops left, and hopelessly outnumbered. The campaigns were also overboard later on at trying to give you heroes and towns from as many different factions as possible, which made it nearly impossible to build one very large army up on 1 or 2 heroes, being unable to convert all your units from 4+ different factions into one faction type.

Heroes 4 I just never really got into. There were too many changes that weren't to my liking, such as troops spawning every single day instead of each week. I also didn't like picking between which tier 2 to 5 creatures to build in my towns. And then I especially hated each unit having different amounts of movement points, which discourages you from even hiring slow troops, even if they're a strong unit. Oh, and the castles were pretty much worthless to in battle. It's easy for Heroes 3 and 5 to outshine heroes 4.

[Bandobras Took]

I mean take Restoration of Erathia for example. The first three campaigns were easy (the enemy towns often weren't even allowed to build higher than tier 4 or 5 creatures). Once you got to the middle set of campaigns however, things were hopelessly rigged against you, to the point that about the only way to win was by cheating.

Well, the only cheating really necessary was restarting the whole map, but your point is well-made.

[TheUndeadKing]

Oh, and the castles were pretty much worthless to in battle.

Uh, no. While the implementation of castles was far from perfect, they were nowhere near "worthless".

[ShadowLiberal]

Oh, and the castles were pretty much worthless to in battle.

Uh, no. While the implementation of castles was far from perfect, they were nowhere near "worthless".

Well I didn't play heroes 4 enough to have them help much in siege battles. I only played a couple of missions (including the tutorial mission) before I got bored with Heroes 4.

[TheUndeadKing]

Oh, I see. They're very useful and fun when you know how they work.

For starters, units behind castle walls gain a minor defense boost. Flying units lose movement points when they fly over castle walls. You get a moat when you upgrade your fort, which slows movement of ground units. You also get towers (when you further upgrade it), which is the real deal by the way; towers double your creatures' attack and defense ratings, giving them tremendous damage potential. If you place large stacks of powerful (esp. ranged) units on them, you can literally destroy armies way stronger than your defending army. I always think twice when I attack a fully upgraded castle with a large number of ranged units, because If you don't have any counter to those ranged units, you're screwed.

[klaymen]

Does not the moat also give some penalties for units standing there, or am I confusing it with something else?

[TheUndeadKing]

Yeah, it penalizes units who stand or walk on top of it. Can't remember what else it did, as units rarely stayed there.