Unfair Hostility to Heroes 5 and Nival >.<

[Ya5MieL]

"Thats quite less than game deserves."

Saying that game is 3/4 out of 10 is ridiculous, it is a good game, and while not among the best (9 or 10) it surely deserves 7+
Problem is that most ppl are disapointed with anything less than 9 so in anger they give a game a 3

[tekeeee]

Thats quite less than game deserves.
Saying that game is 3/4 out of 10 is ridiculous, it is a good game, and while not best 9 or 10 it surely deserves 7+
Problem is that most ppl are disapointed with anything less than 9 so in anger they give a game a 3

Right on! I don't think I have ever seen a game with less then 9 that everyone liked, especially if it is a new developer and especially since people hated that it was made in Russia
Of course I assume they are just stupid people who should not be given any care

[asandir]

Ok let's be very clear here!

AI turns taking too long

this is one of the game breakers for me

now you mentioned computer specs, tell me where my system falls down on recommended specs: Athlon 3500+, 1 Gig RAM, 256MB x850XT video card .... all of this should give excellent performance (even if I cranked everything up), but it still runs like a dog with everything maxed, and isn't a great deal better with most everything turned down!!! Not a great selling point!

The game resembles HIII in a lot of ways, but has quite some differences too, initiative, battlefield, skill and ability system (which I actually like). The graphics certainly are better in terms of eye candy, but are less effective as well (underground anyone?) any game that requires I continually change my POV just so I can find something on the map, or even be able to move where I wish needs some serious work!

as I stated above though, the gamebreaker for me is the AI turns, I don't want to play a game where the opponents turns take significant time .... and some of the turns can take minutes to complete - Not Good!

So my initial rating (pre-patching) would have been around a 4.5 or a 5 due to crashing and buggy campaign and other things mentioned .... post-patching I would give it a 6.5 or maybe even a 7.5 if I was in an especially happy mood - because it is fun to play, if only it wasn't so irritating as well!

[Jolly Joker]

The long AI turns are a computer specific problem: I don't have them, and I play the game on a laptop.

In fact, if you want to see long AI turns, play the map Reavers of the North (great map, anyway) for H 3 on a machine that was top then - I'm not even sure it would be okay on a machine now; you'd think the game had crashed.

[asandir]

yeah .... and that's why so many people have them - so it's not a coding problem? optimisation? .... blame the user or his PC - I like it!

[Jolly Joker]

My intention was to make it clear that your rating is pc-biassed: "I rate the game this and that because it runs this and that way ON MY PC." I don't know, personally, how many people experience it. I've read it a couple of times and codes can always be optimized, but it is clear that long AI turns is NOT a universal game feature.

[asandir]

but it is a feature of THIS game, so was the bugginess and that's why I rate it that way .... I can only play it on my PC, not 10 peoples, and this is generally the same for any reviewer!

How do you want me to rate it? In my mind the game could have been great so I will give it a 9 out of 10 because it coulda been if not for the issues listed above? Rate it's potential?!

[Jolly Joker]

It's not a feature of the game. It's a feature of the combination of the game with your personal pc configuration - in other instances it might even be a feature of a certain map or script.
The bottom line is, that you cannot experience the full potential of the game, because it runs too slow to really enjoy it, and because you would just love to you are pissed and rate the game down. That means, you see a personal 9, but since something isn't allowing you to experience the 9 in a satisfactory way you hit the game.
I'm here in full agreement with Ya5Miel's post and tekeeee's last post.

[Wurtzel]

I'm in full agreement with JJ, Ya5 and Tekeee insomuch that this game is getting better with each patch/expansion.. To be fair on Nival, as I posted in a reply elsewhere, what chance have they got with all the differant hardware/os configurations to get the game to work on ALL machines Having said that, there's still no excuses for the the little blunders such as spelling errors ect. I would currently rate the game a 7.5 compared to a 5 when it was first released.

[asandir]

The bottom line is, that you cannot experience the full potential of the game, because it runs too slow to really enjoy it, and because you would just love to you are pissed and rate the game down. That means, you see a personal 9, but since something isn't allowing you to experience the 9 in a satisfactory way you hit the game

Not quite right .... my personal opinion (if we assume all is well with the world and it isn't slow or buggy or anything) then I would give it a 8, but since I do (and lots of others as well) experience these slow-downs and bugs (though I agree the bugginess is much improved with the patches) it only gets a 6.5 in my book, you can't just isolate the fact that this happens on some maps or to a set of people, IT HAPPENS, and as such it affects how I think of the game

I also don't believe that I hit the game, I am happy to stand up for it when it is unfairly bashed, but I am not going to gloss over the faults of it either

I have experienced the full potential of the game, and it is good, but it is held back by poor coding (or optimisation or whatever) bearing in mind that I suffer no issues with other newer games.

[BoardGuest808888]

Patches solve some problem, but also introduce some more. How many patches should be there before Heroes 6 ?

If every patch is supposed to increase the game rating by, say, .5, and current rating is about 7 - 7.5, then initial rating wouldn't be too far from..?

[Alamar]

That's a bit less than the game deserves!

You may be right .... I will go over my thinking as far as ratings go and where the major point deductions are.

I guess we should start at 10 of 10 and start making deductions from there.

Map Editor: Because the map editor isn't very user friendly I'm going to deduct 1 full point. Basically I see no reason why I should learn an entirely new [to me] scripting language just to make a fairly basic map. For those that would argue with this being important enough to remove a point I'll add that a good HoMM map editor is one of the critical components to making the game a long lasting favorite.

AI: The unimaginitive "bull rush" tactics / all-or-nothing AI causes the game to lose 1 point. The fact that if the initial bull rush fails the AI turtles up contributes to the 1 point lost so far. The fact that many [obvious] tweaks have been suggested but have yet to have been implemented to make the AI a better opponnent causes me to deduct another 1 full point here.

Graphics Implementation: While the graphics LOOK anywhere from very nice to stunning the graphics engine runs too slowly. So slowly in fact that a common complaint from map makers is that they can't build the maps they want because the graphics engine takes up too many resources. -1 point here.

Unresolved game bugs. AI turns often take too long [they can take 5 min to 20 min in mid to late game] thus making the game unplayable for many. I would be justified in removing 5 points for this [an unplayable single player game means as a whole an otherwise perfect game would be at best average]. However lets just remove 2 points for this. This doesn't even factor in RUNE BUGS, MP desyncs I still hear about, etc.

To summarize:
-1 for a map editor that's not user friendly
-1 for boring AI tactics [bull rush or turtle]
-1 for poor AI hero building + other easy to fix AI issues
-1 for a slow graphics engine
-2 for the AI turn duration bug making single player unplayable

This already knocks us down to a 4 of 10. Considering that a 5 of 10 game should be an average-run-of-the-mill game I think that it's fair to say that a 4 of 10 is justified.

If you look at the above though please note the game has potential to be dramatically better. Just squashing fun killing bugs and making a better AI gets HoMM potentially up to an 8 of 10 which should be a VERY good rating.

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Points of clarification:

1. If HoMM5 was launched in the state that it is now I would be tempted to give it an 8 of 10 [or better] simply because most of my problems could be fixed by patches. However I tend to grade a game that's been out a while more harshly than a new release ....

2. My grade is based ONLY on my personal experience with my personal PC. If HoMM ran PERFECTLY BUG FREE as it does on some people's PCs then I'd probably rate it at least a 6 or better for that alone.

3. For those that say a 3 or 4 is rediculous how would YOU rate a game whose single player component was virtually unplayable [on your PC] due to bugs? Lets throw in the caveat (sp?) that you play almost 100% of your games with an AI controlled faction that [due to uncorrected game bugs] leaves almost all games you play unfinishable.

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FYI: Computer specs:

AMD 3800+
4GB Ram [XP only recognizes 3GB]
NVidia 7800 GT 256MB OC
Creative Labs Audigy 1 Gamer Sound Card [driver only install]
Win XP Home SP 2 with latest updates / drivers / etc.
Fresh install of Windows with only HoMM5 on it [and NWN towards the end of HoMM's life]

[PhoenixReborn]

@ Alamar, I can see what you mean by all of your points except one. I don't think you need to know scripting to make maps. You can make a plain fight 'em all map (what I like to make and play) without special objectives or events. Do I misunderstand you?

[Alamar]

@ Alamar, I can see what you mean by all of your points except one. I don't think you need to know scripting to make maps. You can make a plain fight 'em all map (what I like to make and play) without special objectives or events. Do I misunderstand you?

I should have clarified. I've been making maps since HoMM2 and I like lots of custom objects and events in the maps that I make. If a map editor makes it annoying to do what I want to do then I may subtract because of that.

My personal map preference [for playing] is for the RPG-style maps. While I'm sure there are SOME great quality maps out in the style that I like to play there seem to be far fewer than were in HoMM2-HoMM4 so this is a contributing reason to why I subtracted 1 point because of the map editor.

[AngelEyes]

as I stated above though, the gamebreaker for me is the AI turns, I don't want to play a game where the opponents turns take significant time .... and some of the turns can take minutes to complete - Not Good!

Agreed completely. While I like the game a lot and think it has a lot of good things going for it, I can't sit around and wait 3-5 minutes per turn waiting for the AI to do something. My machine specs are similar to yours, stefan.urlus (with a bit more RAM), so I can't understand why the AI is so slow.

[Bandobras Took]

now you mentioned computer specs, tell me where my system falls down on recommended specs: Athlon 3500+, 1 Gig RAM, 256MB x850XT video card .... all of this should give excellent performance (even if I cranked everything up), but it still runs like a dog with everything maxed, and isn't a great deal better with most everything turned down!!! Not a great selling point!

The AI turns are short for me and my computer is inferior to yours in just about every respect -- a similar thing happened in NWN2 where high-end users were suffering more problems than low-end users.

Weird.

[Pol]

It's a software problem, games are tweaked on cards which existed in the time of their release. So later, here maybe imperfections....

.. even more laters new drivers can smooth that out, or playing with your card 3d acceleration settings may helps too and instantly. Hmm, or omega drivers.

offtopic* I remember with one of the fist release of Java 1.5 as I was looking on with disbelief how it's processing my vocabulary database. Word after word, each word stayed, probably for my convenience, at least 1 sec. Horrible! Today Java 1.5.x is not suffer from that problem but experince was gained. *offtopic

[Elvin]

Hmm rating something does not start with subtracting values from the top grade, with this line of thinking it could get negative But I will wholeheartedly agree that it has been disappointing in some ways.

[Alamar]

Hmm rating something does not start with subtracting values from the top grade, with this line of thinking it could get negative But I will wholeheartedly agree that it has been disappointing in some ways.

Well I think that rating based off of subtracting from a "perfect" score isn't a TERRIBLE way to go as long as you're careful.

FYI: Before I responded I thought to myself for a long time ... what would I give the game if these "xyz" things were fixed. My "best guesses" at ratings correlated very well to the subtractions that I listed.

While possibly not a good method for others to use it seems to be a good method for me ....

==========================================

I'm not sure if I made it clear but I suspect that if neither I nor anyone else were seeing BUGS or GRAPHICS SLOWDOWNS I'd probably rate the game in the neighborhood of 6-8. Points would still be taken off for the AI and Map Editor though.

==========================================

Offtopic: Is it me or are there VERY FEW highly rated, XL [or larger], Coop Multiplayer, H5 standard game, user made maps out? On several map sites I've searched in the past I would usually get 0 or maybe 1 result. Back in the H2-H4 days I had no problem finding tons of these.

[jeff]

@ Alamar, I can see what you mean by all of your points except one. I don't think you need to know scripting to make maps. You can make a plain fight 'em all map (what I like to make and play) without special objectives or events. Do I misunderstand you?

First I disagree with Alamar on one point, I feel an editor usable by the majority of the fan base is vital and anything less is a 2 - 3 point deduction. I also fall into the group that is annoyed with the H-IV improvements that were ignored; at least they brought back caravans.

Now returning to the editor, making plain fight'em maps even take much more effort than in previous editors and these are the most simplest and from my point of view most boring maps. These will not give the game near the longevity of the earlier games. The creation of campaigns and RPGs to me is a critical part of the HoMM experience.

The graphics are a vast improvement on earlier versions, but eye candy does not make a great game. While it had the potential to be a 9 or 10, and it can still achieve near a 9 with proper patching and an improved editor. Right now the best it can get in its current form may be a 6, as I found it enjoyable when played in short segments.