So is this game worth buying?

[Banedon]

Lol, sounds like MMH7 is very similar to MMH6. Looks similar, sounds similar, and even has the same problems. At least the AI sounds better? MMH6 felt like a huge chore to play since the AI never did anything but still managed to amass huge armies. Single player the game would be just grinding from one area of the map to another, and even multiplayer games didn't seem appealing for some reason ... MMH7 sounds like the same, except with longer load times

I think I'll pass.

[Panda Tar]

AI sounds better? I'm not sure of it either. People complain about it a lot as well, sometimes melee units going up and down the battlefield not targeting your shooters, or not being able to learn how to cross bridges before losing almost all stacks. The bad news is when you choose auto-combat, your troops will also be controlled by that dumb thing, and you may be surprised by the results.

Multiplayer has this simultaneous turn in which your turn freezes when the other player enters a battle and you are forced to sit and watch it. I simply cannot wrap my brain around this feature, not in a satisfactory way. You cannot see them moving on the map, but you can see their every battle.

Sometimes I think that Heroes should have a version of its own for Multiplayer purposes.

[Banedon]

Was referring to adventure map AI, not combat AI. MMH6 adventure map AI just sits in towns and never clears its zone of the map, and it sounds like MMH7 improves on that

[cjlee]

Panda Tar,

you don't happen to be from that Brazilian family with polydactyly that was in the news during the world cup, do you?



But yeah, I agree with you totally. It's not normal, and it's not acceptable, to accept a product that can barely run and say you can deliver a patch at whatever time of your choosing in the future.

MIcrosoft Office always runs on my computer. I've bought many versions over the decades. Every version has run smoothly with minimal crashes. I have never needed a patch to make that function. Granted there were always many smaller grouses with MSOffice, but these were not integral to functioning. Just like the music and the town screens are not integral to H7; even if music and town screens were poor it won't affect basic gameplay ie Ubisoft's responsibility to deliver a functioning product the minute you pay for it.

I didn't pay a cent for many of my softwares. AuraVideoEdit was free. Potplayer was free. Utorrent was free. Vuze was free. VLC was free. Irfanview was free. Except for VLC, the others have never crashed on my computer before. For VLC, maybe I get 1 crash, hang or restart every 12 hours of play. I sometimes even have to restart my computer before VLC will work again. But that's like 6 minutes wasted max every 12 hours of operation. I can live with that.

If you exclude the people for whom H7 can't even start up, I think that the average for a H7 gamer is like many hours of wasted time spent trying to make the game run, run better, or simply hours more spent waiting for loadups or reloads than the average game in the market. If the gaming industry standard is 20 seconds spent for a game to load, H7 should not take more than 30 seconds to load before we start complaining. (H3 takes 1 second to load for me on my present computer; back in 1997 it took 3-5 seconds to load on my Pentium 75MHZ.)

In years of running, VLC has not clocked up more than 1 hour wasted time for me. Anecdotally it seems that the average gamer will clock up 1 hour wasted per 4 hours of H7 operation.

I also think Ubisoft is prisoner to modern conceptions of financial success. They are once again trying to con people into buying their game within a very short time of release, and not caring if it builds a franchise, a long term reputation, that will keep people buying the game years later. This business model works for apps and stuff that has a very quick shelf life. It doesn't work for a turn based strategy game with many similarities to chess.

As much as I hate Ubisoft, if they had launched Heroes3 HD with all expansions included (come on, it's just about making better HD pictures and animations of Conflux and combo artifacts!), I would have paid for it. 18 years after H3 was launched, after I'd already paid for H3 MORE THAN TEN TIMES over by buying every single possible version, plus buying versions in Chinese and English, plus buying several copies as gifts. This is the kind of money you can make if you do a good job. I know there are still people buying Starcraft because their old CDs died.

In contrast, H6 was so crap, you need to pay me to spend my precious time playing H6.

Is this how Ubisoft wants to make its money? Fire and forget. Walk off after some bad reviews and a few half hearted patches?

[Salamandre]

If the gaming industry standard is 20 seconds spent for a game to load, H7 should not take more than 30 seconds to load before we start complaining. (H3 takes 1 second to load for me on my present computer; back in 1997 it took 3-5 seconds to load on my Pentium 75MHZ.)

Nuts. 20 seconds for a load, wtf? Those are strategy games, which means you will need a lot of reloads, at least until knowing the game, then mapmakers do awesome and challenging maps then you need again to reload a lot. For me anything above 3 seconds is "au revoir". Take for example HoMM 3 most difficult maps, like Wayfarer or Xiedu. Sometimes we need 10-20 reloads every turn. Then there are maps as Metataxer Revenge where I had to reload 50-100 times every day. As reload is instant, it barely bothers me.

Sure those are special maps, but they are also the result of creativity issued from both players design talent and game potential, so both go together. Best maps should not become a torture because technical issues. When you have a good game, you can expect challenging maps. Challenging maps means "reload a lot". 10 reloads/turn x 30 seconds, you spend 5 minutes every turn to stare at their generic screen. For me this is not playing, is suffering.

And bet it wont be 30 seconds neither. It took me 1 minute to reload on small map. Knowing their optimization ignorance, how long could we expect for giant maps, 6-10 minutes to reload?

[Steven Aus]

Previous games in the series, H1, H2, H3, and H4 eventually (and even H5 with TotE thanks to Nival's dedication under trying conditions) are worth playing, but based on the feedback so far by all sorts of people who have played H6 and H7, I would have to recommend Heroes fans NOT to buy any new games with Ubisoft as the publisher. I just don't see Ubisoft changing any time soon.

Hopefully either no new (bad) Heroes games will be released, and if we are lucky and Ubisoft dumps the M&M brand, maybe someone better will come along to take it. But I would rather have no more Heroes games released than the kind of quality Heroes has had for both H6 AND H7 - two games in a row! It was only Nival's passion for and knowledge of the Heroes series that kept H5 on the straight and narrow, and build some serious momentum with TotE (and subsequent mods improved on it). But then Ubisoft dumped Nival and made two extremely poor releases. This stuff about the anniversary of Heroes was just a cover so they could flog another poor quality game using old goodwill from different developers.

[Panda Tar]

Was referring to adventure map AI, not combat AI. MMH6 adventure map AI just sits in towns and never clears its zone of the map, and it sounds like MMH7 improves on that

Ah yes, that. Reports say that some changing from Beta to release happened. In Beta, people complained that AI wouldn't get resources around their territory either, sometimes they would disappear, or have great armies but not engage battle; and if they did, played so poorly that they could be killed with barely any effort. I gather that a behavior in this game in particular might reflect from poor battling abilities, can't say for sure. But after release, I don't know how it behaves.

Panda Tar,
you don't happen to be from that Brazilian family with polydactyly that was in the news during the world cup, do you?

Well, one of my hand fingers is crooked badly, actually. That might represent someone whose game just crashed.

@Steven Aus
Me too. "Die with some dignity", as they say. A bit dramatic, but that's a feeling we both share, amongst other people around the globe.

[cjlee]

salamandre

while I agree with you that a game should take as little time to reload as possible, especially turn based 'chess' strategy like ours where you need to try many strategies, I can also say that expectations are simply not of 'instant' or even 5 second reloads.

You're looking in retrospect, when you play an 18 year old game on a 1 year old computer.

Heroes 2 took more than 5 seconds to reload for me. H3 also took more than 5 seconds on certain maps.

Heroes 4 was much worse. I'd gotten a new computer when H4 came out, and it still took like 10 seconds to load some maps.

Heroes 5 was no better, maybe 10 seconds on a mid range gaming computer 'current' at the time it came out. It took over 10 seconds on many maps for me. The long reload times really made me much less interested in trying out new strategies and ideas for H5, and spend more time reading walkthroughs instead.

I don't like the idea of a 30 second reload time for any game. But I'm pretty sure the idiots who defend and like H7 will think 30 second or even 5 minute reload times are OK, because there are some idiots who accept garbage as gold just because it was sold to them as 99.99% pure. Unfortunately Ubisoft is going to listen to these idiots, because it is making money off them and not us. So unless we can have most gamers say, 30 second reload is NOT COOL and stand back with their dollars and not prepay for unfinished beta games, Ubisoft will forever be able to produce trash and get away with it.

Right now I'm betting that H8, H9 WILL come out. Heroes franchise will survive under Ubisoft mismanagement. The swarm of morons who paid for the beta will come back again to be conned, because that is the nature of fools.

I'm not sure how many people would have ponied up for Gottlieb Daimler's horse drawn cart called a beta Mercedes Benz in the 19th century, or the Wright Brothers' wood and paper kite aka their beta aircraft in 1900, but now that Ubisoft has made a pile of cash already from Heroes 7, who cares about bad reviews?

[Steven Aus]

It's easy to say "big bad evil company" and get carried away with that (even I did): http://celestialheavens.com/forum/11?p=359120#p359120

I think I will leave it and see what happens.

[Alannaland]

I wasted 4 hours trying to get my Dungeon campaign back on track 3/4 through the first board. Then I wised up and started enjoying some scenarios, which are not crashing on load screen. The scenario I played today was some of the best hours of gaming I've had all year. Some games I wait a year or two until they iron out the bugs, Heroes, I just don't. I loved 4, 5, 6 and 3 is fun too. 7 is worth buying if you are a mega fan who can't wait, otherwise go play something else til they patch this baby up.

[Dalai]

I expected it to score 0/100 in gameplay and 80/100 in technical. Well, I was too optimistic.

It's very satisfying to see that more and more people come to conclusion that problems are not in engine, or graphics, or spellbook. There is only one problem, but it is major - Ubisoft. The team is just incompetent. The higher in hierarchy - the more incompetent they are.

If you really-really want to play this game (why? but ok) - at least don't expect a magic patch to come out in two weeks, or a month. It will be just barely playable when it hits version 3.0. By then (it's approx. 18 month from now) you will probably have better hardware, which will help reduce waiting. The game itself will be cheaper too.

[gomaki]

Thanks for the honest reviews of the game. We're most certainly doing what we can sooner rather than later in regards to patches and fixing of things. If however you just don't enjoy the core game play mechanics, I can't speak for that.

[Dalai]

Of course you can't! For one game 4 resources are much better than 7. For next game 7 resources are much better than 4. But to be even "more better", you have to rename them. Because you care about the lore so much.

Just one of too many cases that really shows how consistent your design process is.

[crislevin]

I concur with cjlee, AI balance, small glitches, etc, they can all wait. The game's basic functions need to be sorted out (infinite loading, humongous memory leak).

I am glad you guys are working on it, TBH, i really enjoy the graphic and skill system so I hope it get fixed soon. Please, make sure it is solved in the next patch.

[cjlee]

For anyone who is wondering about buying the game, here is a very, very thorough review (40 plus minutes!). Author goes through every single aspect of the game. I was able to learn that (two tiny positives) game now spawns castle tower garrisons based on how long you've held a castle (ie no more taking over a castle after a big siege where you demolish the castle, and getting the towers to do the same damage against an opponent next turn as if you've held the castle for years and have populated the towers with your own archers), and that flanking exists in combat where if you attack an enemy troop from the back you can do more damage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74GRowG ... e=youtu.be

Author concludes that in many ways, the game is technically inferior to previous versions. EG the 3D stuff can't even match H5. Aesthetically, it is plain crap. Everything else looks incomplete and done by an underresourced team with little pride and no signs of polish or commitment. Creatures on the battle progress bar look more cartoonishly drawn than Heroes 1 on DOS. The Faceless' faces in particular look like something I was drawing as a kid when I saw Edvard Munch's The Scream and got so intrigued I spent the next day producing imitations.

I strongly agree with the author that the town build screen is remarkably ugly. You have to mouse over everything to figure out what you're building, because it all looks the same. How come they can't even repeat something that H2 got right? What's so hard about making a flowchart diagram linking pretty little pictures of dwellings? EVEN I CAN GET THIS DONE RIGHT although I have practically no knowledge of programming. Ubisoft, do you know Microsoft Powerpoint can do this?

If anyone has suggestions for another game that I can play (ie something like what Heroes of Might and Magic is supposed to be like) I'll be happy to hear it. After looking at the review, I do not believe this game can be fixed in 18 months because the fundamental issues are way too much. It is like Donald Trump's apprentice building a luxury mansion out of You-Be-Soft toilet paper rolls painted with gold paint, and betting that Donald Trump's taste is so poor that he won't notice the poor quality work. To make this 'luxury mansion' fit to live in for most normal human beings, you might as well tear down everything and rebuild. H7 is not going to be worth playing with 10GB or 500GB updates. I'm seriously thinking of Settlers of Catan as my main strategy game in future.

[gourley4p]

It's interesting how two different people can play the game and get wildly varying viewpoints. I play Heroes VII and immediately brand it as better than everything in the series except V and III at launch. I expect it to get better with time, and the return of a good map editor means I can look forward to some great user-generated content. Additionally, I think it is graphically superior to V in almost all ways. I even like the 2D town screens.

That said, I cannot--nor should anyone else--ignore the technical difficulties many customers have experienced. That is a major factor in early adoption. That must be fixed immediately.

[Dalai]

For anyone who is wondering about buying the game, here is a very, very thorough review (40 plus minutes!). Author goes through every single aspect of the game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74GRowG ... e=youtu.be

Author concludes that in many ways, the game is technically inferior to previous versions.

Great review! And it is from someone with a very positive attitude to begin with.

[Panda Tar]

Yeah, I watched that review days ago. It was the first time I did sit down and watched the game to have a final idea of how it looked like, although I decided not buying it since last year due the proposed mechanics which didn't triggered anything to me which justified trying it - very much obvious in that blog that mechanics would not get much feedback/attention when they kept releasing artwork and lore articles one after the other, only to release, already months in 2015, why they wouldn't be able to change anything from the already chosen mechanics and why they chose that philosophy.

Something they must do, almost as fast as fixing the critical bugs and crashes, is creating a tutorial map or mini-campaign, or a turn on-off help tool. As the reviewer pointed out, there's no easy way for newcomers to learn how to play this game. Now, add to that all technical issues, it's really hard to get new people to play this, even if it was working marginally a bit better, and this is considering those who would ignore the tsunami of bad reviews everywhere.

[crislevin]

I think height of HoMM is H3, height of HoMM in 3D is H5.

One major thing H7 can easily do, to approach H5 in terms of 3D UI, is to allow dragging right mice to rotate camera. It is already available with keyboard, so I can't imagine this being hard with a mice.

3D town screen would be another major thing to do, but it probably will take more effort than camera rotation with mice.

I do believe there are many things H7 did right, a more advanced 3D engine, a easier skill system, etc, but at the moment, for many people, failures in basic functions (performance, loading save, memory leak, long AI turns) are overshadowing everything else.

[mr.hackcrag]

The answer to this thread was apparent during the first beta. There was no reason to believe the game would have had a twist of fate from then until now. It is very bad.