You know I was going to talk about the expansion packs but I gave up. This is more of a rant at this point. The game is just terrible.
I did play The Gathering Storm, so I’ll talk about that for a bit first.
Remember how, before, I congratulated the developers for trying to innovate even when their company was facing bankruptcy? Well apparently I have to take that back, because when their backs were really up against the wall, they churned out the blandest and most generic material ever. The Gathering Storm has virtually no plot, and what little it does is better suited to an RPG than this. The premise is that an evil sorcerer is doing evil sorcerer stuff, and five heroes travel across the world in search of powerful artifacts that will help them defeat him. Because this is a war simulator and not an RPG, they also get thousands of innocent soldiers slaughtered along the way (probably causing a greater overall death toll than the guy they’re trying to stop), but, as always, we’re just supposed to ignore that minor detail I guess.
Gameplay-wise, at least, there are some pretty significant improvements. Steps have finally been taken towards rectifying the fact that learning spells is a crapshoot through new map locations that sell a large selection of spell scrolls that your hero can learn from. Unfortunately, though their selection is large, they don’t cover every spell in their school, so the selection is still randomized. Due to the restrictive way spell progression is handled, too, you may get a lot of high-level scrolls you can’t use. They’re still nice to have.
The expansion also seems to have taken a page from Heroes 3’s Shadow of Death. New artifacts have been introduced, but they come in “sets” where you get an additional bonus if you equip all of a certain type. (The campaign quests revolve around this.) They’re a bit underwhelming compared to Shadow of Death‘s super-artifacts, but those were ridiculously overpowered so I can understand if they wanted to scale things back a bit.
A few new creatures have also been added, but they don’t have dwelling locations so you can’t recruit them, just fight them. I think that kind of defeats the purpose…and is also another point for this game desperately wanting to be an RPG instead of a war simulator. You had a perfectly good RPG franchise, developers, why didn’t you direct your energies into that instead?
There is one thing I really liked about this expansion: the campaign heroes. They all display unique starting skill layouts that produce highly interesting combination effects, but which rarely occur organically during gameplay. One character has access to every single school of magic, two others have skills in two opposing schools of magic, and one is designed for stealth gameplay, an interesting quirk of the engine that I didn’t realize was feasible. Playing as them is incredibly fun and novel. Four out of the five heroes are magic-oriented, too! It’s like they figured out that spellcasters are more interesting to play as than fighters. The archmage character was particularly fun, since his wide variety of spells gave me a huge amount of control over almost every battle. (I suppose I have to admit that magic really does beat might for once, you just have to invest everything into it to the exclusion of everything else.)
It does get really dull after a while, unfortunately. It feels like they purposefully cranked up the difficulty level for no real reason, with lots of mechanics and events in the maps that serve only to frustrate the player. Your opponents starting with far more resources than you, for instance, or you having absolutely awful positioning that allows the enemy to outnumber and run rings around you, or your success being largely dependent on whether you get the right skills and spells, which are completely random. The special heroes are fun, but the frustration factor of the maps kind of balances that out.
Winds of War, though? I took one look at it and said “Screw it.” The plot looks to be just one long string of “kill all the other guys for fun and profit” which, no. Just no.
Instead, I’ll leave you with some final thoughts.
I said before that the series creeps me out with its disregard for life in the pursuit of a few peoples’ hero fantasies, and that’s only been cranked up to eleven here. Heroes now participate in battles directly. I should be happy about that; at least now they’re risking their own lives instead of sitting back and letting the troops do all the work, right? But it only serves to underscore everything that’s wrong with the franchise. High-level heroes are virtually unstoppable, especially if you have multiple ones in the same army. The game dotes on them obsessively, handing out special potions and equipment like party favors and giving them all sorts of special rules. They even have life and mana bars. What I want to know is, why are these people so special? Why do a select subset of soldiers get superpowers and special treatment while other troops are interchangeable and expendable? RPGs are power fantasies, but at least their weird power fantasy rules tend to be universal. Battles are single combat or between small groups of people, and even generic enemies will grow in power to match your level. There’s a semblance of equality. Here, though? I don’t even know. It’s like battle mechanics exist in two separate worlds. Heroes can shrug off blows that would fell a dragon, but can cut down dozens of troops in a single strike. How does that even work, anyway? I just cannot believe that a single person firing a single crossbow bolt or throwing a single punch can kill twenty people at once. I know the stack mechanic makes no logical sense to begin with, but there are limits to suspension of disbelief.
There are certain points in the campaigns where you can do pretty much entire maps with just two heroes or so. In fact, I actually beat the final boss of one of them with nothing but my one hero. That final boss was no pushover – he had a full army backing him, he was in a castle, he was immune to harmful spells, and he could cast Hand of Death (which would insta-kill my lone hero). I won anyway. It wasn’t even that hard.
And actually, the more that I think about it, the less it makes sense to require increasingly large amounts of experience points for every new level in this game. In RPGs, an exponential experience curve makes sense – it’s incentive to move on to the next area and fight things that are more of a challenge. But here it’s just weird. It’s sort of the same thing I complained about with the direct-damage spell formulas: the stat gains from leveling seem to be pretty much linear, yet it takes so much more effort to get to the next one. The way you get experience is just so weird, too. I’d usually go through most of the map fighting insignificantly small armies for a pittance, then have to fight my opponent’s main army, which would give me a ridiculous amount of experience. Time is all your enemy needs to amass an army, and enemy quantity is the main experience determiner here. There’s no real bearing on your own hero’s level – you can take a brand-new one, throw him into a giant army, and make him gain a half-dozen levels at once just by pitting him against another army of similar size. And that’s not even getting into the fact that there are map locations that can give you an instant level up regardless of experience cost…
And yet despite this linear power growth/exponential experience setup, high-level heroes still manage to be game-breakingly powerful. It’s probably the skills more than the stats, I will grant – I noticed my high-level fighters were pretty meh in a lot of cases, but my spellcasters (eventually) became gods. So, it looks like access to high-level spells is the gamebreaking feature here. Kind of like Dungeons & Dragons! I noticed that spell schools did tend to be pretty back-loaded in terms of effectiveness (seriously Hand of Death did they even bother to balance test that thing)…which, come to think of it, the developers probably felt was necessary given how many hoops you have to jump through to access higher-level spells in the first place. The whole thing’s just a mess.
It’s not just the mechanics, though. The stories themselves are RPG plots. They revolve around a single character or groups of characters undergoing personal trials and growth. Or just look at the plot of The Gathering Storm, which would be perfectly at home in any western RPG or D&D campaign. It’s about an honest-to-God adventuring party convening at a tavern and searching for magical artifacts that will help them defeat an evil sorcerer.
Throughout all of this, the ordinary troops, the people who are dying by the dozens for you in every battle, they are never mentioned – or if they are, only in passing at obligatory points, as if the game is reluctant to do so. Emilia is heartbroken over Tharj’s death (why couldn’t they just revive him, anyway? Resurrection of heroes is pathetically easy in-game), but the thousands of other dwarves she’s used as cannon fodder don’t even make her bat an eye. She does express a negative sentiment about commanding troops and the inevitable death involved, but only like, once, in a minor scene at the beginning of the campaign. What are the writers even trying to say here?
The story itself has just veered off in such random directions – it seems like they wanted to do a reboot, but for some reason didn’t quite follow through. They blew up the world, but they never really do anything with that – it’s mentioned in passing in a few of the original campaigns, but you’d think it would be more of a focus. These people have witnessed how the hubris of a few people and their lust for power made them nearly lose everything, yet they don’t seem to take these lessons into account. We start with a setting that’s already established, not one that had to be built up from scratch. It’s mentioned that Lysander had to go through a lot of trouble founding Palaedra and establishing some sense of order in the new world, but we never actually see it. Why couldn’t that have been the focus of his campaign, instead of that stupid inheritance crisis thing? Tarnum laments how the barbarians have gone back to warring amongst each other even though their numbers dwindled from the catastrophe, but we don’t get to see the intervening years that led to that regression. Yes, why didn’t the barbarians realize that now, more than ever, they had to band together for survival? Tawni doesn’t pirate because civilization has collapsed and most people have resorted to crime – she raids established kingdoms and areas that have already been settled. And the elves are pretty much exactly the same as they were last time, even though you’d think that one of their people playing a central role in the catastrophe would shake them up a bit. Everything is treated as if the dust has already settled and reverted to the status quo, as if we’re in an established setting. It’s as if the designers are purposefully avoiding interesting setting ideas.
And speaking of that, the fantasy elements don’t even make sense! Just like how Tharj’s death is permanent, Emilia also gets a sword through the belly during the climactic battle (due to a really stupid plot contrivance, I might add), and a big deal is made about how it severed her spine, so she’s paralyzed for life. Except there are lots of other vital organs around the stomach area, yet I guess those healed up fine? A perforated esophagus, stomach, or intestine is a major injury that requires immediate modern medical attention to survive, but apparently their magic can fix it up with no problems? And yet, it seems their super healing magic draws the line at nerve damage, because. I kind of wonder if this is that stupid thing where fantasy stories can’t actually be fantasy? They have this bizarre tendency to make themselves as similar to the real world as possible, even when they have freaking magic. That’s really the only way I can make sense of this – modern medicine can fix organ damage, but not neurological damage (at least not at the time this game was made), therefore the same must apply to healing magic here. A similar principle probably applies to Tharj’s death. Except at the same time they have an immortal guy running around with a magical artifact that can hypnotize all sentient life so I don’t even know.
The series is just a tangled, nonsensical mess at this point. I’m beginning to see why it fell through – it seems like the developers just didn’t know what to do with it anymore. Perhaps it’s a good thing that the series was finally killed and rebooted in a different setting under new management.
Honestly, what is wrong with the people who made this game? I don’t even know what they were trying to do. They purchased an RPG franchise and decided to make a war simulator spinoff instead, then decided that they wanted to go back to RPGs, but instead of making actual RPGs in the actual RPG franchise they paid actual money for, they just shoehorned their RPG plots and mechanics into their war simulator? And throughout all of it, they chose to dress everything up in creepy nobility worship and an extreme disregard for life. Lovely.
I’m sorry, I’m rambling even more than usual. Everything about this game has just left a bad taste in my mouth. The tedious, repetitive, and purposefully frustrating gameplay, the disgusting and nonsensical story elements – just, everything. I’ve been slogging through this series for months now and I’m just so tired of it all. I’ve heard good things about the next two games but there’s no way I’m going into them without a lengthy break. Right now I just hate this series and everything it stands for.
“You had a perfectly good RPG franchise, developers, why didn’t you direct your energies into that instead?”
They did. Might&Magic IX was the result. It… was not received well.
A lot of problems are rooted in the awkward transition from pseudo-3D to full 3D which makes everything in the game look fucking ugly, even by the standards of early 3D games. Glitch that caused pretty much every static object like tables, chairs, doorknobs and so on turn into a dwarf woman with a texture of the original object didn’t help.
Gameplay-wise it was nothing special, and there just wasn’t much of interesting stuff that could attract players.
Plot-wise, it was pretty typical, and the lack of connection to previous games didn’t help the matters.
I said it before, and I’ll say it again: you make some really weird distinctions. Apparently, it’s ok when nameless soldiers kill other nameless soldiers at the direction of a Plot-important Character, but when said Plot-important Character actually takes to the battlefield, THERE is where you draw the line?!
“I just cannot believe that a single person firing a single crossbow bolt or throwing a single punch can kill twenty people at once. I know the stack mechanic makes no logical sense to begin with, but there are limits to suspension of disbelief.”
There are limits, indeed. This, however, is not a valid one; this is just you disliking the game and nitpicking it to death.
“Because this is a war simulator and not an RPG, they also get thousands of innocent soldiers slaughtered along the way (probably causing a greater overall death toll than the guy they’re trying to stop)(…)”
I’m sorry, but this has gotten quite tiresome. Did you not understand the series is made of turn-based strategy games before playing it? Its entire premise is to raise an army of nameless soldiers to fight and die for a higher entity, the player! You’re not going to fight anti-war messages in those games! What you are going to find (usually) is a distinction between wars with good causes and wars without good causes. Now, if you were to offer some criticism on how the game tried to portray a specific character as being in the right and his war as just, but failed to do so, that would be entirely valid; but you can’t just criticize the entire premise when you knew what it was beforehand! That’s like complaining about how many jumps Mario has to make when Super Mario Bros. is a freaking platformer! It’s not even as if you’re being forcefully exposed to these games by the mass entertainment industry, they’re a niche series in a niche genre!
The recurring complaint is really that the games are trying to be more than turnbased strategy and failing at it. Two forces of nameless soldiers is better, because they’re equal. They both suffer losses, they face similar risks and the survivors gain similar rewards. Add in that also, one of the troops is a single powerful guy who can cut through armies, and it starts looking worse. Try to sell it as the story of a “hero” who’s really just fighting to have the stuff himself, and it falls apart entirely. Heroes and warfare don’t play nicely together.
“The recurring complaint is really that the games are trying to be more than turnbased strategy and failing at it.”
You mean, in terms of plot and storytelling? I agree, those aren’t good – well, they’re actually average in terms of video game storytelling, I’d say -, but there’s a difference between, say, criticizing Arthas’ story in “Warcraft 3” for being poorly written, and criticizing the fact your units die when playing a strategy game.
“Heroes and warfare don’t play nicely together.”
I don’t agree with that. I mean, I would love it if there wasn’t any fighting, ever, in the real world, but that’s not feasible – even if we solved ALL economic, philosophical and social issues that lead to war and crime, we would still have some violence of some sort (physical, psychological or social) because some people really are just awful (a shorthand for a variety of different adjectives: power-hungry, sadistic, careless with other people’s feelings or well-being, etc.). So, if not all wars are evil (although I understand if you disagree with that premise), why would it necessarily be evil for a heroic character (“heroic” in the modern sense of the word) to take part in one?
Besides, not all protagonists need to be heroic (again, in a modern sense). They do need to be sympathetic to some degree, but not necessarily good people. For instance, look at the two “Blood Omen” games – the protagonist, Kain, is a complete bastard, but that doesn’t detract from the story. Granted, this is entirely subjective – I myself strongly dislike Kratos, from “God of War”, while I still like Kain.
As I understand, the position expressed here is that the strategic games shouldn’t be about heroes. Their stories mean nothing when every single unit that bled and died for them could very well had its own story.
Instead, the games should be about causes that affect all, with heroes serving to highlight the story rather than define it.
For example, a unification of warring feudals is a good plot for a strategic game, I think: it is about the whole nation changing and people forging a better future for themselves rather than about a few special people resolving whatever issues they have with each other.
Now, I, personally, don’t mind “heroes” being callous towards their troops, but that’s because I am fine with reading about old schools assholes who honestly believe that being a noble or an equivalent elevates them above the masses as long as the narrative acknowledges that it’s a bad thing.
I understand why some people would be peeved about it, though.
“Instead, the games should be about causes that affect all, with heroes serving to highlight the story rather than define it. (…) rather than about a few special people resolving whatever issues they have with each other.”
Hmmm… Ok, I see the point. I don’t agree with it entirely – there’s room for both types of stories, so I don’t think a strategy game, specifically, “should” necessarily be one over the other -, but I see the point.
As I said, i am fine with either as long as the narrative acknowledges that throwing people at your personal drama is a bad thing. It’s mostly writing scenarios as if the heroes are the ones who do anything, even though their troops pay the price that is the problem.
I mean like RPG heroes vs ordinary people giving orders. I played the earlier ones where the hero hangs back and they worked a lot better. The “heroes” were sort of like officers or knights – social convention treated them differently from the troops they led, but they weren’t ubermen capable of slaughtering an army personally. Ubermen capable of slaughtering an army personally leading cannon fodder in with them anyway on their way to personal supreme power that we’re told is objectively right looks really bad.
(And yes, also the “heroes” should either have a society-based reason for why what they do is good, since it’s the society that’s suffering for this, or the story should embrace the classical hero thing and not try to sell them as actual good guys.)
They’re not true ubermen. Seriously, the OP is judging all Heroes by the standards of Dogwoggle, a specific Hero from the expansion who is armed with artifacts that simply don’t (and can’t) exist in regular games. Even a level 20 Barbarian with Grandmaster Combat, Grandmaster Melee and a variety of powerful items will still be all but helpless before a stack of level 4 units. Other Heroes will probably drop like flies.
The issue isn’t with the power of Heroes, it’s with the disparity of power between levels 1/2 units and higher-leveled ones. So yes, the same Hero above will make short work of a stack with 300 Berserkers or Halflings – but then again, so would a single Phoenix or Titan.
“(And yes, also the “heroes” should either have a society-based reason for why what they do is good, since it’s the society that’s suffering for this, or the story should embrace the classical hero thing and not try to sell them as actual good guys.)”
Well, Lysander is worried about a noble who shows up out of nowhere claiming to be from the Gryphonheart line, which should be impossible (which only highlights the stupidity of the reveal at the end, but I never claimed the game was well-written). Emilia is just trying to run things as best as she can (as she was entrusted by her people) when all of a sudden an immortal sorcerer demands she surrenders everything they built so far. Gauldoth Half-Dead is trying to build a kingdom where necromancers will be able to live in peace without being persecuted (or persecuting others). Tawni Balfour is an admitted villainess who’s trying to become the queen of the seas and also upstage the man she thinks is her father.
I can’t remember much about the Nature campaign, mostly because I found it so boring, but you can see my point, I think. :-)
Seriously, the OP is judging all Heroes by the standards of Dogwoggle
Nope, I just used Dogwoggle as a single rebuttal to a specific example. The Gathering Storm’s heroes are particularly gamebreaking but the vanilla heroes are still ubermen. You’re splitting hairs. Just because you can think of a force that can beat them doesn’t change the fact that even mid-level heroes can kill dragons with a single blow. No other single troop can do that, not level 4s and definitely not other humanoids. They are ubermen.
I’M splitting hairs? Seriously? You think it’s ok when Crono and his friends (or the party of protagonists of any other RPG, like the Baldur’s Gate or Final Fantasy series) are the only ones that can face eldritch abominations and save the world, but it’s oh-so-awful when a level 18+ Hero bearing a variety of powerful artifacts (a considerable investment in time and resources, and those artifacts aren’t even prevalent in all maps) can kill a freakin’ dragon?!
Also, I just tested what you proposed – a mid-level Hero (only I used 20th-level Heroes, so that’s actually a high-level) decked with minor and a few major artifacts against a variety of level 4 creatures -, and guess what? Sometimes the Hero won, sometimes the Hero lost, but he didn’t kill any Black Dragon, Hydra, Behemoth or Thunderbird in a single blow.
You know who actually had the best results? The Chaos Magic Hero. Grandmaster Pyromancy + Grandmaster Sorcery meant even his lowly level 1 spells dealt excellent damage, let alone his higher-level ones.
You’re complaining that heroes aren’t technically ubermen because some low-level ones can theoretically be on-par with ordinary troops. That is splitting hairs. It doesn’t mater. Heroes are clearly special in the gameplay. They get tons of gameplay mechanics reserved for them and them alone, and really we should be comparing them to tier 1s because that’s who they look like. Are you really going to argue that even level 1 heroes are not ubermen compared to the ordinary dwarves or berserkers that look exactly like them?
The Chaos Magic Hero. Grandmaster Pyromancy + Grandmaster Sorcery meant even his lowly level 1 spells dealt excellent damage, let alone his higher-level ones.
And you don’t see that as having something to do with heroes being superpowered maybe. Can a single mage or even genie deal “excellent damage” with level 1 spells? No. Why are they cannon fodder and this person gets superpowers? Why such a sharp divide in fighting styles?
You think it’s ok when Crono and his friends (or the party of protagonists of any other RPG, like the Baldur’s Gate or Final Fantasy series) are the only ones that can face eldritch abominations and save the world
I addressed this already. Quoting myself: “RPGs are power fantasies, but at least their weird power fantasy rules tend to be universal. Battles are single combat or between small groups of people, and even generic enemies will grow in power to match your level. There’s a semblance of equality.” Also, Crono didn’t carry cannon fodder in with him. That’s really my sticking point here. RPGs are single combat, whereas this expects you to bring in ordinary troops that are going to inevitably die for the hero’s personal glory quest, when the hero can easily win most battles on their own. There are a few RPGs (mostly western ones I think) that let you do that and it always struck me as weird.
“(…)and really we should be comparing them to tier 1s because that’s who they look like.”
…So it’s a matter of appearance?! You mean, if the Heroes looked like, I don’t know, giant olympian creatures, you’d be fine with them as a gameplay element?
“Also, Crono didn’t carry cannon fodder in with him. That’s really my sticking point here.”
So it’s ok when a pack of heroes can solve everything by themselves, as long as the rest of the world – all of the NPCs they have interacted with – sit peacefully at home, instead of fighting for themselves? “Out of sight, out of mind?” Like I said before, you make some weird distinctions.
Also, do try to get by with just a Hero on one of the game’s custom maps, instead of one of the campaigns. It should be an eye-opener for you.
“…So it’s a matter of appearance?! You mean, if the Heroes looked like, I don’t know, giant olympian creatures, you’d be fine with them as a gameplay element?”
The problem is that their backstories don’t justify their specialness in any way. It’s not an in-universe fact, they are just special even though they shouldn’t be much different from their troops.
Compare it to Exalted which does a pretty good job at showing what life under the reign of demigods who are objectively better than you would be like.
RPGs do have a problem where you go from a nobody to legendary warrior in a matter of months if not weeks, but at least the power disbalance is less blatant due to a lower scale fights.
Plus there isn’t much you can do with RPGs and still keep them RPGs, while with Heroes you have the old formula. They really do work better as distant generals, giving orders, busting army’s stats due to the superior doctrine, training and discipline and occasionally throwing powerful spells which are presumably rituals requiring calm concentration to prepare unlike field spellcasters’ abilities which are quick field spells.
“The problem is that their backstories don’t justify their specialness in any way. It’s not an in-universe fact, they are just special even
though they shouldn’t be much different from their troops.”
That’s true. And that is a good argument. But I honestly don’t know why that would be worse than, say, Heroes being the only ones capable of “boosting army’s stats due to the superior doctrine, training and discipline”, or “throwing powerful spells which are presumably rituals”. Either way, you have the same “überman”, the difference is that instead of killing, I don’t know, 300 level 1 units all by himself, he kills 300 level 1 units via another 50-100 level 1 units, or via a “powerful spell which is presumably a ritual”.
I get that this is an entirely subjective matter, and the OP has the right to feel that way and I should have just let this go even if I think he’s making another weird distinction. But to objectively condemn a gameplay element based solely on a personal preference? Not even as a “I don’t like this gameplay change because of the following philosophical reasons, but here’s how it works”?
“But I honestly don’t know why that would be worse than, say, Heroes being the only ones capable of “boosting army’s stats due to the superior doctrine, training and discipline”, or “throwing powerful spells which are presumably rituals”.”
With the way Heroes 1-3 work, it’s easy to imagine that they aren’t special and many of their troops would be capable of doing it more or less as well, given a chance and training, but, due to the circumstances of birth or choices made in live, they are not in charge.
Basically, I assume that heroes improve troops’ stats by virtue of being good generals. Presumably, some of their troops could be good generals as well, but not everyone could be in charge. Same for rituals: heroes are removed from the direct fight, so they have time and peace necessary for it while field casters are busy trying not to die.
“But to objectively condemn a gameplay element based solely on a personal preference?”
As a gameplay feature, it’s fine, more or less. It just feels weird because suddenly you have this special unit that doesn’t behave like your other units, which can break the suspension of disbelieve for some.
It works better in Disciples or Jagged Alliance where your troops have comparative stats to your hero/avatar.
Compare it to Exalted which does a pretty good job at showing what life under the reign of demigods who are objectively better than you would be like.
Actually I think this game does show that in the actual gameplay. In both, you can take along regular followers to net you a combat advantage, and in both, they die messy deaths in the process while you take easily healed flesh wounds and go pick up another bunch of followers for the next battle.
Yes, the difference is that Heroes seem to have done it accidentally.
…So it’s a matter of appearance?! You mean, if the Heroes looked like, I don’t know, giant olympian creatures, you’d be fine with them as a gameplay element?
I have to say, this whole conversation’s unfolding has been surreal because you keep saying this sort of thing like you’re trying to highlight the absurdity, but it’s just like, yeah, you seem to understand the crux of issue being complained about! Dragons mowing through human armies is reasonable, one guy mowing through an army of what appear to just be other guys is weird. And a guy who can mow through armies taking along an army of his own to die for fleeting tactical gain is an asshole.
I understand what you’re saying about the series kind of glossing over the loss of life in a war, but there’s a degree to which I kind of agree with SpoonyViking about this.
For one, I mean, it’s a battle simulator. It’s just the RTS genre. I guess like, Total Annihilation didn’t have that problem by virtue of everyone kind of technically being robotic, but I don’t really like RTS games for their deep examination of the laymen’s experience with the horrors of war, I like wRPGs for that. I play RTS games for the same reason I play chess: to think about strategy and battle in a technical way. The units don’t even really matter; it could be pogs and it wouldn’t make a difference. Stories are added as flavor, and sometimes units are human to give the place a feel, but sometimes they’re robots or dragons or whatever. If every five seconds I was being reminded that each individual unit had a backstory, the game would be a so, so tedious. If an RTS sold itself as a genre deconstruction that’d be different (and also really really interesting), but this doesn’t seem to be pretending to be anything it isn’t.
The second thing is… they’re not real people. This is more related to a comment you made in the HMMIII review, about you being worried about not feeling anything for the loss of life, but I forgot to bring it up then, so here we are.
Your brain knows that. Your brain knows to disengage, and to not mourn like they would a real person. That’s normal and healthy. It’s also why good characterization is such an amazing thing: to make you feel so deeply for someone who doesn’t exist is pretty damn amazing. But it doesn’t mean bad characterization (or lack of backstory) is… immoral, the way you seem to be implying.
The *not* healthy thing is what happens to me, which is the inability to distinguish and disengage. I am horribly blessed with High Sensitivity to an obnoxious degree, and I have a really, really tough time not having extreme reactions to fiction, *especially* visual storytelling. I’m very careful not to watch upsetting shows or movies, because they can trigger depressive episodes for me. It’s bad with games too, like the time one of my decisions in Fallout 3 resulted in people dying and it caused a huge anxiety episode and I couldn’t even look at my XBox for weeks without getting upset. That is not normal and if it happens to you a lot I highly recommend seeing someone to talk about it (edit: not being facetious here at all), because the statistically normal reaction to sad stories is actually to feel better about your life afterward, not to mourn like a real person died.
My point is that it’s okay to come away from a game not caring about every minor character involved. It’s certainly not a reflection on the writers’ feelings on war or moral standing or something. In fact being able to put a game down and just forget about it is literally the healthiest thing.
Hell, I honestly don’t even remember the story of Total Annihilation aside for vague overall stuff (I bring this game up again because it was one of those genre-definers), but it is to this day one of my favorite games of all time for the mechanics, feel, and (at the time of its release) technology. If it had a great story or a terrible one has literally no bearing on its status as an iconic RTS game; that’s just not the thrust of the genre. God knows it didn’t have any memorable characters. I don’t even remember if it had recurring non-unit characters.
It’s pretty clear from your reviews that this game had some serious issues with the actual things that one *would* look for in an RTS, and an RTS with a crazy-good story and characters would certainly set it apart, but then it’d probably just turn into an RPG. Trying to analyze an RTS from an RPG viewpoint and then, further, extrapolating some kind of moral reflection on yourself and the dev team from that is just incredibly bizarre.
The unique beauty of video games is that, unlike every other form of storytelling, they allow for subgenres in which the story literally does not matter and can still create a narrative that’s pretty awesome and even revolutionary.
Now I just want to play Total A again…
Anxiety health etc.
Oh, no, it’s not like that (and I’m sorry you have to go through that). I feel more…frustrated and tired, honestly. The one that really disturbed me was Heroes 3, and that was because the interactivity made me feel complicit. By Heroes 4 I was kind of numb to it.
And… Yeah, I probably have been a bit harsh due to my perceptions. I’m not very familiar with strategy games, and so I couldn’t shake my typical approach of looking at this through an RPG/story lens, which is usually how I function. (Though in my defense, I was introduced to this because of its RPG concepts and that was what interested me.) I actually did hold off on posting these for a while so I could calm down and be more rational (note the massive time gap compared to the ones between the first three games), but I probably should have waited longer.
But, well, I think Farla brought this up in a comment on another part of this, but this doesn’t read like a strategy game. Correct me if I’m wrong, but most strategy games tend to be pretty plotless, or have general plots focusing on entire nations or indirect rulers. That’s totally legitimate. The first game was actually like that, and it was fine. These stories don’t do that, though. They’re RPG stories about individual heroes and philosophical stuff like morality and free will, and that’s incredibly incongruous and lacking in self-awareness. You say it’s unfair to judge a TBS as if it’s an RPG, but it clearly wants to be an RPG, in both gameplay and story, so I don’t think my critique is totally unwarranted. (I suppose it would have been a better idea to just cerebrally point out that that was a terrible decision and why instead of harping on it and getting all emotional, but hindsight is 20/20 and such.)
I mean, looking back on it, I highly doubt that the developers were purposefully trying to espouse a disregard for life and that individuals are all that matter in wars, yes. I think that can be attributed to incompetence and tone-deafness. But it still bothered me, and the RPG imagery contributed a great deal to that. If it took the more traditional approach of the first game I doubt I’d care, and to be honest I probably would have lost interest and walked away from the series long before I got here.
Regardless, I will definitely only move on to Heroes 5 when (or if) I manage to sort out my feelings and cool off quite a bit. That will probably not be for a while, if ever.
Look, to be perfectly honest, I was being a bit hypocritical. I DO get caring for the story even in a video game that purports to be mindless fun; I mean, I love hack’n’slash games (I still replay the “Golden Axe” series somewhat frequently), but I strongly dislike the “God of War” series (despite its awesome gameplay) because Kratos is such a hateful character, especially in the sequels. I also criticize “Castlevania – Symphony of the Night” for its shallow handling of the characters and for completely overturning the ending of the previous game AND common sense, all in order to justify having Alucard as the protagonist instead of a Belmont (although the game is still fun, if a tad too easy).
But I do think you let your expectations and arbitrary distinctions colour the review of the HoMM series too strongly. I mean, why is it ok for an NPC in an RPG to stay at home going “Welcome to Corneria!” all day while the PCs save the world all by themselves, while it’s monstrous for soldier units to fight and die alongside hero units? Or, it’s awful that a high-level Hero equipped with artifacts of world-shattering power (which are only available in the expansion single-player campaigns, not the ones in the base game) can kill 100 soldiers all by himself, but then you complain about how direct-damage spells are weak – how a sorcerer CAN’T kill 100 soldiers all by himself with a single spell.
Gotta agree with Viking on wargames front too. The whole point of the genre is to mass armies to fight other massed armies with tactics and strategerizing, this might as well have been a rant about Mortal Kombat guys still being selectable after they got fatalitied last match.
Heroes getting personally on the field is an experimental design move that wasn’t executed well. Stories and setting have problems in theme and execution, true, but all that stuff is window dressing. Street Fighter also has a massively large backstory and it’s %95 stupid crap but nobody cares because that’s not the point.
If you were examining JUST the story/setting of Heroes franchise, then yes, there’s all the shitty nobility worship, cartoon villains cartooning it up, filler plots, contrivances, etc (even then you’re going overboard with the hatin’). But nope. You’re supposed to be reviewing the whole thing, not just the packaging. You focused on one (mostly unimportant) aspect of the series and then got carried away.