Flavour | Forums

[Darkdewd86]

Why do designers of modern computer games allways forget to increase the "feel" of a game by adding some simple flavouring. A small comparision to things heroes III had and V doesn't:

-Short movies when a battle was finished (with music).
-Highscores
-A map on which you could see the different scenarios. We don't ever get to see what Ashan looks like.
-A short story when one of your heroes encountered a building or artifact (now it just flings "artifact found")
-A good looking campaign menu (again with music)
-Briefings at the start of each map. They replaced them with cinematics, which are a bit lame sometimes.

It is such a pity. They made such a good-looking game but they forgot about the details.

[glenn_d42]

i agree .. building a hero, playing a story (preferably one with many possible outcomes), and finding the artifact that will make you a 'god' .. i think are the 3 main reasons why we all like the heroes game in the first place ..

[Voodoo64]

You're right, this is sadly a fact in almost every modern video game. I think it stems from developers being pushed by publishers to make a game that will get the most sales in the least amount of time, this means make the game LOOK awesome first.

If you go around in Heroes V you should easily be able to see that graphics were the primary focus of the entire game. To see this, look at the attention for detail in things you won't regularly see unless you zoom almost all the way in. You can see it in that the user interface is broken apart to allow more view of the graphics. The unit stat screen is broken up into several tabs so they can have a half-screen close-up 3D image of the unit. The town screens are less accessible without clicking on building icons, you would have to scroll around the build screen to find a building. The battle screens look good, but are less functional because of the camera (and you can't return to default view), castle seiges are a problem because the walls and the center tower get in the way of units.

The next focus was on the story of the game, this is seen in that the campaigns don't really teach you each race correctly. They often have you using different towns for a lot of the missions. Each campaign is actually named for the hero you use in the story, and not the faction you are using as a whole. Thus the focus on story. What this means is that while everything is there, you really won't get to use them until scenario maps.

Then it appears as if everything to do with gameplay was attempted to be fit in at the end, with time running out and not all of it being able to be implemented.

It would really be better if developers would be allowed to go back to making a game based off of a gameplay idea first, make the gameplay work seemlessly and functionally, then story,then focus on atmosphere/style/ambience, then graphics.

I've made a few posts since I had the game and it appears that most of them have been ignored, they mostly have to do with little things that were in the other Heroes games. Things like the building structure animation being strange, no preset camera angles on map or battles, the ambient sound being camera based instead of hero based (thus very quiet unless you are zoomed in).

[Campaigner_1st]

It's funny most people think like the last poster do but still games focus on graphics
Think that shows what sells and what doesn't.

You have to go to independent gamecompanies to get what you crave for. (Illwinter and Stardock).