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It's interesting that they don't really start off the game with a tutorial level or anything. It's right off into a four-way fight with access to your faction's ultimate units and everything. In most strategy games, you'd only have had your tier 1 and tier 2 units for a brief attack on a single enemy castle or something.
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# ? May 13, 2015 14:50 |
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# ? Apr 25, 2024 16:34 |
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In Heroes II it really was a different time. Rarely games actually had tutorials and in this case the campaign was more about making you acquainted with the game as a whole and then it started throwing you in different situations. Like a very small map with 3 allied enemies, a race to get the ultimate artifact, maps where you start without castles, to maps that pitch you against much more powerful opponents and heroes. Heroes III was already at a time of tutorials and it begins much simpler, giving you access to bigger toys at a slower pace and limiting your growth, but it also introduced persistent heroes so that the campaign as a whole felt more involved. But in the end I'd rather just get thrown into the action head-first without artificial barriers and leave the teaching to proper tutorials.
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# ? May 13, 2015 15:19 |
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I'm glad that you guys chose HOM&M II, since that's the only game in the series I never actually played. And I even played the fifth one! I think I might get it from GoG, I heard they have it now for cheap.
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# ? May 13, 2015 15:20 |
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Disco Infiva posted:I'm glad that you guys chose HOM&M II, since that's the only game in the series I never actually played. And I even played the fifth one! You just missed it on Humblebundle, but GOG deserves the extra $2-3!
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# ? May 13, 2015 15:44 |
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The_PC_Snob posted:In Heroes II it really was a different time. Rarely games actually had tutorials and in this case the campaign was more about making you acquainted with the game as a whole and then it started throwing you in different situations. Like a very small map with 3 allied enemies, a race to get the ultimate artifact, maps where you start without castles, to maps that pitch you against much more powerful opponents and heroes. There I a tutorial save, but even that allows you to go wild if you want to. It just starts off really really slow. Rangers and Ogres are probably the two best upgrades in the game bang for buck wise. As much as I like titans they're also quite expensive for what they offer when you compare them to the other strongest unit in the game.
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# ? May 13, 2015 16:28 |
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It's a bit weird to read about the misadventures of Evil Sandro considering how relatively benign he was in his first appearance in Darkside of Xeen, where he wanted you to bring him his heart so that he could finally die. Sure, he tried to kill you every time you talked to him, but he felt real bad about it afterward.
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# ? May 13, 2015 22:20 |
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Seyser Koze posted:It's a bit weird to read about the misadventures of Evil Sandro considering how relatively benign he was in his first appearance in Darkside of Xeen, where he wanted you to bring him his heart so that he could finally die. Yeah, well, another Sandro. I really like the way the series borrows names and locations from itself, that's the main reason I wasn't really bothered by Ubi making a new setting for the game. They can't keep me from placing Ashan in the Spinward Rim (and as of Might & Magic X, they seem to agree with me) and the series was at first a romp from planet to planet to figure what was wrong and save the day. Heroes then borrowed heavily from certain themes, creatures and characters from the M&M series, but mostly they're their own thing, not the same characters. Whenever possible I'll reference back to the M&M roots of characters. Rialdo of course is very unlikely to be the same Ranger from XEEN, but the original Zam and Zom were vague enough that there's nothing keeping them from being the same characters in both Secret of the Inner Sanctum and Heroes II.
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# ? May 14, 2015 00:02 |
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The only games that are really connected are M&M 6 - Heroes 3 - M&M 7 - M&M 8, who follow each other chronologically in this order.
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# ? May 14, 2015 14:00 |
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Torrannor posted:The only games that are really connected are M&M 6 - Heroes 3 - M&M 7 - M&M 8, who follow each other chronologically in this order. What happened to Heroes 2, and to a lesser extent, M&M3? The stuff happening in Heroes 2 is heavily referenced in M&M6.
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# ? May 14, 2015 14:04 |
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Torrannor posted:The only games that are really connected are M&M 6 - Heroes 3 - M&M 7 - M&M 8, who follow each other chronologically in this order. You're forgetting Heroes II there, M&M 6 follows RIGHT where Heroes II left off (well, a decade or so after, but still), while Heroes II is explicitly a couple of decades after Heroes I. Also, Heroes IV does follow M&M 8 and Heroes Chronicles. It is a direct consequence of Gelu keeping the Armageddon Blade instead of going for a quest to chuck it into the heart of a Star like they did with the One Ring (that's what they did in the Lord of the Rings, right? Well, that's how they'd do it in Might & Magic), then M&M IX follows right where Heroes IV left off (if you believe the mythical whispers spread far and wide in back alleys about that game, but no-one can say for certain). Finally, it is hard to pin-point the chronology of M&M I-V, but III leads directly to M&M VI (EDIT: WRONG, it is VII, my bad) and it's events. It is unknown how much time there is between III and IV, but VI (VII again) is a few decades after III (since the party from III is already fairly old by then). The_PC_Snob fucked around with this message at 14:46 on May 14, 2015 |
# ? May 14, 2015 14:10 |
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The_PC_Snob posted:You're forgetting Heroes II there, M&M 6 follows RIGHT where Heroes II left off (well, a decade or so after, but still), while Heroes II is explicitly a couple of decades after Heroes I. King Morglin from Heroes 1 is also mentioned in MM7 at least twice.
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# ? May 14, 2015 14:13 |
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The_PC_Snob posted:You're forgetting Heroes II there, M&M 6 follows RIGHT where Heroes II left off (well, a decade or so after, but still), while Heroes II is explicitly a couple of decades after Heroes I. Yeah, I somehow forgot to set Heroes 2 at the very start of the list like I wanted to . As for the others, I always thought that non-disk XEEN wasn't Erathia, is that wrong? I never played M&M 9 so I can't comment on that. I also forgot about Heroes 4, but the only real connection back to the Erathia games is the presence of Gavin Magnus and his jinn, if I recall correctly. It's otherwise a completely fresh start.
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# ? May 14, 2015 14:26 |
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Torrannor posted:Yeah, I somehow forgot to set Heroes 2 at the very start of the list like I wanted to . As for the others, I always thought that non-disk XEEN wasn't Erathia, is that wrong? The standard party from MM3 is what the main plot revolves around in MM7. MM3 still takes place on Terra, not Colony/Enroth. Spaceships allow for convoluted storytelling! A few Heroes 4 stock campaigns are about Enrothian survivors, like the Haven campaign that has an Ironfist pretender trying to claim the new throne or the Stronghold one with Tarnum and his foster son trying to bring the clans together. THE BAR fucked around with this message at 14:35 on May 14, 2015 |
# ? May 14, 2015 14:32 |
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THE BAR posted:Spaceships allow for convoluted storytelling! I see three main plot threads here that touch the RPGs. (I've played MM1-8, but haven't seriously played any of the Heroes games.)
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# ? May 14, 2015 23:32 |
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ManxomeBromide posted:I see three main plot threads here that touch the RPGs. (I've played MM1-8, but haven't seriously played any of the Heroes games.)
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# ? May 14, 2015 23:45 |
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ManxomeBromide posted:I see three main plot threads here that touch the RPGs. (I've played MM1-8, but haven't seriously played any of the Heroes games.) The Kreegan are a major plot-point in Heroes III. Where they fall on Erathia and start off a new faction. Supposedly the Ancients intervene by joining the Erathians and the Castle faction as Angels to curb the Kreegan invasion. The Kreegan's are ultimately kind of defeated in the Armageddon's Blade expansion. And yeah, as AradoBalanga said, the Kreegan are really terrible as a faction, completely taking their bite away as a threat. They have only one good creature, the Efreet, everyone else is badly outclassed. The_PC_Snob fucked around with this message at 01:18 on May 15, 2015 |
# ? May 15, 2015 01:13 |
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The_PC_Snob posted:The Kreegan are a major plot-point in Heroes III. Where they fall on Erathia and start off a new faction. Supposedly the Ancients intervene by joining the Erathians and the Castle faction as Angels to curb the Kreegan invasion. The Kreegan's are ultimately kind of defeated in the Armageddon's Blade expansion.
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# ? May 15, 2015 01:45 |
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AradoBalanga posted:The Kreegans are the Inferno faction in Heroes 3, aka one of that game's worst factions to play with. And no, any of the information about them from the M&M games never gets brought up in the Heroes games. So, to people who only played the Heroes games (like me, until I read more about the lore online), you'd just think the Kreegans were a cult of devils and demons invading from another plane of existence and not aliens invading the planet Enroth. They hid that fact by giving Inferno towns a handful of human heroes (roughly 4 Demoniacs and 2 Heretics) to make you think they were just a faction of demons with humans having been converted to their dark cause. I think the original intention was to make the alien reveal along with the Forge town in Armageddon's Blade, but the fan result was so negative that they decided to keep the Heroes series pure fantasy. And yeah, the Inferno was terrible. That said, even if their Grail structure sucked it was also hilarious to use. Chronology-wise, Might and Magic is almost as bad as the Legend of Zelda series. It's pretty simple up until Heroes 3, but once the expansions and Chronicles started showing up, the timeline got messy.
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# ? May 15, 2015 02:07 |
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AradoBalanga posted:The only usefulness I ever found in an Inferno town was the Order of Fire structure, which gave a permanent +1 to spell power to a visiting hero. After that, Inferno towns have almost no useful units (Efreet are debatable, in my opinion) and the most laughably useless Grail structure in the game. I avoid the Inferno faction like a goddamn plague. Actually, what I found most useful about inferno was their gate, but it requires at least a second inferno castle to be of any use... As for Efreets, they are a unit everyone dreads fighting against. They have the most painful retaliation of the game and are too fast to be dealt from range alone. I once had the misfortune of losing a third of a large stack of Dread Knights with a lucky deadly strike against a stack of something like 5 Efreet. Though to be fair their Tier 7 upgrade is a huge upgrade that almost turns it into a different unit altogether, almost gaining a new tier on its own (but since the unupgraded Devils are so weak they're closer to Tier 6...). Certainly defeats some of the weaker T7 and is ridiculously fast, giving Inferno the chance to act first most of the time (except against Archangels, of course)... but the Inferno magic hero is one of the worst in the game (winning only over the Battle Mage from the Stronghold if memory serves) so that chance to act first doesn't really give them much of an edge and the rest of the creatures provide absolutely no support for the Archdevil (except for the Efreet, but the Efreet can hold its own just fine), so it usually just gets chopped down if it advanced too much.
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# ? May 15, 2015 04:40 |
Astrologers declare Month of the Imp, now and forever.
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# ? May 15, 2015 06:28 |
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Yea the grail structures like most things in heroes weren't the most balanced things in the world. Would you rather reveal the entire map (after you explored enough of it to find the grail in the fist place) or do you want +2 luck on all your heroes. Do you want to double the production of your (worst in the game) tier 1 unit, or do you want to get a free (stacking) expert necromancy effect on all your Heroes. The only real balancing factor was that the grail gave a poo poo-ton of gold and extra creature growth regardless of faction so it often didn't matter if your faction specific bonus was shi,t as non of them were game breaking. At least until the expansion came out and the new town got 'learn every spell in the game' as its grail special.
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# ? May 15, 2015 07:03 |
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Wasn't the conflux one something insane like "why don't we just give you every spell in the game?"
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# ? May 15, 2015 08:21 |
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Yes it was. Conflux period were just brutally overpowered.
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# ? May 15, 2015 17:32 |
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what with their reviving Phoenixes
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# ? May 15, 2015 17:40 |
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Let's not forget guaranteed access to the best magic secondary skills in the game, tier 2 and 3 units with the stats of a tier 4, oh and 3/7 of their units are fire immune so they can take the warlock's 'spam Armageddon on everything strategy and one up it by keeping half their army with them. Man I loved playing as those basterds. Vorpal Cat fucked around with this message at 18:52 on May 15, 2015 |
# ? May 15, 2015 18:49 |
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Aces High posted:what with their reviving Phoenixes It was less about their units and more about their secondary buildings and, as mentioned, ridiculous synergy with fire spells. That said, Conflux is probably the only town I would ever use fire spells with, as I find them horribly inadequate compared to earth's destructive prowess and utility. Regarding the Kreegan continuity, you do murder Xenofex, one of the main characters in Heroes 3, in MM7, clear out one of the old Baa temples they used as a front and.. ..This I find humorous, having played WoW back in its heyday, but is a major spoiler for MM8 - The main villain from MM8 is a construct made by the Ancients (the guys behind all life, more or less, and main opposition against the Kreegans), who sets out to destroy the world of Enroth, as the Kreegan infestation has been deemed uncontrollable. The protagonists of MM8 reasons that the kingdoms can deal with the Kreegans themselves, which the construct finally agrees upon after losing to the protagonists. This entire plot, with the Kreegans and Ancients renamed to Old Ones and, well, Ancients, was stolen wholesale by Blizzard during the second expansion to WoW's boss Algalon, which no one seemed to pick up on for some reason.
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# ? May 15, 2015 18:55 |
THE BAR posted:..This I find humorous, having played WoW back in its heyday, but is a major spoiler for MM8 - The main villain from MM8 is a construct made by the Ancients (the guys behind all life, more or less, and main opposition against the Kreegans), who sets out to destroy the world of Enroth, as the Kreegan infestation has been deemed uncontrollable. The protagonists of MM8 reasons that the kingdoms can deal with the Kreegans themselves, which the construct finally agrees upon after losing to the protagonists. This entire plot, with the Kreegans and Ancients renamed to Old Ones and, well, Ancients, was stolen wholesale by Blizzard during the second expansion to WoW's boss Algalon, which no one seemed to pick up on for some reason. I have always found Blizzard to be a font of creativity and originality.
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# ? May 15, 2015 19:16 |
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Neurion posted:I have always found Blizzard to be a font of creativity and originality. Yeah, Blizzard has a long and well-documented history of ripping off Games Workshop. To be fair, at first they wanted Warcraft to be a Warhammer game, but Games Workshop flat-out backed out of the deal so Blizzard was forced to use the assets they already had and pretty much just rename all of them. Everything after that is less defensible, though. Starcraft was Warhammer 40K through and through and when Games Workshop complained Blizzard just flipped them the bird. Warcraft III, admittedly my all-time-favorite Blizzard title, not only ripped itself off (Blight is the same as creep, the Undead summon their buildings, the Night Elves sacrifice their builders...) but it also ripped Might & Magic lore in some big and noticeable ways. Then World of Warcraft ripped off Everquest almost directly (and it was originally planned to rip-off Dark Ages of Camelot as well, but they ultimately ended up taking their sweet time to finally implement a PvP that wasn't complete poo poo). Also, Diablo is a direct rip-off of Ultima, except with good gameplay. Blizzard pretty much has banked on a business strategy of copying something and tacking in just enough diferences to give it plausible deniability and then "improving" it. Granted, they at least made great games out of this model... until EA stepped in, at least. Then they changed their agenda from "ripping off but making good games" to just plain "ripping off and milking it for all it is worth".
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# ? May 15, 2015 19:39 |
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Terrible Opinions posted:Yes it was. Conflux period were just brutally overpowered.
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# ? May 15, 2015 19:44 |
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Yeah I'm not suggesting they were intentionally made more powerful than the other factions but the end result is still a town unsuitable for fair multiplayer. I also have no idea why people would dislike the forge and it's a shame that it wasn't included.
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# ? May 15, 2015 19:53 |
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The Conflux campaign with Tarnum was also one of the best campaigns in the game.
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# ? May 15, 2015 19:57 |
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The_PC_Snob posted:Yeah, Blizzard has a long and well-documented history of ripping off Games Workshop. To be fair, at first they wanted Warcraft to be a Warhammer game, but Games Workshop flat-out backed out of the deal so Blizzard was forced to use the assets they already had and pretty much just rename all of them. It's less about them ripping off other popular stuff, which is one of their main strengths as a game developer, but copying the plotline from Might and Magic, and one of the least played titles at that? Torrannor posted:The Conflux campaign with Tarnum was also one of the best campaigns in the game. The standalone Heroes 3 campaign packs all featured Tarnum, and all were excellent.
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# ? May 15, 2015 20:06 |
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The_PC_Snob posted:Everything after that is less defensible, though. Starcraft was Warhammer 40K through and through and when Games Workshop complained Blizzard just flipped them the bird. While I will agree that Blizzard makes rather bland unoriginal games this is one of the stupid claims bandied around a lot that doesn't have a huge amount of truth to it. GW copied the aesthetics of Starcraft after it was successful not the other way around. When Starcraft came out this is what the tyranids looked like. Starcraft did look like that during the alpha. However by the time the actual game came out the zerg were revised and made their own substantially different race, and the Protoss were about as close to original as Blizzard ever got. Though there is no getting around the fact that the Terran were assembled from ripping off Wing Commander and Battletech in equal measure. I assume the Terran marines were taken from Battletech because they resemble that franchise's power armor illustrations much more closely than they do 40k's and various other units like the goliath resemble Battletech designs very closely.
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# ? May 15, 2015 20:09 |
Terrible Opinions posted:Starcraft did look like that during the alpha. Goddamn those colors
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# ? May 15, 2015 20:13 |
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THE BAR posted:..This I find humorous, having played WoW back in its heyday, but is a major spoiler for MM8 - The main villain from MM8 is a construct made by the Ancients (the guys behind all life, more or less, and main opposition against the Kreegans), who sets out to destroy the world of Enroth, as the Kreegan infestation has been deemed uncontrollable. The protagonists of MM8 reasons that the kingdoms can deal with the Kreegans themselves, which the construct finally agrees upon after losing to the protagonists. This entire plot, with the Kreegans and Ancients renamed to Old Ones and, well, Ancients, was stolen wholesale by Blizzard during the second expansion to WoW's boss Algalon, which no one seemed to pick up on for some reason. To be fair, it might not be MM8 they were ripping off. Plots along the lines of "enlightened" elder race think they know what's best for some younger race(usually humanity), often involving their subjugation or destruction because they're violated some dearly-held tenet of the highly conservative Ancient Aliens, the younger race refuses to accept this judgment and fights back, showing that human principles are the best after all, either winning over or destroying the elder race and also whatever the threat is/was are kind of a dime a dozen. Hell, you might as well accuse both of ripping off TTGL or something. Not to call Blizzard original, I just think that in THIS case I think it's probably not MM8 they were ripping off. Unless there are more similarities.
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# ? May 15, 2015 20:28 |
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Terrible Opinions posted:However by the time the actual game came out the zerg were revised and made their own substantially different race, and the Protoss were about as close to original as Blizzard ever got. Though there is no getting around the fact that the Terran were assembled from ripping off Wing Commander and Battletech in equal measure. I assume the Terran marines were taken from Battletech because they resemble that franchise's power armor illustrations much more closely than they do 40k's and various other units like the goliath resemble Battletech designs very closely. The Protoss were pretty much the Eldar, as far as I can tell (even up to the fact they believe themselves to be individually more important than whole populations of Humans), as for the Zergs... their entire modus operandi and faction ideology is Tyranid, all I talked about goes way beyond just design. Humans themselves live in a totalitarian all-powerful government where the chief-of-state has absolute power and psychics are harvested for government use... doesn't that sound even slightly similar to the Empire of 40K? Yes, Games Workshop ripped off the zergs after the zergs ripped off the tyranids, that doesn't cancel out the original rip-off. quote:It's less about them ripping off other popular stuff, which is one of their main strengths as a game developer, but copying the plotline from Might and Magic, and one of the least played titles at that? Like I said, the lore "borrowing" from Might & Magic goes way beyond and much far back than Algalon alone. It started in Warcraft III. When I played that game I kept thinking to myself that the story was very familiar. In World of Warcraft it became much less subtle when the Burning Crusade was released. It was Kreegan invasion all over again and sci-fi elements became more overt. Might & Magic is more influent than people give credit among PC developers. quote:To be fair, it might not be MM8 they were ripping off. Plots along the lines of "enlightened" elder race think they know what's best for some younger race(usually humanity), often involving their subjugation or destruction because they're violated some dearly-held tenet of the highly conservative Ancient Aliens, the younger race refuses to accept this judgment and fights back, showing that human principles are the best after all, either winning over or destroying the elder race and also whatever the threat is/was are kind of a dime a dozen. Hell, you might as well accuse both of ripping off TTGL or something. Might & Magic had the gall to say that Escaton was right after all and they ended up nearly destroying themselves without any help from the Kreegan. The_PC_Snob fucked around with this message at 20:36 on May 15, 2015 |
# ? May 15, 2015 20:32 |
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The_PC_Snob posted:The Protoss were pretty much the Eldar, as far as I can tell (even up to the fact they believe themselves to be individually more important than whole populations of Humans), as for the Zergs... their entire modus operandi and faction ideology is Tyranid, all I talked about goes way beyond just design. Humans themselves live in a totalitarian all-powerful government where the chief-of-state has absolute power and psychics are harvested for government use... doesn't that sound even slightly similar to the Empire of 40K? The Protoss connection is really rather weak to the eldar. Both are a shiny ancient race, but those are and were back then a dime a dozen in scifi. They also don't think of themselves individually as more important than human populations, because the whole point of Protoss society is that the individual isn't important at all. Killing zerg is more important that the lives of humans or any individual Protoss. The whole reason for the dark templar split was some Protoss wanting to be individuals rather than constantly connected to a big old psychic computer. Which come to think of it kinda makes them sound like a Vulcan/Romulan rip off. As for zerg and humans the I'd say it just comes down to ripoffs of more popular media than GW being way more likely the primary sources of inspiration. Things like aliens, battletech, and judge dredd were a lot more popular than warhammer at the time and had far more direct visual similarities to Starcraft stuff. edit: I'm not saying Blizzard is innocent of ripping people off. I'm just pointing out that they're ripping other people off, most often the same sort of people GW was taking ideas from originally.
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# ? May 15, 2015 21:00 |
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The_PC_Snob posted:Might & Magic had the gall to say that Escaton was right after all and they ended up nearly destroying themselves without any help from the Kreegan. If you haven't played Heroes III, Escaton is executing a severely faulty program. Escaton is blowing up Enroth to keep the Kreegan from spreading, but you wiped out their Hive Queen in VI. I'd forgotten about Zenofex being present in VII, actually, but that's enough to prove they didn't complete the job there. However, Escaton actually says outright when you confront him in 8 that he couldn't detect any Kreegan on the Planet! He gives you the key to ending the destruction of the world after an elliptical conversation and does so because "he cannot prove that you know what to do with it." Without Heroes III making them a relevant force again, the world of Enroth is unnecessary collateral damage.This isn't even Algalon's "we can handle the invasion"; the run of the RPGs makes it look more like "we had already handled the invasion by the time you showed up, and you know it. No wonder he doesn't directly oppose you - he's deliberately playing to lose. ... now that I'm typing that out, that's interesting. Escaton is kind of the opposite of Sheltem. Sheltem destroyed worlds as part of going rogue, and enjoyed it. Escaton was destroying worlds on the direct orders of the Ancients, and he didn't want to, but he remained bound by the directives of the Ancients. His final line to his keeper robot thing - "Tell the Ancients that I failed" - could mean "the Jadamians stopped me", or it could mean "the anti-Kreegan strategy that I embody doesn't work after all". In other news, I beat M&M8 for the first time last night. ManxomeBromide fucked around with this message at 21:31 on May 15, 2015 |
# ? May 15, 2015 21:22 |
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ManxomeBromide posted:In other news, I beat M&M8 for the first time last night. I've only ever beaten it once, so some of the details were lost on me. Back to Heroes 2, I'm always at a bit of a dilemma with Heroes 2 through 4. 3 is arguably the most well crafted, with 4 having a, to me, fun RPG side to it, but Heroes 2 is the hands down prettiest of the three. So much craft has been put into every animation, and it all comes down much more organic than 3's amalgamation of 3D rendered models and 2D backgrounds. I've been told that "painterly" is a word that describes 2's style? I would personally just say that it's just pixel-based spritework done perfectly. So much good stuff has come out of putting small squares next to each other, it's crazy to me considering the SVGA limits they had. The dilemma being which is the better. It's 2 or 3, obviously, but is it 3 for its refined gameplay or 2 for its overwhelming charm? Logic would dictate that gameplay trumps anything, but.. It's not easy, really!
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# ? May 15, 2015 21:37 |
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# ? Apr 25, 2024 16:34 |
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Neurion posted:Goddamn those colors
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# ? May 15, 2015 21:53 |