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Sunday, October 30, 2011
Might & Magic Heroes VI Dynasty
I passed on the beta, and only recently started playing Might & Magic Heroes VI. In many respects this is very much a classic Heroes of Might & Magic games. Gameplay, strategy, and tactics work pretty much like always. And if it would just be prettier graphics and the new talent tree, I probably wouldn't even write about the game. But there is one other "modern" addition to the venerable HOMM series, and I think it is worth discussing: The Dynasty.
Normally in HOMM you start a map at level 1 and level up while you beat the map. If the map is part of a campaign, you might be able to keep your hero's level from one map to the other. Heroes VI goes one step further: You are playing the members of the Griffin dynasty, and with every map and campaign you do, you level up the dynasty as well. You gain xp, levels, and ranks for your dynasty, resulting in points which can be used to buy dynasty traits on other extras. You also find dynasty weapons, which level up too when carried by a hero and then give various bonuses.
Heroes VI has 7 campaign: A tutorial "prologue" campaign, an "epilogue" campaign at the end, and 5 parallel campaigns in the middle. At least these are supposed to be parallel. Only that by having the dynasty traits and weapons it suddenly matters very much in which order you play them. Some traits are extremely powerful, like getting 3 more creatures every week from every building. Playing a campaign late in the game with 5 traits and a fully leveled dynasty weapon will make it much easier than your first campaign where you only got 1 trait. You can even have dynasty bonuses turned on in multiplayer games.
I'm not really sure I like the idea. How do the developers balance difficulty of campaigns when they don't know what kind of dynasty bonuses players will have when they play them? And the dynasty stuff turns Heroes VI into yet another game where the more you play, the more advantages you get. That is part of the business model for online games, where in both subscription games and Free2Play games the developers want to make people play for a long time to get a maximum of money out of them. But do we really want those features in single-player games as well?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:08 AM Permanent Link
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Does the difficulty change between campaigns? Do the enemies' levels stay the same regardless of the play order? If the answer to both of them is yes, then this may be an attempt to implement variable difficulty; If the game is too easy, you can up the ante by playing the campaigns in a different order.
One of the key "benefit" of the Dynasty feature for the developer is that is limits piracy. Since Dynasty levels and weapons are inherentely an online feature (with the profile of the player being stored online), cracked versions of the game do not include them and players using cracked version find the difficulty much too high.
I'm expecting this trend of keeping part of single player games online to continue to increase in the future to fight piracy.
It doesn't adds much for players in terms of experience (except the bragging rights for those who like to show off their achievements), but it forces them to use a legitimate copy.
I'm expecting this trend of keeping part of single player games online to continue to increase in the future to fight piracy.
It doesn't adds much for players in terms of experience (except the bragging rights for those who like to show off their achievements), but it forces them to use a legitimate copy.
I was pretty excited about the prospects of playing the game but HOMM V left such a bad taste in my mouth.
I'll wait until its 50% off on Steam and then pick it up. At least, as I understand it, this version pretty much has all of the features a HOMM should have at release.
I'll wait until its 50% off on Steam and then pick it up. At least, as I understand it, this version pretty much has all of the features a HOMM should have at release.
This sounds really odd. So basically when you first start playing the game is challenging and then as it gets easier as you go? Isn't that the opposite of good game design?
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