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Itt kiderül pár dolog pl a modellek újrahasznosítása kapcsán, az art design a költségvetési bajok, a döntési nehézségek kapcsán, a Heroes eladási számainak csökkenése kapcsán. A hős kezdő bónuszokról is szó esik. S kiderült pl hogy a H6-jól fogyott csak nem lett sokkal nyereségesebb a nullszaldónál. Hisz a játékok költségei 20 év óta megnőttek. H3 sokkal olcsóbb volt és kevesebben vették meg mint H6 ot pl furamód.
Assassins Creed sorozat egyes részei 10-szer jobban fogynak mint a Heroes részek. Így több pénzt adnak is a fejlesztésre (bár ez ne mindig látszik a Unityt még nem játszottam de a többinél is volt pár gyenge rész pl az AC 3.). Pl a Might and Magic X-et is 10-ből 2 ember vette meg.... Állítólag. Ezért folytatása kérdéses.
Stevie said:
Look, you can blame budget to a certain point, after which all there's left to blame is incompetence. And some design decisions just scream of it.
My post was only referring to the art budget. Game design or programming are different topics and a different column in the budget. But in 2015 art is definitely the biggest column, for any game. Which is sad, but we have to deal with it.
The_green_drag said:
If your still around, is there any plans on giving necropolis and dungeon's reused units some more touch ups, like you guys wanted, in an expansion or update?
I'd rather try to add more content to the game to be honest rather than just tweak the existing.
Storm-Giant said:
Why I can't simply understand is investing so many resources into high quality models when in-game they are represented in the tiniest sizes possible
There's basically three reasons for that:
- 3D artists actually work on detailed models in Zbrush or Maya (what we call the hi-poly model) and then downgrade them to use ingame (the low-poly model). So using the detailed versions saves time. That's the simple, practical reason.
- 2D graphics, as great as they are (and trust me, I'd love to do a Heroes game with lovely hand-painted 2D graphics), are actually more expensive than 3D graphics in our HD age (finding good 2D animators is not easy, finding cheap ones is almost impossible). If we need to do 3D models and turn them into 2D sprites (like they did on H3/H4) then it's actually simpler to go full 3D.
- Marketing. It's easier to make cool looking trailers with detailed 3D models. And trailers help the game sell more.
Now I see some people may have misinterpreted my post, or maybe over-interpreted it. Heroes itself is not in any danger, but it needs to find new paths in a challenging PC market. All series that have existed for 20 years have to. Doing some art recycling seemed the best road to take. But maybe we were wrong? Time will tell.
As for Heroes VII, Limbic and us will be working on Heroes VII until the release date, and even beyond that. The map editor is really cool and allows to do great stuff, and I for one intend to use it to the max (more on that in a couple of weeks, but I think many of you will like it). And hopefully we can do expansion packs that add brand new content without having to recycle anything this time around.
Last but not least, I believe in Heroes VII. The road has not been an easy one, we had to make tough choices, but I am confident by September 29th you will see the work and the love Limbic and us have all put in this game.
In the meantime -- we are reading all of your feedback and will keep on improving, balancing, debugging. So keep them coming. Just make sure they are a bit more developed than "they changed it, now it sucks"
Még folyt köv.
Again, I was talking from the point of view of production and budget, not of the gameplay itself.
The truth is, it was much cheaper to make games in the 90s, so you didn't have to sell as many copies as you would have to nowadays to make a benefit. I found an old magazine article from the early 90s where some devs were happy of their game being a best-seller... after selling 3000 copies. Nowadays it's more like 3 million copies
Times have changed, we either have to change Heroes in a fundamental way, which we don't want to do (heck, according to you we already changed it way too much, although I'm pretty sure we'll get criticized in some reviews for not changing enough ), or change our way to produce a game, which is what we tried with H7.
I still consider H7 a "best-of album" of Heroes, but I agree it's "our" best-of album. I believe every fan would make his own best-of album, each of them different from all the others. And they would all claim to speak for the whole fanbase
LizardWarrior said:
Yet, nowadays, making games is a lot easier. There are a lot of indie games out there, unreal makes it easy as hell, don't deny it, Limbic uses it, I use it and it eases the process a lot. You already got physics build in, drag and drop interface, you can separate level design from actual programming. You don't need to make your engine old style in OpenGL or DirectX, you already got one hell of a tool there.
That's exactly why we use it on H7 rather than a proprietary engine like on H5 and H6. Although it still needs a lot of work to make a Heroes game in Unreal. It's not a magic wand.
LizardWarrior said:
also the market is much much bigger, a lot of people got computers and internet now, there is steam, no need to advertise your game God knows where.
These are the good sides, but every coin has a flip side. The Steam market is overcrowded and tough as nails, it's very hard to stand out because so many games are released all the time so marketing and advertising cost more than ever, people pirate PC games with much more ease than before thanks to high-speed connections, and the increase in computer power mean you need to spend much more money on graphics else you get called "outdated", even if your game doesn't rely on eye candy.
@Marzhin or Ubi-Nox
Could you please explain why you make hero-specialization something that doesn't exactly support the hero-class almost in every case?
Keep in mind I'm not one of the game designers, my job revolves around levels and story, but as far as I understand two things happened:
- on one hand, it was a choice from the game designers to make specializations less important than they were in H5 for instance. Because of the class system we have in H7 (with 3 Might classes and 3 Magic classes per faction), the class is actually, in many ways, your hero's true specialization. What we currently call specialization is more of a "quirk", something that sets the hero apart from other heroes of the same class in the early game, but is much less important than the class in the long run. I think part of the issue is the fact we still use the name "specialization" where it should really be called "starting bonus" for instance.
- Specializations were chosen very early on, based on the hero's bio or his past specializations (in the case of returning characters), but the classes and the precise set of skills they would grant were not set in stone yet. When I say "chosen early on" I'm not talking about specific design, just a general direction like "Tyris = Cavaliers".
I agree that a new round of iteration on specializations is much needed now that all ingredients are finally in place. I can't promise it can be done for the release), but I will definitely push the topic. Now it won't change the general philosophy behind specializations, but at least we can try to make them more useful and more fun.
dark-whisperer said:
@Marzhin
When and why did you choose to make unique neutral creatures like Shantiri titan and Gold dragon and leave black dragon untouched?
Work on these units were done before the votes even started. Outsourcers had not yet increased their prices.
dark-whisperer said:
Why is every dev, when giving explanation about reused models, saying they would rather polish the game and add more features when art has completely separate budget as you said?
Not a separate budget, a separate column in the budget. But the total budget remains the same. So increasing the art budget would have meant eating away at the other columns. For the Vampire and Lich we were able to negotiate an extra to redo the models, but that's not something we can pull off every time.
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