King's Bounty - Preview @ IGN

[magerette]

IGN (http://pc.ign.com/articles/879/879974p1.html) takes a short hands-on look at Katauri's upcoming Kings Bounty:The Legend and posts their impressions:
The easiest way to describe The Legend is that it's sort of like a blend of Heroes of Might & Magic with Master of Magic, with an art design that will remind you a bit of WarCraft. This is a sort of adventure strategy game where you guide a hero and army around a map, and they encounter hostile armies which they do battle with. King's Bounty has a few twists on this formula, though...
The first is that the adventure phase, which involves wandering around a map, is done in real-time rather than turns. This makes it more like an old school Final Fantasy game in a way, only you can see enemy armies and encounters on the map..[while] The Legend's combat system...is a turn-based mode that's not unlike the one found in Heroes of Might & Magic.
There are special attacks that you can call upon, such as spirits. These are basically elemental spirits that can carve a swathe on the battlefield, such as the spirits of rage that manifest some demons that can attack multiple units simultaneously...Should you be victorious after a battle you'll amass experience that may be enough to level up your hero. Then you can usually select an upgrade, such as improving the hero's leadership ability or giving him a boost in a certain statistic.
More information. (http://www.rpgwatch.com/show/newsbit?newsbit=9255)

[Lucky Day]

The easiest way to describe The Legend is that it's sort of like a blend of Heroes of Might & Magic with Master of Magic,


I wonder how many times were going to see this without the reviewer knowing their video game history.

[magerette]

Someone will have to enlighten me on Masters of Magic--never heard of it.

[Lucky Day]

I believe MoM is that old fantasy version of Civilization. It was a pretty good game IIRC.

If the new King's Bounty has elements of technology trees in it that could be interesting.

[MudsAnimalFriend]

Well MoM is a fantasy 4x but there are major differences between MoM and Civ. MoM's combat is considerably less abstract than Civ's: unit's can be grouped into parties and combat is resolved in tactical turn based mode on a separate grid from the world map. Research is focused primarily on spells and spell casting so the player is a bit more proactively involved with the fruits of research. The player must select a character type at the start of the game whose stats, alignment and associated servant race have considerable impact on the gameplay - the Civ series is much more vanilla in that aspect. There are also recruitable heroes. In many ways MoM is a much deeper game than Civ.

For a more up to date MoM experience there is Age of Wonders which is more-or-less a remake that dumps the 4x aspects in favour of scenario-based play. There's also the excellent Fall From Heaven mod for Civilization 4 which replicates as much of the MoM experience as is possible within the Civ 4 engine.

[zakhal]

Som still consider Master of Magic the best turn based fantasy strategy game ever created - just like Master of Orion 1 & 2 in space.

Im not expecting anything like that from this game though. The idea that today somone could&would make somthing as good as moo2 just makes me laugh.

Fall of heaven is a superb mod but just like every other civ4 mod its still restricted by the civ-style combat which is way too generic imho.

[Alrik Fassbauer]

Masters of Magic is the "spiritual predecessor" of Age of wonders. Both play quite similar.

You control "magic nodes" which give you mana with which you can cast a variety of spells - over your own troops (enhancing), enemy troops (the opposite) or overland.

And then you battle other mages, trying to control most of the nodes or destroy the other mages completely. Your troops are your "tools" with gaining the winning point.

[Lucky Day]

If this review is accurate then, the new King's Bounty sounds like its trying to differentiate itself from HoMM and its original namesake which HoMM was the "spiritual successor" to.

[magerette]

Thanks for filling me in on MoM, everyone.

Som still consider Master of Magic the best turn based fantasy strategy game ever created - just like Master of Orion 1 & 2 in space.

Im not expecting anything like that from this game though. The idea that today somone could&would make somthing as good as moo2 just makes me laugh.

I now want to fire up Master of Orion 2 :)--I agree after the MOO3 mess I've pretty much lost hope on that game ever being equaled--shame, because with just a few updates it would play with anything out there now.

[MudsAnimalFriend]

After failing to secure the licence for an actual remake Stardock are supposed to be developing a MoM type game. It has been on the back burner for an awfully long time though :-(

[Alrik Fassbauer]

I don't understand your concerns. Age of Wonders is actually *very* much like MOM.

Especially the last two of the three AOW games.

[MudsAnimalFriend]

By the same reasoning Rise of Nations is very similar to Civilization but that wouldn't change the fact that they're different genres. The scenario-based gameplay of AoW is a different experience to the 4x gameplay of MoM.