Legends of Eisenwald - Preview @ IndieRPGs
 

Craig Stern reviews Legends of Eisenwald over at IndieRPGs in a video preview, based on the beta of the game.

More information.

It looks intriguing; just enough tactical combat feel combined with exploration and gradual strategic build-up. The graphics are nice too.

LOL - Thought I was confused, but the reviewer made even more of a cock up of it than I did (I'm a beta tester following supporting the game on the kickstarter), probably because I played their previous title "Discord Times" and had some idea what was going on.

In my opinion this isn't really fit to have been released as a beta/preview, even after the last update, as there is so much that hasn't been implemented yet or doesn't work properly. That combined with a complete lack of information as to what you are meant to be doing, makes the game very hard to play right now. And from a testers point of view its hard to know what to report as a bug, since so many aspects of the gameplay are not functional.

However, the game looks really promising, the graphics are good, the combat looks like it will be interesting, when it works, and the music is superb (so far). I hope that the devs can fix everything that needs fixing and most importantly add a tutorial, as repeating the same content until one works out what is going on isn't remotely fun. Plus they need to do some work on the translation.

The game is already well over schedule, but that's just normal (none of my backed kickstarter projects are even close to being on schedule). I only hope they have sufficient funds to get it finished and it looks like there is a lot of work still to do.

It tells of the necessity of a tutorial.

Click and drag, party 1+5 (cant hire)

If things are not clearly stated, people wont find.

Impressive.

Yet again another declension of Heroes of M&M. What a lack of creativity !

This actually looks far more like cross between Disciples and King's bounty that Heroes.

Yeah, it's not dissimilar to King's Bounty. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm not particularly keen on the cartoony style of the latest iterations of KB and rather prefer the more realistic look that LOE is doing. I also think they should avoid the temptation of trying to be too humorous in the writing, which doesn't fit in so well with the style of the graphics and music and currently doesn't translate all that well.

Players must be receptive for creativity to be received.

After watching the video, the player happened to display that wish for the game to play as something he played before, or in a way that was more pleasing to him.

At no point in his play, he tried to play the game's specifics. Never tried to order his lines, always expose his damage dealer to the attacks of two opponents at once while leaving his tank facing one enemy. Never tried to play on the activation sequence etc…

Players want to play the same good old thing they know and love.

It is quite hard to be creative in this context as players naturally reject anything vaguely new to fall back on something familiar.

Yes I believe you have a point there. Whenever I see a project I consider innovative, there is no shortage of comments, like "why isn't it working like X?" , "They should have done it like in Y", or even worse, "Hey, this is just like Z!" (when it clearly isn't).

I just hope they don't make battles easier just because people are not using their brains

The battles at the start aren't difficult, but you do have to pick up the right reinforcements, particularly the healer peasant woman, right at the start. Playing the game cold you aren't going to know that and the game actually directs you elsewhere. Still it's only *early* beta and improvements are in the works.

Probably not a question of brains but of tastes. This player probably like this kind of games to play a certain way as you can see him always wanting to go for the rear line.

Nevertheless, as KS projects are funded (sold in advance) in full before release, there should be no pressure on the team to change their vision and please the tastes of buyers, since buyers have already bought the game.

Will be interesting to see if KS allows designers to maintain their vision integrity or if they have to bend it to the tastes of players, leading them to change the project's substance.

This game being in beta, the pressure might not be that big. But for projects that sold participation in alpha as a pledge level, the pressure to distort the initial vision might be otherwise bigger.