King's Bounty: Dark Side - Now Available

Couchpotato

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King's Bounty: Dark Side has been quietly released on Steam for $24.99.

Time has come to join the Dark Journey to the other side of Teana and visit a mysterious part of the world never before seen by royal bounty hunters.

For the first time in King’s Bounty series, players will be able to choose their hero’s race as well as class. Become a fearless Orcs warrior, lead and heal your troops as a Demoness, or use dark magic as a fearsome Vampire.

The world is in turmoil. After winning the battle of Tristrem, arrogant elves plunder Orcish villages, desecrate holy shrines, and massacre the innocents. Orc-Baghyr, the greatest living Orc warrior, is forced to flee with a handful of loyal followers. He vows to return with a stronger force and retake his homeland!

Armies of human knights invade the land of Atrixus. A young Demoness named Neoleene, still mourning the death of her royal father, and her small unit of devoted imps is all that stands in the way of the invading horde.

Castle of the ancient Morton clan is threatened by an army of vampire hunters. Young Daert leaves home to seek allies among the other Dark races. All must join him or perish.

Fates of the three heroes are sealed. They come together in the depths of the Black Cave, where many centuries ago races of Light imprisoned Ancient Evil. The heroes exchange vows and share antique artifacts, then gather their armies and march to fight for the very survival of their race. They must unite against the Light or face extinction!
More information.
 
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It's downloading, set for after R3. This wekend? :)
 
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I am 62 hours in the game already (started during early access) and to me this is the best one in the series. The quests are better, the design is polished, full with sense of humor. For the first time I found myself reading carefully the dialog and rolling on the floor laughing. Also , reading the dialog and following the story is essential for completing some quests.

In short - strongly recommended if you enjoyed the Legend.
 
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Really? Well, I will buy and play that game anyway, first I have to finish Warriors of the North (I gave upafter 270 hours, patches were ruining buggy gameplay, you had to restart the game after every patch in order to have fixed quests....). I remeber reading every single line of text in The Legend and often gigling like a little girl - the game was funny and well polished. So I'm glad that they made a good game again. The problem is that 2014 is full of good games. Anyway thanks Glorian for your post and encouragement to check out the Dark Side.
 
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Warriors of the North (I gave upafter 270 hours, patches were ruining buggy gameplay, you had to restart the game after every patch in order to have fixed quests….)
I played the release version and a few quests were impossible to solve, but that was okay.
However ice dragons were practically gamestopper bugs that prevented people from finishing the game - but for that we had a solution (using 7zip to unpack a file, change the erroneous value and then repack the file back).

Didn't have time to replay it later after patches and IIRC there was some DLC and sorry but I'm not buying DLC. I loved it anyway and there is no chance I won't be playing Dark Side as soon as possible.
 
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I played the release version and a few quests were impossible to solve, but that was okay.
However ice dragons were practically gamestopper bugs that prevented people from finishing the game - but for that we had a solution (using 7zip to unpack a file, change the erroneous value and then repack the file back).

Didn't have time to replay it later after patches and IIRC there was some DLC and sorry but I'm not buying DLC. I loved it anyway and there is no chance I won't be playing Dark Side as soon as possible.

There were quite a few other bugs later on as well - i.e. sometimes the whole stack of your army was getting 0 damage and the game was crashing... And that was usually happening to me at the end of boss fight or in the middle of big fight - and because you can not save during the fight I lost a few hours as well. Anyway I'm the guy the buys DLC and what is worse I have to have ALL DLCs for the game - my worst case was Omerta: City of Gangsters which I played for less than 30 minutes and bought all DLCs ... But anyway enough ranting gotta finish Age of Wonders 3 and next week I will buy King's Bounty Dark Side. I'm very happy that Early Access program improved this game.
 
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I play as vampire and everything goes smooth and nice ( I am level 43 atm). The key to solving the quests this time around is to follow dialog, story, hints, previous quests etc. I love it as you need to immerse yourself rather than just following exact instructions. I just finished a quest where I had to remember the skills of some previous characters I had met during my previous travels…

I believe the game-play mechanics are polished, there is very nice teleport system implemented to help you improve and optimize your travels, you get wings from a point on in the story, which additionally improves the travel sparing some annoying waste of time as many of the quest are implemented with tons of going back and forth , all over the world, making even the very first locations you explore meaningful until the end of the game.

All in all - this game is KB: The Legend , polished, and on steroids when it comes to quests, game-play and humor.
 
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I played the pre-release version (completed the game). I thought was quite good but a bit long at the end. It had two major bugs (for my play) one was a quest bug where the quest branch became totally confsued and closed the wrong branch (game bug not player bug); the other was constant crashes when using time back. I'm hopeful they fixed these two bugs in the release version but haven't tested it yet (the quest bug takes a while to hit; it won't block completion of the game but i still found it very annoying as it is a very long quest).
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The balance is much better all the way till the end (at least in the pre-release version). The valks are gone and the dragon was replaced with blackie with new rage skills So I would call it tweaks on the basic design. I used almost none of the new spells so can't comment on them (crystals are very limited so spell choices are limited; so I stuck with old favorites - fire rain, fire bolt and time back - oh yea posion was also quite usseful).
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I will probably play again soon - but right now mucking with xulima (sp) and The Legend of heroes. I think it took me over 90 hours for the first play and I suspect even knowing more abuot where things are it will take similar time for hte next play (and first play was on normal and it was still hard - as oppose to being easy on impossible)
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One note - not sure if this is a bug or feature but some quests will block until you complete earlier quest - what i mean is that if inn keeper has a quest that you start and then you get another quest to visit the inn keeper - in many places you have to finish the first quest for the (in this case) inn keeper to respond to the second quest.
 
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One note - not sure if this is a bug or feature but some quests will block until you complete earlier quest - what i mean is that if inn keeper has a quest that you start and then you get another quest to visit the inn keeper - in many places you have to finish the first quest for the (in this case) inn keeper to respond to the second quest.

I believe this is a feature. Looks weird at first, but when you know it works this way it is even cool in a way.
 
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I guess if you're going to buy it, you should buy the collector's edition since it has 2 more locations, lots of new quests and a new unit. I don't care when a collector's edition has (apart from fluff like music and 'behind the scenes' stuff) in-game items that are cosmetic, or that just give you some extra starting money or extra exp... But when the actual game is reduced if you don't have the CE, then it hits a cord I don't like.
 
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I play as vampire and everything goes smooth and nice ( I am level 43 atm). The key to solving the quests this time around is to follow dialog, story, hints, previous quests etc. I love it as you need to immerse yourself rather than just following exact instructions. I just finished a quest where I had to remember the skills of some previous characters I had met during my previous travels…

I believe the game-play mechanics are polished, there is very nice teleport system implemented to help you improve and optimize your travels, you get wings from a point on in the story, which additionally improves the travel sparing some annoying waste of time as many of the quest are implemented with tons of going back and forth , all over the world, making even the very first locations you explore meaningful until the end of the game.

All in all - this game is KB: The Legend , polished, and on steroids when it comes to quests, game-play and humor.

Sold!
Thanks for the mini review Glorian, sounds different and interesting enough to get back into King's Bounty again having skipped the last one.
 
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Thanks for the info. I was taking a sit back and wait approach, as I didn't really care for WOTN that much. I will pick this up at some point, though I just started Risen 3 so that is going to take a while.
 
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Think you sold me, too, probably during sale time.
 
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Man, you guys make me want to play this now. I thought I was done with these expansions after the last one. I want a sequel, but these are still pretty good.
 
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I also want to play it as soon as possible (it's installed but I just don't want to play 2 games paralelly).

I'm starting to hate this year. Too many great games are appearing too often, who has so much time for all of them!?
 
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Sold!
Thanks for the mini review Glorian, sounds different and interesting enough to get back into King's Bounty again having skipped the last one.

You are welcome!

Another new cool feature which adds a new color to the game-play :

When you defeat some of the enemies in the game you take prisoners. Low profile prisoners can be used to fill up your army ranks, while the high profile prisoners , who you in-prison join your party and later on could participate in quests solving. Even prisoners taken at the beginning of the game could play critically important role later on in the game, so do not forget them once you put them in your pocket ;-)

As I mentioned, the writing is full of fresh humor based on modern life politics, fairly tales and so on.

In a nut shell - If this was the first one in the series, it was going to be an absolute blast to my opinion.


Of course there are some down sides like technical issues, which are not completely solved even now, when the game is officially released. There are "quit to desk top" bugs which appear once in a while. Fortunately I haven't encountered any show-stopper bugs so far (I play vampire). Somebody who plays the other character could probably shed a light on the situation there.

I hope this helps.
 
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