King's Bounty II - Gameplay and Interview Video

King's Bounty I. was the most amazing champion game of this type. Excellently executed, superb music, fantastic gameplay and gorgeous graphics!!!
MUSTPLAY™©℗®!!!!!

Jesus, I just skipped through the video: WTF have you done to our beautiful game?? What is this stupid extra junk making it a movie? Also BAD Art Direction! Bad bad. Look at how clean and visually well designed King's Bounty I. was. They even show comparisons! On one side: King's Bounty I. looks amazing its a true beauty. On the other side: then they show their game, supposedly King's Bounty II. looking like a jumbled mess and some badly executed docu-history drama that has not only the cities artistically messed up - bad color design, no distinction of background and foreground lacking the correct measure of emphasis - but the Battlescape is badly done as well, LOOKS LIKE SHT!!!!!!!!!
 
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I don't care that much about the looks of the game. They have changed it into a game with a fantasy realistic look, like so many games out there. So there is little point to compare the look to its predecessor, as it is also a matter of taste.
Although I have some concerns about the RPG part of the game, what has me worried most is the combat in the game. I find the squads to look too much alike to visually determine who is where on the battlefield. Given that the surface you cover with all your squads is quite big, you need to zoom out, which isn't helping. Obviously hovering over them gives the needed feedback, but it would be much easier when the visual identification of what squad is where would be easier.
I don't see much improvement in that area in this video compared to what I saw last August.
 
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Honestly, the more I hear and see about/on this project, the more I'm certain that when I feel the craving to enjoy these games, I'll be replaying the older versions and not buying the newer ones.
 
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Totally agree with the rest of you, and was actually happy to see Mercy praise the originals graphics, I would've figured it was too colourful for his liking.

I can not for the life of me understand who thought it was a good idea to take the former game, remove all the colours, charm and personality, and then release it as some kind of improvement?

And the setting? I couldn't stand to watch that entire viedo but is the setting now realistic/low fantasy? No creatures or monsters, no other races than humans??? Tragic.
 
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Wow... the setting seems so bland... even the Ui seems to have most of its character stripped away.

Beyond that I'm skeptical of the gameplay too... the switch to 3rd person and the battle maps ... it all feels like a generic, medieval fantasy game from 2001.
 
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And I agree with all of you (saying this is easier than +1ing everyone, lol).

I also noted that while everything about the UI was different, and less pleasing to the eye, the icons for the special abilities of the units remained the same icons from the old colourful game, which was odd.
 
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Nobody here likes something new, big surprise. :lol: At what age do you you start disliking everything new and cling to everything old with a death grip. I want to try and avoid that. Maybe I can if I have fair warning and see it coming.:D

Seriously though I thought it looked pretty good and it will be a rare day 1 purchase for me.
 
Nobody here likes something new, big surprise. :lol: At what age do you you start disliking everything new and cling to everything old with a death grip. I want to try and avoid that. Maybe I can if I have fair warning and see it coming.:D

Seriously though I thought it looked pretty good and it will be a rare day 1 purchase for me.

Hmm. So if the next Marvel movie came out in grainy black and white and was silent apart from very loud orchestral music, and people said it looked worse than the older ones, would they be saying that because their problem was that it was 'something new'?

The complaint isn't that it's different, the complaint is that it looks like something we've all seen before, to the point where one can legitimately describe it as 'generic' without being either edgy or contrarian.

Which, for this series, is important because the primary reason so many got sucked in by King's Bounty (2008) was the sheer unapologetically un-generic cornucopia of colours and associated cheese/humour/music/art-style.

I agree it needed to change, as they got themselves into a bit of a cul-de-sac by the fourth game. But there's change, and then there's change.
 
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Seriously though I thought it looked pretty good and it will be a rare day 1 purchase for me.

I'm glad you feel that way, then you can try it out and tell us if it's any good!
Are you a fan of the other Kings Bounty games? To me the best part about them apart from the actual mechanics was the charm and light hearted tone. This just looks dull and grey.

It reminds me if when Ubisoft took over Homm, I really tried to play and like their Homm games but they just felt off to me, and I love Homm 1-4. There's evolving and then there's mutating. For games I like I far prefer the former.

As a sidenote, I believed my grumpiness with things new started with Fallout 3 in 2008 and DA:O in 2009, so for me the age it kicked in was late twenties. ;)
 
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And the setting? I couldn't stand to watch that entire viedo but is the setting now realistic/low fantasy? No creatures or monsters, no other races than humans??? Tragic.
There are several other races. With what I've played in August I saw Orcs and some angelic figure, of which I forgot the race. Next to that the game does have dragons as well. I've been told in August, there are a lot of other creatures as well, but I don't know how many 'a lot of' are. So, I think it is realistic/ high fantasy.

As I mentioned before I don't mind the looks of the game. And I think this game should be judged by its own merits and not its predecessor's. However in my opinion there are a couple of things related to combat (of which I named a few), which are a bit worrying. I saw it in August, so things might have changed (although the video doesn't really show that).

There are a few smaller things as well, like having 'natural' obstructions (rocks, trees, etc.) that keep you from straying from the paths and quite a number of cut-scenes to tell the story in the short time I've played it. Although I can't tell if that is representative of the entire game. Some other RPG elements like C&C appear to be there, but my gaming time was not long enough to see that the results of my choices actually had consequences.

I don't know if it will be a good game or not. It can very well be a good game and the issues I have with combat are just mine and you simply might not have them.
 
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Thanks Myrthos, orcs and dragons sounds better to me than only humans!

Not a fan of a railroaded experience if that's what we get, I enjoyed the other Kings Bounty games more once they opened up. We don't know yet what we get in that regard though, so I'll try to be cautiously optimistic until we know more.
 
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Unlike @mercy; 's case, my rig can run things shown in the video smoothly, so I'm buying. :D
Unless 1c publishes a Gamebryo broken pos.

In other words, I'm interested. Mildly, but still.
 
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They said, they wanna move to something different this time, as we already have 5 KB games (or how many?). Didn't people complained that all 5 games in the end was almost the same?! Do we really need one more? I bet if they would make KBII samey as KB, people would be dissatisfied anyway, saying "but there is nothing new"!
 
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People always complain. Having said that this game doesn't look like fun. I'll reserve judgement until it is out but changing things but not making it more enjoyable isn't going to help ;)

They said, they wanna move to something different this time, as we already have 5 KB games (or how many?). Didn't people complained that all 5 games in the end was almost the same?! Do we really need one more? I bet if they would make KBII samey as KB, people would be dissatisfied anyway, saying "but there is nothing new"!
 
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Hmm. So if the next Marvel movie came out in grainy black and white and was silent apart from very loud orchestral music, and people said it looked worse than the older ones, would they be saying that because their problem was that it was 'something new'?

The complaint isn't that it's different, the complaint is that it looks like something we've all seen before, to the point where one can legitimately describe it as 'generic' without being either edgy or contrarian.

Which, for this series, is important because the primary reason so many got sucked in by King's Bounty (2008) was the sheer unapologetically un-generic cornucopia of colours and associated cheese/humour/music/art-style.

I agree it needed to change, as they got themselves into a bit of a cul-de-sac by the fourth game. But there's change, and then there's change.

It’s certainly possible as taking the marvel movies and making them look old would qualify as something new. It’s irrelevant though as my first paragraph was a joke. I thought the 2 emoticons and starting the next sentence with “seriously though” would convey that but I guess not. Sorry.
@TomRon;, yes I played they previous ones. THe first 2 anyway then they started to get a bit stale. So changes are a positive to me. Will it be better I don’t know but I’ll wait and see.

As for the art direction and such I never thought it was anything special. They’re plenty of colorful games out there. I play games for combat pretty much. It had a fun TB combat system and that was the appeal for me.
 
Myrthos said:
I find the squads to look too much alike to visually determine who is where on the battlefield. Given that the surface you cover with all your squads is quite big, you need to zoom out, which isn't helping.

I assume there will be option to show grid. So this shouldnt be a problem if I understand you correctly.

you said:
but changing things but not making it more enjoyable isn't going to help

I dont think they dont try to make it more enjoyable. :) And I doubt that you had opportunity to play it.


I can not for the life of me understand who thought it was a good idea to take the former game, remove all the colours, charm and personality, and then release it as some kind of improvement?

If you would watch the video you would see that they have different team, different vision, more or less different genre.


I couldn't stand to watch that entire viedo but is the setting now realistic/low fantasy? No creatures or monsters, no other races than humans??? Tragic.

Its probably low fantasy. In the video they said there are other fantasy races like elves or dwarves. And Myrthos said the rest.
 
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Thanks @Farflame;, I have a hard time watching videos, I just skip around so I'll probably miss most if what they say, I just looked at the gameplay parts.

I'm glad we seem to have some Watchers who aren't put off by the look, I will try to keep an open mind to their impressions.
 
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I'm glad we seem to have some Watchers who aren't put off by the look, I will try to keep an open mind to their impressions.

Well, there were several games in Kings Bounty series already so in this regard I dont agree with fans who expect basically the same again. I think its actually pretty bold move to create RPG while preserve some strategical elements instead of creating strategy game with lite RPG elements. I dont know if they will succeed but I hope the game will have some merits.
 
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