Disciples Games Have Poor Reviews, Will This Be Any Better?

[Pan Darius Cassandra]

I was just looking at Disciples III: Rennaissance and Disciples III: Resurrected, one had Mixed reviews and the other had Mostly Negative.

That's not a good track record, do you think this one will be any different?

[Elveone]

Well, Disciples 3 is a buggy incomplete mess in all of its iterations developed by a Russian studio that no longer exists over 10 years ago so what would it even matter what its reviews are?

[Pan Darius Cassandra]

Originally posted by nTu4Ka:

"Renaissance" is a real mess it's first version of the game. Very raw.
"Ressurection" is Renassance + Undead Hordes. It's slightly better but technically is the same as vanilla.
They are rightfully bad.

If you want Disciples III experience I propose to play "Reincarnation".
This what game should have be from the start. It contains Undead Hordes, new gameplay features, reworked balance and is a lot more polished. Has technical issues but not critical.

As shared in Russian part of this community .dat developer studio management was pretty bad.
Due to greed, misleading publisher, lack of organization and not listening to adequate community feedback they released a very-very poor quality product.
After publisher punished them and reformed into new organization they improved quality significantly and released Reincarnation.
Though core issues remained. Therefore mixed score on steam.

It's not a problem that it was a Russian studio.
Great games were made in Russia:
HoMM V
King's Bounty
Space Rangers
Etherlords
IL-2 Sturmovik
Pathologic series
The problem was in developer studio management and their CEO in particular. Fish rots from its head.

Yes, I understand all that. But will Disciples: Liberation be any better?

[iSeenUB4]

Sometimes it's okay to use a time machine and go back to the party system it was known for............



1 and 2 is still imprinted in people's memories

[Ferrus Animus]

Disciples 1 came out at half a year after Heroes of Might and Magic 3, which was simply better looking, offered more and had a fanbase. It was well-receaived but didn't get much attention, often seen as another ugly heroes killer. It was quite decent though.

Disciples 2 game out shortly before HoMM 4, and looked great for the time, so got attention as a game to help with the wait. With Heroes 4 not getting that good a reception it also got further attention and is rightly seen as the high point of the series.

Disciples 3 was detailed above, it was just a mess ind esign and execution,

So Disciples 4 could be a return to form or it could be bad. We'll find out.

These games are however 20 years old by now, and were released on steam quite a bit later, so reviews reflect that,

[OXYHELL]

No one knows. Today the game may be great, but tomorrow all critics will give it negative marks and no one will buy it. If the game had developed as actively as the warhammer, then there would have been no problems, but 20 years have passed and it has been gathering dust on the shelf without developing in any way. Yes, a series of books and a bunch of mods for the second part were released, but no board games, no card games, no games in other genres, nothing was released in these 20 years. Therefore, there is every chance that the game will revive a great series or bury it for years to come.

[Elveone]

Originally posted by Ferrus Animus:

Disciples 1 came out at half a year after Heroes of Might and Magic 3, which was simply better looking, offered more and had a fanbase. It was well-receaived but didn't get much attention, often seen as another ugly heroes killer. It was quite decent though.

Disciples 2 game out shortly before HoMM 4, and looked great for the time, so got attention as a game to help with the wait. With Heroes 4 not getting that good a reception it also got further attention and is rightly seen as the high point of the series.

Disciples 3 was detailed above, it was just a mess ind esign and execution,

So Disciples 4 could be a return to form or it could be bad. We'll find out.

These games are however 20 years old by now, and were released on steam quite a bit later, so reviews reflect that,

If you think of this game as Disciples 4 I think that you will be disappointed. It doesn't seem to be a turn-based strategy game - although the devs have said that there will be base building it also seems that the game will lean heavily on the RPG elements with a persistent world, quests and non-linear story based on decision making in said quests.

[Bardorp]

I'm willing to throw some money at it. This is the first Disciples anything we've got in a decade so I'll take it. With Kalypso, they have a proven track record of overall mediocrity. Sometimes they get a hit, sometimes not. I'm a big fan of Nevendaar, it's lore and aesthetics, so as long as those are right, I'll remain optimistic.

[iSeenUB4]

Originally posted by nTu4Ka:

Originally posted by Ferrus Animus:

These games are however 20 years old by now, and were released on steam quite a bit later, so reviews reflect that,

It doesn't matter. It plays better than most of the things nowadays.
I needs face-lifting and QoL improvements but game in general is still very good.

I read somewhere that; when Strategy First went bankrupt they lost the Source Code to the original games so they weren't able to hand them over when the takeover happened. Maybe that's why we never see the idea being thrown around.

[Elveone]

Some of the art in 3 is significantly better than the art for the same unit in 2. And vice-versa. And yeah, sadly 3 was produced in that era of gaming where everything was brown.

[Elveone]

Color palette has nothing to do with the game engine. If we are talking the color palette being bleak - Disciples 2 wasn't just bleak, it was also predominantly brown. There are 2 main reasons. First - it is dark fantasy so bleak colors are naturally to be used especially when the developer does not understand color well and .dat were pretty inexperienced at the time. Just look at Diablo 4 - they are actually making the same ♥♥♥♥ mistake - desaturating everything and removing color because it is supposed to be "dark". Second - it was also a time when the game industry really really f**king loved brown. Look at GTA4: Brown City and Gears of War 2: Gears of Brown and Prototype a.k.a. [BROWN]. I am so glad we got past that poop-colored era of gaming.

About the engine - actually the graphics of Disciples 3 were kind of amazing for the time especially for that type of game. Too bad the engine was also a buggy bag of crap. Unfortunately at that time most of the engines were proprietary and in-house developed and you didn't really have the option to buy a good engine if you were a small studio. Currently Unity and Unreal are practically free to get your hands on and using them in a commercial project is far easier than it used to be.

About the game being 3d - of course it would be 3d, it started development in 2005. Heroes 5 has gone 3d and there was quite an excitement for it, Age of Empires was in 3d, Civilization 4 was in 3d, everything big was in 3d. There were still some outliers from small studios that were still in 2d but both Strategy First and Akella were looking to make a big thing out of the next Disciples game. And, come on, Disciples 2 had rasterized 3d models as well so it was the natural step to take. Sure, today it is definitely easier and probably cheaper to make that kind of game in 3d than it is to make a 3d game. Can you imagine drawing 2d units and their animations for 4k resolution? They would make the models anyway to animate them and at that point - why even bother making it in 2d.

[Elveone]

Neither Thunder Lotus nor Stoic use that many animations in their games, both use very cartoony style to cover for lack of detail which is necessary in order to use the features most modern 2d animation software have for interpolating the animations and their games are smaller in size. With Banner Saga it is probably the most obvious - you have units heavily reusing animations and the unit list growing steadily from game to game reusing old animations. There are actually very few games that use hand-drawn animations as it is very cumbersome to do.

[sam_502]

Disciples 3 was simply a hideous game. The people who made it had no clue what made disciples 2 great. No wonder they went bankrupt. If you want to know why this series is so loved play 1 and then 2.

Disciples 3 never happened