To Developers: Why did you want to make this game?

[Clown Reemus]

This is a genuine question from a man who loves and adores Disciples II with all his meager heart. To the point he wished to make his own continuation (still wants to, who can truly know?) of the masterpiece of the story that DII left hanging. A story of cycle of war and tragedy, of hatred between mortals and their deities.

I understand this question is prying into confidential right now. After all, you have a game to make and release and sell as well. But just as I hoped a continuation would eventually come and... liberate me from this feeling of extreme anguish, I can also hope you, the people who inherrited the right to produce the continuation, will read this and maybe even tell me something.

I really wanted to see a direct continuation of the story where literally everyone lost everything - Dwarven nations lost their freedom and became confined in the underground fortress (the escapees that supported Sir Allemon are, I assume, a small faction only), Elves lost their purity, sanity and the only friendship they had in the world, Demons lost their cherished dream of reviving an unjustly punished father of their, Hordes lost the chance to reunite their mother with her beloved husband and the Empire lost their empire.

What I saw in this story is a hard statement of war tragedy, that keeps ravaging the world generations after generations. Ambitions of mortals and flaws of deities contibuted to unprecedented catastrophies. The concept that Bethrezen, the mightiest of the demons, was tricked by a malicious human child (and humans are his children, from his time as the angel), is still unique and indescribably impactful.

Then, when I finished the game I noticed another grieving race - Greenskins. Throughout the game they were exterminated to level up, to do quests and to serve the ends of the greater races. They suffered as well and when the player ravages their temple in the final Elven mission, they say "Why do you keep oppressing us (not a direct citation)? Our god will punish you!"... and that is when it dawned on me. That it really should. Even thought originally, I guess, it was just a flavour text, but in my mind it became the ultimate foreshadowing.

I wanted to write my own scenario where Greenskins become the new playable race. They rise up, become a full-fledged empire and in their quest for justice *bring upon* their own deity - god of wrath. I wanted every race, after a time skip of half a century, to be reminded of the horrors they committed upon each other and be witnesses to the consequences their fathers brought on them. Disillusioned races, left struggling on their lands and abandoned by their just as much disillusioned gods, would become targets of extermination by the Greenskins.

Seeing them struggle in a world without conviction and purpose, come in terms with their past and their present - a reflection on the times of war the major races participated in. But wait, I wanted to go even more philosophical. The Greenskin god would not actually be a god - but a spirit ever present in the world. A spirit of vengeance and wrath that resided in the world, fed on sorrow and destruction of the great wars and finally rose to judge all of the races as unworthy. With the sole purpose to destroy them just like they tried to destroy each other.

And ultimately, this wrathful spirit would set in motion events that would bring not only peace, but also conclusion for everyone involved - mortals and gods included. Now, I will not publicly dwell on what exactly I had planned, but I would gladly discuss it with everyone interested. Especially the developers. Going back to my question - what did you want to make this game about? A direct continuation to the masterpiece of a story? An attempt to revive the IP with a modern strategy? A successful turn-based RPG? I would be honoured to hear from you.

Best regards,

[QWEEDDY2]

Just to understand that question:

Disciples 3 - game of one person, one producer\gamedesigner from Akella. Akella just put title that they buy. They(him) treat own devs - and later treat gamers. Official word from that main designer:
"i just make game that i want - i dont care about Disciples series".

Discipels 4 already looks like noname game with titile from Disciples. And since it Canada-Germany game, i dont think that publisher - Kalypso - acting like Sega\TCA or russians companies. But that not mean that game be good. Will see.

[mell00yell00]

Originally posted by Clown Reemus:

This is a genuine question from a man who loves and adores Disciples II with all his meager heart. To the point he wished to make his own continuation (still wants to, who can truly know?) of the masterpiece of the story that DII left hanging. A story of cycle of war and tragedy, of hatred between mortals and their deities.

I understand this question is prying into confidential right now. After all, you have a game to make and release and sell as well. But just as I hoped a continuation would eventually come and... liberate me from this feeling of extreme anguish, I can also hope you, the people who inherrited the right to produce the continuation, will read this and maybe even tell me something.

I really wanted to see a direct continuation of the story where literally everyone lost everything - Dwarven nations lost their freedom and became confined in the underground fortress (the escapees that supported Sir Allemon are, I assume, a small faction only), Elves lost their purity, sanity and the only friendship they had in the world, Demons lost their cherished dream of reviving an unjustly punished father of their, Hordes lost the chance to reunite their mother with her beloved husband and the Empire lost their empire.

What I saw in this story is a hard statement of war tragedy, that keeps ravaging the world generations after generations. Ambitions of mortals and flaws of deities contibuted to unprecedented catastrophies. The concept that Bethrezen, the mightiest of the demons, was tricked by a malicious human child (and humans are his children, from his time as the angel), is still unique and indescribably impactful.

Then, when I finished the game I noticed another grieving race - Greenskins. Throughout the game they were exterminated to level up, to do quests and to serve the ends of the greater races. They suffered as well and when the player ravages their temple in the final Elven mission, they say "Why do you keep oppressing us (not a direct citation)? Our god will punish you!"... and that is when it dawned on me. That it really should. Even thought originally, I guess, it was just a flavour text, but in my mind it became the ultimate foreshadowing.

I wanted to write my own scenario where Greenskins become the new playable race. They rise up, become a full-fledged empire and in their quest for justice *bring upon* their own deity - god of wrath. I wanted every race, after a time skip of half a century, to be reminded of the horrors they committed upon each other and be witnesses to the consequences their fathers brought on them. Disillusioned races, left struggling on their lands and abandoned by their just as much disillusioned gods, would become targets of extermination by the Greenskins.

Seeing them struggle in a world without conviction and purpose, come in terms with their past and their present - a reflection on the times of war the major races participated in. But wait, I wanted to go even more philosophical. The Greenskin god would not actually be a god - but a spirit ever present in the world. A spirit of vengeance and wrath that resided in the world, fed on sorrow and destruction of the great wars and finally rose to judge all of the races as unworthy. With the sole purpose to destroy them just like they tried to destroy each other.

And ultimately, this wrathful spirit would set in motion events that would bring not only peace, but also conclusion for everyone involved - mortals and gods included. Now, I will not publicly dwell on what exactly I had planned, but I would gladly discuss it with everyone interested. Especially the developers. Going back to my question - what did you want to make this game about? A direct continuation to the masterpiece of a story? An attempt to revive the IP with a modern strategy? A successful turn-based RPG? I would be honoured to hear from you.

Best regards,

If you decide to make a spiritual successor, ill be your first backer

[Clown Reemus]

Originally posted by mell00yell00:

Originally posted by Clown Reemus:

This is a genuine question from a man who loves and adores Disciples II with all his meager heart. To the point he wished to make his own continuation (still wants to, who can truly know?) of the masterpiece of the story that DII left hanging. A story of cycle of war and tragedy, of hatred between mortals and their deities.

I understand this question is prying into confidential right now. After all, you have a game to make and release and sell as well. But just as I hoped a continuation would eventually come and... liberate me from this feeling of extreme anguish, I can also hope you, the people who inherrited the right to produce the continuation, will read this and maybe even tell me something.

I really wanted to see a direct continuation of the story where literally everyone lost everything - Dwarven nations lost their freedom and became confined in the underground fortress (the escapees that supported Sir Allemon are, I assume, a small faction only), Elves lost their purity, sanity and the only friendship they had in the world, Demons lost their cherished dream of reviving an unjustly punished father of their, Hordes lost the chance to reunite their mother with her beloved husband and the Empire lost their empire.

What I saw in this story is a hard statement of war tragedy, that keeps ravaging the world generations after generations. Ambitions of mortals and flaws of deities contibuted to unprecedented catastrophies. The concept that Bethrezen, the mightiest of the demons, was tricked by a malicious human child (and humans are his children, from his time as the angel), is still unique and indescribably impactful.

Then, when I finished the game I noticed another grieving race - Greenskins. Throughout the game they were exterminated to level up, to do quests and to serve the ends of the greater races. They suffered as well and when the player ravages their temple in the final Elven mission, they say "Why do you keep oppressing us (not a direct citation)? Our god will punish you!"... and that is when it dawned on me. That it really should. Even thought originally, I guess, it was just a flavour text, but in my mind it became the ultimate foreshadowing.

I wanted to write my own scenario where Greenskins become the new playable race. They rise up, become a full-fledged empire and in their quest for justice *bring upon* their own deity - god of wrath. I wanted every race, after a time skip of half a century, to be reminded of the horrors they committed upon each other and be witnesses to the consequences their fathers brought on them. Disillusioned races, left struggling on their lands and abandoned by their just as much disillusioned gods, would become targets of extermination by the Greenskins.

Seeing them struggle in a world without conviction and purpose, come in terms with their past and their present - a reflection on the times of war the major races participated in. But wait, I wanted to go even more philosophical. The Greenskin god would not actually be a god - but a spirit ever present in the world. A spirit of vengeance and wrath that resided in the world, fed on sorrow and destruction of the great wars and finally rose to judge all of the races as unworthy. With the sole purpose to destroy them just like they tried to destroy each other.

And ultimately, this wrathful spirit would set in motion events that would bring not only peace, but also conclusion for everyone involved - mortals and gods included. Now, I will not publicly dwell on what exactly I had planned, but I would gladly discuss it with everyone interested. Especially the developers. Going back to my question - what did you want to make this game about? A direct continuation to the masterpiece of a story? An attempt to revive the IP with a modern strategy? A successful turn-based RPG? I would be honoured to hear from you.

Best regards,

If you decide to make a spiritual successor, ill be your first backer

I will make sure to notify you when and if I move towards that goal, but the notion of your support makes me more eager to.

[sam_502]

Clown are you part of that old old team that was making new sagas using the disciples 2 game editor? I am talking about around 10-15 years back now. There was talk of making new sagas and possibly introducing three new races but i never heard what happened of them.

If they are reading this forum it would be nice to hear what happent of that project

[Clown Reemus]

Originally posted by sam_502:

Clown are you part of that old old team that was making new sagas using the disciples 2 game editor? I am talking about around 10-15 years back now. There was talk of making new sagas and possibly introducing three new races but i never heard what happened of them.

If they are reading this forum it would be nice to hear what happent of that project

Absolutely not, up until recently I was just a player and while I enjoyed a lot of the fan-made maps and sagas, I have never made one.

I know about some Russian projects (like, Disciples II map projects) that were supposed to make a continuation of the story in the game's editor, but I feel like this is not doing the series much honours. I am sure it has to be done anew, and alas most people from back then would simply not fight any time to work on a possible successor.

[sam_502]

I didnt know russians also did a similar project. These guys i am talking about were either english or at the very least mixed. In any case yeah they were making sagas and i remember reading that they had progressed well enough.

Sadly the internet landscape changes and those pages are no more but if anyone is reading i would like to know what happened to that project. It was very very promising

[Kinja]

Originally posted by nTu4Ka:

There was talk of making new sagas and possibly introducing three new races but i never heard what happened of them.

If they are reading this forum it would be nice to hear what happent of that project

That's probably:
-Us with Greenskin addon[prnt.sc]. Was frozen due to lack of possibility to add actual content.
-Nazar with Dwarves expansion. Still blooms but suffers from the same problem. You can watch new portraits though. They are pretty cool.
-NorvezskaiaSemga mode[norvezskayasemga.pro] with total rebalance and new abilities.
-There was new Naga race mod (you can start watching from 11 minute). I'm not sure it's active at the moment.

P.S.:
Yeh. Russkies weren't doing only bad things to Disciples.
:)

I don't speak russian. What was the guy on the Naga link talking about? That's the Sanctuary(i think) town screen from HoMM 6.

It's actually funny that people are still trying to add Greenskins as a full race even after so many years. We were talking about it even back in the day on the old Strategy First forums(i was going by the_harbinger back then) before they sold off Disciples and deleted the subforum. But talk stopped because of the same problem back then, no one could find a way to add actual content into the game because of the way the files were packed.

The Mountain Clans thing look great, how did they manage to add actual new units into the game?

[Clown Reemus]

Originally posted by Kinja:

Originally posted by nTu4Ka:

That's probably:
-Us with Greenskin addon[prnt.sc]. Was frozen due to lack of possibility to add actual content.
-Nazar with Dwarves expansion. Still blooms but suffers from the same problem. You can watch new portraits though. They are pretty cool.
-NorvezskaiaSemga mode[norvezskayasemga.pro] with total rebalance and new abilities.
-There was new Naga race mod (you can start watching from 11 minute). I'm not sure it's active at the moment.

P.S.:
Yeh. Russkies weren't doing only bad things to Disciples.
:)

I don't speak russian. What was the guy on the Naga link talking about? That's the Sanctuary(i think) town screen from HoMM 6.

It's actually funny that people are still trying to add Greenskins as a full race even after so many years. We were talking about it even back in the day on the old Strategy First forums(i was going by the_harbinger back then) before they sold off Disciples and deleted the subforum. But talk stopped because of the same problem back then, no one could find a way to add actual content into the game because of the way the files were packed.

The Mountain Clans thing look great, how did they manage to add actual new units into the game?

Did Strategy First just sell the rights? How did it happen, was Danny Belanger behind it, or he was forced to go along with it?

As for the Greenskins, they have tremendous potential. In the spirit of the first two games - they are even set up for a possible continuation, lore-wise. When during the final Elven mission the player raids a Greenskin temple in the middle of the map, they get a message "Why do you hurt us Greenskins so much? Our god (something) will punish you!" and that is more than enough to have a whole sequel. But I am also thinking about a full series culmination, story-wise. This is what I would like to incorporate into my vision of a worthy continuation. A serious, Disciple-ish Greenskin race.

[Kinja]

Originally posted by Clown Reemus:

Did Strategy First just sell the rights? How did it happen, was Danny Belanger behind it, or he was forced to go along with it?

As for the Greenskins, they have tremendous potential. In the spirit of the first two games - they are even set up for a possible continuation, lore-wise. When during the final Elven mission the player raids a Greenskin temple in the middle of the map, they get a message "Why do you hurt us Greenskins so much? Our god (something) will punish you!" and that is more than enough to have a whole sequel. But I am also thinking about a full series culmination, story-wise. This is what I would like to incorporate into my vision of a worthy continuation. A serious, Disciple-ish Greenskin race.

I joined the old forums in 2005. It's been 16 years but as i remember it we had one of the developers talking to us on the forum, sharing some early concept art and giving us some vague updates. At the time we were expecting the Disciples 3 that Strategy First was supposedly making to come out at the same time or around the same time as Heroes of Might and Magic 5. HoMM 5 kept getting more and more info released, screenshots and gameplay video but nothing conclusive was coming out for D3. I also remember something called World of Disciples being brought up by the same developer but i don't remember what it was and unfortunately i can't access the thread on the wayback machine and there's only one snapshot before the game got passed to .dat on which most threads can't be accessed. Might have been a possible title in another genre but i'm unsure, might have been an aggregate website for all titles in the series since back then they all had separate websites, even the expansions.

We were eventually told something along the lines of Strategy First no longer being the ones that were developing Disciples 3, that .dat would be taking over but we should rest assured that the game was already pretty far into development so we wouldn't have to wait long. This of course was not true and the fact that they had shut down the Disciples 3 website should have been a sign of things to come. The english forum was less and less active and eventually everyone who was left just moved to the russian forum and the original forum got deleted. At some point we were simply told that Akella had actually purchased the IP and it had nothing to do with SFI anymore. I think they also told us that either that there had been almost no work done on the game before it passed to .dat or that they had to scrap it and start over(i'm a bit foggy on that part), either way the game clearly looked very different from anything i was expecting. At least as far as i know we never got any word from the original team on what happened, i have no idea if anyone ever tried to reach out to Danny Belanger or anyone else on the team over the years. Would have been very interesting to get a postmortem on the project from them but my guess is SFI was in deep financial issues and just couldn't handle big projects anymore so they sold off the most valuable thing they had to stay afloat. I kept checking out their website over the years after that(mostly because of Kohan before TimeGate broke ties with SFI as well) and they were basically just releasing what today would be classified as shovelware.


Yeah, it wasn't just that one message. There was a lot of 1 line flavor text in the game that hinted at there being much more to Greenskins than it appeared, on at least one of the maps(i think it was a scenario) you had a full on greenskin invasion coming onto the map to attack your settlements across multiple turns. I think there was also speculation of a possible Greenskin expansion but instead we got the 2 campaign packs. Greenskins in general had the most units out of all the neutral races in the game a lot of potential to be a full on race. Sad that it never happened.

[Clown Reemus]

Originally posted by Kinja:

Originally posted by Clown Reemus:

Did Strategy First just sell the rights? How did it happen, was Danny Belanger behind it, or he was forced to go along with it?

As for the Greenskins, they have tremendous potential. In the spirit of the first two games - they are even set up for a possible continuation, lore-wise. When during the final Elven mission the player raids a Greenskin temple in the middle of the map, they get a message "Why do you hurt us Greenskins so much? Our god (something) will punish you!" and that is more than enough to have a whole sequel. But I am also thinking about a full series culmination, story-wise. This is what I would like to incorporate into my vision of a worthy continuation. A serious, Disciple-ish Greenskin race.

I joined the old forums in 2005. It's been 16 years but as i remember it we had one of the developers talking to us on the forum, sharing some early concept art and giving us some vague updates. At the time we were expecting the Disciples 3 that Strategy First was supposedly making to come out at the same time or around the same time as Heroes of Might and Magic 5. HoMM 5 kept getting more and more info released, screenshots and gameplay video but nothing conclusive was coming out for D3. I also remember something called World of Disciples being brought up by the same developer but i don't remember what it was and unfortunately i can't access the thread on the wayback machine and there's only one snapshot before the game got passed to .dat on which most threads can't be accessed. Might have been a possible title in another genre but i'm unsure, might have been an aggregate website for all titles in the series since back then they all had separate websites, even the expansions.

We were eventually told something along the lines of Strategy First no longer being the ones that were developing Disciples 3, that .dat would be taking over but we should rest assured that the game was already pretty far into development so we wouldn't have to wait long. This of course was not true and the fact that they had shut down the Disciples 3 website should have been a sign of things to come. The english forum was less and less active and eventually everyone who was left just moved to the russian forum and the original forum got deleted. At some point we were simply told that Akella had actually purchased the IP and it had nothing to do with SFI anymore. I think they also told us that either that there had been almost no work done on the game before it passed to .dat or that they had to scrap it and start over(i'm a bit foggy on that part), either way the game clearly looked very different from anything i was expecting. At least as far as i know we never got any word from the original team on what happened, i have no idea if anyone ever tried to reach out to Danny Belanger or anyone else on the team over the years. Would have been very interesting to get a postmortem on the project from them but my guess is SFI was in deep financial issues and just couldn't handle big projects anymore so they sold off the most valuable thing they had to stay afloat. I kept checking out their website over the years after that(mostly because of Kohan before TimeGate broke ties with SFI as well) and they were basically just releasing what today would be classified as shovelware.


Yeah, it wasn't just that one message. There was a lot of 1 line flavor text in the game that hinted at there being much more to Greenskins than it appeared, on at least one of the maps(i think it was a scenario) you had a full on greenskin invasion coming onto the map to attack your settlements across multiple turns. I think there was also speculation of a possible Greenskin expansion but instead we got the 2 campaign packs. Greenskins in general had the most units out of all the neutral races in the game a lot of potential to be a full on race. Sad that it never happened.

I have tried reaching out to Danny several times and he thanked me for support for his work (on Disciples II) and also said that "Unfortunately" the IP is not in his hands anymore and he cannot do anything about what Liberation is going to become under the Disciples plaque. Alas it seems that the future of the spiritual successor is indeed in the hands of the "fanbase" and passionate enthusiasts.

[sam_502]

Back in the day i remember talks of greenskin race, lizardmen race and barbarian race. The talk branched to these three races plus one new one to make a disciples 2 without the original 4 races. After that the idea was for next games to have maybe all races. But these talks were long ago and i cant find anything at all. Old forums are closed. But yeah that was the discussion back then.

Never heard of the nagas as race but it sounds quite possible they were probably the 4th race. Just by talking here we made alomst a new story for a disciples 3 game haha

[Clown Reemus]

Originally posted by sam_502:

Back in the day i remember talks of greenskin race, lizardmen race and barbarian race. The talk branched to these three races plus one new one to make a disciples 2 without the original 4 races. After that the idea was for next games to have maybe all races. But these talks were long ago and i cant find anything at all. Old forums are closed. But yeah that was the discussion back then.

Never heard of the nagas as race but it sounds quite possible they were probably the 4th race. Just by talking here we made alomst a new story for a disciples 3 game haha

Well it is ambitious indeed, and it would fit in well with the universe. Just like Heroes of Might and Magic have 8 core races/nations, the same is possible with Disciples - although does it need as many races? The original ones were there for a strong, enticing tragic story. A Barbarian race would be just the fan-dream and there for the gameplay.

[Kinja]

Originally posted by nTu4Ka:

@Kinja, Thanks for sharing your story. It was pretty interesting to read.

They started over.
.dat wanted to feature their inhouse engine. They in addition found unreasonable to use previous Disciples engine (they deemed it outdated).
Btw. I also remember some information about World of Disciples and was concerned that they will make MMO. XD

It was an interesting trip down memory lane, pretty cringe reading some of my own posts from 15 years ago but also funny reading the posts of people i kept in touch with for a very long time after i stopped visiting the forum and one who i'm still friends with today. It was also a bit sad reading how excited we all used to be for Disciples and all the feedback and ideas everyone gave and .dat basically chose to ignore to the detriment of the final product.

While i know that some people liked the final product from a visual standpoint(i'll agree that the soundtrack was pretty good) i still think it looked inferior to Disciples 2. Disciples 2 may have had dated graphics but it more than made up for it in how deeply atmospheric and immersive it was, neither of which i have ever felt for Disciples 3. A lot of the units looked worse than their Disciples 2 versions and the towns, imho, looked terrible. Their choice to focus so much on their new engine also resulted in the game having, as far as i can remember, no new units for any of the factions which was another major disappointment as one of the few gripes i had with disciples 2 was the lack of more fleshed out lateral progression and choice. Not to mention the fact that they axed the Clans either for financial reasons or because they wanted to sell them separately later if the game was a success.

Yeah, browsing the few snapshots of the forum on the "wayback machine" i also saw another thread called "Disciples MMO" and i thought it might be related to Disciples World. While i can't access either threads it would make sense as it was the period after World of Warcraft became a massive success and everyone wanted to make their own money printing machines.

Originally posted by Clown Reemus:

I have tried reaching out to Danny several times and he thanked me for support for his work (on Disciples II) and also said that "Unfortunately" the IP is not in his hands anymore and he cannot do anything about what Liberation is going to become under the Disciples plaque. Alas it seems that the future of the spiritual successor is indeed in the hands of the "fanbase" and passionate enthusiasts.

It's nice to hear that he still remembers the series, hopefully fondly. While i wouldn't expect any of the old devs to be able to do anything about the IP(outside of proposing it's purchase to whatever large studio they might be working at, tho seeing how HoMM ended up....) it would have at least been interesting to hear what they had been planning to do with their version of Disciples 3 and what went wrong at SFI that they ended up forced to sell it.

Originally posted by sam_502:

Back in the day i remember talks of greenskin race, lizardmen race and barbarian race. The talk branched to these three races plus one new one to make a disciples 2 without the original 4 races. After that the idea was for next games to have maybe all races. But these talks were long ago and i cant find anything at all. Old forums are closed. But yeah that was the discussion back then.

Never heard of the nagas as race but it sounds quite possible they were probably the 4th race. Just by talking here we made alomst a new story for a disciples 3 game haha

Yes, a lot of discussions were had about how the neutral factions might become full playable factions and i'm pretty sure Greenskins were planned to be playable in SFI's version of Disciples 3. You can still see the old forum in the form of snapshots on the website i'll link below. Sadly there's not that many of them, they're only of the first page of the forum and many of the threads are lost to time.

https://web.archive.org/web/20070516073718/http://www.strategyfirst.com:80/forum/cgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=forum;f=48

[mell00yell00]

Every now and then I go back and try to play disciples 3 for a couple hours just hoping it isn’t as bad as I remember. Unfortunately the good soundtrack can only carry me soo far :(

[hopefulveil]

In my opinion the soundtrack, art style and some of the embellished lore for the undead hordes were the highlights of D3.