My feedback (narrative is awful)

[AVATON]

Despite the decent turn-based combat, the game has serious flaws.

Awful narrative

The game starts as low-fantasy, but the narrative doesn't correspond to this setting and strives for the common fantasy. The twist is poor, some BAD guys are destroying some GOOD guys. It's so flat, it's so simple, like the first cutscene. Characters have poor acting voices and poor lines, they speak like characters of a trash fantasy movie with 3/10 IMDB rating. If you want to make a quality dark fantasy, read some lines from Battle Brothers quest lines. Even without cutscenes, they are really dark and really low-fantasy.
1. Low-fantasy needs realism to be dark. Without realism, it will not be dark. The lines in Crown Wars are like a school essay, they are not realistic dialogue lines that could be there.
2. You should avoid good/bad side for this setting, it makes it flat. No one should be 100% good or bad. This is not a classic fantasy with good elves vs bad orcs.

Awful graphics

The graphics if pretty cool on screenshots and trailers, but in the game? Everything is blurred, insane amount of blur is there. Please remove it. Animations leave best to be desired. They are pretty ok for battles, but in the cutscenes, characters move like dolls. Also. FPS is low equally on low and high graphic settings.

No open world

The map looks like it has only linear missions and no sandbox mechanics. It's very bad because we have a very similar game Wartales with open world within the same setting, and everyone will compare these games. Will Crown Wars be better? I think no with such an approach.

Combat

Ok, this part of the game is pretty normal, unlike that I wrote above. But it has its own flaws.
1. All skills are epic. Bowmen do headshots, but where is a common shot? When you can't compare epic with common, everything becomes so innatural and false epic. Please make less "epic cool fantasy abilities" and make more usual skills for a typical medieval fighter, look at the Battle Brothers skill system.
2. Characters classes. They are like a cheap fantasy... totally not dark, totally not realistic, totally not low fantasy, nor dark fantasy. They remind me Marvel superheroes, it doesn't fit the setting of medieval dark fantasy based on real history. Again, we have the same beastmen, dark guys, two handed guys in Battle Brothers but there they don't look like invaders from the Marvel. Even Wartales looks more realistic.

Overall impression

The game needs serious rework, many things look better in the description and trailers than in the actual gameplay.

[The Seraph of Tomorrow]

I have not tried the demo yet, but I will agree to some of the points you made. The selling point of low fantasy is its gritty realism, while the selling point of high fantasy is its focus on adventures both epic and wondrous.

Meanwhile Dark Fantasy is based around a grim setting where terrors or tragedy are never far from mind because the genre incorporates elements of horror and/or despair into the world. This often is represented by settings where civilization is on the edge of the abyss, which can be seen in games like Bloodborne where the humans in the setting that are still sane can not be really called good or evil. Most the NPCs you encounter are just different flavors of doing what they believed was right or falling to the corruption of the world despite their best efforts.

As a dark fantasy writer myself, I feel the word "Dark Fantasy" has been cheapened due to its popularity. With many who use it now using the term wrong to describe generic evil, when the term is meant describe the overarching a tone / theme of a setting. In a good dark fantasy setting, often morality is in shades of grey where what is right is never obvious because the world does not allow for easy solutions to the perils that threaten the people. Black and white morality is a theme of high fantasy.

It's one of the great things about the Dark Fantasy genre. What determines what is right or wrong is left for you to decide, or it is a complex thing where the antagonist could be a "villain of good intentions" whose only mistake is that he is willing to fight for his people just as hard as you desire to fight for yours. Where as a hero in such a setting may be someone with very human flaws and only by virtue of standing by your side earns the title, or loses the title due to these flaws.

That and the greatest threat in a dark fantasy setting is typically the world itself rather than your fellow man. Which takes the pressure off of writer who might instinctively try to create a villain, when the writer just needs to make a person with believable motivations in the world.

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After trying the demo, I have to agree the narrative and dialogue is awful. I have no idea who approve it, but they should really reconsider what exists. I was not impressed, and this (as it should come to no surprise as a writer) don't have much interested in a game with a poorly presented story and characters with dialogue that feels very forced.

That and this game calls itself dark fantasy, which is just plainly wrong. It's just generic fantasy which would be fine if it was better written.

The only thing the game has going for it is the unit customization options, which are limited but that's more than most turn based games that are not Xcom.

[glenn3e]

I’m going to assume the game is linear with no choices until the devs give us any info cause them clamping up this close to release is a warning of a potentially bad game.

[CavalierArcher]

Looking at your post history, you basically just go around to complain and criticize a bunch of games. Either you are just a really negative person, or an amazing Developer who looks down on inferior ones. But the pattern is really clear from your post history.

I'm not saying this is an amazing game, but from the demo it is certainly a competent AA version of XCOM at least. I have hundreds of hours in XCOM and Wartales, and still think this can sit with them. The setting and story is fine, not everything needs Witcher quality depth of narrative. I just wanna moves dudes around in turn based combat, and the AA price point is fine for that.

[AVATON]

Originally posted by CavalierArcher:

Looking at your post history, you basically just go around to complain and criticize a bunch of games. Either you are just a really negative person, or an amazing Developer who looks down on inferior ones. But the pattern is really clear from your post history.

I'm not saying this is an amazing game, but from the demo it is certainly a competent AA version of XCOM at least. I have hundreds of hours in XCOM and Wartales, and still think this can sit with them. The setting and story is fine, not everything needs Witcher quality depth of narrative. I just wanna moves dudes around in turn based combat, and the AA price point is fine for that.

I'm not an active steam forums' user, neither a developer. I'm just a person who *sometimes* write what he thinks. I do not see any sense in writing "this game is good", a lot of games are good you can check my play hours, I just don't write about them because... they are good, what should I say more? When I come to Steam forums, it is usually related to some problems that I want to show directly to developers, in other cases I prefer Reddit just for talking about games.

About XCOM, well, XCOM has much more freedom of actions. This game seems to have not. If it will, it will be better.

[MateSalsa]

OP has some valid points honestly.

I also noticed a discrepancy between the setting (100 years war and plague so brutal and dark) and the presentation (cartoony npcs and cheesy and tongue in cheek voice acting). I think it is intentional though and they simply didn't want to go with a Got\Witcher route, instead they wanted to create a mix of seriousness and comedic fun.

Personally this approach doesn't work for me either.
Altough I wouldn't be surprised if they pushed back the release date because they completely rework the voice acting after the backlash on the steam forum.

I noticed one annoying thing in the demo. During a combat encounter the UI shows only your party's portraits and HP even though in most c\trpgs you see those of all participants. It made the encounters a little bit more janky than I preferred.

Lastly I didn't finish the demo becuase one party member bugged out in the 2nd quest:
her animations disappeared so she moved like a chess figurine ina a C64 chess program. And between each tile and attack I needed to wait around 30 seconds. Didn't reload and retry, just uninstalled it.

I have mixed feelings with the experience based on the demo.

[bobbylee412]

Originally posted by AVATON:

No open world

The map looks like it has only linear missions and no sandbox mechanics. It's very bad because we have a very similar game Wartales with open world within the same setting, and everyone will compare these games. Will Crown Wars be better? I think no with such an approach.

Uh, not everyone wants open world. That was the only thing I hated about Wartales how much time I had to spend traveling back and forth. I don’t play any open world games anymore I only prefer linear. Open world consumes way too much time and not everyone has hundreds of hours to dump into a single game. Some people have lives. That doesn’t mean my opinion or your opinion is more accurate, but you are blatantly saying it’s worse because it’s not open world. You’re kind of a moron. Terrible reviewer, it’s no wonder you don’t get paid to do so.