Is this 'Shadows Behind the Throne 3'?

[Canute VII]

Is it basically the same thing, improved? Or somehow different?

[Ramidel]

The main difference is that you don't get to play with the politics directly, which was key in SOTT 2.

[Canute VII]

Hmm.. so is this an improvement or a degradation? :-)

[Attelso]

Originally posted by Canute VII:

Hmm.. so is this an improvement or a degradation? :-)

In several areas its objective improvement, such as graphics and GUI etc.

But if you dislike the new focus and you really loved politics then its a degradation.

But it has a free demo so why dont you just try it and see for yourself.

[Canute VII]

I haven't played neither of the games, just noticed they were released in short progression. I guess the dev had a reason to drop "politics" then... Graphics/Gui upgrade sounds nice, though.

[stun]

It's remarkably worse

Originally posted by Canute VII:

Is it basically the same thing, improved? Or somehow different?

All ruler agency or nuance has been removed. Relationships between characters basically don't exist and evidence/suspicion is replaced with magic numbers where all characters are omniscient and behave precisely the same motivations and will perform precisely the same actions regardless of how different their circumstances and nature. World panic is fixed and everything is on a fixed timer and there's the ugliest bandaid fixes on a few things and almost every class of bug from shadows2 (evil civs warring with each other, things simple not working or having an implementation) is present in full force and many more besides from it being an even earlier EA than the aborted and unfinished shadows2.
Shadows3 is basically running around with the red masque rushing plague to blow up sites during the lightbringer ritual stretched out over 200-400 turns. It isn't any harder or more interesting, you just have to destroy most the entire map and have a 12.5x longer timer. Enthrallment of either sort is gone, and you interact with locations which bear next to no relations to their current rulers (who you can barely impact in any way, regardless). Shadow is on locations, rulers pick it up from the there, shadow has no impact on character relations and at less than 100% on rulers has basically no impact on decision making, which with the very slow spread of shadow from location to ruler that you cannot alter in any way leaves even enshadowed regions acting pretty much the same as light ones for almost every purpose.
Every change in the art has been for the drastically worse since the cropped placeholder art has been replaced with custom sprites that'd feel right at home in a warcraftIII custom map. Tying everything to locations rather than characters and putting decals on the map means that on any busy game (the only reason any game is ever not busy is because you can win trivially without interacting with 99% of game systems) the map will be painted with clashing florescent colors such that you have to use the fullblack masks to find anything over all the visual noise.

[Typical_Name]

I like this game, but wish it focused more on politics like this Shadows 2 game I sometimes hear about. I kind of wish that game had been finished instead of just moving on to this one, it sounded really cool.

[Omega]

I'll add my vote to conversation :) I pretty much have found last game with its politics, really tedious. I liked the god/shadow part, but just trying to do homework with voting similarly to others, was just boring and repetitive.

I'm extremely happy that they went more into interesting actions as a gameplay, it mimics all lord of the ring's like sagas with evil lurking in some desolated fortress, with global magic, orcs united, powers for each god are interesting and make gameplay fresh.

I love the fact they took out this politics factor (it is still here in some form, just without the dull part).

My 2 cents, so devs see there are people happy about new direction (extremely happy, new game is amazingly fun)

[Gaz]

I completely agree with Omega. This game is a vast improvement over its previous iteration. In every facet the game is better I think, it's far more narratively rich and the mechanics are much more interesting/varied.

[Flap]

In a word, Shadow of the Forbidden Gods, is different enough from Shadow behind the throne 2, that it is not its 3rd iteration.
It is a different game, with more emphasis on the agents, and (much) less on the politics.

[krugg.the.gamer]

It's pretty fun, and it looks like the political stuff is still there so maybe a mod or after it's finished a DLC could be sold that lets you play as the kingdoms and try to stop the elder God? As it is though, it's interesting.. I like sending my agents all over the place causing havok, and having revenge on the families that kill them. I think it needs a bit more love, more events, more personality and background for characters ect, but as is, it still gets the job done.