Why does Spellforce 3 get so much hate?

[Doctor Roach]

When I try to browse stuff online about Spellforce 3 people are always ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ on it for some reason.

I really enjoyed Spellforce 3 and its DLC? I never completed the originals although I did play them and I never found them that superior as others claim them to be.

[Crypto Gamer]

During SF 3 launch game had MANY game breaking bugs and had to recieve patches like weekly and even then it was RNG if you get game breaking bugs or not.

So first few months were a bug fest.......very bad first impressions-

Game does not utlilise CPU cores well so it was a common complaint resulting lowering perfomance.

Game AI unit crazy spam was a complain....especially when they had 1 sector left and were pooping out 50 tier 3 units like crazy.Amd vanilla had no pop cap so perfomance could be very bad with 1000 pop armies.

Unit balance was terrible.

And heroes could easily bybass RTS by just yoloing enemy main even before your started RTS........
Lots of RTS complaints.

For long some new AMD CPUs did not work with spellforce despite it being from 2017.........
I think it was fixed in 2020.........

Most of spellforce 3 lore it basically not even compatible with SF 1,2 lore many things do not make sense story and lore wise including creating the blades within a few weeks time.

And many found gameplay to be inferior to SF 1.

Less spells than SF 1
RTS that is very anti turtle unlike SF 1.
Harder to control than SF1.

And many people hated the caravan system which made understanding your resources very hard.
And SF 1 had cool stuff like food,iron refinement with cool animations but resource system was easy to understand.SF 2 dumped down everything.

That said reforced fixed most of the problems.

But game had a very rough launch lots of complaints were justified.

Reforced early patches were also ultra bad balanced on higher difficulties in RTS till like patch 4 or 5.

Soul harvest and Fallen God(did not play it yet)were much more polished by start.
So not sure why they got complaints.

[Doctor Roach]

Originally posted by Crypto Gamer:

During SF 3 launch game had MANY game breaking bugs and had to recieve patches like weekly and even then it was RNG if you get game breaking bugs or not.

So first few months were a bug fest.......very bad first impressions-

Game does not utlilise CPU cores well so it was a common complaint resulting lowering perfomance.

Game AI unit crazy spam was a complain....especially when they had 1 sector left and were pooping out 50 tier 3 units like crazy.Amd vanilla had no pop cap so perfomance could be very bad with 1000 pop armies.

Unit balance was terrible.

And heroes could easily bybass RTS by just yoloing enemy main even before your started RTS........
Lots of RTS complaints.

For long some new AMD CPUs did not work with spellforce despite it being from 2017.........
I think it was fixed in 2020.........

Most of spellforce 3 lore it basically not even compatible with SF 1,2 lore many things do not make sense story and lore wise including creating the blades within a few weeks time.

And many found gameplay to be inferior to SF 1.

Less spells than SF 1
RTS that is very anti turtle unlike SF 1.
Harder to control than SF1.

And many people hated the caravan system which made understanding your resources very hard.
And SF 1 had cool stuff like food,iron refinement with cool animations but resource system was easy to understand.SF 2 dumped down everything.

That said reforced fixed most of the problems.

But game had a very rough launch lots of complaints were justified.

Reforced early patches were also ultra bad balanced on higher difficulties in RTS till like patch 4 or 5.

Soul harvest and Fallen God(did not play it yet)were much more polished by start.
So not sure why they got complaints.

I also played on release,
Yeah I understand the bug and other critisms thats fair, i stopped playing at the beginning because my PC wasnt fast enough, I later played it after when it was more optimised so my experience was better.

From my understanding they changed bit of the lore and rectoned it? which imo is okay, but I dont think its a serious issue TBH especially when the first game was made nearly 2 decades ago.

Overall I did really like Spellforce 3 though, a hidden gem in the RPG market in my opinion.

I tried 1 and 2, but they have aged too much for me, and I usually play a ton of old games dont get me wrong, SP1 was just really buggy for me, alot of crashes etc.

[Dracir]

Well first off:
The first original release in 2017 which we know today had quite a rough launch with a lot of stuff not working back then.

As well as the sector system confused a lot of people. It wasn´t that bad honestly. Just maybe a bit slow. The devs definitly made some lore mistakes but overall the story was quite praised. AI was always quite spammy which was a problem for many people.

Afterwards you had the release of Soul Harvest which brought the Dwarves and the Dark Elves. The devs reworked the whole thing with this standalone-addon to what we kinda know today. Without the carts, improved UI. rebalanced values and a smaller scale campaign.

It was definitly better recieved.

Next in the row was Fallen God now bringing in the Trolls. A Standalone-Addon again and well the reception was pretty good. Characters and story got really praised a lot. Only bigger ciritism point could have been creep variety (since they don´t have the biggest manpower / budget).


With that also Versus released the standalone client.
But back then you would get one of the free base races asigned randomly, which got quite some ciritics so it was changed in the end. Multiplayer drew some people in. However the balancing wasn´t just there yet and with the player numbers declining again which led to quite a depressing mood.
Also that people always came up with the "Starcraft-Comparison" like that was really cancer.

Devs took continiously player feedback in. And improved the whole thing.

Last but not least: Reforced.
The update came for free for everyone owning the original basegame. And the whole thing was now combined into one thing. With "Versus" kinda acting as the launcher.
This led to A LOT of confusion hence why people are asking what is what until this day.
Sadly Reforced got a little downvote train from some people because they saw the Epic API ingame and voted it down : "AH CHINESE SPYSOFTWARE" (which is utter bolocks).


Well and there is this problem: A minority that set their lifegoals on witchhunting the devs. They think they own the IP but they don´t.


Other than that sadly the IP is quite unknown outside of european regions because JoWood never promoted it properly. But hey the games have at least a decent score:
Reforced: about 80%
Soul Harvest: around 85%
And Fallen God: close to 90%

So yeah quite unlucky Q.Q

[Krosis Priest]

I really don't know, but from experience, if something is getting a lot of hate for no clear reason, do not trust that kind of witch hunt mentality. It usually is a very vocal and very toxic minority, typically with no other reasoning than "it's not what I wanted so I hate it".

In my case, I literally found the game by accident some time before Reforced came out, struggled a bit with the camera at first, but I ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ love the game to bits now and it filled a void for me that I've had in gaming for maybe a decade or more.

And I heard a lot about the bad launch, but the kind of support from the devs I've been seeing since I started playing is frankly amazing these days. A game getting improvements and updates for FREE for no other reason than just making the game better and lenghtening its lifespan? With no strings attached and no paid DLCs required in 2020s?! And devs still actually responding to questions and suggestions on the forum? No way.

[Crypto Gamer]

So game got a lot of justified compalints especially in early lifecycle of the game when majority of sales happen.

And reforced(and other games)often get review bombs if it has epic in it.It quickly got removed.

Forgot one more thing.

Spellforce 1 and 2 had many races eg.Kithar,lots of demon types.

So SF 3 also has less vareity than SF 1 and 2.

Spellforce 3 could have used far more creep types eg.werewolves,shadows,minotatur,beastmen etc. just from SF 1 or 2.

SH also recieved some complains about dark elves being so much different from SF 1 and SF 2 and they might also not be lore friendly.
Over all SF 3 lore pissed off many fans.

So it also has less vareity than SF 1 and 2.

To be fair current steam rating for SF games seems to be justified.
They by no means perfect they are kinda good scores.

I like SF 3 I still prefer SF 1 over it by far for many reasons.

SF series likely could have been well know if SF 3 was delayed for 6-12 months as it needed tons of polish including working with modern CPUs.......

[Witski]

Originally posted by Dracir:

Well first off:
The first original release in 2017 which we know today had quite a rough launch with a lot of stuff not working back then.

As well as the sector system confused a lot of people. It wasn´t that bad honestly. Just maybe a bit slow. The devs definitly made some lore mistakes but overall the story was quite praised. AI was always quite spammy which was a problem for many people.

Afterwards you had the release of Soul Harvest which brought the Dwarves and the Dark Elves. The devs reworked the whole thing with this standalone-addon to what we kinda know today. Without the carts, improved UI. rebalanced values and a smaller scale campaign.

It was definitly better recieved.

Next in the row was Fallen God now bringing in the Trolls. A Standalone-Addon again and well the reception was pretty good. Characters and story got really praised a lot. Only bigger ciritism point could have been creep variety (since they don´t have the biggest manpower / budget).


With that also Versus released the standalone client.
But back then you would get one of the free base races asigned randomly, which got quite some ciritics so it was changed in the end. Multiplayer drew some people in. However the balancing wasn´t just there yet and with the player numbers declining again which led to quite a depressing mood.
Also that people always came up with the "Starcraft-Comparison" like that was really cancer.

Devs took continiously player feedback in. And improved the whole thing.

Last but not least: Reforced.
The update came for free for everyone owning the original basegame. And the whole thing was now combined into one thing. With "Versus" kinda acting as the launcher.
This led to A LOT of confusion hence why people are asking what is what until this day.
Sadly Reforced got a little downvote train from some people because they saw the Epic API ingame and voted it down : "AH CHINESE SPYSOFTWARE" (which is utter bolocks).


Well and there is this problem: A minority that set their lifegoals on witchhunting the devs. They think they own the IP but they don´t.


Other than that sadly the IP is quite unknown outside of european regions because JoWood never promoted it properly. But hey the games have at least a decent score:
Reforced: about 80%
Soul Harvest: around 85%
And Fallen God: close to 90%

So yeah quite unlucky Q.Q

So with reforged i could not install the other two standalone games?
Just now i decided to finish the game after playing a bit conquest of eo.

[Dracir]

[/quote]
So with reforged i could not install the other two standalone games?
Just now i decided to finish the game after playing a bit conquest of eo. [/quote]

You need both Versus + Game with the respective campaign.
But don´t ask me how it is with the GOG version. Haven´t used mine since Fallen God anymore.

[Witski]

Originally posted by Dracir:

So with reforged i could not install the other two standalone games?
Just now i decided to finish the game after playing a bit conquest of eo. [/quote]

You need both Versus + Game with the respective campaign.
But don´t ask me how it is with the GOG version. Haven´t used mine since Fallen God anymore. [/quote]
hm, i just installed reforced and the dlc's without versus,not sure about versus,it seems im able to play all the campaigns.

[zizi]

Versus is more important for multiplayer than singleplayer. That means, while you need to have the respective campaign installed to be able to play it, for MP it's enough to solely have versus installed.

[Doctor Roach]

Originally posted by Crypto Gamer:

So game got a lot of justified compalints especially in early lifecycle of the game when majority of sales happen.

And reforced(and other games)often get review bombs if it has epic in it.It quickly got removed.

Forgot one more thing.

Spellforce 1 and 2 had many races eg.Kithar,lots of demon types.

So SF 3 also has less vareity than SF 1 and 2.

Spellforce 3 could have used far more creep types eg.werewolves,shadows,minotatur,beastmen etc. just from SF 1 or 2.

SH also recieved some complains about dark elves being so much different from SF 1 and SF 2 and they might also not be lore friendly.
Over all SF 3 lore pissed off many fans.

So it also has less vareity than SF 1 and 2.

To be fair current steam rating for SF games seems to be justified.
They by no means perfect they are kinda good scores.

I like SF 3 I still prefer SF 1 over it by far for many reasons.

SF series likely could have been well know if SF 3 was delayed for 6-12 months as it needed tons of polish including working with modern CPUs.......

I understand the lore criticisms but I thought they changed the lore on purpose and it was more of a reboot/recon of some of the lore. Personally I found this a good change, but maybe other players dont agree and thats fine.

I still love the story of Spellforce 3+the DLCS

[iameatingjam]

Well I never played at launch, or played any of the predecessors, only discovered the game recently and I love it. Already spent over 100 hours playing and haven't even started fallen god. Definitely surprised its not more popular. Then again, I've been focusing mostly on single player I don't know much about the multiplayer.

[ScythianUA]

it is not just bad first impression, there is a lot of small things they didn't add for some stupid reason and main problem for many: rts is ♥♥♥♥...yes it is looks like it is solid and complex, but when you actually play it - you feel that is a mess of "tower defence" with waves of constantly spawning armies out from nowhere and only heroes can withstand those...and all you do is microing those waves after waves from 2-3 directions for hours and constant reloads just to build up your one army and finish enemy base...it is a bad design at its core...hack hiding under a beautiful and expensive wrapper

[Dracir]

Only the original basegame had quite the problem with the waves.
With the rework it definitly got better (also that you still can kinda faceroll with the right hero)

Ironically the original "hard" burningblood missions kinda got swaped. The elves now being the hardest and the orcs... i don´t think that mission is that hard anymore <.<

Soul Harvest and Fallen God were also more fine in that regard.

[Kenz]

if you think spellforce 1 was not good compared to 3 then you are missing the point completely about spellforce.

[HazardHawk]

It is like anything else. People with negative opinions push them and people with praise rarely say. Anger is a driving motivator and happiness is held close and dear. Sadly, in today's world, anger is driven to destroy any peace it encounters for fear of being alone.