Operencia vs. Bard's Tale 4 vs. Might & Magic X?

[D.a.r.k.ELF]

Hello all! Like in subject, who of you guys play all this games and can you tell me which is the best and why?

[Kordanor]

It depends on what you look for in a game.

Personally I'd say that Operencia was best, MMX is second and BT4 is third.

I'll go over the strenghts and weaknesses of each game from my perspective:

Might and Magic X Legacy:
Pro: Nice open world, a somewhat deep character system, overall good feel
Con: Very easy to gimp your characters and if you are really bad at planning ahead and play on hard difficulty you could actually get stuck. On the other hand, if you master the system the last third of the game will also be really easy, as some game mechanics are totally out of balance (double attacks which multiply procs and so on). Also weapon balance was accordingly horrible.

Bards Tale 4:
Pro: Great Atmosphere, great Voice Acting, Lots of Puzzles with challenging difficulty
Con: TOO much puzzles. I actually liked them, but you spend lots of time on these and they actually added an option in a patch to just skip some. There are also some puzzles which need external material to solve them, meant as gimmic but really bad design.
Also when I played it the balancing was horrible. The game was completely out of balance after maybe half of the game. Enemy groups just died. Funny thing: When I talked about it to a friend he was like "yeah, totally easy, I just use this overpowered ability and everything dies". And I was like "oh, didnt know of that, I am using this other overpowered ability"...

Operencia:
Pro: Perfect balance of stuff to explore, fighting, and puzzles, lots of dialogues, combat (with the new hard difficulty) seems to be decently balanced (so far, I am not finished yet). Super beautiful graphics, very unique and well done surroundings
Con: No open world and also no Cities or anything like that (BT4 also isnt exactly open, but has more of a feel of a world). The Story is all over the place and isn't very immersive. About 20% of the voice acting is quite bad. The puzzles are too easy. Combat readability isn't great.


So what's the best overall? To me (and again I am not finished with operencia yet), Operencia is the best, as it's a very well made package. Yes, the story and voice acting is not top, but it also has this kind of humor and this fairy tale flair, which put less weight into a dense atmosphere. (same way as good voice acting and believable story is more important in a Thriller than in a Comedy Movie).
I especially like density of dialogues, you are always feeling you are doing something "meaningful" and not just running around, killing stuff (especially like in Grimrock). Also there are some optional puzzles where you can go back to with new items you found. It's really fun to explore the unique world. It also didn't add something like a stupid crafting system to set another mark at a checkbox, instead it uses "crafting" to add a few more logic puzzles, which again add to the variety of stuff you do in the game.

Overall Operencia is just the best overall package imho. Unless ofc you hate the story or style or prefer much harder puzzles.

Btw: I also did review videos about MMX and BT4, but they are in German, so I didn't link them here. You can find them on youtube by searching for game name + Kordanor + Review
Same goes for Let's Play videos, which also document the imbalances of mentioned games.

[Kholdy]

Since I'm one of the few people who played MMX and actually like it, I can offer my opinion. All the games have vast differences, so I will focus on the differences that I feel are worth mentioning.

Operencia definitely looks the best out of all the games by far. It has a much better difficulty curve, and this is where the game outdoes others. Many games are super hard at the beginning then it becomes super easy. Operencia remains the same difficulty throughout, with the endgame arguably more difficult due to stunlocks and charmlocks. With other dungeon crawler games, I feel excited at first then halfway through it gets boring.

MMX arguably have more combinations of parties that you can try out. There is a wider variety of builds which leads to me replaying the game multiple times. However, you do want to read up on the game and classes beforehand. It is extremely difficult if you are not building your party correctly. Those who play MMX as their first dungeon crawler may just quit after a few hours and never touch another dungeon crawler again since it's not a good starting point. For experienced players who are used to optimizing, it is greatly enjoyable.

Bard's Tale: I didn't play up to 4 but I did play the previous ones. I didn't like how little the story there is. It's similar to the old dungeon crawlers where you just drop a party into a world and start exploring with little or no explanation. I don't know how much this changed for 4, but I did not play it due to preference.

[Maximusdu83]

i think operencia is the best but after (dungeon master or chaos strike back on artari st)
i dream to can replay with this game .

But operencia is very very good game

[D.a.r.k.ELF]

Thanks for your every answer! :) I play now Bard's Tale 4, than i try MMX. Operencia is beautyfull but she doesn't have open world.
Maybe some of you know some nice Dungeon Crawler games but with Polish language ;)) Or maybe something coming soon?

[Edgewalker]

Fall of the Dungeon Guardians> Operencia > M&M > Bards Tale

Bards tale started out very strong but evolved into boring puzzle nightmare, I gave up on about 80% progress.
M&M had weird balance choices with narrow "correct" builds you had to fit into.
Operencia sucks on lack of combat log and hiding mechanics from you but is great overall.
Fall of Dungeon Guardians is darkest in terms of story and strongest in terms of balance and gameplay. It's also the most hardcore.

I played all games on max difficulty without ironman.

[Kordanor]

I am also playing everything on hardest without Ironman, and also played "Fall of the Dungeon Guardians" but would rate it a whole class lower than the other 3 games.
Mechanically it has it's share of flaws as well, but compared to the other 3 games it mostly lacks a "decorated" world and story. It's not as dull as Grimrock and has at least some attempts on putting some story and dialogues into it, but quality wise they are pretty horrible (much inferior even to Operencia and with a lower densitiy).

Mechanically first of all it's different as it is not Turn Based but Real Time with Pause, which surprisingly works quite well in this gam and I would say is the main reason to play it due to a "new mechanical" approach to these kind of games.

But other than that it has it's flaws as well. The combat system calculations are quite hard to look through (I actually had some discussions in the steam forum with th developer there) and the skill trees seem to be more open than they actually are and only allow for a minimum of combination options.

I did a Review for that one as well. Unfortunately also German Only:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lb1dh8P6cI

[Maximusdu83]

the fall of dungeon guardians is wonderfull

[Kholdy]

Since we started talking about Fall of the Dungeon Guardians, I shall offer my opinion as well. First of all, I greatly enjoyed playing through the game. Like Kordanor says, it severely lacks in a world and story. I got bored at parts because I'm just mindlessly killing things and am not very engaged in the actual reason of why I'm killing these things. As for mechanics, I will say that it doesn't have much in common with the other games aside from grid-based movement and skill trees. The combat is real time with pause, and there is a quite strict aggro system that you must use. While Operencia highly suggests through encounters that you should use someone with Taunt, you can still get through the game in another way.

tl;dr FotDG is enjoyable but I wouldn't really compare it to the 3 mentioned above.

[Darke]

Originally posted by Kordanor:

Bards Tale 4:
Also when I played it the balancing was horrible. The game was completely out of balance after maybe half of the game. Enemy groups just died. Funny thing: When I talked about it to a friend he was like "yeah, totally easy, I just use this overpowered ability and everything dies". And I was like "oh, didnt know of that, I am using this other overpowered ability"...

I've only played it post mega-patch of the Director's Cut edition and it feels like they've completely swung the other way now. I got tired of the repetitive-grindy-frequently-TPK fights on normal that started around 20-30% of the way through and ended up dropping it to 'easy', which is a bit too easy. I guess normal mode is optimized for using these overpowered abilities, but I can't say I'f found any too unbalanced after the mega-patch.

[Darke]

Originally posted by Kholdy:

Bard's Tale: I didn't play up to 4 but I did play the previous ones. I didn't like how little the story there is. It's similar to the old dungeon crawlers where you just drop a party into a world and start exploring with little or no explanation. I don't know how much this changed for 4, but I did not play it due to preference.

Bards Tale IV has more story than pretty much any of the Might & Magic games (1-9, I haven't played X). Honestly it almost feels like there's too much talking at times. :/

[Kordanor]

Yeah, BT4 is pretty heavy on story for a crawler, which is fine for me.
BT1-3 did not have any story at all, and also no immersion in the game world itself. Well, the games are from the 80s ofc, but it was still extremely bad and actually quite a shock to me about how bad these early crawlers really were story wise as well as mechanically.

But ofc that just increased the clash and the expectations people had for BT 4. Apparently people expected just chopping up millions of mobs in generic looking dungeons.

Instead they got something very different. A game comparatively strong on story and an over the top amount of puzzles. Also didnt help that it didnt have tile based movement when it released.

[drusca]

hmm. the fall of guardians has some stange combat at least for me. operencia and BDT4 have awesome combat. and it;s true that bd4 is kinda easy on normal once you get the hang of it BUT that's why it has more difficulties that can be changed anytime at will. too complain about the difficulty when you can adjust it any way you see fit is kinda strange.
but I would like to see the dungeon crawler which comes close to BD4 when it comes to music. the music in BD4 is AWESOME. couldn't get enough of it.

I didn't play MM series at their time and now the graphics makes them no-go for me. and also he combat system is...old.

[Kordanor]

I always play on hardest difficulty. So when I complain about difficulty that usually means that it's very easy on hardest difficulty.

[Edgewalker]

Guys, check out "Lords of Xulima". It's only for the true school though, difficulty is significant ^^

[Kordanor]

It's not a crawler though. Decent game, but also much easier after first 20 hours or so. Unfortunately also much more grindy. Well, maybe if you don't kill everyone it also becomes harder...but difficulty and incentives are set a bit weird in the game (like collecting berries instead of buying food to save some coins, which you don't have to do, but as gold is limited in the game, you would lose out. Same for XP, and herbs which have a skill you should increase right away to max this stuff out, and ignore all herbs until its maxed out...and so on)