Heroes of Might and Magic VI is a War Crime
Posted: Sun Jul 21, 2013 6:43 am
Heroes of Might and Magic is a venerable franchise that has been driven into the ground and then shat upon by its current owners: Ubisoft. Heroes of Might and Magic VI is demonstrably a worse game than the original King's Bounty, a game that was released in 1990 and had support for CGA and EGA color graphics.
Heroes of Might and Magic VI has a number of "innovations" and is in the peculiar position that literally all of them make the game shittier. It's such a litany of terrible design choices, poor programming, and half-assed implementation that it is in a way amazing. In order to detail how craptacular this game is, we have to go piece by piece.
The DRM
Holy shit! Ubisoft unveiled their most intrusive, most astounding, most game destroying DRM yet for this game. User usability wasn't a consideration at any level, and it shows. Your saved games are stored on your computer, but they are "validated" on their servers, which means that the game takes forever to load, and you have a sharply limited number of save games, but simultaneously gives you no advantages of server access. You can't play your game on multiple computers. You can't recover saves when they crash (and they will crash). In fact, sometimes the server connection will fuck up your save, and then it's just a giant "Fuck You" because there is no way to get it back.
You have the ability to play the game "online" or "offline". But if you play offline, you can't access any of your games that ever were online, and nothing you do unlocks any content or advances your dynasty weapons and shit. Indeed, if you play offline, you can't even access your dynasty shit or your unlocked content, meaning your characters can't even use weapons (which are all dynasty shenanigans). So if you even try to play offline, you're basically playing with crippleware, and you can't even switch back and forth between the two - if you want to go from cripple version to non or vice versa, you have to go back to the beginning of the game.
But let's say you do try to play the game in its non-crippled version: the DRM fucks you there too. If the server so much as gets distracted by clouds or butterflies, you get kicked out of your whole game, with no chance to save. So if the last time you saved was a long time ago (remembering that there can sometimes be many battles in a single turn), you're out quite a bit of time.
So to recap: if you can't maintain a stable internet connection, you either play a crippled version of the game that doesn't save your progress or you get kicked out of the game at random and it doesn't save your progress. Now for the cherry on top: it's not just you who needs a stable internet connection, because it also goes down if Ubisoft doesn't have a stable internet connection. Their internet connection is not stable. Not only does it crash regularly during "peak usage", but they also have uncheduled server downtimes that sometimes last for days. And during that whole period, you can't progress or save your progress in the single player game. Also you can't play multiplayer duals or anything of course, but I can't stress this enough: you can't play your single player maps with the saves that are on your hard drive while their servers are down, and they don't even have the graciousness to warn you in advance or compensate you in any way.
Fuck Ubisoft. Fuck them so hard.
Moving on the Map
The first thing you notice is that when your hero moves on the map, it is very slow. Some of this is because the aforementioned DRM sometimes causes your game to hang for seconds or even minutes at a time. But most of it is because the game has an internal multiplier set for the overland movement multiplier and it very slow. But hey, that's stored as an integer, so if you bust open the program with an editor you can jack up the walk speed and you'll solve that particular problem. Why this is not accessible from in-game preferences and why the default settings are so teeth grindingly frustrating I do not know.
But now let's try to walk our hero to a distant part of the map. We run into two problems. The first problem you'll notice is that it will take you more than one day to walk to the target, but the game does not tell you how many days that actually is going to be. It doesn't even hazard a guess, there's just a bunch of red step arrows ahead of you and you're on your own guessing how many days it'll take. This is especially frustrating, because predicting how many days a multiple day trip is going to take is something that Heroes of Might and Magic games have been doing since Clinton was president.
But if you actually click a second time to actually start off on this journey that it can't be fucked to tell you how long it's going to take, you take a couple of steps and... stop. See, while the path predicter is capable of showing you the path your hero is supposed to take, the actual movement function gets confused by intervening objects. Your hero is literally incapable of simply walking along the path the computer already fucking calculated and you just clicked to accept. So you have to walk your hero in a series of baby steps, and I'm sure you end up losing some movement points to minor detours and shit. Fuck!
Resources
Heroes VI got rid of most of the special resources. Gems? Gone. Sulfur? Gone. Mercury? Gone. You get Wood, Ore, and Crystal, Final Destination. And looking at that, you might say that that could be enough. And perhaps it could, if hypothetically you didn't require every single resource to field every single creature type for every single faction. Which you do. If you didn't have any Crystal, or Ore, or Wood, you wouldn't be shunted to one creature type over another, you'd simply be stymied and unable to build. There's no strategy at all. No choices. No trade offs.
But it's actually worse than that. See, they made Marketplaces give a better exchange rate than in previous versions, and more importantly made that exchange rate progress all the way to a 1:1 "no loss" rate with only a handful of marketplaces in your empire. Also, Marketplaces actually generate money, and quite a bit of it compared to their cost to build, meaning that every city you have or conquer will in fact have a marketplace in it. So by the time your empire is even big enough to start worrying about "build strategies" or whatever, it simply doesn't even matter. All resources are totally exactly the same as money. You can sell all your secondary resources and then buy the secondary resources you need for whatever you intend to build each turn with no loss at all.
And if you were at all concerned with the slight variations in resource focuses earlier in the game making any difference - fear not. While the Sanctuary takes slightly more wood and slightly less ore than average, you can actually simply buy starting messenger heroes who make wood just for being alive, negating even that much give-a-fuck you might have for the game's entire economy minigame.
Fundamentally, any mine or lumberyard is just worth an amount of gold. Gold mines are slightly bigger than the other mines and no fucks are given.
Recruiting Your Army
There are basically no choices anywhere. First of all, you can (and therefore do) convert any castles or external dwellings you control to your faction. Secondly, the number of units your faction makes is exactly the same as the number of units you can have in your army. Third, the buildings that convert your units to the upgraded version also increase the number of creatures that grow each week. Fourth, there are no limits to how many troops you can have in a single stack. Fifth, you can teleport your main hero with your entire army to any city you own no matter what class or faction you have. Sixth, you can recruit all the creatures made by your entire empire from any city you happen to be in.
What this means is that if you are playing a faction, your army will be all seven creatures of that faction, in their upgraded forms, and you will put all of them into a single army led by your big hero and you will use essentially the same tactics every time. If you play that faction again, your army will be exactly the same.
On release, there were only 5 factions, and with the no mix-n-match realities of the way everything else in the game shakes out, that means that there are seriously less available end-game armies than in any edition of the game. Including the original King's Bounty that came out on the Sega Genesis. And just to shit in your hand even more, there's a for-money expansion that adds one faction, bringing the total number of armies from 5 to 6, which is the number of factions that Heroes 2 was released with, but less actual actual armies than have been delivered by literally any game in the series.
Combat
Just as the outside walking speed is inexplicably slowed down to a snail's pace, the combat animations are also defaulted to a painfully slow rate. You can again hack the game to have goblins walk across the screen at a reasonable pace, but such a choice should be accessible from in the game.
The attack and defense calculation is somewhat complex, with the base damage of the attacker multiplied by a number that is raised to an exponent based on the total Might or Magic Attack of the creature and the Hero, and then the defender negates a percentage of that damage that is itself raised to an exponent based on the total Might or Magic Defense of the creature and the Hero. This all sounds difficult to calculate, and it is, but it is also important that all of this involves no breakpoints or choices at all. Getting +2 Might Attack adds the same relative amount of damage to your Might Units no matter what they are, no matter how much Might Attack you already have, no matter what you are fighting, and no matter how much Might Defense the enemy hero brings to the table. Getting Moar Might and Magic Attack and Defense are always good, but they are always good to precisely the same degree. This means that there is no strategic thinking that is even possible with regards to choosing which bonuses to invest in. The same choice that is correct for one game as the Stronghold (take Might Attack) will always and forever be the correct choice for every game as the Stronghold no matter what your enemies are or do.
The combat map has a lot of squares on it, units move pretty fast. Even a slow unit crosses the board in 3 turns. And very importantly, they can cross the board and attack in 3 turns even if there are a bunch of enemies between them and the target. Because units have no zones of control, and units can and will simply walk around intervening enemies. There are eight squares you can attack an enemy from, and an army is only 7 units. While you can in fact protect a unit with a box formation in the corner, that's seriously it. No other arrangement of troops is likely to make any difference because the enemy can and will simply walk around your melee troops to attack your archers. Creatures simply don't have zones of control, and despite the large number of things on the battle map, basically none of it counts for shit. It's like 4th edition D&D except you don't even get Attacks of Opportunity. Placing a melee unit in the way really seriously just denies that one square, and enemies can and will walk around. The only think that makes combat even look like there are tactics if you squint is the fact that the computer is incredibly stupid and may get distracted and attack powerful melee units if the choice is waiting to attack the next turn.
There is in fact only one way to play any of the fights. And that is to take no losses in anything but the final battle. Remember how your final army is composed of literally every unit you've ever built? If you take any losses in any battle before the final battle, that directly and irrevocably reduces the size of your final army. Barring a few edge cases such as capturing a city right before the week clicks over so you get the week's production instead of not, it's just not worth it to fight any battle under any circumstances where you lose even a single troop. To that end, healing is incredibly powerful. The game doesn't distinguish between healing and resurrection, so Heal, Regeneration, and Life Stealing bring troops back from the dead. And they bring a lot of troops back from the dead.
Lest you think that this will cause all battles to be an extremely boring affair where you find your favorite healing spell and spam it every round until you run out of enemies or have all your troops, never fear. It's slightly less bad than that. You have skill points, which can be invested in individual spells, war cries (which are activated abilities that don't cost any mana that you use instead of casting a spell), and passive abilities. And each of the spells and warcries has a couple of turns of cool down after it has been used. So you don't just spam healing, you have a couple of spells and warcries and you cycle them. Of course, you also get 30 skill points over the course of the game, and you only need 3-7 use activated abilities, so the vast majority of your skill points go into the passive abilities. This means that you're going to see most of the same passives on almost every character. But don't worry, most of those are just raw number buffs, so you won't even notice!
The Bugs
Not content with actually being a game that has no tactics or strategy to speak of that runs at a glacially slow pace and has no replayability because of a lack of meaningful choices, the game also doesn't actually work. Like, at all. Crash bugs are common, even after the expansion, even after numerous patches.
To give you an idea of how shoddy the programming is, let's consider some of the "special weeks". Every week there is a modest chance of there being some kind of special effect in play for the duration. Mostly, these are fairly minor, but for now we are concentrating on the weeks that increase or decrease the cost of spells for their duration. For reasons no one can adequately explain, these weeks were programmed in as an effect that applies a multiplier to the cost of every spell every character in the world knows, and then at the end of the week applies a different multiplier that cancels that out. So if you're in a campaign and one of these special weeks goes off on the first or last week of one of the missions, your main character will experience the beginning but not the end of the week (or vice versa), and go the entire rest of the campaign with permanently modified mana costs on all their spells. WTF!
This sort of sloppy programming permeates the entire game. Special abilities are constantly going off twice or not at all, special attacks doing wildly more or less damage than they are supposed to, and so on. The game was released in a state where critical hits did zero damage. Seriously, I'm not even making that up. There is, by the way, an entire faction dedicated to luck effects, so the fact that they did absolutely nothing when the game was released was extremely obvious.
-Username17
Heroes of Might and Magic VI has a number of "innovations" and is in the peculiar position that literally all of them make the game shittier. It's such a litany of terrible design choices, poor programming, and half-assed implementation that it is in a way amazing. In order to detail how craptacular this game is, we have to go piece by piece.
The DRM
Holy shit! Ubisoft unveiled their most intrusive, most astounding, most game destroying DRM yet for this game. User usability wasn't a consideration at any level, and it shows. Your saved games are stored on your computer, but they are "validated" on their servers, which means that the game takes forever to load, and you have a sharply limited number of save games, but simultaneously gives you no advantages of server access. You can't play your game on multiple computers. You can't recover saves when they crash (and they will crash). In fact, sometimes the server connection will fuck up your save, and then it's just a giant "Fuck You" because there is no way to get it back.
You have the ability to play the game "online" or "offline". But if you play offline, you can't access any of your games that ever were online, and nothing you do unlocks any content or advances your dynasty weapons and shit. Indeed, if you play offline, you can't even access your dynasty shit or your unlocked content, meaning your characters can't even use weapons (which are all dynasty shenanigans). So if you even try to play offline, you're basically playing with crippleware, and you can't even switch back and forth between the two - if you want to go from cripple version to non or vice versa, you have to go back to the beginning of the game.
But let's say you do try to play the game in its non-crippled version: the DRM fucks you there too. If the server so much as gets distracted by clouds or butterflies, you get kicked out of your whole game, with no chance to save. So if the last time you saved was a long time ago (remembering that there can sometimes be many battles in a single turn), you're out quite a bit of time.
So to recap: if you can't maintain a stable internet connection, you either play a crippled version of the game that doesn't save your progress or you get kicked out of the game at random and it doesn't save your progress. Now for the cherry on top: it's not just you who needs a stable internet connection, because it also goes down if Ubisoft doesn't have a stable internet connection. Their internet connection is not stable. Not only does it crash regularly during "peak usage", but they also have uncheduled server downtimes that sometimes last for days. And during that whole period, you can't progress or save your progress in the single player game. Also you can't play multiplayer duals or anything of course, but I can't stress this enough: you can't play your single player maps with the saves that are on your hard drive while their servers are down, and they don't even have the graciousness to warn you in advance or compensate you in any way.
Fuck Ubisoft. Fuck them so hard.
Moving on the Map
The first thing you notice is that when your hero moves on the map, it is very slow. Some of this is because the aforementioned DRM sometimes causes your game to hang for seconds or even minutes at a time. But most of it is because the game has an internal multiplier set for the overland movement multiplier and it very slow. But hey, that's stored as an integer, so if you bust open the program with an editor you can jack up the walk speed and you'll solve that particular problem. Why this is not accessible from in-game preferences and why the default settings are so teeth grindingly frustrating I do not know.
But now let's try to walk our hero to a distant part of the map. We run into two problems. The first problem you'll notice is that it will take you more than one day to walk to the target, but the game does not tell you how many days that actually is going to be. It doesn't even hazard a guess, there's just a bunch of red step arrows ahead of you and you're on your own guessing how many days it'll take. This is especially frustrating, because predicting how many days a multiple day trip is going to take is something that Heroes of Might and Magic games have been doing since Clinton was president.
But if you actually click a second time to actually start off on this journey that it can't be fucked to tell you how long it's going to take, you take a couple of steps and... stop. See, while the path predicter is capable of showing you the path your hero is supposed to take, the actual movement function gets confused by intervening objects. Your hero is literally incapable of simply walking along the path the computer already fucking calculated and you just clicked to accept. So you have to walk your hero in a series of baby steps, and I'm sure you end up losing some movement points to minor detours and shit. Fuck!
Resources
Heroes VI got rid of most of the special resources. Gems? Gone. Sulfur? Gone. Mercury? Gone. You get Wood, Ore, and Crystal, Final Destination. And looking at that, you might say that that could be enough. And perhaps it could, if hypothetically you didn't require every single resource to field every single creature type for every single faction. Which you do. If you didn't have any Crystal, or Ore, or Wood, you wouldn't be shunted to one creature type over another, you'd simply be stymied and unable to build. There's no strategy at all. No choices. No trade offs.
But it's actually worse than that. See, they made Marketplaces give a better exchange rate than in previous versions, and more importantly made that exchange rate progress all the way to a 1:1 "no loss" rate with only a handful of marketplaces in your empire. Also, Marketplaces actually generate money, and quite a bit of it compared to their cost to build, meaning that every city you have or conquer will in fact have a marketplace in it. So by the time your empire is even big enough to start worrying about "build strategies" or whatever, it simply doesn't even matter. All resources are totally exactly the same as money. You can sell all your secondary resources and then buy the secondary resources you need for whatever you intend to build each turn with no loss at all.
And if you were at all concerned with the slight variations in resource focuses earlier in the game making any difference - fear not. While the Sanctuary takes slightly more wood and slightly less ore than average, you can actually simply buy starting messenger heroes who make wood just for being alive, negating even that much give-a-fuck you might have for the game's entire economy minigame.
Fundamentally, any mine or lumberyard is just worth an amount of gold. Gold mines are slightly bigger than the other mines and no fucks are given.
Recruiting Your Army
There are basically no choices anywhere. First of all, you can (and therefore do) convert any castles or external dwellings you control to your faction. Secondly, the number of units your faction makes is exactly the same as the number of units you can have in your army. Third, the buildings that convert your units to the upgraded version also increase the number of creatures that grow each week. Fourth, there are no limits to how many troops you can have in a single stack. Fifth, you can teleport your main hero with your entire army to any city you own no matter what class or faction you have. Sixth, you can recruit all the creatures made by your entire empire from any city you happen to be in.
What this means is that if you are playing a faction, your army will be all seven creatures of that faction, in their upgraded forms, and you will put all of them into a single army led by your big hero and you will use essentially the same tactics every time. If you play that faction again, your army will be exactly the same.
On release, there were only 5 factions, and with the no mix-n-match realities of the way everything else in the game shakes out, that means that there are seriously less available end-game armies than in any edition of the game. Including the original King's Bounty that came out on the Sega Genesis. And just to shit in your hand even more, there's a for-money expansion that adds one faction, bringing the total number of armies from 5 to 6, which is the number of factions that Heroes 2 was released with, but less actual actual armies than have been delivered by literally any game in the series.
Combat
Just as the outside walking speed is inexplicably slowed down to a snail's pace, the combat animations are also defaulted to a painfully slow rate. You can again hack the game to have goblins walk across the screen at a reasonable pace, but such a choice should be accessible from in the game.
The attack and defense calculation is somewhat complex, with the base damage of the attacker multiplied by a number that is raised to an exponent based on the total Might or Magic Attack of the creature and the Hero, and then the defender negates a percentage of that damage that is itself raised to an exponent based on the total Might or Magic Defense of the creature and the Hero. This all sounds difficult to calculate, and it is, but it is also important that all of this involves no breakpoints or choices at all. Getting +2 Might Attack adds the same relative amount of damage to your Might Units no matter what they are, no matter how much Might Attack you already have, no matter what you are fighting, and no matter how much Might Defense the enemy hero brings to the table. Getting Moar Might and Magic Attack and Defense are always good, but they are always good to precisely the same degree. This means that there is no strategic thinking that is even possible with regards to choosing which bonuses to invest in. The same choice that is correct for one game as the Stronghold (take Might Attack) will always and forever be the correct choice for every game as the Stronghold no matter what your enemies are or do.
The combat map has a lot of squares on it, units move pretty fast. Even a slow unit crosses the board in 3 turns. And very importantly, they can cross the board and attack in 3 turns even if there are a bunch of enemies between them and the target. Because units have no zones of control, and units can and will simply walk around intervening enemies. There are eight squares you can attack an enemy from, and an army is only 7 units. While you can in fact protect a unit with a box formation in the corner, that's seriously it. No other arrangement of troops is likely to make any difference because the enemy can and will simply walk around your melee troops to attack your archers. Creatures simply don't have zones of control, and despite the large number of things on the battle map, basically none of it counts for shit. It's like 4th edition D&D except you don't even get Attacks of Opportunity. Placing a melee unit in the way really seriously just denies that one square, and enemies can and will walk around. The only think that makes combat even look like there are tactics if you squint is the fact that the computer is incredibly stupid and may get distracted and attack powerful melee units if the choice is waiting to attack the next turn.
There is in fact only one way to play any of the fights. And that is to take no losses in anything but the final battle. Remember how your final army is composed of literally every unit you've ever built? If you take any losses in any battle before the final battle, that directly and irrevocably reduces the size of your final army. Barring a few edge cases such as capturing a city right before the week clicks over so you get the week's production instead of not, it's just not worth it to fight any battle under any circumstances where you lose even a single troop. To that end, healing is incredibly powerful. The game doesn't distinguish between healing and resurrection, so Heal, Regeneration, and Life Stealing bring troops back from the dead. And they bring a lot of troops back from the dead.
Lest you think that this will cause all battles to be an extremely boring affair where you find your favorite healing spell and spam it every round until you run out of enemies or have all your troops, never fear. It's slightly less bad than that. You have skill points, which can be invested in individual spells, war cries (which are activated abilities that don't cost any mana that you use instead of casting a spell), and passive abilities. And each of the spells and warcries has a couple of turns of cool down after it has been used. So you don't just spam healing, you have a couple of spells and warcries and you cycle them. Of course, you also get 30 skill points over the course of the game, and you only need 3-7 use activated abilities, so the vast majority of your skill points go into the passive abilities. This means that you're going to see most of the same passives on almost every character. But don't worry, most of those are just raw number buffs, so you won't even notice!
The Bugs
Not content with actually being a game that has no tactics or strategy to speak of that runs at a glacially slow pace and has no replayability because of a lack of meaningful choices, the game also doesn't actually work. Like, at all. Crash bugs are common, even after the expansion, even after numerous patches.
To give you an idea of how shoddy the programming is, let's consider some of the "special weeks". Every week there is a modest chance of there being some kind of special effect in play for the duration. Mostly, these are fairly minor, but for now we are concentrating on the weeks that increase or decrease the cost of spells for their duration. For reasons no one can adequately explain, these weeks were programmed in as an effect that applies a multiplier to the cost of every spell every character in the world knows, and then at the end of the week applies a different multiplier that cancels that out. So if you're in a campaign and one of these special weeks goes off on the first or last week of one of the missions, your main character will experience the beginning but not the end of the week (or vice versa), and go the entire rest of the campaign with permanently modified mana costs on all their spells. WTF!
This sort of sloppy programming permeates the entire game. Special abilities are constantly going off twice or not at all, special attacks doing wildly more or less damage than they are supposed to, and so on. The game was released in a state where critical hits did zero damage. Seriously, I'm not even making that up. There is, by the way, an entire faction dedicated to luck effects, so the fact that they did absolutely nothing when the game was released was extremely obvious.
-Username17