2009 - the year of RTS... or maybe TBS?

disciple

9070 Posts

November 11 2008 23:58 GMT

Most of us link the upcoming gaming 2009 with SC2. And sure, why not, Blizzard manage again to build up enormous hype around a game which they are developing for so long. I mean they are doing this all the time, keeping the fans in touch sharing some dev info from time to time, posting their artworks and stuff and the hype just keeps growing and growing. Ofc the peak will be the beta release but until then most of us will just keep speculating about the game and how we think it should be. Anyway 2009 is so damn expected because of SC2 as it was I think 2006/2007 because of the rebirth of the Doom and Half-Life series. For me in personal 2009 will be the year of the TBS. You know why? Well there is a game dev company not as huge as blizzard. The guys are actually french I think and call themselfs "Strategy First". I dont want to offend them but most of their games are low budget crappy games... except one. Strategy First are the makers of the grimmest rival of Heroes Of Might And Megic. You most likely never even know about the existence of such a game but its called DISCIPLES. And believe me if you try the game out, I have in mind the Disciples 2, you will get what I'm talking about. This is the most amazing fantasy TBS ever made. Its simply better than everything you like in the HOMM series. Well perhaps the combat system of Disciples 2 is crappy , but everything else, all the details , the graphics, the art work even the soundtrack are way ahead. I was so surprised when I first played the game, because by that time I was still pretty much a H3 hardcore fan, but Disciples 2 totally obsessed me. Ofc Strategy First won a bunch of awards for this game but it never reached the fame of the HOMM3 because I guess the french didnt knew how to sell it, there was absolutely no hype around the game. At some point they decided to make the 3 part of the series, which they say should be revolutionary for the genre. Disciples 3 is under development for more than 3 years now. After the first year or so strategy first just gave it up, they wanted to make such a huge and great thing but they simply didnt quite had the skills like blizzard to do it. So the project was dead. Until ofc the russians came. The guys from akella decided to revive the project of the ultimate TBS. And what they did so far is absolutely mindblowing for every fantasy TBS gamer. The new engine is amazing , the models are so cool and full of details

Ofc to get to the idea of making those models you need the artwork. And here blizzard are facing some tough competition...

But what makes a game great is its gameplay. And here comes the revolutionary stuff. The hole idea of Disciples 3 is to be TBS/RPG, the problem with the heroes is maybe the lacking of a lot of artifacts. Akella solved the issue by developing an item generator like the one in the Diablo games. So what we can expect is a huge number of items with different options depending from the prefixes and suffixes of their names. Whats more the game devs made a various ways of spell casting which makes the game full of possibilities and options. In Disciples 3 all your units are leveling up, not only the party leader, some of them have their own inventories which again offers endless options

Disciples 3 is fallowing the example of SC limiting the playable races only to 3 in order to make the game perfectly balanced. The previous games suffered from a very lame telling of the plot, now the russians are stating they lifted the single player mission of their TBS to a hole new level... and I really hope they did

I've said above that the combat system was the only weak point of the game. Well no problem, the guys just saw how heroes made it so copied the thing and I think this was the best solution they could possibly find

The game seems to be pretty much done and it supposed to came out this fall, but ofc it wont. The dev are saying they will take some more time to polish up the single player mode and the game will be finally for sale somewhere in the Q1 of 2009. And I really hope that this time the publishers will find the best way to sell the product...

http://disciples3.ru/main_eng.htm