Hidden? How? Only issue the game had was that its buggy and difficult to run every time a new OS is released. Then GOG started hosting it.
Putting that aside, this game's simple 3rd person POV mechanic really made me self conscious of stuff I always took for granted when building bases like walls of towers and all buildings face the exact same direction. While i got used to it as I played the weirdness of it never went away.
I remember playing 2 as a kid and never completing it because it felt long as frick
as if there were 3 game's worth of campaigns packed into a single game
I remember getting filtered in one of the first Orc missions where you have waves continuously coming at you through a canyon, and you need to push them all the way back. Even with maxed out army i'd just keep bleeding units while slogging through the canyon until i ran out of juice and had to start over
The trick to finishing this game without suffering was to never build any bases, not activate a single monument. As long as you don't the AI won't respawn or create new units, so you can easily solo the whole map with your hero. Otherwise some missions are downright impossible (the mission you have to climb the troll mountain comes to mind)
>where you have waves continuously coming at you through a canyon
That's literally every mission and every wave got bigger and bigger. I think I completed it as a kid by just building towers all the way to the enemy base every mission. I may have cheated to get the resources.
The original campaign had me hooked until the cancer levels started happening in
The second expansion felt like it was cancer levels from start to finish
The third expansion I never made it far in because the second left such a bad taste in my mouth
Yes it's the bestin the series for me
It's probably one of the best single player campaigns for an RTSs. Feels like what warcraft 3 was originally going to be like
It's the worst in the series. You don't even have to go far to find that opinion
>I remember playing 2 as a kid and never completing it because it felt long as frick
2 is fricking shit.
I'm pretty sure even the reviews on whatever site you got it on agree
This guy
Spellforce 2 is superior to pic related0
The amount of cancer levels in the second expansion made me quit. The final straw was the one where you get your base attacked by constantly spawning shadows and I could not do shit since my hero was only one capable of killing them since all my other units and heroes were underleveled. Feel like replaying Spellforce 2 but then I remembered the forced character progression for most heroes even if you turn off auto leveling
is one of those contrarians that shills the worst game as the best because it's his favorite for some weird nastolgia reason like the guy who shills NWN2 in every NWN thread on /vrpg/
I will never undestand people who claim NWN1 is better than NWN2. NWN2 is far from perfect, but NWN1 is just plain bad in literally every way except for the toolkit it came with.
Spellforce 2 is superior to pic related0
The amount of cancer levels in the second expansion made me quit. The final straw was the one where you get your base attacked by constantly spawning shadows and I could not do shit since my hero was only one capable of killing them since all my other units and heroes were underleveled. Feel like replaying Spellforce 2 but then I remembered the forced character progression for most heroes even if you turn off auto leveling
>The final straw was the one where you get your base attacked by constantly spawning shadows and I could not do shit since my hero was only one capable of killing them since all my other units and heroes were underleveled.
Don't remember that specifically but it sounds about right. I'll still take a hard well designed game over a shit easy game any day.
Literally one of my favorite games of all time. It's jank and unbalanced, but the soul levels are off the charts and the gameplay can be very deep (although it takes a long time to open up in the campaign).
the entire series is extremely mediocre, they are neither good RTSs nor good RPGs, and it's not surprising since there never was a hybrid genre game where both genres were well made.
The story in Spellforce 3: Fallen God is one of the best I've seen. The gameplay in 3 is somewhat janky though, and the quality varies wildly between the original, expansion 1, and expansion 2.
how do the stand alone expansions work for spellforce 3? Do you get any benefit from having the base game in the expansions or are they just straight up separate entities and there's no point in keeping them installed after finishing each one?
Campaigns are completely separate
tbh Fallen God was the most fun of them all despite being the shortest. RTS parts of the base game and second expansion kinda drag on. Feels like the Ai cheats the most in them so you constantly get into a situations where you slowly have to push through extremely large hordes which spawn instantly.
If you play a Heavy Combat+White Magic avatar then you can solo the black towers. Cast Aura of Fast Moving, Aura of Fast Fighting and Invulnerability in this order and you can run up to a tower and destroy it before the Invulnerability ends.
the only "filter" in this shit is the fact that the moronic siege unit AI will go and fricking melee buildings if you tell it to attack one instead of using their siege ability.
>10th level in the 2nd expansion >Noob filter
All the noobs were filtered by pic related in the OC.
I find it hard to believe anyone got filtered after all the shit in the first expansion.
>noob filter >a stage that literally punishes you for playing the RTS portion of the game
No, it's a filter of people that expect better. Have the germans ever made a game that wasn't fundamentally broken in some way, and isn't a job simulator?
>a stage that literally punishes you for playing the RTS portion of the game
That's literally the entire game. It's just this stage is so aids it incentivizes you to exploit that oversight way harder. Same is true with the later levels.
i don't think it's a hidden gem for anyone who knows anything about RTS/RPG hybrids but admittedly it isn't mainstream game so it's entirely possible one could find it one.
also 3>1>2. though can't rate expansions since i don't remember them.
1 is the best game even though it's the most unpolished. It's difficult and unbalanced as frick, but that's actually what makes it fun. There are a lot of viable strategies and ways to cheese missions. The artstyle is nostalgic and the soundtrack is amazing. The story in the main campaign and expansions is nothing to write home about, but it's entertaining enough.
2 was dumbed down a lot, but the gameplay had some interesting quirks and was pretty well balanced (until Dragon Storm). The RPG aspect of the game has more in common Bioware games, which I neither loved nor hated. The graphics were superb for 2006 and the soundtrack was almost as good as the first game. It also had the best free game mode in the series.
3 is the most polished and also the most generic game in the series They went out of their way to retcon the lore and make the setting dull as frick, which undermines the otherwise good characters and story. The graphics are crisp, but the artstyle is bland. The RTS gameplay is very competent, but there is hardly anything special about it, and the most unique gameplay feature was heavily streamlined in the expansions and remaster. Finally no third person mode, and free game mode was only added three years after release.
1s art style is really comfy. I wouldn't call it nastolgic because there are a lot of old RTS people love the graphics for because of nastolgia but I cannot stand the look of. I played Spellforce 1 only a few years ago and the art style carried it really hard. Its one of the few low poly games to hold up like that.
Effort was made to make a deliberately stylized appearance in the aesthetics, the slow pace and music also helps sets the tone and mood as well. Later races don't have that comfy feeling though the Elves don't even look like something you would live in.
>be spider master >be outcast >be able to talk to spiders >assemble a large host of spiders >use them to kidnap and cannibalize children
Another case of Germans and their weird fetishes yet again.
>early game mass clerics over recruits because I thought they're stronger since they come latter and cost more >turns out recruits has all better stats
See, that's why I hate when the rts doesn't show any stats of units.
On the bright side that disparity isn't nearly as bad as the Orcs. Where you are given a low tier tech tree against a 3-way gangbang. Best way is to just annihilate everything with you and your small group of companions.
Only partially. In some missions, destroying a spawn building causes all the others on that map to come online and start shitting out troops.
A trick I used in that instance was to first hit all the buildings until they remained with a few hitpoints (just enough so one or two hits would destroy them), then quickly move around the map and take down as many as possible before they spawned too many troops.
That's the only way to play the game on Circle Mage difficulty in 3. As soon as you start building half the planet charges your ass in less than 30 seconds.
wow, nice to see that 15 years weren't enough to fix this fundamental flaw of the series
The only thing I know about SF2 is that you can cheese missions by destroying enemy bases with your heroes before the base-building part happens.
I honestly only remember one mission in SF2 where that's not only the case but also practically the only way to actually beat it, otherwise you will simply lose due to resource attrition.
Gonna replay that shit soon to dull the pain of existence. The 1st one was a fricking blast if you're into hard CBT with no safewords. Buggy, unbalanced and unpolished but so satisfying, like any flawed gem. The music, the art style, the pacing, the basebuilding, the frantic scout hunting, the jannies doing the voice acting, everything was just so right. Highlight is obviously the gameplay itself.
2dn was so mediocre, it was actually physically painful. Reduced the units to nothing without making them interesting in any way. All three factions were basically pallet swaps with minor flavoring. Loot was fricking abysmal. Shit like "ring +2% dark resistance" or "shield +3% ranged damage". Still enjoyed it enough, for the freeplay if nothing else. But damn if it wasn't a "shit something out to keep the copyright" project.
3ds was a mixed bag. Fricking loved the grandiose style, the music, fricking pro voice acting. A special mention goes to the writing. The central topic is nothing special. Save the world, kill the big bad and all that. But the quality of the writing itself. HOLY FRICK. Not one of the, but THE BEST writing I've ever seen in a video game, period. Every character was written with respect and attention in just the right way so that you feel like these are real people. Not just "the lancer stereotype" and "brooding emo #4573". Plus the superb voicework made if fricking supreme. Maybe I'm a pleb, but frick you, I enjoyed it.
Where 3 falls short is the gameplay. Since the artstyle is so realistic now, everything feels floaty and weightless. Every mace hit is mundane, every low-medium spell is instant with barely any feel to it. Being checkpoint based instead of how it was in the past made it weird but doable. Loot was okay. Something overall feels missing and lacking and I can't put my finger on it. Freeplay is buggy and got added way too late. The campaign is way too short, tho maybe it's because I wanted more of it.
First time that I am hearing about this, but I'm skeptical. The Spellforce universe could actually make for a good 4x game, but Grimlore removed all of the personality in III. The artstyle is also boring and generic.
Thought it was pretty crap after the initial novelty wore off. Neither the rts nor rpg aspect are well refined, so once you've built some cool bases and zoomed in to walk around in them you've experienced the best part of the game.
Can't speak to SF3 though—apparently it's quite different. Might be good.
>Neither the rts nor rpg aspect are well refined
They prioritized depth over refinement. Spellforce 3 is very streamlined and refined, but it feels neutered compared to the first game which allowed all sorts of crazy builds and tactics.
>hidden
From who? This shit was on the PC game shelf of stores right up until I stopped going to game stores.
Maybe to blind people.
That is a game, not a gem.
It's a piece of dirt
Hidden? How? Only issue the game had was that its buggy and difficult to run every time a new OS is released. Then GOG started hosting it.
Putting that aside, this game's simple 3rd person POV mechanic really made me self conscious of stuff I always took for granted when building bases like walls of towers and all buildings face the exact same direction. While i got used to it as I played the weirdness of it never went away.
the only problem with this game is how it's clunky on modern PCs.
I remember playing 2 as a kid and never completing it because it felt long as frick
as if there were 3 game's worth of campaigns packed into a single game
>I remember playing 2 as a kid and never completing it because it felt long as frick
2 is fricking shit.
I remember getting filtered in one of the first Orc missions where you have waves continuously coming at you through a canyon, and you need to push them all the way back. Even with maxed out army i'd just keep bleeding units while slogging through the canyon until i ran out of juice and had to start over
The trick to finishing this game without suffering was to never build any bases, not activate a single monument. As long as you don't the AI won't respawn or create new units, so you can easily solo the whole map with your hero. Otherwise some missions are downright impossible (the mission you have to climb the troll mountain comes to mind)
>where you have waves continuously coming at you through a canyon
That's literally every mission and every wave got bigger and bigger. I think I completed it as a kid by just building towers all the way to the enemy base every mission. I may have cheated to get the resources.
Literally a zoom-zoom!
/v/tards should be barred from entering any other vidya board with their zoomer moronation.
I really liked soul harvest and dark elf mechanics
Still load up skirmish from time to time
The original campaign had me hooked until the cancer levels started happening in
The second expansion felt like it was cancer levels from start to finish
The third expansion I never made it far in because the second left such a bad taste in my mouth
That's a different game.
>second expansion
*first
>third expansion
second*
For some reason I thought of the expansions as sequels.
Game name?
age of empires 4
If I wanna play 3 should I just play the campaigns in order of release?
i was always impressed with the visuals
I got spellforce 2 for cheap but never played it. Is it good?
its excellent if you like RPGs and RTSs
Yes it's the bestin the series for me
It's probably one of the best single player campaigns for an RTSs. Feels like what warcraft 3 was originally going to be like
It's the worst in the series. You don't even have to go far to find that opinion
I'm pretty sure even the reviews on whatever site you got it on agree
This guy
is one of those contrarians that shills the worst game as the best because it's his favorite for some weird nastolgia reason like the guy who shills NWN2 in every NWN thread on /vrpg/
I will never undestand people who claim NWN1 is better than NWN2. NWN2 is far from perfect, but NWN1 is just plain bad in literally every way except for the toolkit it came with.
Spellforce 2 is superior to pic related0
The amount of cancer levels in the second expansion made me quit. The final straw was the one where you get your base attacked by constantly spawning shadows and I could not do shit since my hero was only one capable of killing them since all my other units and heroes were underleveled. Feel like replaying Spellforce 2 but then I remembered the forced character progression for most heroes even if you turn off auto leveling
>The final straw was the one where you get your base attacked by constantly spawning shadows and I could not do shit since my hero was only one capable of killing them since all my other units and heroes were underleveled.
Don't remember that specifically but it sounds about right. I'll still take a hard well designed game over a shit easy game any day.
Literally one of my favorite games of all time. It's jank and unbalanced, but the soul levels are off the charts and the gameplay can be very deep (although it takes a long time to open up in the campaign).
Not so hidden. A whole lot of people heard of it and its sequels.
Frick 3 for what it did to the lore
The setting was fricking great for RTS game and allowed for some kickass scenarios
I have this installed in my computer.
I keep wanting to continue playing it but I end up doing other stuff.
This game had some real good enemy design.
What about SpellForce 2 and 3?
the entire series is extremely mediocre, they are neither good RTSs nor good RPGs, and it's not surprising since there never was a hybrid genre game where both genres were well made.
1st game is extremely comfy
Yeah it's really underrated in that department.
The story in Spellforce 3: Fallen God is one of the best I've seen. The gameplay in 3 is somewhat janky though, and the quality varies wildly between the original, expansion 1, and expansion 2.
>Literally a hidden gem.
It's not a gem it's a computer game
how do the stand alone expansions work for spellforce 3? Do you get any benefit from having the base game in the expansions or are they just straight up separate entities and there's no point in keeping them installed after finishing each one?
Campaigns are completely separate
tbh Fallen God was the most fun of them all despite being the shortest. RTS parts of the base game and second expansion kinda drag on. Feels like the Ai cheats the most in them so you constantly get into a situations where you slowly have to push through extremely large hordes which spawn instantly.
The ultimate noob filter fortress.
If you play a Heavy Combat+White Magic avatar then you can solo the black towers. Cast Aura of Fast Moving, Aura of Fast Fighting and Invulnerability in this order and you can run up to a tower and destroy it before the Invulnerability ends.
the only "filter" in this shit is the fact that the moronic siege unit AI will go and fricking melee buildings if you tell it to attack one instead of using their siege ability.
>10th level in the 2nd expansion
>Noob filter
All the noobs were filtered by pic related in the OC.
I find it hard to believe anyone got filtered after all the shit in the first expansion.
>noob filter
>a stage that literally punishes you for playing the RTS portion of the game
No, it's a filter of people that expect better. Have the germans ever made a game that wasn't fundamentally broken in some way, and isn't a job simulator?
>a stage that literally punishes you for playing the RTS portion of the game
That's literally the entire game. It's just this stage is so aids it incentivizes you to exploit that oversight way harder. Same is true with the later levels.
Oh god this was painful. I did like it though, the way back really felt like a "they're coming out of the walls!" moment
i don't think it's a hidden gem for anyone who knows anything about RTS/RPG hybrids but admittedly it isn't mainstream game so it's entirely possible one could find it one.
also 3>1>2. though can't rate expansions since i don't remember them.
Which voice acting is better, the english or the original german voices?
1 is the best game even though it's the most unpolished. It's difficult and unbalanced as frick, but that's actually what makes it fun. There are a lot of viable strategies and ways to cheese missions. The artstyle is nostalgic and the soundtrack is amazing. The story in the main campaign and expansions is nothing to write home about, but it's entertaining enough.
2 was dumbed down a lot, but the gameplay had some interesting quirks and was pretty well balanced (until Dragon Storm). The RPG aspect of the game has more in common Bioware games, which I neither loved nor hated. The graphics were superb for 2006 and the soundtrack was almost as good as the first game. It also had the best free game mode in the series.
3 is the most polished and also the most generic game in the series They went out of their way to retcon the lore and make the setting dull as frick, which undermines the otherwise good characters and story. The graphics are crisp, but the artstyle is bland. The RTS gameplay is very competent, but there is hardly anything special about it, and the most unique gameplay feature was heavily streamlined in the expansions and remaster. Finally no third person mode, and free game mode was only added three years after release.
1s art style is really comfy. I wouldn't call it nastolgic because there are a lot of old RTS people love the graphics for because of nastolgia but I cannot stand the look of. I played Spellforce 1 only a few years ago and the art style carried it really hard. Its one of the few low poly games to hold up like that.
Why do these old graphics feel so comfy af?
Effort was made to make a deliberately stylized appearance in the aesthetics, the slow pace and music also helps sets the tone and mood as well. Later races don't have that comfy feeling though the Elves don't even look like something you would live in.
It's stylized but also not a complete ripoff of Blizzards style.
bump
good thing you bumped or else the thread might have died sometime in the next month
>be spider master
>be outcast
>be able to talk to spiders
>assemble a large host of spiders
>use them to kidnap and cannibalize children
Another case of Germans and their weird fetishes yet again.
>early game mass clerics over recruits because I thought they're stronger since they come latter and cost more
>turns out recruits has all better stats
See, that's why I hate when the rts doesn't show any stats of units.
On the bright side that disparity isn't nearly as bad as the Orcs. Where you are given a low tier tech tree against a 3-way gangbang. Best way is to just annihilate everything with you and your small group of companions.
The only thing I know about SF2 is that you can cheese missions by destroying enemy bases with your heroes before the base-building part happens.
That trick works in all three games
Only partially. In some missions, destroying a spawn building causes all the others on that map to come online and start shitting out troops.
A trick I used in that instance was to first hit all the buildings until they remained with a few hitpoints (just enough so one or two hits would destroy them), then quickly move around the map and take down as many as possible before they spawned too many troops.
That's the only way to play the game on Circle Mage difficulty in 3. As soon as you start building half the planet charges your ass in less than 30 seconds.
wow, nice to see that 15 years weren't enough to fix this fundamental flaw of the series
I honestly only remember one mission in SF2 where that's not only the case but also practically the only way to actually beat it, otherwise you will simply lose due to resource attrition.
>well known everywhere but the Burgerland
>hidden
S O U L
Childhood memories.
Hidden if you're fricking blind.
Gonna replay that shit soon to dull the pain of existence. The 1st one was a fricking blast if you're into hard CBT with no safewords. Buggy, unbalanced and unpolished but so satisfying, like any flawed gem. The music, the art style, the pacing, the basebuilding, the frantic scout hunting, the jannies doing the voice acting, everything was just so right. Highlight is obviously the gameplay itself.
2dn was so mediocre, it was actually physically painful. Reduced the units to nothing without making them interesting in any way. All three factions were basically pallet swaps with minor flavoring. Loot was fricking abysmal. Shit like "ring +2% dark resistance" or "shield +3% ranged damage". Still enjoyed it enough, for the freeplay if nothing else. But damn if it wasn't a "shit something out to keep the copyright" project.
3ds was a mixed bag. Fricking loved the grandiose style, the music, fricking pro voice acting. A special mention goes to the writing. The central topic is nothing special. Save the world, kill the big bad and all that. But the quality of the writing itself. HOLY FRICK. Not one of the, but THE BEST writing I've ever seen in a video game, period. Every character was written with respect and attention in just the right way so that you feel like these are real people. Not just "the lancer stereotype" and "brooding emo #4573". Plus the superb voicework made if fricking supreme. Maybe I'm a pleb, but frick you, I enjoyed it.
Where 3 falls short is the gameplay. Since the artstyle is so realistic now, everything feels floaty and weightless. Every mace hit is mundane, every low-medium spell is instant with barely any feel to it. Being checkpoint based instead of how it was in the past made it weird but doable. Loot was okay. Something overall feels missing and lacking and I can't put my finger on it. Freeplay is buggy and got added way too late. The campaign is way too short, tho maybe it's because I wanted more of it.
are any of you guys looking forward to the new game?
They are making a new one? If it doesn't have the third person cam I'm not interested
it's a spinoff that looks like homm or aow
First time that I am hearing about this, but I'm skeptical. The Spellforce universe could actually make for a good 4x game, but Grimlore removed all of the personality in III. The artstyle is also boring and generic.
Thought it was pretty crap after the initial novelty wore off. Neither the rts nor rpg aspect are well refined, so once you've built some cool bases and zoomed in to walk around in them you've experienced the best part of the game.
Can't speak to SF3 though—apparently it's quite different. Might be good.
>Neither the rts nor rpg aspect are well refined
They prioritized depth over refinement. Spellforce 3 is very streamlined and refined, but it feels neutered compared to the first game which allowed all sorts of crazy builds and tactics.
So the new game is actually a sequel to the first two games and not a prequel. That's interesting.