The Disciples games had their own comfortable sub-niche in the genre of fantasy strategy. Unlike games with finicky tactical combat, Disciples focused on the units moving around the strategic maps. Battles played out quickly on a simple grid rather than the extensive, chess-like encounters that characterized games like King’s Bounty, Heroes of Might and Magic, Master of Magic, and Age of Wonders. It was simple, fluid, and uniquely slick.
But for whatever reason, Disciples III has decided to be like the competition. Now it’s virtually identical to King’s Bounty and Heroes of the Might and Magic, except for the fact that it’s nowhere near as good as either of them. If you’re going to compromise your unique identity, the worst thing you can do is do it poorly.
There’s almost nothing to recommend the new tactical battles, especially since the A.I. is unable to play them in any meaningful way. For instance, there are special squares on the map that give units a bonus. The A.I. is absolutely unaware of these. A cover system lets melee units defend frail neighbors, which is a great way to lend the tactical battles a sense of actual tactics by encouraging units to stay together. The A.I. has no sense of this. The A.I. has no idea how to effectively use unit abilities, ranged fire, spells, and so forth. This is a classic example of how a strategy game is utterly undone when it doesn’t have a competent A.I.
This applies to the strategic map as well, where small stacks of A.I units march blithely to their deaths, initiating battles with no chance of success. It’s stupidity after stupidity after uninformed stupidity, completely undoing any viability Disciples III has a single-player game. Which is where multiplayer comes in. Oh, no, wait. No, it doesn’t. There is no multiplayer in Disciples III, unless you count a clumsily implemented hotseat option. All that’s left are campaigns that pit you against brittle, scripted challenges. Puzzle missions where, if all else fails, you can grind the occasional replenishing dungeon if you want to level up your units.
Also new and cribbed from other fantasy strategy games is an RPG style of hero progression. Level up to earn points to distribute among your hero’s attributes and to unlock bonuses on a grid bloated with minutiae, slowly working your way towards a handful of abilities at the farthest reaches of the grid. Disciples was always slow with the upgrades, which worked fine with the previous games’ streamlined pacing. But now that Disciples III is bogged down by tactical combat, inconsequential leveling, and backpacks full of trash loot, the pacing is absolutely glacial.
And the game is further bogged down by a slapdash interface that makes it impossible to find out what unit abilities do, or to even see the stats for any unit beyond the first in a stack. A game that ships with a manual this non-specific should at least have thorough tool tips.
Many of the basics from the previous games are carried over. You get almost identical units and buildings for the three included factions (the rest will be along in promised expansions). The spell system is mostly similar. You still capture points on the map to convert the terrain. The artwork is as elaborate and detailed as ever. In fact, the best parts of Disciples III come directly from Disciples II. This is one of those rare sequels that reminds you how much better off you’d be just playing the previous game.Disciples III was released in Russia last year. This means the recent North American release got an extra six months of polish and patchwork. Which is quite a shock, since the latest version of the game is full of bugs, graphics errors, missing text, and botched localization. Some Windows configurations won’t let you save your game. My copy didn’t come with the scenarios or hotseat maps. And the state of the A.I. is deplorable. If this is what we get after more than a half year of post-release support, I don’t have high hopes for the future of this game. What’s more, I can only imagine the terrible state of its original release. I suppose one of the nicest things you can say about Disciples III is that you’re not playing whatever was foisted on the Russians last year.
August 2nd, 2010 at 7:31 am
great post