Comparison between SF3 and the older SF chapters

[Ommariuolo]

Disclaimer: the following conclusions are my personal view, based on a lot of years of software analysis, videogaming and playing specifically Spellforce. They aren't related to personal fun, since anybody can enjoy any game and any thing without feeling the need of an explanation.

Hereafter I'll use 1, 2 and 3 referring the three chapter, or the proper acronyms when I refer on a specific vanilla/addon.

The pillars of RTS and RPG games are: base building, resource management, army development, strategy, character growing, party management, writing, environment, control system. So I'll use these to develop the topic.
About art direction, musics and voice acting, I think 3 is a good product, but I suppose these elements are related to all games and not only a single genre, so I'll not discuss them.

Devs speeded up the RTS part between 1 and 2, a right choice I think since 1 have several downtime during RTS phases. In 3 the sector system change drastically how the RTS play works, forcing you to focus more on the location of the buildings instead of allowing you to grow quickly your base and focus on the army, and forcing your hero to wander on the map in order to follow the sectors instead of letting them explore properly. Moreover, the sector system make difficult having a real coop between two or more faction on the same map, since each sector can have only one owner, whereas 1 and 2 allow you to exploit the resource competitively and cooperatively as your choice. 2 simplifies the base building and resource management allowing the player to focus on the military part, and 3, instead of embracing this good choice, return back slowing too much the pace.

About army development, 3 has less units than the old games and less characterized. In SH and FG they have more distinctive traits, but nothing more than DS already does 17 years ago. In fact, the sector system makes the army development secondary, since you can use your heroes to destroy immediately the enemy capitol and win easily each RTS map. In 1 you can win several maps without activate race monuments if you have a hero monument, but in BoW and SotP they almost solved this issue. So 3's devs don't learn from the past...

Since all these things, in 3 the strategy is almost zero, compared to 1, where several maps forced you to choose between what race develop where you have different race monuments, or compared to 2, where you have always a first phase where you have to defend your base with your heroes and then retaliate with army and heroes when you have built a good one. In fact, in 3 you can follow 2's way, but only if you volountarly want to slow your pace.

About character growing, maybe this is the only point where 3 does a good job, since they follow 2 where the skill tree is simplified. 1's way of giving points to skills follow the classic pen & paper system, and it's useful when you play p&p, but it tend to be too slow playing on a videogame.
2 simplifies it too much, IMHO, but it's a good starting point, 3 luckily follows that way.
Said so, if you compare 3 with old games, but also AoE2, AoE4, SC2 and other RTS games, the comparison is pretty merciless, due to sector system, almost no specialized units, slow pace of base building and army management.

About gameplay choices, in 1 and 2 they're really well integrated with the lore, unlike 3 where the gameplay choices are forced almost without explanation (for example, in 2 you can't leave a RTS map by an oath due to a specific trait of your race, in 3 why you can't leave a RTS map?)

About party management, the choice to almost ignoring it in 1 is due to the lore, since runic warrior have predetermined skills and you have only to give them the proper gear. The classic RPG games (BG, IWD, P:T, NWN, and so on) can't follow p&p because they have to give you the capability of create your own character, specialized or hybrid as your choice, and have to balance subsequently the party giving you the needed choices. A classic good party have 4 of these elements, sometimes combined together: tank, melee fighter, ranged fighter, rogue, healer, mage. Usually a RPG game give you several companions that have such skills combined, so you can ignore the one or the two who have the same skills as your character and choose the others in order to balance your party. 2 takes the classic RPG party management and change it a little: since you don't need a rogue they give you 5 characters following the classic, adding your character and unbalancing the party towards your preferred playstyle; moreover, having all your companion with you allows the writer to explore better all of them.
This is a winning choice because in classic RPG you almost ignore some characters, whereas in 2 you know and play along with all your companions. You can also have two companions whom you can only give orders, adding a good point for narration. If you change the skills of each companion, you can create your favourite party with 6 elements instead of 4, improving the balancing chances (for example, 2 tanks and 4 mages from different schools). This is a good choice that 3 should follow, but inexplicably don't.
Last but not least about party management, in DS we have classic companions' quests that give us, in 3 the companions' quests are no more than a textwall, a real step back.

About environment, the step back compared to 1 and 2 is huge: the absence of the sky dome, of the day-night cycle, the presence of a little fraction of the creatures that old games gave us. There's a weather condition, a good idea, but completely disconnected by the gameplay, becoming so a useless frill. In 3 there's a city where you can see a lot of things, but the interaction is almost zero, namely a handful of quests and characters... again the comparison with Empyria or Sevenkeeps is merciful. The poorness of the environment is harsh also compared to other games, if you want to see it, starting from PoE and passing by TW. And it's not a question of AA or AAA games, it's a question to give the feeling of a rich world.

About the control system, 1 and 2 have a winning choice, namely the click & fight system, unexplicably 3 ignore it.
Usually the way you fight is: choose the performer, choose the action, choose the target. Each RTS/RPG game have to follow this model. In 3 (and a lot of other games) you follow it by acting several times in different location and moment: usually you choose the performer before, then during the fight you click on the action and then on the target. Sometimes you perform an action using the keyboard, making it a little quicker: press the action key and then click the target.
The click & fight change this paradigm allowing you to choose the target via keyboard and before the action. This make the fight very quicker than the classic system, since you choose performer and target before the fight. Since you can change target via keyboard almost without moving hands, you're very quicker than using the mouse pointer, since pressing a key is quicker than moving the mouse and point exactly on your target, especially when you have one hundred of unit on the screen.
Dulcis in fundo, the click & fight allow you to play the same way with heroes and RTS units, so you don't have to memorize different approaches. In 3 you have the wheel of action for the heroes, that follow the classic system (choose performer then action from the wheel then target) only via mousepointer, a big step back, and you have to use the classic system for the units (choose the performer then the target since the units have only one action available), another step back.

So, speaking about technical matters, it seems that 3's devs don't learn from the past, don't want to follow a traced route.

[Unrealmaster]

I can only agree that SpellForce was always about the PVE focus. The story, the progression and the many world and landscapes you could visite. Sadly it seems that this focus was gone with the old developers and the new ones never know what SpellForce is but did take the name IP to sell this game.

To say that this game here is a bad game would be not true, but it is a bad SpellForce game.
There are so many things that just make this not a good SpelLForce game, but a PVP focus game with some PVE on the site. It shows that there was nerver much effort in the PVE part with the 3er series and almost all dedication to realise someones PVP dream here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKXBvxnX8PU

There were many attemps by the community to bring back the focus to PVE and to bring this game back to the values of it’s IP name, but these were ignored by the devs and even put down by scraping some options to enhance these lacks of SpellForce features.

The biggest famous feature oft he SpellForce series was always the „free game mode“ (open realm mode) with a real native 3 player coop with open end options and progression, but all these demands had been ignored for the PVP „vision“ that this game is used for. The so called "Journey Mode" we got is not even a shadow of what the FGM was and is even now only an grind spiral that lacks it fun in any PoV. Lets not even start about the missing 3rd person view that got also scrapped, not only because they did not care, but because they are also lacking the competence to create a gameengine that does not roast hardware. Mods show this quite well...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xbVjFdbdUw

I really hope that someday we will get people in charge of the SpellForce series who get back to the roots of it with the main PVE focus with some PVP only on the side, not hardcore balanced, not forced down the players throat but all fun for everyone.

[NeoX]

Hey everyone! You do not have to read this if you don’t want to listen to an old man crying about how a very important part of his gaming hobby dies and the future only gets even worth.

Still interested in hearing me crying about the death of my beloved SpellForce franchise and community? Alright then, thank you for reading this.

Well I am NeoX. Some of you (also old gamers) may know me from the last big entries in the Series of SpellForce where I was also very active in map creation and modding. Back then we had a forum (online forum) where everyone could come together to talk about the franchise, exchange knowledge and content that they had created. It was the heart of the community and everyone had a hot-spot for getting news and collected information’s about their most favorite series. It got attacked by hackers and spammers many times, but the devs always restored it until the last time...

Since early November 2017 the forum is gone forever and the publisher (who is in charge) THQNordic, does not care about it, because it only creates more maintenance effort for him and needed server capacity. More than 15 years of community knowledge, lore and content went gone without any hope of reviving and most of all, no known meeting point for the spellforce community. A failure that will and has backfired very badly.

THQNordic and the new developers decided to move to a more modern form of communication, a discord server. It’s cheaper, requires no maintenance and some spellforce fans settled up one some month ago. And here starts the problem. Nobody knows (of the old players) where the new meeting point is and who is in charge. If we didn’t spam the invite links like crazy, we wouldn’t have catch up any of the community. But even if we manage to get most of the community back on one place, it shouldn’t be a pure community leaded place. The current admins and mods of the discord server are sometimes mentally “instable” and change the rules how they like it. Not to mention that everyone gets talked down or silenced who doesn’t agree with them, or says something that makes the last entry look bad.

And so we come to current biggest problem of the franchise: SpellForce 3
Oh was I excited when they said that they will make a SpellForce 3. Finally a continuation of the SpellForce saga! How does it go on after Sf2-DotP? What? It doesn’t? Long time before SpellForce 1? Smells like a reboot… and it is. But let’s get back in time. SpellForce 3 has been in development for 4 years, but they rebooted it after 2 years because they noticed the game back then didn’t make fun and you will notice this reboot in the development. I say how I feel it. This RTS System is exactly an Age of Empires with the “Die Siedler” section system. This RTS system has nothing to do with the system of the other SpellForce games. I have the feeling they wanted to do another game but needed a name to sell it. So they took it and just added a basic RPG logic to it.

To say that the game didn’t make me any fun wouldn’t be true. But it never gives me the feeling of a SpellForce. More like an Age of Empires with Heroes. EVERY RTS part/map of the game can be skipped/rushed in under 10 min. How you may ask? Just rush with your heroes to the Main Sector of the enemy, destroy the main building and ignore everything else. If this building falls, everything of the enemy drops dead. Everything! Whoever designed that logic hasn’t planned it with RPG heroes. This RTS system does only work in PVP. The RPG part was also only tested on paper but not in game. Because the items are skill based and not level based you can gear up your heroes with end game items at the half of the game. I never had any issues to finish a map in the second half of the game. For these who may wonder, I played it on normal.

What I really dislike about the game is, that there is no “Free Game” Mode and 3rd person view like in the old games. If you don’t play PVP the game has nothing to offer after the campaign. Let me say it how it is, 10 years ago you got a lot more for your 50€/$ as today. These is so much content missing compared to the old ones, that you may think, these was 1 year of development missing.

If you want to play a fun Top-Down RPG with some sort of RTS, you will be happy with this game, but you shouldn’t pay more as 30€/$ at the current state of content. If you want to play a good SpellForce game, then I can recommend my all time favorite SpellForce 2 Dragon Storm.

The Developers added Modding tools and a map editor for the game. Oh yes the game really needs more content, but push he task to the community.

Well and all that leads us to why I created all these Mod-Maps and tools for SpellForce 3.
To make it short: I wanted to make to a game where the price is at least closely to what you get. I feld very betrayed for what I payed for and the missing content we all should have gotten for this price.
So I wanted to create content in form of Mod-Maps that make MP more fun and offer more than just simple PVP. I did so with now over 14 Mod-Maps and tools, where I hoped it would inspire others to do the same and make this game more reasonable to play in MP and online to help the community.

This is the reason why I invented the Community Content Patches. I wanted to do these collection content patches of all good community work to expand the game to something we all deserver. Sadly, after nearly a year after release, I am still the only active modder. Mission failed.

I really hope to see a new wave of community-made content. The old games such as SpellForce: The Order of Dawn and SpellForce 2: Shadow Wars had an active community with lots of maps, interesting communication about the lore and the stories within the games. In SpellForce 3 i can hardly find these old aspects anymore: The community feels isolated since there is neither an active mapping community nor are there people contributing to community content sites such as the wikia. I really hope to see some change!

If you read until here I am very grateful for your time and effort.
Thank you for being part of this community and all support in any form. If you are a fan of my work specifically then I am even more thankful for your longtime support. If you are gone, the community dies even more.

Your NeoX