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| Thread: Fanstratics - A Spiritual Successor from the lead game designer of Heroes of Might an |  This thread is pages long: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 · «PREV / NEXT» |
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Rimgrabber
Promising
Famous Hero
Voice in Gelu's Head
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posted December 13, 2021 12:54 AM |
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Thanks Galaad. Weirdly I thought I was subscribed but I haven't gotten it in a while.
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Stevie
Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
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posted December 15, 2021 01:37 AM |
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blob2 said:
Lol Guys, not that it matters, but told you there was a reason behind suddenly jump-starting this project and going public with it, after so many years:
Why did you decide to develop a new game now, 20+ years after the release of Restoration of Erathia? (Silent)
This is a big question to answer, but I will try to be concise. When I left game development, I was burned out and unhealthy from years of stressful working conditions and crunch. I tried other professions, specifically, writing, stock options trading, and ultimately... foreign currency trading. It took years to learn how to profitably trade the currency markets, but once I figured it out, I suddenly had spare time on my hands. With this extra time, I began to crave a return to computer game development. Slowly, I started to reawaken my game design skills, when disaster struck. My foreign currency broker collapsed... and I lost everything. I no longer had a choice. It was ‘game dev or die’, and Fanstratics is the hill on which I have chosen to fight.
I didn't even get to read this, it's been almost 2 years now. And judging by how this thread went, nothing significant seems to have happened. But since it got necro'd, I'll throw my 2 cents anyway with regards to what he said there. This story about how his forex broker collapsed and lost him everything seems rather suspicious to me. I highly doubt a scenario with no form of recovery can happen. Even if said broker went bankrupt, he would still be entitled to a minimum amount from the proceedings, which in EU for instance is in the millions of dollars/euros last time I checked. So if his investment exceeded that sum and the broker went insolvent, he would still receive at the very least that guaranteed amount back. That's how the law provides a safety net in case your broker implodes so that you don't end up on the streets. And for good reason, because otherwise no one would invest with that amount of risk involved. So blaming the broker's collapse for losing him everything? I'm not buying it.
What is far more realistic is that he yolo'd his savings one way or another and got burned. That would be a lot more believable. Either way, the question that arises as blob2 fairly surmised: would you trust this person with your kickstarter money? I most certainly wouldn't. So this moment of honesty from him, while definitely appreciated, is probably backfiring.
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Guide to a Great Heroes Game
The Young Traveler
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Borsukrates
Tavern Dweller
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posted January 04, 2022 01:05 PM |
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I lost my old account, so I registered a new one.
WOW, and I thought *I* was grumpy. I mean, I once made a thread arguing H2 was better designed than H3. You people seem quite traumatized. But it makes sense. You wouldn't be here if you had moved on.
For me Eador: Genesis (which I only discovered in 2021) filled the void. It's not perfect, but it tackles the most important boxes. Maybe that's why I'm now cautiously optimistic about Fanstratics. I no longer feel starved. And a new Eador game is being made, using Unreal Engine.
I have some insight about HOMM games. They remind me of Citizen Kane and Rashomon (I especially liked the latter movie). Almost everyone sees HOMM differently. And I pretty much agree with Gregory Fulton's summary:
fstnewsletter10 said:
Ubisoft distributed HoMM3 outside of North America, and it sold millions of copies across Europe, Russia, and Asia.
I was stunned. I had really had no idea.
6b. Do you have any idea what could be the reason behind the popularity in those regions?
I’ve chatted with David Mullich about this, and thought about it at length. In my opinion, it is a unique combination of elements.
​1. Easily accessible genre
Fantasy is a universal genre. Around the world, most people understand the concepts of knights, wizards, and dragons. It doesn’t hurt this genre was also birthed in Europe.
2. Beauty
HoMM3 is a beautiful game, and continues to hold its own after all these years. Phelan Sykes, Scott White, Adam McCarthy, George Almond, and David Mullich, don’t get anywhere near enough credit for what they pulled out of the New World Computing art staff.
3. Exceptional Value
There’s plenty to see, experience, discover, and play within HoMM3. It’s unusual for a game to be both deep and wide. This creates an exceptionally large amount of gameplay for your money. With all the expansions, mods, user made maps, and the random map generator, you can literally play the game for 100’s if not 1000’s of hours.
4. Accessibility
While HoMM3 isn’t the easiest game to get into, you don’t need to be a guru to enjoy it. Also, being turn based, there is no pressure to immediately engage the game, and you can explore it at your leisure.
5. System Requirements
You don’t need to be a member of the PCMR to play the game. Any office computer or laptop should suffice, and this makes almost anyone with a computer, a potential fan.
6. Piracy
Most game developers don’t like talking about this, but at some point in their lifespan, all of PC’s biggest franchises were heavily pirated. This effectively got the game into the hands of people who wouldn’t pay-to-play the game. This ‘unofficial’ demo uncovered a lot of fans who didn’t know they were fans, and hopefully purchased a legitimate copy, at a later date.
I strongly agree with points 1,2,3,4 although I would name them a little differently.
Generic fantasy is not so much an universal genre as universal franchise. It's not Warhammer or its knock-off Warcraft, it's not Star Wars, Harry Potter or Might&Magic. HoMM wasn't perceived as a Might&Magic game by most of its playerbase. It often wasn't even called Heroes of Might and Magic, but instead "HoMM" online and "Heroes" offline, because the full name was terrible and certainly not better than Fanstratics. This is why people reacted violently to Forge. Playerbase mostly never cared about Might&Magic lore, universe and all that crap. They felt that introducing actual M&M lore was changing the setting from generic fantasy to some kind of mix of Fantasy and SF.
Beauty. Yes, Heroes games had beautiful visuals by the standards of 1999. All units were sounded and animated. Elaborate town screens. Consider the visuals of H3 versus H4. They were made using the same technique - 3D models turned into 2D pictures. The difference was in the artists. That's it.
Add points 1 and 2 together and you see why girls and people who didn't see themselves as gamers wanted to even look at it.
Point 4 - Accessibility. In other words, HOMM is pretty simple as far as strategy games go. Points 1, 2 and 4 added together is why the game had a wide appeal, and simplicity is why people who saw it wanted to try it. HoMM doesn't look overwhelming. It's not hard to make a more complicated game. But if you keep adding features, often it just feels like extra burden, extra ballast, not fun. HoMM had a carefully selected set of features. Simplicity is also why you want to play it even if you're tired or angry.
If you play board games you know boardgamegeek.com. One of the most distinctive features of the site is that games are evaluated with two primary scores: Rating(fun) and Weight(complexity). Heavier games are not necessarily better. They make your head hurt and it doesn't always make it more fun. Because board games are processed by player brains, game designers sometimes talk of a "complexity budget". They don't expect players to enjoy moving around countless tokens.
Point 3 - depth - is why people wanted to keep playing it. But I think the game would never enjoy such popularity if it didn't look so appealing and hospitable. It looked delicious, so people wanted to try it, and only later, to their surprise, they found it has great longevity.
Points 5 and 6 - super low requirements and piracy - may not sound like a big deal now, but they were, back then. HOMM spread like wildfire and any computer could run it. Computers were expensive in central/eastern Europe in the 90's.
fstnewsletter15 said:
1. What do you think is the best element/part of Heroes 3 what put it on the strategy classic status?
Everything Heroes of Might and Magic 3 (HoMM3) works in concert (design, programming, art, sound, and music), and because it works in concert, it’s impossible to select a ‘best’ element.I can however, pick a personal favorite... Battlefield Combat.Almost everything in the game distills down to Battlefield Combat, and if Battlefield Combat wasn’t fun and engaging... the game would falter.
I think this guys gets it. Tactical combat is the core part of HOMM. It must be fun.
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Borsukrates
Tavern Dweller
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posted January 04, 2022 01:33 PM |
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...and what Heroes of Might and Magic is not.
1. HOMM is not, and never was, a good multiplayer game.
fstnewsletter said:
5c. Were there dedicated testers and balance designers in the dev team of Heroes III?
Short answer... no. Please keep in mind, at the time, network play was a relatively new thing, and the thought of competitive HoMM3 was inconceivable. Also, dedicated balance designers and testers didn’t really become a thing until Starcraft became an esport in South Korea. Today, it is standard practice for any pure multiplayer game.
But it doesn't mean it can't become one:
fstnewsletter01 said:
To be fair, network play in HoMM3 was an afterthought. In 1999, no one ever expected, twenty years later, people would be playing the game online... competitively. HoMM3 was never intended to be an eSport.
My intention is to reach out to current HotA internet players, and assuming they are interested, have them play Fanstratics and get their feedback. Similar to Starcraft2, I suspect there will end up being two separate sets of game stats: Single and Multiplayer. Upon shipping, the Single and Multiplayer numbers will match. After shipping, Multiplayer will probably diverge from Single, as network players discover unanticipated exploits and abuses.
2. It was also never a game which cared about story:
fstnewsletter02 said:
HOMM’s storylines have been interesting, but with each sequel, the previous world and characters have been tossed aside and new ones created. Are you planning to do the same, or do you have a grand plan in mind?
Truthfully, at NWC we didn’t have a lot of time to work on story elements, so map and quest makers were given relative freedom to work within quickly established guidelines. This led to each team ‘wanting to do their own thing’, without the restrictions imposed by the lore of a previous team.
With FST, I want to put considerable effort into the lore and lay a strong foundation for future story lines. We’ll see what happens, as there are many hurdles to overcome, but my goal is ‘longevity’. There may be other stories, involving different characters from different continents, but I would prefer to stick with one world and one progression of characters.
There you have it. In HOMM, story was an afterthought.
fstnewsletter03 said:
5. How far ahead had you planned the storyline for future installments when working on HoMM3?
Officially, there were never any storylines planned beyond the games in production. If we had any goal, it was to loosely tie one game into the next. MM6 into HoMM3 into MM7 into HoMM3:AB, etc.
Having a ‘grand plan’ typically requires a singular individual, with the desire and power, to enforce such a long term goal over multiple years and multiple teams. In game development, people come and go, teams come and go, and turnover is high. For example, after HoMM3:AB, 3 of the 5 team leads either left the company or moved on to other projects.
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joe18nm
Tavern Dweller
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posted January 20, 2022 11:19 PM |
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Edited by joe18nm at 16:20, 28 Jan 2022.
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Quote:
Everything Heroes of Might and Magic 3 (HoMM3) works in concert (design, programming, art, sound, and music), and because it works in concept, it’s impossible to select a ‘best’ element.
I can totally agree on that. But sometimes it's way better to look at things like digital art in some collections, or something like that, where you can compare one item with another. For example, I could find some cool top nft collections on [url=https://topnftcollections.com/]TopNFTCollections[/url] web resource recently, and I should say, that it's one of the great resources I could find for the last few years. It has dozens of truly nice and unique NFT assets.
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Dreamaster
Tavern Dweller
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posted August 25, 2022 03:17 PM |
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new vid
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LeJYudnLZQ&t=1s&ab_channel=DreaMaster
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NimoStar
Responsible
Legendary Hero
Modding the Unmoddable
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posted August 27, 2022 08:55 AM |
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Edited by NimoStar at 08:57, 27 Aug 2022.
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Seems fake but OK...
Actually, scratch that it's a pure fever dream from bath salts.
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Never changing = never improving
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Blake00
Known Hero
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posted November 01, 2022 04:24 PM |
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Edited by Blake00 at 16:27, 01 Nov 2022.
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Blake00
Known Hero
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posted December 03, 2022 07:10 AM |
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Edited by Blake00 at 11:26, 10 Jan 2023.
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Galaad
Hero of Order
Li mort as morz, li vif as vis
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posted January 10, 2023 12:56 PM |
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Thanks Blake.
Stevie said:
I didn't even get to read this, it's been almost 2 years now. And judging by how this thread went, nothing significant seems to have happened.
Sadly I have to agree with this. After two years not a single game screen is rather worrying... Did they even enter game development yet?
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ArdentWyrm
Famous Hero
King of the Elder Dragons
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posted January 10, 2023 07:23 PM |
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Gregory Fulton says he has long covid and doesn't have much energy to work on Fanstratics, which I would prefer not to be the final name.
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Torment is blinding. It lies. Its pollution steals my sense. It promises: destroy everything and the pain will cease.
- Kralkatorrik
https://dragcave.net/user/ArdentWyrm
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NimoStar
Responsible
Legendary Hero
Modding the Unmoddable
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posted January 10, 2023 08:03 PM |
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Edited by NimoStar at 20:04, 10 Jan 2023.
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Yeah, I was about to point out how "fanstratics" name should have been phased out already
I do not believe there is any direct medical measurable correlate of "long covid", but however, if it was real... for sure that game name would have been made under "permanent mental haze" :_¨P
(unfortunately the choice happened way before)
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Never changing = never improving
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JollyJoker
Honorable
Undefeatable Hero
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posted January 10, 2023 09:54 PM |
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Likely long covid cause
There have been many studies within the last year that support the brain inflammation theory.
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NimoStar
Responsible
Legendary Hero
Modding the Unmoddable
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posted January 11, 2023 01:18 AM |
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Quote:
potentially raising the risk of long-term health issues
"potentially"
"raising"
"the risk"
of
"health issues"
extremely vague wording with no accepted conclusion
Anyways, it's pretty offtopic. I didn't meant to discuss the nonexistent long covid, but rather point out how Greg Fulton has a seemingly endless array of excuses for this or that (including strangely losing all his fortune to forex exchange bankruptcy). However he has plenty of energy to write long articles :V
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Never changing = never improving
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Galaad
Hero of Order
Li mort as morz, li vif as vis
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posted January 11, 2023 08:24 AM |
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NimoStar said:
the nonexistent long covid
I personnaly know someone who got it and it's very real. Took her two years to recover and stop feeling like she was 60 years older. And yes that's very offtopic.
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Drakon-Deus
Undefeatable Hero
Qapla'
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posted January 11, 2023 09:38 AM |
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covid is like Homm5 for me: it exists but I strongly dislike and ignore it.
Sorry for offtopic.
Fanstratics doesn't sound bad from what I read here.
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Horses don't die on a dog's wish.
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baronus
Legendary Hero
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posted January 11, 2023 11:21 AM |
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For now its only hypotetic game. But nice to think that something goes on old good brand.
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NimoStar
Responsible
Legendary Hero
Modding the Unmoddable
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posted January 11, 2023 12:33 PM |
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Edited by NimoStar at 12:35, 11 Jan 2023.
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The mind is a powerful thing. Cultural suggestion meant that some people were absolutely certain that they were cursed and bewitched by warlocks, or possessed by demons (in fact I think that like 40% of world population still believes in the power of witchcraft) - and many times the authorities were like "yep, that's a classic case of possession" and the person would act possessed just because there's a certain expectation associated for how a "possessed" person acts
you can also see how the powers of self-suggestion work when people
expect christmas hota release or that fanstratics will ever get developed when after years there isn't a single hint that it even exists 
In fact, most worryingly, according to his wikipedia page there is no hint that Greg Fulton worked in any published game past the year 2002 - for those keeping track, that is 21 years ago...
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Never changing = never improving
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ArdentWyrm
Famous Hero
King of the Elder Dragons
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posted January 11, 2023 05:22 PM |
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Maybe it should be renamed "Sword and Sorcery"
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Torment is blinding. It lies. Its pollution steals my sense. It promises: destroy everything and the pain will cease.
- Kralkatorrik
https://dragcave.net/user/ArdentWyrm
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purerogue
Known Hero
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posted January 11, 2023 05:41 PM |
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