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Very Disappointed

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Level 2
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Mar 25, 2004
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7
I am quite aware that over a year's work went into making RotD. Some of the customized spells, models, and skins area amazing. But let's face it: For all the flashy models and spells, the campaign lacks real substance. It has a basic, predictable storyline, extremely unprofessional grammar, droning voicing, and abounding bugs and glitches that can make the game impossible to beat.

Spider Queen was actually a much better campaign, in my opinion. It at least ran smoothly, and didn't have massive areas of useless terrain filler.

I think that too much work and effort has been put into custom visuals at the expense of gameplay and creativity. I would gladly play a campaign that had only a few custom skins, but didn't have the massive bugs, rather than RotD. Let's just take the War of Corruption campaign. No messing around with JASS, no custom models- there are no more than 10 custom skins. But that was a truly magnificent campaign. Why? It didn't have bugs or crashes. It didn't have horrible grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Most importantly, it was a heck of alot of fun.

I don't mean to in any way degrade Darky28's mapmkaing ability, or that of his team. I do, however, mean to point out that their efforts have been directed to the wrong aspect of the campaign. Strive first for quality, and later quantity.

Frankly, I'm considering going through the maps in the editor and removing the voicing, fixing the texts, and changing the hotkeys; pausing units during cinematics...it isn't that the campaign is fundamentally flawed. There is just so much carelessness in the way it has been executed. Tiny, easy to fix gameplay bugs and problems are evident everywhere. It is obvious that almost all of the year+ of designing went into the abilities and modelling. But nice abilities and modelling don't make a great campaign.

Obviously, this is jsut my opinion. But the points should be taken into consideration.
 
Level 8
Joined
Jul 29, 2004
Messages
448
I don't agree, not completely. The campaign IS cool, and there are much good ideas. But, there are very much bugs and, of course, the grammar is awfull, but the voicing for example is better than in much other mods...

The main thing I dislike is that all the heros have the same hero attributes. They are too similar.

But if Darky releases a (good) patch, RotD can be one of the best wc3 campaigns...
 
Level 3
Joined
Jul 21, 2004
Messages
20
I too find that some of the bugs can cause the whole experience to be less desireable. One of the things i do like is the inclusion of funny "pissed" sounds for the heroes, and the biting treasure chests were an awesome touch :D

But it is, regrettably, not all i was expecting from such a promising concept... The main bug that has spoiled the game for me so far is the disappearing alchemy menu...
 
Level 1
Joined
Aug 7, 2004
Messages
7
I think you should be happy there IS a campain you can nag about.
Isn't it funny to try to discover all the bugs? ^^
And if some of the bugs are that easy to fix, why you didn't do it by yourself? I think Darky won't be very annoyed if you do some work for him.
At least he make that campain for fun, he wasn't payed for it. If you don't like the campain, don't play it.


P.S. Exuse my English, I'm sure there are a whole lot of spelling and grammar mistakes. I'm a German and not very good in learning languages :)
 
Level 2
Joined
Mar 25, 2004
Messages
7
Well, in the time since I originally posted this thread, I have come to realize something important.

The campaign was designed during Patch 1.14, and probably finished during 1.15. When 1.16 came out, I doubt that any of the mapmaking team expected it to cause such problems with the game, and so further testing wasn't deemed necessary. Thus, on release date...*bug complaint* *bug complaint*

Yeah, the campaign is fun, and cool, and a heck of alot of work went into it. And when the testing wrapped up, it was probably (almost) bug free. But when the game crashes 3/5 of the time after you finish an important quest, or the game is simply impossible because of a trigger bug, it detracts from the overall enjoyability.
 
Level 2
Joined
Mar 25, 2004
Messages
7
Good, good. It really sux when a great campaign like this gets screwed up by a blizzard patch. Then again, patches tend to screw up alot of custom games :evil: .
 
Level 4
Joined
Aug 7, 2004
Messages
124
This campaign is one of the few really ambitious projects, that try to overcome the feeling of the 'normal' Warcraft and implent their own, even when the story is set in the Warcraft Universe. That's not easy to do. I highly appreciate your work, it's awsome!
But you should have added an autosave or something, one of my heroes always dies in the chaos, and I'm pretty lazy when it comes to saving the progress. I always end up starting the map over and over! And now my savegame seems to be corrupt, leaving me to restart at Mission 4 (I was at half of Mission 5!).
I've lost interest for now...
Maybe I'll try again in a few weeks.
 
Level 11
Joined
Jul 20, 2004
Messages
2,760
Ok... maybe the terrain is useless but at least it's impressive. Indeed, this campaign is very good because of the models and graphics. What impresses this campaign is how it looks. What is really lacks is the ideas in base so obviously Quests, Dialogues, Voices, Techtree, Heroes... They are either bad, boring or unbalanced. In my opinion the skills, at least some of them, are partly impressive on how they look but... They are not useful. I prefere heroes with useful but less animated spells than heroes with useless but incredible ideas of spells that would look impossible. As for the Techtree, I must say I am again disappointed greatly. For the beginning I must say that in the four levels I've finished I've seen no altar which is bad. Also, the units are not good and most of them have sucking skills (Abolish Magic, Cannibalize, etc). As for the dragon workers, CALL TO ARMS??? That is sooooo peasant. That is my problem and I don't mean to offend you but these stuff could use a lot work. I don't say that RotHE is better. It's even worse since the terrain is not that cool but we are trying to make good heroes and techtree first plus a good story base. After that, we will see but in my opinion, icons, spells, skills, heroes, techtree and Quests were not worked much. Anyway, i expect to see the patch.

Daelin
 
Level 2
Joined
Jun 21, 2004
Messages
4
It's cool that there will be a patch;)
Sorry but i only played until mission 3, there where too many bugs (I had n o chance to complete Mission2 even, so i had to use the level cheat in the hope that only the first two maps had bugs) So I will send you a list with all the bugs i found, i hope it helps you to debug it.
 
Level 11
Joined
Aug 4, 2004
Messages
978
It's good to know there will be a patch. I personally liked the Spiderqeen better. I'm afraid I agree with Atrcionode on some things, though I did like the custom voices, skins, and models, because they added a uniqueness to the campaign. However the bugs were a real turn off and the quests were kinda simple. To be honest I only played the first few missions before losing interest...but I will dl the patch to see how it's improved.
 
Level 3
Joined
Sep 29, 2004
Messages
66
"The Return of The Dragons" is certainly the very best campaign I have ever played. It would be far superior to most of Blizzard's Campaigns, were it not for the bugs, the lack of hints, the unprofessional transmissions and a few other problems of minor importance.
 
Level 3
Joined
Sep 29, 2004
Messages
66
Have you played the campaign "The Spiderqueen" entirely? At the end, the Lich King imprisoned Arachna and the Unseen in ice.
 
Level 11
Joined
Jul 20, 2004
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2,760
Mind said:
"The Return of The Dragons" is certainly the very best campaign I have ever played. It would be far superior to most of Blizzard's Campaigns, were it not for the bugs, the lack of hints, the unprofessional transmissions and a few other problems of minor importance.

If you find the fact that I cannot get past level 5 because of a bug, a minor thing then I don't want to hear major things. The many bugs make the campaign unplayable. Sheesh...
 
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