Warning, rant ahead, just my personal opinion, anyone who disagrees, good for you and I sincerely hope you have great fun with the game.
: What was your take on the demo?
: I know it's sort of a silly criticism, but one of the
: weirdest things for me in playing M3 is how long it
: takes for you to get a lousy dwarf! I miss those
: guys.... It sounds minor, but it brought home to me
: the gameplay balance the other Myths had with the
: basic warrior/archer/dwarf unit mix.
Believe me, most of my criticisms are weirder. :-)
I'm a story guy first, a mapmaker second, and a player third, so my criticisms run in that order. I actually had the story down long before the demo, since I did a miniscule amount of beta-testing. There was no Mac beta and I couldn't find a PC which could actually run the beta I had, but I did at least get to hack open the text files with Fear. Whereupon I discovered that the story is a) badly written, b) badly in conflict with Bungie's, and c) boring. Connacht is Generic Musclebound Barbarian Dude, until he becomes Generic Cosmically-Aware Dude That Knows Everything But Can't Talk About It. Shiver's former self is, inexplicably, Xena with implants. Damas is a Heron Guard. And he doesn't like killing other Heron Guards. And he goes topless and carries a big glaive for some reason. That's characterization!
So, forget about the story, move on to editing. Well, once the demo came out and the Mac Vengeance was released--because the tools that were actually used to make Myth III couldn't be distributed, because they were *cough* "too buggy"--I discovered that, functionally, the Myth III engine has almost no enhancements over the Myth II one. Almost all the innovations and additions are on the graphical end. Functionality in most areas has if anything been slightly reduced. So editing doesn't look that appetizing. (Especially because the current Mac Vengeance can't edit any of the graphical or mesh-related tags).
That leaves gameplay. Well, I don't have a whole lot to say about gameplay, mainly because I can barely do it. Gesture-clicks take about 10 tries, so I have to give all my orders in solo while paused. Except that you can't move or give orders while paused anymore, so I have to open the Hints dialog instead. Except that there's apparently a bug which forces you to click Hints ONCE to open it if you closed the dialog with "Hints" last time, TWICE to open it if you closed the dialog with "Resume." Which means that I have about a 50% chance of successfully pausing on any given try, unless I write down which button I'm gonna use to close the dialog this time. This really, really doesn't help on Siege of Llancarfan.
Beyond all this, the game certainly looks pretty. There's an irritating profusion of "innovations" which are worse than what they're meant to replace, though. The shadows which can vary with light sources are cool--in screenshots. Once you actually see them in game, you notice that they never change intensity or length. All they do is rotate around the unit, which looks oh so stupid when there are bright light sources on either side. Stand in the sun. Light a fire on your shadowed side. Do you now have a long black shadow extending away at the exact average angle between the sun and the fire? Didn't think so.
Again, arrows sticking in the ground is cool--until you see them sticking in rocks. And in stone walls. And hitting the top of walls, dropping while partway inside them, and coming to rest halfway down the wall, still perfectly horizontal. Eugh.
Oh, and the art...eugh again. Check out Connacht in the level 2 pregame. Muscles like the Incredible Hulk, swinging an axe larger than his own body, in a stance such that one of his pecs is directly over his opposing buttock. His spine was shot off in the war, you see.
Unit concepts are pretty fun, for the most part--but I don't think a very attractive lineup of units appeared in the demo. The Packmage, in particular, ought to have been hidden from mortal view until people had absolutely and irrevocably laid down their money. Look! It's a Myrkridian Dracula! He stalks around at 2 mph in a big bat-cloak, then shoots the most piddly, visually underwhelming lightning bolt in history. And his bat-cloak doesn't cast a shadow! Look at the ground beneath him! LOOK AT THE GROUND!
Ahem. :-)
So, in summary: It's not a very engaging world, either textually or visually. There aren't very interesting editing possibilities. And I can't play it without two trained macaques to take over pausing and gesture-clicking for me. There you go. :-)
--SiliconDream
