Hey, just coming here to praise your work. You and the whole team should be reeeally proud of what you've accomplished. I'm a long time RTS player (since C&Q Red Alert 1 was fresh, literally), and can't say how incredible and breathtaking Spellforce 3 as a whole is. It's really one of a kind, and the amount of attention you all gave to each small detail, from brief carefully crafted dialogs, the voice, visuals and mechanics, everything is so incredibly well put together. I can only image how challenging was to come up with a blend of fantasy RPG and RTS with a solid story, and damn... You guys nailed. I wish there was an investment for a Spellforce 4, but I'm just glad I had to opportunity to see all this as it is. Thank you so much. Be proud! Cheers
@@anduril38 i adored the writing, i was eagerly going through the story excited for what came next. I love stories that leave me not able to predict whats coming next. Tahar being the son of that creature was fascinating and i loved all the characters. All in all one of my favorite games, i hope another spellforce comes out
I just finished watching the 3 spellforce critiques you have, what a journey remembering one of my favourites childhood games and knowing how it evolved. Thank you so much for your effort and hope you had as much fun creating it as me watching it. P.D: Love those bloopers
Hey if you want another hidden gem forgotten RTS underrated game, check out Rise of Legends. It was a spinoff title based on the Rise of Nations gameplay system, in a unique and extremely memorable world with lore that deserved so much more development and progression than it got. It's such a rare and forgotten game that you may need to get the ol' VPN up and running and get the game from an internet 'diagon alley' of sorts -- but it's so worth it. I wish more people knew about this game. There is a whole society based on an alternate timeline where Leonardo Davinci's blueprints were created en masse and the world went in this Da Vinci steampunk direction instead of fuel like we did in reality. Hope you get a chance to try it if the game peaks your interest!
aww yeah, the long awaited spellforce 3 critique finally here. see yall back in 3 hours. Edit: great stuff man, enjoyed it thoroughly. shame about the multiplayer but hopefully release of versus will help the game gain some Steam. ^_^ Whatever you decide to do next don't ever remove those bloopers. :) Statistics on the workload were quite intriguing as well. All in all looking forward to your future content, have a good one.
Same here, I have more ram now and when I first this game in 2017, it crashed constantly. Now im 10 hours in and perfect so far. Makes me happy, god this games great.
Just map the battle slot next or previous page to something and you can have a ton of spells in spellforce 3. I use 1 and 2 and just click page to page.
There is a final choice regarding the vessel for the Fial Darg. Normally Noag would sacrifice himself but when I strongly disagreed with that decision someone else forcefully took over. I won't spoil you about the rest of the game since your choice does really matter. About the multiplayer part: I can understand what the devs were initially thinking about the multiplayer mode since the playerbase is so small. Still they decided to listen to the community and spent money and working hours in order to create the rank system for a handful of people. Maybe the creation of the multiplayer mode didn't cost much money anyway and with the sales data they can develop a better strategy for the sequel if we ever get one. Imho the lack of media attention and sales will probably make this dlc the last Spellforce game. One can still hope that they at least will remake the first game + dlcs.
So some good news on multiplayer -- I think they managed to fix a lot of the bugs in the time from recording the video to release. Player count has also been better it seems - I have consistently been able to find matches in
Its interesting to hear your perspective because i move so slowly in this game that none issues of base pushing with heros because even on normal difficulty i tended to wait until i had a 200 pop army because even with all artifact tier items my first push in the siege of the iron ones forge i used the orcs their titans and tier 3 units and lost a massice amounts of units and had to retreat cause even the titan died and needed to regroup a second round of recruitment to finish it off cause i literally boxed the ai into the fortress at the southern half of the map lol ok just saw how much changed with soul harvest because i did get them in reforced
just bought it and was blown away by how good it is, it's everything i imagined Warcraft 4 would be like, the RTS controls are very responsive and intuitive.
I spent countless hours - literally like a couple hours every day for almost 20 years, sometimes entering periods where I played it morning to night, went to bed, woke up, started again - playing Warcraft III. I tried playing WOW to get over my addiction, and that just itroduced another one. Warcraft Reforged was the best thing to happen to my life. The complete destruction of the game by the developer finally, FINALLY cut the cord. See, I was addicted to the ONLINE 1v1 portion of the game, and the original version, Reign of Chaos, at that. When even that functionality was removed, I walked away. This game offers great hope. It is the ultimate realization of Warcraft III's potential. It expertly combines deep Real Time Strategy and CPG (Role Playing elements). Although I am too old to ever give myself completely to a game for decades, I am happy this game exists. Now, if I ever need that itch scratched, rather than playing some pirated, nonn-online version of Warcraft III, I can dabble in this now and then.
To give a future update. The game will get an update in December where you can play all 3 campaigns one after the other without needing to buy the previous expansions. PC players who bought them before this it seems will get this as a free update similar to Skyrim PC on Steam. They're also going to release the game for consoles. THQ is really going all out for this.
@@lujolonewolf I'm just excited because I haven't played a good rts since battle for middle earth is last one I remembered playing, also this game looks good graphics wise.
Great video. Multiplayer did have problems in the first 3 days of the Fallen God/Versus release, but it's fixed now. There's a decent player base, ladder, tournaments etc. You should try again.
Awesome! Just started the critique and i cant wait for what you saying. Spellforce is/was my favorite game since childhood. But i honestly have to say that i dont play sf3 because they changed so much in the gameplay. Sf1 and 2 were so much better than what we have now in sf3. In my opinion they could have done so much more with sf3 than they actually did. I was so disappointed when i played the Beta
You could actually swap action bars in the base game with a hotkey. That way you could've actually used like.. 9 or 12 abilities per hero. It was a bit clunky, but you could get used to it.
I was playing this several months ago, but got distracted by other games (a common problem I have). I forgot how much I liked the story. I enjoyed the 4 heroes roaming around, but found the RTS could get a bit tedious (although I think that is more my changing tastes as I get old). Still I need to go back and finish this.
I haven't played very far into SF3 Reforced yet, but I'm happy to report a UI update, gamepad support, and a complete lack of caravans. Global resources are the norm and, so far, "normal" difficulty almost seems too easy on the RTS side (compared to the "normal" difficulty of Starcraft II) while being actually a bit challenging on the RPG side. I am also less happy to report that they still haven't squashed all of the bugs quite yet. It seems I did something in the "wrong" order on the first battle with the Elves and couldn't interact with the north gate. So I had to run all the way around to the south gate and beat them the regular way, but I had built up a pretty big force by that point.
It's kind of crazy that in the original SpellForce 3 campaign, your party is composed of the most evil characters Eo has ever seen. And it’s hard to like them, especially Isgrimm, who is already showing reckless abuse of power.
Just bought spellforce 3, first game I played in the series. I absolutely loved it, however Im not much of a fan of the rts part. It’s not hard but it’s tedious and it really just breaks the flow of the story.
Oh man I disagree with a lot of what you said, it seems you completely missed a lot of the nuances of each race in the first campaign. Humans are balanced and a good all round race. Orcs have weaker units, but make them in greater numbers, they also have less workers in each of their resource gathering buildings which means they need to build multiple lumber mills and hunting camps to get an acceptable output. The nuance with the Elves is that they don't need as much territory as the Orcs as their production buildings house more workers so they harvest resources faster initially to fuel themselves to their stronger endgame, if you payed attention you would know that the elves can turn their outposts into defensive buildings. Which means they only need to use half of the territory other races do to come online while gatekeeping enemies from invading and taking resources. Also there is Spellforce 3 VS edition which is a free to play multiplayer focussed mode. Thats why the count on the multiplayer for the base game and soul harvest is low.
Ya know, I actually agree with you so much that I think I brought up every single point you just mentioned over the course of the video if you took the time to watch it. But you did a really good job of rephrasing my thoughts on the different races, thank you.
spellforce 1-2 were super popular and known on the release what next? you'll say you never heard of besieger cossack blitzkrieg annihilated empires or natrolis? kknd?
Well, at least with TW warhammer adds with DLCs without subtracting, spellforce forces you to install separate games that are not really incremental, why cant the last one published (fallen gods) include all 6 races for skirmish mode? Even if you own the 3 releases there is no way to use all 6 races at once in a skirmish game... Pathetic design choice.
Amazing graphics and details but the gamestyle is pretty boring and imbalanced. It's all about taking control of the whole map, there is no way to play it in a personalised way, as you are bound by the number of the workers you can use, so it`s all about conquering all sectors and massing units, researching and hero leveling would make little difference. It's a different gamestyle than classical RTS games, in which you are not bound by map positions and limited workforce. Which for me means taking away half of the fun. Pros: - great graphics and unit models - factions' units and gamestyles are unique - detailed 3D surroundings - relaxing nature sound effects - RPG elements included. Cons: - the sectors based gameplay is limiting the tactics variety - only 1 or 2 heroes can be selected for each race - not enough variety for units: usually only 1 air unit and only 1 siege unit per race - the unlimited number of free of charge teleports makes the map positioning irrelevant - imbalanced (it`s a challange for any RTS though) - silly bugs even 3 years after release - boring repetitive soundtrack (I turned it off after several games) - only one server which makes it unworthy for players far from Europe. I only purchased the VERSUS version, unfortunatelly it`s a NO for me.
I have to admit, I was too quick to come with a conclusion without checking the game`s features in detail. Yes, the game does not have the units variety of the AOE games and it doesn`t have units abilities as games such as Starcraft or Warcraft 3. For a game called Spellforce it's ironic that it lacks magic units / spellcasters, there`s more magic in Warcraft 3, in Spellforce 3 only the heroes can perform magic and in Ranked battles there`s only one hero that you can use compared to 3 heroes in Warcraft 3. However there are enough elements to create complexity in the game: you can control a fairly amount of units, the resource management is quite challenging (6 types of resources per race, limited number of workers and resources types in each sector), map control is essential because of key sectors and the fact that the game is over if you destroy the main fortress, the hero is split between conquering sectors, creeping and buying items, the sectors' management is essential in the evolution of the game. This is the best modern RTS game with RPG elements after the long reign of Warcraft 3.
Great video! I was one of the writers for Spellforce 3: Fallen God. This was an enjoyable watch ^_^
I really loved the writing in this game. I hope you are really proud of this game because I think its one of the greatest of all time :)
@@draxx85 Aww thanks! I'm gla you enjoyedd it :)
Hey, just coming here to praise your work. You and the whole team should be reeeally proud of what you've accomplished. I'm a long time RTS player (since C&Q Red Alert 1 was fresh, literally), and can't say how incredible and breathtaking Spellforce 3 as a whole is. It's really one of a kind, and the amount of attention you all gave to each small detail, from brief carefully crafted dialogs, the voice, visuals and mechanics, everything is so incredibly well put together. I can only image how challenging was to come up with a blend of fantasy RPG and RTS with a solid story, and damn... You guys nailed. I wish there was an investment for a Spellforce 4, but I'm just glad I had to opportunity to see all this as it is. Thank you so much. Be proud! Cheers
That makes me happy to hear!@@renancesarantunes7498 Glad we could make a series of games you enjoyed :)
@@anduril38 i adored the writing, i was eagerly going through the story excited for what came next. I love stories that leave me not able to predict whats coming next. Tahar being the son of that creature was fascinating and i loved all the characters. All in all one of my favorite games, i hope another spellforce comes out
I just finished watching the 3 spellforce critiques you have, what a journey remembering one of my favourites childhood games and knowing how it evolved. Thank you so much for your effort and hope you had as much fun creating it as me watching it.
P.D: Love those bloopers
Hey if you want another hidden gem forgotten RTS underrated game, check out Rise of Legends. It was a spinoff title based on the Rise of Nations gameplay system, in a unique and extremely memorable world with lore that deserved so much more development and progression than it got. It's such a rare and forgotten game that you may need to get the ol' VPN up and running and get the game from an internet 'diagon alley' of sorts -- but it's so worth it. I wish more people knew about this game. There is a whole society based on an alternate timeline where Leonardo Davinci's blueprints were created en masse and the world went in this Da Vinci steampunk direction instead of fuel like we did in reality. Hope you get a chance to try it if the game peaks your interest!
Huh, never heard about that one before. Thanks for putting it on my radar :)
aww yeah, the long awaited spellforce 3 critique finally here. see yall back in 3 hours.
Edit: great stuff man, enjoyed it thoroughly. shame about the multiplayer but hopefully release of versus will help the game gain some Steam. ^_^
Whatever you decide to do next don't ever remove those bloopers. :)
Statistics on the workload were quite intriguing as well.
All in all looking forward to your future content, have a good one.
i must admit im playing right now and iv had no bugs with 20 hours in, great game btw!
They have gotten a couple of years to iron things out over time
Same here, I have more ram now and when I first this game in 2017, it crashed constantly. Now im 10 hours in and perfect so far. Makes me happy, god this games great.
Just map the battle slot next or previous page to something and you can have a ton of spells in spellforce 3. I use 1 and 2 and just click page to page.
spellforce 3 reforced is out. Hope to see your thoughts on it.
There is a final choice regarding the vessel for the Fial Darg.
Normally Noag would sacrifice himself but when I strongly disagreed with that decision someone else forcefully took over.
I won't spoil you about the rest of the game since your choice does really matter.
About the multiplayer part:
I can understand what the devs were initially thinking about the multiplayer mode since the playerbase is so small.
Still they decided to listen to the community and spent money and working hours in order to create the rank system for a handful of people.
Maybe the creation of the multiplayer mode didn't cost much money anyway and with the sales data they can develop a better strategy for the sequel if we ever get one.
Imho the lack of media attention and sales will probably make this dlc the last Spellforce game.
One can still hope that they at least will remake the first game + dlcs.
I think I mentioned the separate endings for fallen god, although I never bothered enough to go back and get footage for the Grungwar ending.
So some good news on multiplayer -- I think they managed to fix a lot of the bugs in the time from recording the video to release. Player count has also been better it seems - I have consistently been able to find matches in
Est? Estimated?
@@HoganTon Eastern Standard Time :)
@@Rebeluke92 Eastern? Like Poland Ukrain or Russia?
Its interesting to hear your perspective because i move so slowly in this game that none issues of base pushing with heros because even on normal difficulty i tended to wait until i had a 200 pop army because even with all artifact tier items my first push in the siege of the iron ones forge i used the orcs their titans and tier 3 units and lost a massice amounts of units and had to retreat cause even the titan died and needed to regroup a second round of recruitment to finish it off cause i literally boxed the ai into the fortress at the southern half of the map lol ok just saw how much changed with soul harvest because i did get them in reforced
just bought it and was blown away by how good it is, it's everything i imagined Warcraft 4 would be like, the RTS controls are very responsive and intuitive.
You need more views man. I'm sorry. This is a long video and it's clear you put a lot of energy and time into this. Great video.
Good job, I really enjoyed your videos. Thank you for moving the courser off center during cutscenes.
Loved the og Release. Can't wait to replay the remastered Version they Released
I spent countless hours - literally like a couple hours every day for almost 20 years, sometimes entering periods where I played it morning to night, went to bed, woke up, started again - playing Warcraft III. I tried playing WOW to get over my addiction, and that just itroduced another one.
Warcraft Reforged was the best thing to happen to my life. The complete destruction of the game by the developer finally, FINALLY cut the cord. See, I was addicted to the ONLINE 1v1 portion of the game, and the original version, Reign of Chaos, at that. When even that functionality was removed, I walked away.
This game offers great hope. It is the ultimate realization of Warcraft III's potential. It expertly combines deep Real Time Strategy and CPG (Role Playing elements). Although I am too old to ever give myself completely to a game for decades, I am happy this game exists. Now, if I ever need that itch scratched, rather than playing some pirated, nonn-online version of Warcraft III, I can dabble in this now and then.
To give a future update. The game will get an update in December where you can play all 3 campaigns one after the other without needing to buy the previous expansions. PC players who bought them before this it seems will get this as a free update similar to Skyrim PC on Steam. They're also going to release the game for consoles. THQ is really going all out for this.
I'm actually kinda excited for this game since it coming to console in December.
Same, 3 of my other buddies are grabbing it too. Xbox
@@lujolonewolf I'm just excited because I haven't played a good rts since battle for middle earth is last one I remembered playing, also this game looks good graphics wise.
Great video. Very informative. Thank you 😊
Great video. Multiplayer did have problems in the first 3 days of the Fallen God/Versus release, but it's fixed now. There's a decent player base, ladder, tournaments etc. You should try again.
Awesome! Just started the critique and i cant wait for what you saying. Spellforce is/was my favorite game since childhood. But i honestly have to say that i dont play sf3 because they changed so much in the gameplay. Sf1 and 2 were so much better than what we have now in sf3. In my opinion they could have done so much more with sf3 than they actually did. I was so disappointed when i played the Beta
Sp3 Reforced is damn near bugfree.
You could actually swap action bars in the base game with a hotkey. That way you could've actually used like.. 9 or 12 abilities per hero. It was a bit clunky, but you could get used to it.
Great video, hope it can be updated for the reforced edition.
I actually brought ianna to the island and she actually has dialog about dul and says hes got darkness in him
So underrated 😢
Spellforce 3 is amazing.
I was playing this several months ago, but got distracted by other games (a common problem I have). I forgot how much I liked the story. I enjoyed the 4 heroes roaming around, but found the RTS could get a bit tedious (although I think that is more my changing tastes as I get old). Still I need to go back and finish this.
I haven't played very far into SF3 Reforced yet, but I'm happy to report a UI update, gamepad support, and a complete lack of caravans. Global resources are the norm and, so far, "normal" difficulty almost seems too easy on the RTS side (compared to the "normal" difficulty of Starcraft II) while being actually a bit challenging on the RPG side.
I am also less happy to report that they still haven't squashed all of the bugs quite yet. It seems I did something in the "wrong" order on the first battle with the Elves and couldn't interact with the north gate. So I had to run all the way around to the south gate and beat them the regular way, but I had built up a pretty big force by that point.
Thanks for the video!
It's kind of crazy that in the original SpellForce 3 campaign, your party is composed of the most evil characters Eo has ever seen.
And it’s hard to like them, especially Isgrimm, who is already showing reckless abuse of power.
I'm trying the first main campaign now. Finding it confusing. Base building/ economy starting works very differently from what I'm used to in RTSes
spell force 3 is actually a prequel to the first two games.
DUDE HAVE YOU HEAR OF REFORCED?
it play like Halo Wars
Just bought spellforce 3, first game I played in the series. I absolutely loved it, however Im not much of a fan of the rts part. It’s not hard but it’s tedious and it really just breaks the flow of the story.
Its good
Oh man I disagree with a lot of what you said, it seems you completely missed a lot of the nuances of each race in the first campaign.
Humans are balanced and a good all round race. Orcs have weaker units, but make them in greater numbers, they also have less workers in each of their resource gathering buildings which means they need to build multiple lumber mills and hunting camps to get an acceptable output.
The nuance with the Elves is that they don't need as much territory as the Orcs as their production buildings house more workers so they harvest resources faster initially to fuel themselves to their stronger endgame, if you payed attention you would know that the elves can turn their outposts into defensive buildings. Which means they only need to use half of the territory other races do to come online while gatekeeping enemies from invading and taking resources.
Also there is Spellforce 3 VS edition which is a free to play multiplayer focussed mode. Thats why the count on the multiplayer for the base game and soul harvest is low.
Ya know, I actually agree with you so much that I think I brought up every single point you just mentioned over the course of the video if you took the time to watch it. But you did a really good job of rephrasing my thoughts on the different races, thank you.
Hmm
SP3 or SH SP3?
SP3 have a soft spot. Skirmish reason.
I can stop adressing, SF3 looks way better and more like SF1 once you go into game files and increase the field of view and expand your view.
i.imgur.com/PVzA64a.jpg
spellforce 1-2 were super popular and known on the release
what next? you'll say you never heard of besieger cossack blitzkrieg annihilated empires or natrolis? kknd?
Sad....
For it could a rival for Warcraft 3 ....
If you compare this game campaign to how poor Warhammer total war is...You should uninstall it and give SF3 a chance no mather what.
Well, at least with TW warhammer adds with DLCs without subtracting, spellforce forces you to install separate games that are not really incremental, why cant the last one published (fallen gods) include all 6 races for skirmish mode? Even if you own the 3 releases there is no way to use all 6 races at once in a skirmish game... Pathetic design choice.
Amazing graphics and details but the gamestyle is pretty boring and imbalanced. It's all about taking control of the whole map, there is no way to play it in a personalised way, as you are bound by the number of the workers you can use, so it`s all about conquering all sectors and massing units, researching and hero leveling would make little difference. It's a different gamestyle than classical RTS games, in which you are not bound by map positions and limited workforce. Which for me means taking away half of the fun.
Pros:
- great graphics and unit models
- factions' units and gamestyles are unique
- detailed 3D surroundings
- relaxing nature sound effects
- RPG elements included.
Cons:
- the sectors based gameplay is limiting the tactics variety
- only 1 or 2 heroes can be selected for each race
- not enough variety for units: usually only 1 air unit and only 1 siege unit per race
- the unlimited number of free of charge teleports makes the map positioning irrelevant
- imbalanced (it`s a challange for any RTS though)
- silly bugs even 3 years after release
- boring repetitive soundtrack (I turned it off after several games)
- only one server which makes it unworthy for players far from Europe.
I only purchased the VERSUS version, unfortunatelly it`s a NO for me.
I have to admit, I was too quick to come with a conclusion without checking the game`s features in detail. Yes, the game does not have the units variety of the AOE games and it doesn`t have units abilities as games such as Starcraft or Warcraft 3. For a game called Spellforce it's ironic that it lacks magic units / spellcasters, there`s more magic in Warcraft 3, in Spellforce 3 only the heroes can perform magic and in Ranked battles there`s only one hero that you can use compared to 3 heroes in Warcraft 3.
However there are enough elements to create complexity in the game: you can control a fairly amount of units, the resource management is quite challenging (6 types of resources per race, limited number of workers and resources types in each sector), map control is essential because of key sectors and the fact that the game is over if you destroy the main fortress, the hero is split between conquering sectors, creeping and buying items, the sectors' management is essential in the evolution of the game.
This is the best modern RTS game with RPG elements after the long reign of Warcraft 3.
Spoilers
Spellforce 3 is a pure garbage 🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮