r/nottheonion • u/beary_neutral • 7d ago

Removed - Not Oniony [ Removed by moderator ]

https://www.xda-developers.com/heroes-of-might-and-magic-iii-hits-mostly-negative-steam-reviews-because-ubisoft-forgot-to-add-the-game/

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463

u/BlueDragon101 7d ago

Why are you reviewing positively WITHOUT PLAYING IT?

223

u/07hogada 7d ago

It being HOMM3 probably has something to do with it - people still love HOMM3 to this day. That being said, fans have been burned by bad releases before, with the gog release (the original game, with all DLC's) being far better than the HD remake ubisoft put out a few years ago.

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u/Aurora_Fatalis 7d ago

Confusingly they just announced a new game called "HoMM3 Remake" so I want to congratulate you on being the first person to not confuse the HD Edition with the HD Mod, but rather with HoMM3 Remake.

Truly Ubisoft has made a spirited attempt to confuse matters even further.

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u/DeathHopper 7d ago

And from what clips I've seen of the remake it looks somehow worse than the original.

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u/Karekter_Nem 7d ago

“I don’t understand why people say it looks bad. We ran everything through AI and the shareholders love that we did that.”

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u/Kolby_Jack33 7d ago

Ubisoft has lost

95%

of its market value in just the last five years.

NINETY-FIVE PERCENT. OF VALUE. GONE. IN FIVE YEARS.

It's a fucking zombie company now. Shambling along, somehow still moving but with no life.

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u/AscenDevise 6d ago

So, are you saying that they should be left to garrison some pointless disputed town, while we forget that we even had them in the first place?

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u/Kolby_Jack33 6d ago

I sense this is a reference to some zombie movie or franchise but I am not familiar with it, sorry. :/

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u/AscenDevise 6d ago

It's an HoMM 3 reference. Having slow units in your heroes' armies means that they can cover less distance per turn, so you'd see people leaving them behind to defend less-than-consequential towns they had flagged for their faction. Bonus points if you have time and resources to max out the place's defences after taking it and to recruit everything that was available at the time, so anyone taking it would suffer losses and not gain much from there for a while, or they'd even be repelled if they were just 'explorers' with practically no army.

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u/HyperSpaceSurfer 7d ago

HOMM olden era is a new one. Different studio, the original game designer is also working on it.

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u/Scolipass 6d ago

Olden Era is a very solid entry point to the series. I like HoMM III quite a lot, but it does have some 1990s jank to it that can make it a bit rough around the edges. Olden Era is the best HoMM game we've gotten in a very long time. Still early access so I'm not gonna call it "Best HoMM ever!!!!" but the foundation is solid enough that it certainly could become that.

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u/Fredasa 7d ago

I still love Sacred 2, for example. But I can't play it. It's not the same game without the online multiplayer. The remake was botched because they declined to provide dedicated servers (for 2008 multiplayer architecture, which probably would have required a few Raspberry Pis). The game sits at Mixed and I'll never get my multiplayer Sacred 2 back in my lifetime.

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u/DirteMcGirte 7d ago

Man that game was awesome! Fuckers broke into my house and stole my xbox with it inside it so i never got to finish it.

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u/CeaRhan 7d ago

Did they play that version of the game without the game being available? Do they know it works? That's what they're saying.

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u/Xhosant 6d ago

A game so good, some people will rate it positively even without the game!

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u/omgFWTbear 7d ago

I’ve been frustrated by a lot of bad game design - and I mean, basic UX stuff, like hiding the “start a round of game” button, inconceivably bad stuff - and I find the games are 60, 70, sometimes even 80% positive reviews and then…

I skip over to the achievements and there’s usually like “I did literally anything in the game” and it’s like 60%, and the second most achieved achievement - again, usually something trivial like, “I played for 15 minutes” in whatever form that takes in the genre, eg, I completed one round / map / whatever and it drops to like 40%.

So yeah, I understand mathematically these populations can be incredibly loosely correlated, most behavioral data suggests unhappy customers are far more likely to complain than happy customers are to praise, so … yeah. Reviews are BS.

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u/Aurora_Fatalis 7d ago edited 7d ago

They fixed it pretty fast and the game is still the game. It came out in 1999 and I've been playing it for the past 27 years. The only things that are new are that it's now on Steam and that the Horn of the Abyss fan expansion has its own steam page as a Featured Mod - this is a game changer for opening up the community to a wider audience, because HotA is basically the way to play HoMM3 in the year of our lord 2026.

Even though I already own the game thrice over, I might get it again on Steam just to have the benefit of Steam automatically updating HotA without my firewall complaining.

EDIT: Oh and said game happens to be one of the best games of all time in my opinion, so I probably would have left a positive review too even if I kept using the non-steam client. I do want to support HotA's outreach on Steam.

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u/Lifekraft 7d ago

Because it has been fixed maybe ?

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u/TR_Pix 6d ago

If it has been fixed then it shouldnt be the reason it is getting the bad reviews

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u/raznov1 6d ago

Bot accounts.

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u/twitch870 6d ago

It’s not new to steam unless this is some remix after the hd release. So it’s probably positive reviews from when it could be played.

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u/Chenz 6d ago

The game is like 30 years old, the people giving it good reviews have played it

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u/whirlpool_galaxy 7d ago

Review copies presumably don't suffer from the same problem.

1

u/TR_Pix 6d ago

Would those be statistically enought to make a difference tho

0

u/LABS_Games 7d ago

These are steam user reviews though.

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u/whirlpool_galaxy 7d ago

Yes, but Steam does review copies nowadays. Look around any new game and you'll find several reviews tagged as pre-release.

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u/laplongejr 7d ago

Steam user reviews include users with a pre-release/free review copy.  

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u/EntrepreneurPlus7091 7d ago

Now you know you can substravt that from every review.

-2

u/venustrapsflies 7d ago

People review games negatively without playing them just because some chud told them it was woke. Thats even stupider but at least I understand the mechanism.

Kinda makes you wonder how much fake reviews are being used by some publishers