King's Bounty: Dark Side

The fourth and, at least for the moment, final entry in the modern King's Bounty series, and in turn my final chain of posts about King's Bounty stuff. A bit of a black sheep, having been released too early and given inadequate patch support, resulting in a buggy mess with lots of flaws... Dark Side nonetheless does a surprisingly large number of things extremely well. It's too bad it didn't get the chance to be polished properly, and to a lesser extent was probably too ambitious.

These posts are largely designed under the assumption you've read the prior posts covering The Legend, Armored Princess, and Warriors of the North. They're liable to be hard to follow if you haven't, particularly if you're not familiar with Dark Side yourself.

As with all three of those games, I play on the Good Old Games release, so if you're playing a different version you may experience discrepancies.

And once again much thanks to Quaranyr in the comments for digging up more precise technical stuff. Even more so than Warriors of the North, Dark Side is both poorly-documented online and full of things whose true behavior is poorly-explained... especially since Dark Side is full of bugs and poor translation that make many of its explanations outright false.

First is...

The introduction. I mention a few tidbits that can be worth knowing for a first-time player as well.

Units


Orcs. I do wish I knew why the dev team decided to overhaul Orcs again. Did they think Adrenaline Levels were a problem?


Demons. There's some design-problematic choices in here, but I quite appreciate Dark Side finally giving Demons a cool, distinctive dynamic in their own right. I do wish it did more to encourage mono-Demons, admittedly.


Undead. I'm very curious as to why Dark Side kept the Zlogn-generating mechanic Warriors of the North introduced, but dropped all the Necro Energy stuff outside that. Not that it was super-relevant, but it still seems an odd set of choices.


Neutral Animals. Dark Side is the entry with the least relevance of them. They don't show up as enemies very often, and you have almost no incentive to use them, even very early in the game. It's a bit of a slipup.


Neutral Sapients Part 1...

....and Part 2. Dark Side has too many Neutral units, which is particularly frustrating since most of them are gimmicky junk. Dragon Riders are cool, at least.


Humans. Weirdly enough, Dark Side is possibly the best game in the series for Humans, even though their internal elements would seem to be inferior to Warriors of the North's iteration.


Dwarves and Zwergr. By contrast, Dark Side is probably the worst entry for Dwarves. Even The Legend was probably better for them in real terms!


Elves and Dark Elves. I do have to wonder if Dark Side meant to do more with the Dark versions of models. The NPC Dark Elves are all pale in a stereotypical Dark Elf way, but the unit models don't match that.


Vikings. I actually prefer Dark Side's approach to Runes, weirdly enough, and it's just too bad you have little reason to use Vikings and barely any opportunity to fight Vikings.


Bonus: Lizardmen Racial Morale. Fairly clear evidence Lizardmen were meant to be in Dark Side, but didn't make it due to the rushed nature of the game. Alas. I'm curious if Dark Side intended to give them a proper racial special.

Spells and Rage


Chaos. Dark Side didn't do a lot to mess with the core mechanics of Spells, but it did add a surprising number of individual Spells and tweak several existing ones. It's one of the better examples of it being perhaps overly-ambitious.


Order. I particularly appreciate what Dark Side does with Order Magic, which is particularly interesting since Order has always been the anti-evil sphere so you'd expect it to end up stupid on some level or another.


Distortion. Least memorable of the changes, but Distortion has always been fairly solidly designed overall.


Rage. It's not perfect, but Dark Side's Rage system is almost certainly the best one in the series. I really hope it's used as the inspiration for any future reboot or sequels.

Class/Character Stuff


Bagyr's Companions. Another of Dark Side's ambitious experiments is making each class have their own unique set of Companions. The execution could've been executed better, but it's probably my favorite Companion system in the series. Bagyr's set in particular is surprisingly entertaining.


Neoline's Companions. Do you like ogling half-naked men? Well I have good news for you, then!


Daert's Companions. It's interesting to me that Daert is the character who has mixed-gender Companions, given the sexualized nature of the Companions in Dark Side. Usually the homoerotic undertone in mostly-hetero fiction gets attached to women in particular. (ie normally I'd expect Neoline to have a girl Companion while Bagyr and Daert had no men in their ranks)

Titles. Another ambitious experiment, harmed quite heavily by Dark Side's buggy programming. You can't get most of these Titles in normal play, which is too bad since some of the ones you can't get are the most interesting ones. At least the Traitor Human support survived. That's genuinely cool.


Medals. Possibly the best-designed Medal set in the series, with the only notable error being the inexplicable attempt to reward letting fleeing enemies go.


Might Skills. At last! A Might tree that's just about perfect, and a Might class that is king of Rage!


Spirit Skills. I will bury you in bodies until the hill of corpses strains to meet the sun.


Magic Skills. Magic still works fine. It's basically always worked fine. This might actually be a low point for the Magic class, in fact.

Misc


Plot. In which I discuss how Dark Side doesn't seem to know what it wants it's narrative to be, unlike the prior games.


Boss Analysis. This is still a weird twist.

Extra: Initiative/Speed tiers and damage distribution. Not a lot new here, as Dark Side apparently thought prior Initiative/Speed tiers were fine.

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You have no idea how good it feels to be done with this behemoth of a project.

Comments

  1. Read all of your posts on Dark Side, thank You so much for putting in the effort to document all of those elements of the game! I must also admit that I mightily enjoyed the additional thoughts on visual design of units and companions :)

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  2. i'm sooooo glaaaaad these analysis series exists! i'm even more glad that this time you have included plot analysis as well because there's no way i'll ever get to this game unless the coveted fan patch does happen.

    i've often used your posts to check unit stats because it was just a better way of gathering info for informed decision.

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  3. I love your guides! They are the best, amazingly informative and pleasant to read. Thank you so much for them.
    Are you planning to make a similar one about King's Bounty 2?

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    Replies
    1. I'm not sure when I'll even get to buying and playing it (Among other points, my current computer is very possibly not able to run it), but unless it's radically different from what I'm expecting, that is my working assumption, yes.

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  4. Hello everyone.
    I know that I am probably writing this two years late, but I am a huge fan of this series and fantasy/mythology in general, so I would like to propose a few changes to the names of some dark counterparts. I am definitely no expert and most of these interpretations come from Quaranyr's posts anyways, but I want to give it a go.

    TRAITORS
    -Traitor type Horseman's name changed into Equistrian.
    -Traitor type Guard's name changed into Guard Master.
    ZWERGS
    -Zwerg type Miner's name changed into Excavator.
    -Zwerg type Cannoneer's name changed into Artillerist.
    -Zwerg type Mechanic's name changed into Technician.
    -Zwerg type Chief Miner's name changed into Chief Excavator.
    -Zwerg type Giant's name changed into Gargantuan.
    DARK ELVES
    -Dark Elf type Dark Water Fairy's name changed into Undine / Darkwater Fairy.
    -Dark Elf type Dark Forest Fairy's name changed into Darkwood Fairy.
    -Dark Elf type Cannibal Werewolf's name changed into Darkwood Werewolf(Elf) / Werewolf Maneater(Elf).
    -Dark Elf type Cannibal Wolf's name changed into Darkwood Werewolf(Wolf) / Werewolf Maneater(Wolf).
    -Dark Elf type Black Unicorn's name changed into Darkwood Unicorn / Dark Unicorn.
    -Dark Elf type Dark Forest Dryad's name changed into Darkwood Dryad.
    -Dark Elf type Dark Forest Ent's name changed into Darkwood Ent.
    -Dark Elf type Ancient Dark Forest Ent's name changed into Ancient Darkwood Ent.

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    Replies
    1. That's a lot.
      So, let's start with the traitors. I opted to change the Guard's name because, yeah, their name is technically different; but I don't think it sits well with the rest. You know, bowman becomes Bow Master and swordsman becomes Sword Master. Then, all of a sudden guardsman becomes Guard. That won't do. I also thought about making it something like Footman, but that breaks our '-man -> master' rule.

      I just realized, if we were to follow the same rule, the Horseman would be Horse Master. Some great meme potential right there. Speaking of him, horsemen are just the beginning of this "Dark units have the same name as their light counterparts" thing going on. I guess it is linked with the limited time and budget the whole Dark Side development had, but couldn't they at least add a 'Dark-' up front? We will try to do something about that, starting with our villanous cavalry. I think Equistrian is a good alternative, it does have this elegant warlord sound to it.

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    2. Next up, we have the zwergs (btw I keep reading them as "zergs" which messes with my head real quick).
      Let's start with the miners. As forementioned, both units shouldn't have the same name, but this problem becomes a standard zwerg gimmick. Three out of seven units, in fact.

      I changed miner to Excavator. If I understood Quaranyr's posts correctly, it should have been actually the opposite: Light units would be called excavator and dark units would be called miners. But that's the best word I could find that differentiated their names without seperating their meanings. And naturally as I changed them to Excavators, I changed Chief Miners to Chief Excavators. No biggy there.

      I directly copypasted Artillerist and Technician from Quaranyr's posts. Artillerist just sounds awoseme and technician... well. Personally I would prefer mechanic over technician, but apparently the original name for repair droids were mechanics; so I guess that's the most reasonable choice.

      That leaves us with dark giants. I think the best candidate here is Gargantuan. It derives its meaning from, and I quote: "Gargantua, 'enormous,' 1590s, from Gargantua, name of the voracious giant in Rabelais' novels, supposedly from Spanish/Portuguese garganta 'gullet, throat'." Compared to the relatively neutral word giant, it is evil alright. However, I am not certain whether we can actually use an adjective for a name. I have seen the word Gargantuan used in this matter (HoMM IV expansion creature), but I just don't know.

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    3. Finally, we have the dark elves. This part includes a lot of my personal ideas and as you can see, I am torn apart with half of them. So I will just start to rabble.

      First, let get over with the easy ones. Following Quaranyr's suggestions again, I changed all 'Dark Forest' parts into 'Darkwood'. It makes sense that they are not just dark sided forest creatures, they are creatures of the dark sided forests. And darkwood sounds cool. Perhaps it could be something like Duskwood, but that might alter the meaning too far.

      Second, we have the dark water fairy. She changes into either Darkwater Fairy or Undine. The reasoning behind Darkwater Fairy is the exact same with darkwood. Undine, however; is a completely different alternative. There are other water spirit related words, most importantly the nymph, but it has been already used in the Ice and Fire expansion with ice nymphs. Yeah, we could argue that since there are ice nymphs, there's gotta be standard nymphs somewhere; but that simply hasn't been used as far as I am aware.

      Third, we have the black unicorns. I seriously don't know why they opted to entirely disregard a unit with a different backstory and didn't just called the dark unicorns, Dark Unicorns. That's one of the possible candidates by the way. But I believe calling them Darkwood Unicorns instead would be better. You know, creating another pattern?

      Fourth, we have the cannibal werewolves and wolves. I couldn't make my mind on this one either. Something like Werewolf Maneater sounds good enough, but I just like the idea of all dark elves uniting under the Darkwood title. You might be wondering, then what about the dark water fairy, and I am personally happy with leaving them a bit stranded. If we were to go for this Darkwood route, I guess naming them Undines would be better, but it is getting really late at this point and I need to wrap this up. As you can see, my favourite picks are the first options and faithful-to-the-original picks are the second options. You can also just quit everything and try to understand why is this madman writing excruciatingly long posts for a game that almost everyone moved on from, but since you read this much I think you are at least interested in this topic.

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    4. Well, that was it. Thanks for bearing with me through what was probably something like fifteen minutes. As I said before, I am no authority, just a nerd with a passion for these kinda things. I should also probably mention that English is not my native language. That must have cleared some things out.
      And if you have any comments, I donno, just write below. Bye.

      Sorry for the long post, here's a potato

      Delete
    5. PS: Equistrian should have been Equestrian, my bad. It also suffers the same problem with Gargantuan's name and I still don't know what to do about that.
      As another side note; perhaps we should change the hunter's name to something like Poacher, because rangers were called hunters in the prior entries and it just doesn't make sense.

      Delete

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