King's Bounty Dark Side: Introduction

Dark Side is the weakest, most flawed entry in the series, chiefly because it was severely rushed for whatever reason. The result is a game that's full of fairly obvious bugs, severe tuning problems, and content that feels not properly completed or that really should've been reworked to be more intuitive or less of a time-wasting pain in the butt. And digging in the files, there's lots of evidence of intentions that didn't get executed.

It's sad, because it's pretty obvious the Dark Side devs are fans of the prior entries and had ambitious, interesting plans for how to do something fresh with the existing King's Bounty framework. This isn't a cash-in title made by a company that doesn't know or care about King's Bounty as a franchise. It's an earnest, intended-to-be-quality entry that got pushed out before it was remotely ready and then had patching support cut before that could bring it into a more playable state. Short of a fan patch project, Dark Side is probably never going to exit this raw state.

That said, I think it's worth talking about and documenting. Its approach to Skill balance, though not without its own flaws, is the best overall approach to Skills in the entire series. It has a(n awkwardly implemented) concept of building up a resource base, with some mechanically consequential aspects. Its introduction of teleportation strips away a lot of the tedium of travel, even if you insist on avoiding spending gold on it. Its approach to class balance and distinctiveness is my favorite in the series. Its willingness to give high Leadership units early lets some of these units finally strut their stuff.

It's a horrible mess I can't honestly recommend to someone as a starting point in the series, but there's a lot of great ideas struggling to show themselves through the mass of bugs, missing content, and inadequately polished... everything.

I should also point out that while I'm not going to be talking much about Quests and whatnot, Dark Side is the entry you're most likely to want a guide on hand. Many Quests fail to explain what the next step is in concrete terms, and a non-trivial portion of them involve divining that the game intends for you to talk to some character on an entirely different island you've probably forgotten exists. Portland is a recurring offender, with the game repeatedly wanting you to visit the smuggler or the witch in Portland without clearly telling you that's where you need to go for a given Quest. But even when the solution is closer to home, you can still get hung up on the fact that Quests often intersect. That is, you'll start Quest A and Quest B, and beeline toward completion of A, only to get stuck for no obvious reason partway through -because Quest A can't be advanced beyond that point until you've advanced Quest B to a specific point. Often, the Quest you need to advance doesn't look connected at all, and the whole thing can get really confusing if you're doing a second-or-later run and are trying to blitz straight to key points while avoiding unnecessary fights, especially since your prior run(s) may well have played out so you never saw any evidence that one Quest was tied up in another.

Dark Side is also fond of giving the player choices where you can potentially screw yourself over. For example, on Sandy Island there's three pirates in castles who each have a chain of requests for you to complete. Thing is, they always end in 'kill the other two pirates', and you don't get any rewards from any of the three until you've done so. As such, you really ought to pick one and ignore the other two entirely. Compounding this is that Melia (The female pirate of the bunch) needs to be alive for you to get a portrait of her, and one of the endgame sidequests is harder to complete without her portrait! (So if you don't pick her, ideally you ignore this whole thing until you have her portrait)

I'm actually fond of the basic idea of making real choices, but Dark Side generally doesn't clue you into what you're really choosing between ahead of time, and in a number of cases there's a clearly worst or clearly best choice to boot.

If nothing else, you should save frequently when playing Dark Side.

We'll as always start with a units post -but just as I covered Vikings before everything else in Warriors of the North because they were your early-game faction, in Dark Side I'll be covering the 'core Dark races' before everything else, starting with Orcs.

Comments

  1. Regarding "passed off to a different company"- so far as I know, the handover happened with Warriors of the North, with Crossworlds being the last KB developed by Katauri.

    cf https://www.pcgamer.com/how-a-russian-strategy-game-where-you-can-marry-a-frog-or-a-zombie-became-a-classic/
    "King's Bounty: The Legend proved to be a big hit for 1C Company, and was one of the most successful games ever produced in Russia. They published three sequels and an expansion pack, with the last two sequels developed internally when developer Katauri moved on to developing MMO Royal Quest."

    Steam and GOG both credit The Legend/Armored Princess/Crossworlds to Katauri, but WotN/Dark Side to 1C-SoftClub. (Ice and Fire is credited on Steam to "Revultive," apparently an ephemeral name for an internal 1C team- or maybe they really just hired the Red Sands people to do the expansion). The Katauri logo shows up in both WotN and Dark Side, and a bunch of Katauri people are still in the credits of at least WotN, but that only makes sense given how much programming/design/art/animation/music stuff is carried over between games.

    I think WotN shows that the people at 1C-SoftClub basically knew what they were doing with the series, and had reasonably ambitious ideas for where to go with it; and thus Dark Side's issues have to be attributed rather to its overambitious design goals, rushed development, and lack of postrelease support. (Though it's still possible there was internal turnover in the people working on the games as well.)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Huh. I'll need to double-check in-game credits and see if there's more overlap between the AP credits and the WotN credits than the WotN credits and the Dark Side credits -I know that you often get stuff where an expansion or sequel is presented as having been developed by a different team and it's actually 75% or more the same people while other times you have the same team name for two projects that had little or no overlap in personnel.

      Though on the other hand that timing would fit neatly with WotN being relatively 'safe' in its ambitions vs Dark Side getting in way over its head. I've seen exactly that happen a lot, where a team first plays it safe, has it work, and buoyed by that success they think they're ready for much more ambitious changes. (And no, at least not the level of ambition they think they're ready for)

      (And yeah I can't find anything on 'Revultive' aside 'they made Ice And Fire')

      So I'll definitely be checking the credits regardless.

      Delete
    2. I went through the credits cause now I'm curious about exactly who worked on what.

      WotN segregates the main part of its credits into "King's Bounty team," which lists Katauri Interactive and key personnel therefrom (Dmitry Gusarov, director of The Legend/Armored Princess; designers Ivan Magazinnikov and Anna Selezneva of TL/AP; designer Anton Mikhailov of AP; lead programmer Alexander Zeburg of TL/AP; animator Ruslan Cherny, level designer Dmitry Degtyarev, etc), and then a separate section for "Warriors of the North team," (which doesn't give explicit developer roles, just names), which doesn't overlap with the Katauri personnel at all. I assume the Katauri credits are grandfathered in, given that a majority of the game's code, basic design, art, animations, music, etc are carried over from the earlier games. 36 people are credited with being on the WotN team.

      Ice and Fire gets its own "Ice and Fire team" credits section. 11 people are credited: four of them are carried over from the base WotN team, six are new people entirely, and one of them, Ivan Magazinnikov, worked on the earlier games at Katauri. (I guess it's not inconceivable that Magazinnikov is credited on the basis that I&F reuses the Marshan Swamp map and part of the Demonis map, but it's also entirely possible that he'd left Katauri and was free to work on the expansion- his last Katauri credit on MobyGames is from 2013, and his most recent credit (2018) is for a game by a different studio entirely.)

      Dark Side moves the "Darkside (sic) team" credits first, with the "King's Bounty team" credits following; again, with "Darkside team" not giving explicit roles. 19 people are credited with working on Dark Side specifically: nine of them worked on WotN, one of them is one of the new people from Ice and Fire, and nine are new. So: a bit more than half the team on Dark Side had some experience working on King's Bounty games prior, but also the team was only about half the size as the one that made WotN. I expect this much-diminished team size probably contributed to Dark Side's problems as much as the inexperience of half the team.

      (n.b. it's a little funny that the translators' difficulties keeping Anglicized names straight between games even applies to the credits; eg I've seen the lead programmer's name as "Sieberg," "Zeberg," and "Zeburg" in various places. Also, the "WotN team" and "Darkside team" credits are alphabetized instead of listing roles- but they're alphabetized in Cyrillic order, and they didn't reorder them for the English releases, so they go A, B, V, G, D...)

      Delete
    3. Ouch, yeah, Dark Side having a half-sized team, half of which is inexperienced, explains its state pretty perfectly. (And then further compounded in the English release by a really sloppy translation) Much of Dark Side looks a lot like one or more people playing with the map editor and visibly learning things like 'no, it's not actually fun to have long strings of spider nests to tediously click on, however nice it might look from an aesthetic perspective', but there's enough bits of the design and narrative that show clear familiarity with (And fondness for) non-superficial elements of what came before that I was always a little dissatisfied with my theory of 'new team learning from scratch'. This more neatly explains it all.

      Also interesting to see that Ice And Fire is pretty heavily its own team. I'd sort of figured Ice And Fire was the same basic team completing the original vision while adding in cool stuff, like Crossworlds to Armored Princess, but apparently not! And it better contextualizes some of Ice And Fire's clunkier bits, like how limited in access Undead Lizardmen are (One shop in the entire game!), or how the new content that isn't Snow Elves or Undead Lizardmen didn't get adequately spread around in enemy groups and whatnot; they just didn't have enough people to quickly do all that.

      This also paints a very different picture of the progression, where Dark Side was just the point that stuff behind the scenes became really visible to players, not the point at which things were actually starting to go wrong behind the scenes. Dark Side was probably kind of doomed to have serious problems from before it got meaningfully started...

      Delete
    4. I also had assumed that Ice and Fire was basically the same devs, but retrospectively it makes a lot more sense that it's half newer people. The base WotN is actually a remarkably conservative sequel in many ways- it's set back in Endoria, six of the base game's 15 main maps are recycled from The Legend with greater or lesser edits (fun fact: you can actually see Castle Magnis in the distance while riding the platforms in Demonis- and still get the "use building" icon and see its name when hovering the cursor over it), Lizardmen are cut, and outside the Vikings, I don't think there are actually any new units that aren't texture-swap variants of existing units. The only substantial mechanical changes feel half-baked- the Valkyrie powers, combat runes, Necro Energy.

      Whereas Ice and Fire is substantially more radical- it adds new stuff, reintroducing and tweaking Lizardmen, then adding two whole new races and three and a half maps (to be fair, one and half are recycled), adding extra ranks to the medals- but it's also remarkably willing to tinker with elements of the base game, usually for the better. Adding the experience system changes the whole game in subtle ways; the enemy balance of the early islands is tweaked to be less gruelling; the Valkyrie powers are made less obnoxious (w/r/t the increasing cooldowns); you get the flying horse much later in the game, making the midgame less cheesable and making the lategame feel like more of an opening-up of the gameworld. They're all things that feel like changes that might be made by modders who know the games inside and out (albeit working to a deadline and on a budget), and I really do wonder if they didn't hire some modders, possibly the Red Sands devs, to work on the expansion, given how many ideas are taken from Red Sands, how much of the I&F team is new people, and that the expansion is credited to a studio that's done absolutely no other commercial game work. If that is what they did, maybe they should've done something similar for Dark Side, instead of having a half-team do a full game.

      Delete
    5. Castle Magnis is actually present in the base game, though harder to get an angle on since you can't access 'Heaven' to look down. In general, Demonis is one of the main pieces that gave me the impression Ice And Fire was primarily finishing the basic goals of the base game. (Which I still suspect is part of Ice And Fire's purpose, but less so than I'd historically thought) It's too obviously unfinished in the base game, with the path to 'Heaven' already placed but unusable, among other conspicuous gaps Ice And Fire fills.

      Base WotN is also a bit more broadly ambitious than you're making it sound, with a completely redesigned Companion system (Probably the most ambitious redesign of the three), a significant overhaul to Rage (Dark Side's Rage system by contrast is more straightforwardly a refinement of the WotN model), a fundamental reconceptualization of the class triad, an entire new Spell sphere (Even if half of them are familiar concepts retuned or reframed more than entirely new Spells), the brand-new mechanic of Eddas... you also forgot Jotun, Ice Dragons, and Ice Minions for news unit that aren't model swaps, and in fact base WotN's only 'model swap' is the Ice Spider. The rest of the reskins are Ice And Fire content.

      That said, I do agree Ice And Fire feels a lot more like something a passionate modder might do rather than a more conventional development team, in terms of making radical changes to fix issues with the base game coupled with a fair amount of 'low-effort' content. (All the Ice and Fire-added units are reskins, and their mechanics tend to be interesting in the sense of 'I would never have expected an official game to have a unit that leeches Health with a ranged attack' rather than 'this clearly required novel code be written') It makes me curious if they did indeed hire some of the Red Sands modders for this, too; career devs seem to inevitably soak up an incompatible mentality.

      Delete
    6. It's been a while since I played the games, and I haven't played base WotN since Ice and Fire came out, so I reckon I've just been misremembering what's in base WotN vs what's added in I&F. Ah well.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular Posts