Season III - how much new content we got

Let me ask you a question devs - are you lazy?

In Season III we got monsters that already existed in the game, I can live with that as far as Midgard goes but no further.

There are dungeon and forest golems which are already existing in Class Quests, there are Bosses like Cyclops, Desert Barbarian, Epic and Fierce Rock Elementals, Savage Trolls, Runic Bears which already exist in Season I.
Are you lazy to come up with new monsters?

But there is more, in Province 7 of Season 3, in stages 4,5,6 and 9 you even used a background from Season I - namely from Province 14 - Cloudloft. Why? Is Cloudloft on Vanaheim? Of course not.
It is laziness.

*Midgard Woods stage 2-10 and the majority of Midgard Morass stages (Province 3) have the same background art as three Season 1 stages in Slopes of Ogron and two stages in Brokenlands with one difference, the background is now blueish and mirrored.

*Jotunheim Peaks stages 9- 4,6,7,9,10 have the same background as four Ruins of Skyfheim stages from Season 1. So Skyfheim and Jotunheim is the same.

I believe I am entitled to want new content for the money I invest regularly in the game and in you, so please, bring that content and do not copy old things without any sense!

Maybe instead of creating two hundred billion new heroes you can actually think about the story and artwork a bit more.

I sincerely hope it gets better*, your Pois1.

*better like 8-4, wonderful stage, brand new

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Story

I agree.

If you want a mobile MMO with a really great story, try Book of Heroes by Megaspace Industries ( previously owned by Venan Entertainment ). It also has great artwork ( currently 425.4 MB or 0.42 GB ).

Oops, that game is currently on update hiatus because the Devs prioritized F2P / C2P over P2W. Though it did last for 4+ years.

As far as I can tell, you get story telling with few heroes ( single player games ) or you get long grinding with lots and lots of heroes ( MMO / MOBA / etc. ).

Currently I am playing a lot of Stardew valley.

Artwork

Unlike WoW, which is mostly run on laptops, or desktop, computers, Empires runs on mobile devices. Empires saves space by reusing artwork.

I am also playing Niantic’s Wizard United and the game takes up insane amounts of memory on a mobile device. And that game deletes unused graphics, and re downloads them for each recurring event ( currently 5.09 GB ).

Several friends have stopped playing it, or refused invitation to join our team, because their mobile devices do not have enough memory to run the game without constant crashes, and very long load times.

Future

I actually expect it to get worse as they keep adding seasons after season 3 and more 5* heroes ( currently 354.7 MB or 0.35 GB ).

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I honestly don’t look at the artwork. I am impressed you noticed the background from season 1. Never would have noticed.

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Me neither, but the monster design is blatantly lazy and copied over from the other seasons.

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Well, it’s not just the monster design, there is a whole thread on hero bodies and parts reused, as well as monsters being upgraded into 3 star heroes or more (hello Aegir).

But I do think that the design of the new season is gorgeous, the artwork has improved tremendously since season 1 on every aspect. (I’m one of those who notices.)

For the OP: you are not investing in this game in any sense of that word… and that means there are zero expectations you can have :slight_smile:

Also I think a bit of cleverness is not a turn off until it’s done right, there are plenty of new monsters and the old ones fit in. Remember Small Giant’s name origin by choice, meaning a small team can have a giant achievement or something like that.

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Unfortunately SGG made their money and now people are paying Zynga, which has proved the reverse as well: Giant company making smaller and smaller achievements. :slight_smile: SGG shouldn’t even be in the conversation anymore, given how quickly and poorly the game has changed since Zynga took it over.

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Offtopic: Officially they’re standalone, but who knows what that means when your board is obviously most interested in your profits. All companies have to balance that though with retaining and engaging a player base, and I am making an educated guess here that they’re still doing pretty well… Just because there are some louder players on a forum, it doesn’t necessarily represent the millions of players they have.I do think they pay attention to player feedback even if they don’t mostly listen.
Anyway, one shouldn’t forget that this is a business.

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Totally, but it’s a business that wants to keep you engaged. It’s like if a restaurant invited people in and then raised prices 100x…people would be like, “why did you want me to like your food?” :slight_smile:

My main point, though, was that people still act like spending is an act of solidarity with a scrappy little company. Three years ago that was true, and I was happy to give a few bucks a month out of appreciation. Once they sold to Zynga, that no longer became the case, and I think it bears repeating that we’re no longer in this together…this game is now just a money sponge with no real development or design happening.

To be honest, I didn’t notice the recycling of the artwork.

But I’m quite a bit sad about the uninspiring choice of monsters and bosses. Not only were many recycled from earlier, also are Cyclops, Desert Barbarian etc. too little challenging for S3. Even the late stages of S1 had much tougher bosses.

As @Pois1 said, stage 8.4 is great and provides some change to doing the same over and over again (although I was a bit puzzled to see that Nordri only has 1698 HP). The special stages in Midgard (Mist and the other valkyries) were great fun and challenging as well.

A few points to make playing through the map levels more interesting:

  • more new bosses with unique special effects
  • more stages with mini-bosses
  • more stages with special effects (like the Vanaheim mana cut when an enemy dies), maybe in combination with others. In this case I wouldn’t mind recycling S2 effects like dense fog etc, this would also help those who still have to finish the S2 missions.
  • ‘normal’ mobs with special effects (like poison/fire/… resist, small amount of regeneration per round)

Just anything that makes every level different and requires to think of team composition, battle items etc.

This. I was actually thinking about it today when I was browsing through the portal. The design of S3 heroes is outstanding, both in terms of atmosphere and quality. Just look at them, I can not find a single one (except Ratatoskr!) that I would find cheap. They are unique, detailed, climatic. Well done turn after the temporary quality decrease we had with Christmas clowns and fish bar last year. It’s quite easy to write hundreds of posts about poor quality of art or “is this game going to be more and more childish” but sadly I don’t find this amount of passion-posting debating how good some things are. For these, they fully deserve the credit.

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This actually had a good reason. SGG was almost broke because of Oddwing. So SGG needed a hit, fast!

Notes

Click for notes

Prototypes

Art

FIN

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My phone would probably run it no prob but I’m tired of trademarked behemoths from Niantic and that is also why I stopped playing Hogwart’s Mystery and Galaxy of Heroes it was too boring and tedious.

That being said the writing in E&P is abysmal, it feels like an early teenage fanfic. Or maybe it’s just the Polish translation’s fault but I doubt that. And that’s a pity because the game offers a lot of fun and many heroes deserve their own stories imo.

Recycling backgrounds is not that big problem for me, even though some are blatantly from backgrounds from hero cards (hello Jotunheim and Vanaheim), though that does make sense. Jill villagers are a bit more off, though at least it’s great source of jokes here on forum so all good for me :upside_down_face:. Norns battle might be also considered recycled but I actually like that concept a lot, especially since in Norse Mythology there are not only three Norns, but those three are most known.

Actually my complaint is not about S3 but about 3* from Challenge Events who are just recycled monsters. THAT is lazy. Especially since Shrubbear appears next to the very enemies it was based off, just bigger. At least be more subtle, SG!

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This…
And not only are the mob Shrubbears are just the baby versions of the Boss Shrubbears without specials (or the Boss Shrubbears are the super-imposed Mob Shrubbears but with specials), all of them are named Shrubbears. At least name them differently… Ugh. Then again, with there being 1* Purple Troops and 3* Purple Troops named exactly the same (Reanimated Fighters) for this game after 3 years, I don’t expect this to be changed.