To those who are shocked, shocked I say, that a GAMES WORKSHOP licensed game, fairly true to the original IP, comes out of the gate modularly delivered and priced higher than you like, well, you clearly haven't spent more than a few seconds looking at what GW does for a living these past four decades. These guys pretty much invented the notion of paying more to be more flexible / powerful / badass looking in games. You could go spend over $1000 in the iBooks store just picking up the electronic versions of their rule books and painting guides. So $19 for what would cost you a minimum of $500 to buy in physical form AND you don't have to deal with spending dozens of hours painting all the minatures? Or not get the sads because after you just spent half a grand and two weeks getting ready it dawns you that you are now a middle aged father who doesn't have a cadre of friends with nothing better to do with six hours of their time than spend it in your basement over a gaming table rolling dice and moving minatures? That's a killer bargain in my book As for the IAP nonsense, this title is not designed to be freemium, it's not even close to freemium in design. Anyone waiting on the cost of the IAP to come down / go away / base game becomes free is going to be waiting a long time. To those who think the presence of consumable IAP is *inherently* a bad thing, I ask you to just go away, you are the true sheep, you buy games just because a dev posts "No IAP" since you can't understand why markets pretty much NEVER work on a one price for everyone model. To those paranoid that a game that launches with genuinely optional consumable IAP might one day be rebalanced to make it less truly optional, guess what, 100% of the no-IAP games you buy have exactly the same risk. The devs can launch a 2.0 update that adds soul gems and fairy dongs that drop about once a blue moon and you need 200 of them to level up; that's life. Learn to enjoy things for what they are right now instead of living in a hypothetical world you create as your own personal nightmare scenario (really, if you're going to live in a world of make believe and delusion, why not at least make it a good one?). This is a fantastic game, very true to the original IP and I'm going to go back to cursing as I miss again, and get my leg injured because I can't stop helping old ladies cross the street. Like a lot of older, successful IP, you're not going to get it in a faithful form on iOS at "standard" iOS pricing. Final Fantasy Tactics is never going to be be on sale for $0.99 and a true-ish to the original adaption of GW properties is going to set you back more than the latest Angry Birds.
Nice, always looking forward to new Warhammer games. It seems a bit unstable on my iPod Touch 4G though, already had two crashes. I hope they will fix this in an update.
+1 totally agreed bro. My pack of cigarettes cost me $6.42, this game cost me 4.99 and i gaurantee i'll end up buying a few carton by the time i get done with this one hahaha well said broham...well said if you're not convinced then don't buy it, if you have the money to spare then check it out. It is def worth every penny. I am biased i enjoyed the hell out of hunters 1 & 2 gameplay. This is way more expansive and in-depth and polished.
I registered just to post this. I beta tested this game, and the balance worked for me all the way through to the end. At the start of the game your team is weak, damage is low and misses are high. But it's an RPG - your team are low level rubbish fighters! And by a happy coincidence (read: by design) you fight low level characters who also do low damage and miss a lot. At that stage, you have the option to use IAP and buy gold to get a better weapon, or more kit, or some potions. I never felt the need to. Killing a rat still only takes one successful hit, and (apart from some rare weapons which you can't even buy that early on) you won't be buying a better hit rate. Plus to be honest I'd rather be in dungeons fighting monsters and being tactical. You also need gold to level up. However you also need XP! You can't just buy your way to level 5 without actually killing things. And actually, in natural gameplay (picking up loot, selling duplicate weapons etc) I was never short of cash to level up. Sometimes I had to choose between leveling a character or buying them a better weapon, but (OH MY GOD) it turns out that's a strategy decision sometimes you have to compromise! You have to compromise a lot in this game: you can only take 4 characters into a dungeon; space is very cramped so you have to decide who walks in front; there's a limited number of inventory slots so do you take provisions or spells? Saying that people can (or "have to" if you want to be antagonistic) pay real money to advance is missing a) that those people are *choosing* to remove a strategy element from their game and b) that even if you do that you aren't getting a free ride through the game. I never felt unfairly short of gold beyond what the situation my team would expect to be in (shock horror: if you're a green fighting team, being short of money helps you PLAY the ROLE!), in fact towards the end of the game when you've leveled up and start finding rare weapons basically laying around dungeons I had quite an excess. Which I guess you'd expect after your team are basically heroes recognised across the land (spoiler: more ROLE PLAYING there).
I'm still reading all the IAP's responses and waiting. Not a fan of consumable IAP's, especially on a $5 ($19 full) game.
To those of you waiting because of the "IAP Problem" I say there is no helping some people. In no way, shape or form does this game "throw" IAP at you. The IAP is completely optional. There are no timers to speed up, no revive via purchasable gems, etc. You can buy (currently) three extra characters, which have no real benefit over the others, they just provide flavor, and one expansion pack that is not needed to beat the game, hence the "expansion" part of it. You *can* buy gold, but it isn't necessary. Go play Heroes of Destiny (which looks and plays great, but has pay walls built in everywhere) and then try this and see which is destroyed by IAP and which is not. Even Dungeon Hunter 4, which doesn't require IAP to play is still heavily P2W. Great job Rodeo Games. I purchased last night and immediately purchased all 3 characters and the expansion. Less then 20$ for 30-40 hours of gameplay, yes sir. I have done far worse on console games, 60$ for 8 hours of gameplay, yuck! whoda
How does the expansion work in terms of balance? Is expansion content comparable to the initial content or much more difficult? I understand there's an open world dynamic where you can access expansion areas immediation; but would difficulty spike or experience gain overleveling you for subsequent areas discourage you from doing so? Thank you in advance for any reply.
I'm weighing in here on the consumable IAP front too, in my opinion, after 3 hours of gameplay, it is just not needed. Question about the extra characters (only bought the campaign expansion so far as reckon I'll wait for the 4th extra character to be announced then roll with a whole new group). My wizard decided to try and stop a bull charging through a town, got the gratitude of the citizens but also a broken rib for his troubles. Says he now has -3 wounds and -1 toughness for 1 dungeon. Question is, if I get another character like the trollslayer, and run the next dungeon with the wizard sitting it out does his rib heal, or is it a 1 dungeon penalty tied to him? Oh and a small point on games like this from Games Workshop - they are meant to be cruel, it's not about becoming godlike and nurse maided until you get there, it's about surviving an exceedingly harsh world and getting hammered and honed into that said godlike state. If you think this can be mean you should try Blood Bowl, a few bad dice rolls in that (which will happen) and you can be about ready to lob your device across the room. The point is the stories you get from surviving and doing cool shit (triple deathblow when your Marauder is the last man standing and just been ambushed for instance), this is why in this game when your characters get all powerful, you retire them and go back to the sharp end.
I hate iap's as much as anyone and do everything I can to avoid games with it. But that said, as soon as the need to rotate the pad gets patched/changed this will be an instant buy for me.
EXpansion question Is the expansion a build on to the end of the game? or is it an expansion throughout the original game? I guess when I do nuck up and buy the expansion should I have done it at the beginning so I don't miss out on anything or is it a "semi-stand alone" set of gaming with the same champs?
Wow, what a game. iAP is completely not required. I got 4 hours of sleep last night from playing this.
*sigh* Ok, it's unplayable on my iPod Touch 4G. Whenever I'm about to finish a dungeon the game crashes and I lose all progress. Guess I'll really have to wait for a fix.
Loving the game so far. Only issue is crashes, mostly on the loading screen. Once it's up and running though, it plays well on my 3GS.
That's a shame, did you try closing all running apps and doing a hard reset to defragment the memory?
Uh oh, looks like we got one of them "Role Players" here, Martha. Seriously though, welcome to TA and good point.
The expansion area is literally that, an expansion to the core world. You can see it on the normal world map, and use the "Fast Travel" feature to cross back and forth, to and fro any time you want. The game generally scales to your level, so you're free to roam around as you please; you can do the expansion stuff first if you want, or weave it into the core questline. And to Bronxsta, yes, you can counter-attack in combat. ^_-
