It’s impossible to talk about King Arthur without making reference to it’s heritage, so it’s best to clarify from the start that Neocore’s fantasy epic is built around the familiar gameplay of Creative Assembly’s long running Total War series. The core architecture of a turn based strategic map paired with real time battles between large scale armies will be extremely familiar to anyone who has played either of Creative Assembly’s Medieval based efforts. However like Volition before them Neocore have used this solid structure to create a game with it’s own flavour, specifically the unique fantasy setting of Celtic mythology and Arthurian legend.
Mechanically the main difference between King Arthur and the Total War games is a strong emphasis on RPG aspects, with the Knights of the Round table being presented as hero figures who govern your lands on the campaign map and lead or fight alongside armies in battle. Knights come in three different flavours, Warlords are strategists and leaders of armies, Champions are warriors with hard hitting melee attacks and Sages are spellcasters with access to devastating ranged spells. Each army can contain up to four knights, with each taking up as much space as a full unit, this is usually worth while, as the combat prowess of a champion or the lightning strikes of a sage can often be the decisive factor in battle. This emphasis on your knights as characters is King Arthur’s greatest strength, it invests them each with a unique personality absent from Total War’s cookie cutter generals whilst also giving access to some of the more fantastic spells and abilities.
In additional to governing and battling your Knights can also go on quests, one of King Arthur’s most unusual additions. Quests take the form of a short sequence of ‘choose your own adventure’ questions where the Knight’s stats and your moral standings come into play in order to dictate events. It’s a very simple, stripped down system, but surprisingly enjoyable, taking RPG story mechanics down to their core. Choices within quests will often impact on the morality compass; King Arthur’s two dimensional depiction of the player’s moral standing. As well as the traditional good/evil (Rightful/Tyrant) the player can also move between Christian and Old Faith, I played through as Rightful Old Faith, but it’s clear that I would have had a very different game as a Tyrannical Christian, with different units and spells being available, even different Knights and Quests.
The setting is another of King Arthur’s triumphs, far from the generic Tolkien inspired fantasy most gamer’s have come to expect, instead it draws heavily on Celtic mythology. Anyone who has read Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell will recognise the old English lore that King Arthur draws upon, particularly the use of the amoral, otherworldly Fairie as the main supernatural aspect. The game does not, however, remain particularly true to the myth of Arthur itself. The split morality choices result in the player being unable to recruit all of the Knights mentioned in the legends (Merlin and Sir Galahad, for instance are mutually exclusive), similarly the Knight’s personalities and stories are different, Sir Lancelot has no affair with Guinevere, and Sir Gawain becomes a Tyrant and the tale of his encounter with the Green Knight is merged with that of Tristan and Isolde.
Battles themselves play out in familiar total war fashion, but with the addition of Relic style ‘Victory Points’ which can be captured, own more than the enemy and their morale begins to drain, in theory making it possible to win a battle without killing a man. The system is somewhat awkward, while it offers another layer to the strategy of the game, and discourages dull defensive tactics, it can also mean a small mobile force is able to win and otherwise impossible battle, frustrating for those on the receiving end.
The game also has some frustrating balance issues, the options menu offers the chance to use ‘weaker archers’ something I fully recommend doing, as the original settings make them so dominant as to make other units almost unnecessary. Fast cavalry and light infantry are also of limited use, so easily are they cut down by bowfire and the former are made obsolete by the Old Faith’s teleportation spell, resulting in armies consisting largely of heavy infantry and cavalry with supporting archers. The Knights too seem oddly balanced, Champions and Sages are abundant, but I only encountered two Warlords in the entire campaign, resulting in me never building a third major army.
However the biggest problem with King Arthur comes in it’s terrible tendency to fail to illustrate the consequences of your actions. Unlike total war your actions follow a linear story, and while this is great for driving you forwards it’s entirely possible, even very easy, to accidentally advance the story too far and get into an unplayable position. My first attempt at playing had to be shelved when I accidentally started a two front war and triggered an unstoppable tide of ghosts to emerge in the centre of my Kingdom. A simple note that finishing this quest would lead to another Kingdom declaring war was all that was needed, yet this is repeatedly left out. The game also suffers from stability issues, repeatedly crashing during the load out of the battle view.
King Arthur has several clear problems, but it is nonetheless a solid effort from a small studio attempting a subgenre that was previously dominated by a single developer. The emphasis on story and progression drew me in far better than Total War’s aimless world conquering ever did, and even after this review I’m still tempted to play it again from the Christian side. In the end King Arthur doesn’t really fulfill it’s potential, but shows enough to suggest that future installments could well give Creative Assembly the competition they’ve so far lacked.
Wonder if this was from Creative Assembly, even with the same problems; would it still get 72%?! Given this company has 1% of the funding of a Creative Assembly I think it is a gem of a game! It’s certainly worth 8.5, and of course if it WAS from Creative Assembly, it would have got a 9.2 or something!
I think that’s completely unfair, if not offensive to think that we would be biased like that.
And funding doesn’t enter into it – it doesn’t affect the RRP. You wouldn’t say the same when buying, say, a car; would you?
Well certainly you will will always talk about the ‘gloss’ added to a game which does not add anything to the game but needs $10 million to add it. In fact there are any number of standard comments mention when a game is from one of the major publishers. But never have I seen in a review the reviewer pointing out how a game is pretty good or not so bad considering it’s from a company with little funding.
You don’t see the movie industry having the same expectations of an indie movie, and when an indie movie is a good, not great one, reviewers will always point out how good it is ‘considering the money that went into it’! At $34.99, this is half the cost of a $60 game and still I get no feeling that was taken into account either.
And I still say big games from big companies often get ‘the benefit of the doubt’ whereas small developers don’t.
There seems to be some confusion. We are getting charged £35 ($56.90) – so it’s the same price here. Based on that, it’s reviewed against everything else that’s charged at £35 no matter of the publisher or budget.
We have to recommend whether people should buy this product or not. You can’t say “aww, but they tried”. That’s not how it works.
Creative Assembly are only a large business because they’ve managed to make a profit selling excellent strategy games. This game doesn’t sound like an excellent strategy game, considering that it is “[...] very easy to accidentally advance the story too far and get into an unplayable position.”
That doesn’t sound like grade-a craftsmanship that’s running short of funds, does it? It sounds like piss-poor design to me. I’m prepared to trust Tom’s analysis in light of his attempts to back up the (pretty generous) 72%.
At the end of the day, UK_John, the reviews on this site serve to recommend (or warn against) a product. If your niece draws you a picture, you put it on your fridge even if it sucks. If your niece tries to sell me the same picture for £300, or sell me a print in a number of sizes ranging from £15-30, I’ll be giving it a big fat Two Thumbs Down unless it’s worth the money. Quality is the only ticket to a glowing review, I’m afraid, no matter the medium. Journos don’t give indie devs any points for effort, no more than they give extra props to massive studios. Both are unfair, and neither are widely practiced in my circles.
Exactly what Jazmeister said. Pretty much definitively sums up what is REALLY fair.
Although, to me, budget, publisher history and that kind of stuff is interesting, but should not speak about the game itself.
John, I’m confused, your name is UK_John, yet you’re commenting on the US price, rather than the UK one (which is the same as a full price game). Personally I have always considered the text of the review far more important than the end score, you’ll notice I cite serious balance issues and poor stability, things that have simply not come up in Total War games.
I am aware that Neocore is a new studio, but that doesn’t give them free points, what it does give them is acknowledgement of that fact in the review and a mention that they will definitely be one to watch in the future.
They won’t be here in the future because the expectation is they have to be a Creative assembly from day one,which Creative Assembly didn’t have to be…..! As to unfair on big and small companies the same, that got me laughing, so thanks for that.
As to my user name, does that I mean I am in the UK, born in the UK, the UnKnown John, or any number of meanings…..? So just because STEAM has an unfair pricing structure should not be laid an the door of this small Hungarian publisher!
Surely we all know if we see,for example, Bethesda’s Star Trek Legacy with an 8.2, that that means the reviewer was disappointed in the game! Big companies don’t get 4.7 scores however bad they are! Equally if you are a Deep Silver, NeocoreGames or Southpeak, the best you can hope for,however well liked the game is, is for an 8.3 – 8.7. So yes, small companies are biased against, and big companies are biased for, and it’s so pervasive gamers just don’t see it any more! In fact, go to most gaming forums, and when a major publisher gets the occasional 9.1, look how many say it’s not fair and they should have got a 9.5! Hype obviously works, but where does the hype generate from? That’s right – the media!
I’m so glad I own this site and not just run it because it gives me the freedom to do what I like. And what I want to do now is call you an idiot.
You are an idiot.
“They won’t be here in the future because the expectation is they have to be a Creative assembly from day one,which Creative Assembly didn’t have to be…!” – Would you say the same about, say, Voilition? They cloned GTA but no one is expecting them to be R*. Instead they got praised for doing something a bit different and playing to their own strengths.
Your username might not point you out as being in the UK, but your IP address does – so what gives?
The prices on Steam are set by the publishers – not by Valve.
Maybe big companies don’t get 4.7 scores because they don’t release that bad games – they have the money to avoid it through testing. Though, interestingly, Bethesda just released some racing game on wii which got nothing but slammed (http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=228374).
And look at this:
Borderlands average: 82 http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/pc/borderlands
Torchlight average: 84 http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/pc/torchlight
Also, the media can’t control rabid fanboys and idiots as much as we’d like to, nor can we control how scores are held aloft more than the 1000 word review that we’ve ploughed hours of work into TO GIVE A FAIR JUDGEMENT AND OPINION.
Believe it or not, we write about games because we love them – not to stroke publishers egos. I would love if every game that came out was perfect – it would make doing this even more fun. Unfortunately though, that doesn’t happen.
You have something in common with Gamespot. You are the only two sites to have given the game less than 80 (as far as I have seen. Given what I think of Gamespot, I think you are in good company. keep up the good work.
So now you’re annoyed at us for not following the herd?
There’s only two ways to stand out – for a good or bad reason. having something in common with Gamespot should be very worrying for you, I guess.
And ‘the herd is when you all give 9.2 to an average Bioware or Blizzard title. So for example, I am sure the fact that Starcraft 1 with three campaigns and net gaming was $60, but to have the same with Starcraft II you would need £180 won’t have any impact on your review. But if King Arthur was $80 I am sure you would mention the high price of the game and mark it down!
You can’t get herds for a game that is from a small publisher that is still ignored by most of the main and even smaller gaming sites.
Okay, now THIS i unfair. You want unfair? Don’t judge a fucking game that hasn’t even come out yet. StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty is projected to have a campaign size OF THE ORIGINAL GAME. That means a Terran campaign the length of the original game. That is fucking respectable. Not to mention that the prices of each expansion HAS NOT been determined yet.
By the way, the average Blizzard and Bioware title is pretty good, from what I know. I’ve played a couple of each, but it’s clear that effort was seriously made into these games. By your logic, does Valve also fall under “herding”? Don’t hate on quality because it’s consistent. It makes no sense at all.
And if you’re about to go with the whole “support the small studio” argument, don’t bother. I’m a supporter of small studios (shit, I want to go fucking indie in the future) and big studios alike, but studio size shouldn’t be free points. It’s simply unfair to the big studios. Likewise, free points shouldn’t go to the big studios. It’s simply unfair to the small studios.
And way to back up your own arguments. At least provide a REASON why you believe so. Right now, you just stand to be irrationally butthurt for no real reason.
Good luck with getting a rational reply. As soon as you present a structured argument he just changes subject to some irrelevant nonsense.
It felt good to get out. :P
You know, you could at least measure our hypocrisy by our own reviews, rather than “Everybody gives x 90%”.
For the record, I would be scoring Bioware games highly, because they’re really good, Blizzard games I’m not such a fan of. Of course neither makes games anything like King Arthur, that is the province of Creative Assembly alone, so I really don’t understand what point you’re making.
IF AAA PC games were selling, if we were still getting plenty of AAA pc ONLY games, and if DOSBox had been a total bust because pc gamers had to many modern PC games to play versus the over 5 million downloads they have actually had, if when Daggerfall became a free download 17 people had downloaded it in the first week instead of the 150,000, because ‘were too great pc games coming out now’ and if you could get a quote for a game like this or Space Rangers 2 or Arx Fatalis, or Gothic and say, ‘well this has already been done so many times by other, larger publishers, then I would feel you were right and I was wrong.
But as pc games sales went down 23% last year, last year Peter Molyneux said ‘A PC only game can no longer make a profit’ and GOG.com is going from success to more success selling pc games prior to around 2005, I would say my comments are backed up pretty extensively. So I don;t sleep easy because of these issues I have brought up, not through anything said in this thread,
Once I spilt some Jam on my computer and it made this really strange whirrr sound. So I took it to Robin Walker and he said it was down 27.9% from its usual productivity and that I should put the price of it up on steam. Then a console magazine said PC Games weren’t a viable sales platform so I told my PC game to jump onto a hovering platform better than mario ever did and it proved that magazine wrong with 68% INCREASE. The PC game then told me to only ever give big industry titles regardless of quality low scores and small publishers regardless of quality should score really high. So I travelled to they YEAR 1984 and talked to Marty McFly and he said I should have that GAMESPOT of mine looked at as it could be MALIGNANT. Anyway I told him not to look at my name as UNITEDKINGDOM could stand for anything like “Up No Igloo Talking Especially Down Kraft Ifrit Noodle Garna Dredge Opium Matress”.
Deputy Editor Non-Sensical Troll
You know, just yesterday I went to a talk with PZ Myers, and it’s strikingly remarkable how similar you are to creationists.
EGTF wins. Just. Wins.
First off, no links. Just saying shit without links allows them to be taken out of context (which I heavily suspect you did), not to mention if the actual link you got that silly statement from is true or not.
You’re also drawing a HUGE assumption about ALL PC gamers. Clearly, because old games are popular, new ones simply just suck, right? Wrong. I can state several reasons for exactly why you’re wrong. Reason 1, nostalgia. People grow up, people earn money, people get with the times. And then of course, things like GoG and DOSBox come and people use them. Both of these services are well run businesses, enabling old things to run on new computers, and for cheap. Reason 2, new gamers discovering old games. Me, you, and a whole boatload of other people (yes, you. I’ve seen you, you’re a consumer.) are buying these games. And, well, you’re completely contradictory, because here you are, playing this game, yet you’re also buying from GoG (or as much as I can tell, but either way, you clearly appreciate old games as well).
And another thing. The perspective you went from is a bad choice because it assumes the product that is being sold is perfect. Of which there are none. Development costs for AAA games are growing every year into insane amounts. This is ridiculous and completely necessary. Publishers and developers need to manage their budgets better and not blame the market for their faults (as in the case of Peter Molyneux, I’m guessing, I’m still trying to find said source of your inane statement). And things that Peter Molyneux say can’t be trusted. I have huge respect for the man: he clearly has vision, but his execution seems to be unrealized. I really wish he would be successful.
Nonetheless, I think my point is made. You’re taking things at face value, just like a creationist. You’re deducing the wrong things from statements that MIGHT even be incorrect, just like a creationist. And frankly, you need to get your obtuse head out of your ass, just like a creationist.
Good day, sir. Good day.
Quick comment from me, even though it breaks the rule of don’t feed the troll:
I now own 2 developer packs on Steam. The THQ one was a christmas present, and I bought the EIDOS one, on the basis that Tomb Raider Underworld, Project:Snowblind and both Deus Ex’s were in it. I also signed up for GoG because it was the easiest way to get hold of Giants: Citizen Kabuto. The problem is that it’s much easier to play older games for some people than it is to play newer games. The cost of running a new game is rather high. You have to remember that shiny things = more money as far as the developers are concerned, therefore you need that big expensive graphics card.
<blockquote cite="if when Daggerfall became a free download 17 people had downloaded it in the first week instead of the 150,000″>.
I’m sure that had nothing to do with the fact it was free.
The PC is now getting to the stage where it’s easier to develop for a console, and it’s easier for gamers to play on a console, because they know that the game will run for sure. Maybe it’s not the game, but the demographic.
Oh yes, this.
Also, I totally forgot about the people who buy solely AAA games. I have several many of those friends. They outnumber the old game buyers by far more, I’m sure.
Man. I wish businesses focused on innovation and consumer rights more than just profit. The PC would see more usage. I wonder if many attempts have been made to make a standardized software library at a pretty low level that all hardware adhere to.
In other news, a very nice review. Might have a look at that book. I also recommend Sixty One Nails by Mike Shevdon.
It’s interesting to note that all of the reviews (Which is a bit misleading. I’ve read 2), each has said ‘FINALLY! A threat to CA!’, which is great from an indie developer. Even though I’m avoiding the troll, the line a solid effort from a small studio attempting a subgenre that was previously dominated by a single developer seems a great thing to note. I’m not a grand stratedgy player myself, but my Dad might enjoy this.
You need to get your dad on here. He seems to have better taste in games than you.
Maybe my Dad just has the ability to do forward planning :P
I never said I didn’t enjoy Dragon Age (The bastard thing keeps slipping my playlist) but these sorts of games cause me anger because I suck at them.
Good review. I was initially very interested in this game since I love the Total War series and am a big fan of Arthurian mythology but I think I’ll pass based on this review. I hope as this developer progresses they can offer more competition in this genre. Competition pushes everybody to create better products.
Tyler, go here:
http://www.kingarthurthewargame.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=636
for a list of review links. You’ll find other than this site and Gamespot, all the other’s have given 80′s and 90′s. They generally give a much more fair view of the game, and obviously you also should know that this game had had two patches solves all the problems mentioned.
Well, if the fanboys want to plead their case then that’s fine.
How about this then Mr UK: At the point of review, the problems that existed existed. Subsequently, these problems have been patched. It’s not Tom’s fault that he can’t see into the future (Is it?). He’s reviewed what he had. He said he liked it, but it had issues. He may decide to tell everyone it has been fixed. But he’s not obliged to.
Well, what was a modicum of interest for me is now more. Once I’ve exhausted my enthusiasm for playing Mass Effect 2 I’m going to give this a shot.
Thanks…I think.
If we based our reviews on what everyone else has written, I don’t think we’d be the kind of site I’d be interested to read.
I’m really curious how a post-review system would work. I don’t think I’ve really seen it done.
I’d just suggest that at a later date they mention that they’d been playing game x and then say ‘You know those horrible bugs I mentioned? Gone’ and/or they add in an update at the end.
Incidentally King Arthur did actually patch while I was playing it, it didn’t stop the crashes or solve the balance issues.