Reviews - StormyG7

Before I talk about why I rated this so poorly, The Protectors does have a lot going for it; tons of small fixes, support for more resolutions, legacy music from other Warlords games and resurrected old portraits, lots of new quests, items, lore, etc.

Now, I got this mod mainly because WBC3 is unstable on newer Windows operating systems. I got everything from bluescreens to having the screen covered with visual glitches. I don't mind trying out some new stuff when I can tweak it or disable features/changes I'm not enjoying, but that's where I have some problems.

On to the problems...

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Extra Grindy Campaign
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I just wanted to play the original campaign, but you have to deal with grinding for crowns to unlock upgraded keep tiers. This also ruins any "balance". You might have access to powerful units early on, or you might have nothing depending on race/factions. It makes early missions a chore. This is something I'd expect from a mobile game, not a mod. Example: Dwarves under the standard faction, you have to use nothing but runners until you "unlock" keep level 2, and the AI has similar limitations, but the holy faction gets powerful priests at keep level 1. That's utterly ridiculous. I don't want to have to grind just to play the campaign like normal!

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On "Balance"
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For all the talk of "balance" (a buzzword I'm sick of seeing the competitive community in every game), the game is still not balanced. There are still ways to easily create heroes that just break the game. Not only that, but since the AI heroes are at your level (which was the same as the original game), the AI now has lots of broken combinations that make their heroes either useless or fully kitted with Legendary gear and the ability to wreck you before you get your keep to level 2.

The charm of many old games for me is that you can learn ways to "break" them and use the lopsided meta to your advantage. It might not be desirable for multiplayer, but I never played these games competitively. My philosophy is, if it's fun, don't worry about balance. Only competitive egoists are looking for a "skill-based" balanced experience. Bring back the XP stacking and Doom Knight upgrades. Bring back resurrection and summon/necromancy hordes. Since the enemy heroes match your level, the fun is finding ways to overcome them. As is, The Protectors is just an unpredictable tangled mess for people who played the original. It changes the meta and doesn't really balance the game. In fact, solo heroes are the new meta, they often just destroy everything. I'm rolling the dice every game on whether the AI's hero will annihilate me.

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New "Features" and Changes
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If you try the original campaign with this mod, it doesn't matter at all, and you can just farm all the crowns you need with your retinue and use the "wait" option to profit. I don't even want to have to do this in the first place, but you have to just use a lot of normal gameplay features. I don't care about any of those new features. I just want to play the damn game. Also, so many of these new features seem nauseating and make the game utterly unpredictable. There's so much going on with all the different buffs/debuffs you can get during campaign missions that a normal down-to-earth experience is unobtainable. Random abilities from heroes, enemy units getting created near instantly, sudden blasts of special effects from items destroying my retinue within the first 30 seconds.

I'm the kind of person who likes to mod games myself; I don't like to have new "features" and changes forced on me. I don't care if I have to spend 2 hours going through a list of options, I'd rather do that than have to deal with some new change or feature that I dislike, and I just keep running into new stuff that buries the original game under a pile of variables.

I don't see why the mod authors can't just include the stability/bug fixes, and new resolutions separately as a mod to improve the original game. I do not mind some of the changes, but I can't appreciate them when I have to take them all alongside so many changes I dislike.

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Conclusion
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All in all, the expectations just make this a disappointment, of course, it's still in beta because it's created using free time as a passion project, and I just took a massive crap on it, but I can't hide my disappointment when I went back to play this classic game. I can't find the old WBC3 because it doesn't work unless I use Windows 98 or XP. So, I use this mod that promises a lot, but it makes the game too cumbersome and still buggy. It changes and adds so many things that I can't pick and choose between that the game doesn't even feel like the same game.

This mod is reminiscent of RJ's in the sense it's somewhat unpolished but fun. Still needs some work. Many icons are the same where they shouldn't be or units hired will be invisible and crash, but most of the time it works fine and results in rather epic battles.

I remember playing this mod about 10 years ago. I was inspired to look for mods just because I wanted to play Arnor and I didn't care if it was just a reskin of Gondor (I like how they look better okay).

The Action and Strategy:
This mod is a smorgasbord of new factions, maps, and fun, but don't expect balance or polish. Although this mod isn't the most refined available, it somehow gets the fun part right.

The Art and Design:
There's little art or design, but this mod has enough to keep each faction feeling distinct by reusing many assets from other areas of the game although incomplete.

This is a decent mod if you want an improved cinematic 'Battle for Middle Earth II' feel to your game. It adds some new features and alters some of the game's existing features.

The Action and Strategy:
It's more or less similar to the originals. Archers are the meta, you'll want them early and then maybe some cavalry for running down infantry quickly or spears if facing lots of beasts and/or cavalry, but archers are king. It is too slow for my taste. Epic sized battles are uncommon. The unit's guarding the barracks' are a nice touch and feel more authentic than an auto-shooting turret. The early game abilities have been thoughtfully reworked into more supportive roles rather than allowing you to suddenly dominate the battlefield.

The Visuals and Art:
So far, this mod has FAR better visuals and detail than expected. The dwarf custom creation character is the first strange-looking thing I noticed. The textures are washed-out grey. The classes for Dwarf custom heroes are Ironbreaker and Slayer which are basically roles from Warhammer fantasy. It seems a bit cheap.

This mod is ultimately Quality over Quantity. Some mods try to throw in too much and it turns into a half-baked circus of bugs and broken features. This is the sort of mod I hope keeps growing. I know the FAQ says no Arnor or Angmar, but the game is Rise of the Witch-King. I'm looking for mods for the expansion specifically to experience skirmishes with the Arnor and Angmar as fully-fledged factions of their own.

This is a 1/10, no joke, and I'm not just rating low to bash on this mod.

Everything about the gameplay and balance is so poorly thought out. There are some good ideas here mostly inspired by the original Battle for Middle Earth game, but it plays so painfully slow and feels more disjointed than any of the original games.

The Strategy and Action:

In terms of strategy, 20 minutes into a game, I'm struggling to get more than 5 groups of units with a few upgrades, and that's with about 9 farms. Where are the epic cinematic battles??? The most important fights take place early on when the AI spams trash units in increasing numbers as you rush to grab all the farmland you can to generate income. I like bases better than free build, and I like the 5-10 unit groups better than 15-30 crappy ones, but you're hitting strict command point limits every single time you hire one or two new units. It's absolutely frustrating to get any kind of large battle going. Units die off very very quickly. You have to have some durability.

The Visuals and art:

The visuals are pretty at times, but the cut dialogue from the movie with music and sounds in the background make it feel cheap. Many of the models are shoddy reskins of others. The archer's arrows magically arc up when they appear to aim straight ahead. It's like they wanted to do more than they could, and only halfway got there, but left it like crap.

All the new stuff added is so poorly thought out, and makes no mathematical sense. The meta is just to build a load of income, play defense for 30 minutes till you can get a decent hero or two with a tiny army, then finish the enemy off or get swarmed by weak enemies before you do. There are no epic battles, everything dies off quickly, and it takes maybe an hour for one skirmish, and it's over in one anticlimactic flash.

Basically restore the HUD elements you took out to get rid of unnecessary micromanagement to include GPS (that actually exists), ammo/rounds available (I'd be able to check magazines in real life) and life bars (I think I'd be able to tell when I have a wound or not). Really important, since there's no cross hair on my favored difficulty (infamous), please let me aim my weapon quickly and move moderately fast while aiming. In reality, I can hold my rifle up and walk fairly quickly clearing an area room by room. Without that ability, my best tactic is usually to stay pinned down and pick enemies off from a moderate distance.

I honestly prefer this realism mod for now, but I have some hangups. I think reality is fun in some ways, not in others. I like the way vehicles feel, much better, but it's never going to be perfect given the lack of rear view mirrors and side mirror views as well as the fact crashing doesn't result in my head smashing into the wheel and the fact I can't fire a weapon while driving, rather I'm a sitting duck until I climb out (same for enemies driving without buddies on mounted guns).

Let's face some facts first.

1: Your character is superhuman.

In this game, no way around it. He can pull bullets out of his arms, legs and somehow make a full recovery with a syrette of morpheme. He's basically a low tier x-man. I can buy that for the sake of some fun fiction here.

2: GPS does exist, and so do compasses.

Let's give people the option as to how much they want to micromanage considering actual time is a factor and time of day in the game moves fast. In games the foliage and trees tend to look the same. In an area this large in real life with few routes off road, you'd be trapped like a rat if all the militia had were radios.
If I were a merc, hired by someone in the pentagon, chances are I might have some kind of assistance in the form of DOD intel assets, which might be a special GPS navigation system. Yes, and although the game just gives you a stack of horrible maps with no topography, I'm quite sure that I could use the GPS in my hand to see where I am on the map, but because this is a game, I don't want to. After all, I don't have all day in real life and the game moves fast, for example, I'm not going **** and I'm not going to manually track my location using GPS. This type of micromanagement is assumed.

3: Let's take a look at combat HUD.

If I'm wounded, I think I might know the severity of said wound, but in this game I can't tell when I'm wounded or okay unless it's severe! Really not feeling realistic, but rather crippling actually, like my character can't feel wounds or see them on his person until he's bleeding out.
About the weapon rounds available, I'd rather assume my character is somehow a highly trained individual with a wonderful ability to remember how much ammo is in his loaded weapon off the cuff and how much he has available. Why? Because the alternative isn't me checking my magazines, it's pure ignorance of it and I want to limit micromanaging because real life is fun in some ways, not in others. Though I'd accept it, if there were a way to check magazines and chambers etc. When switching between weapons, sometimes I can see the ammo, sometimes not. Weird.

4: About weapons.

Seems like the most realistic so far. I like the animations and I personally feel quite content with the damage. The worst thing about this mod is sneaking up on an enemy, lining your sights perfectly at short range and missing thus alerting them, wasting your last few rounds and getting killed immediately.
There really are some better weapons given early on based on the damage it now takes to eliminate an enemy. I doubt anyone would want to use an IMI Desert Eagle over the other hand guns. Please change their availability in the shop based on their usefulness. Also, REALLY should point out that my character just throws a magazine with ammo away when it's partially full and somehow manages to integrate the rounds back into other magazines; yet you're not concerned about that, but on the other hand, you won't let me see the amount? C'mon, that's a bit selective of you. Obviously managing ammo isn't going to be real, and I don't want to micromanage it. Once again, given how fast the time of day goes, I assume he's had time to do all that for me. BTW, great job getting rid of auto-reload, not only is that inauthentic, it actually gets me killed unless I switch to a loaded weapon fast.

I have to go back to Dylan's mod because this HUD and accuracy experience is just the worst. I simply must be given another way to check wounds and ammo before having it removed from the HUD display. I feel like I have to guess if I'm wounded or not at times since he doesn't always bleed like real people do when shot, and I have to reach for ammo cases without knowing if my current weapon has full ammo or not.

I've got to say, I always mod FPS games for a proper challenge and authenticity but after about an hour in the game Realmode does not deliver or feel realistic.

I do prefer this to Dylan's in one aspect, I get to experience the gritty hits. What I miss is the fact no enemy is ever wounded. More often than not people don't just die when they get hit, even by several rounds. The thing is they'll more likely be wounded and bleed out until hit in a lethal area. Since you can't defend yourself in a vehicle and you'll just die if you're driving and a truck with a mounted gun happens upon you, I'd make getting out of the vehicle a very quick thing to do. Also, I love how enemies don't have semi-omniscience of you when they don't see you, probably my favorite thing about this mod.

Here are my 2 main expectations,

1 Realistic weapons: LMGs are not common in armed combat for a reason. Not only are they difficult to carry on the go, but they also are very difficult to control. I've been in the military and I know people who've used these weapons regularly. Each shot is a slap in the chest. Yes it's quite powerful, and with the right ammo, it'll quickly make a mutilated mess, but it's not ergonomic at all. The same goes doubly for the IMI Desert Eagle as a sidearm. This weapon has such massive recoil that it'll smack you in the face like a brick and you need gorilla hands to grip it right with that large magazine. It'd be way better just to use a Glock 17 with 9x19mm AP rounds. It'll hold a good load of ammo and the kick isn't so bad, but of course, that's not in the game now and it'll never be. In reality, just take the Makarov PB and put a shots in the torso; one through the ribs and there's a sucking chest wound and they'll die. The LMGs are simply the best weapons in this mod that I've used. A huge problem for me is that most any sidearm or fully automatic weapon is just waaaay too inaccurate to be believable. Contrary to what many seem to think. Any assault rifle used in this game is almost completely accurate at the ranges you'll be fighting at. Even the Star 45. is very accurate at 20 yards. When I have the sights lined up over a target at 20 yards and miss, something's wrong. Also, I suppose something that really bugs me, I sorta have to use the sights of the weapon, cause I play on infamous, but you walk slow when aiming. Yes, I'd be less accurate moving fast and aiming, but I don't have to walk while aiming, in fact, this is the ideal way to go about it in combat. I'd make the time it takes to switch in and out of aiming very low, and allow my character to run around aiming at reduced accuracy. The main thing is, if you want to be real, the best rifles and pistols here would not be anything like an LMG or Desert Eagle. In reality, I'd the best weapons available are probably the MP5 SMG / AK, though at ranges used in the game, (the suppressor on the MP5 wouldn't help much if it's quiet) and the Star 45. or Makarov but really most weapons offered in this game are kinda crappy. The M16 isn't as suited to the environment, but were it able to go full auto and semi, it'd (as well as being the more modern version) it'd probably be the most functional and dynamic of all the weapons for the kinds of combat it the game. Against real opponents like this, (unlike these disorganized dummys that don't really use interiors for cover or even try to communicate long range to get backup, setup roadblocks or anything) you'd want a squad of like 10 people going in with intel and a plan or you'd likely just die, which I did, so I saved at nearly every corner. With that in mind, give me a break when it comes to escaping. I find it easier to just stay holed up or pinned down and simply pick them off around one structure. A guy can ruck, jogging around all day if he's well trained (malaria aside, though you wouldn't be doing any of this with malaria after a few weeks).

2 Realistic wounds: If I get shot, I'll die without proper medical attention. My character is still superhuman while at the same time just dead with a couple of nonlethal shots. I understand limitations won't allow for a proper dynamic here, but at least make it so that both my character continues to LOSE health when hit. I don't understand why syrettes were ever a thing; just make the character always on bleed mode when hit until he does some basic self aid, if you can. I suppose if it were me I'd make no health recovery, only just stopping the loss of health from a wound and then making syrettes restore health outside of combat. As for enemies, just make them get wounded at the very least when shot with most weapons so I can see them try to patch each other up in combat and lay down or hovel with a sidearm.