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1  Warhammer Dark Omen Community / Tavern / Re: Why do you adore Dark Omen? on: February 02, 2016, 11:26:12 AM
- The graphics.
They're a work of excellent craftshmanship. The fact that they're technologically antiquated doesn't detract from that. With what limited possibilities the technology of 1998 allowed, they managed to produce something that is simultaneously intuitive, colourful and original.
If something is good, it's good regardless of technological standards. Mozart didn't have electric guitars, video clips, autotune and 16 channel mixers, but his music still stands the test of time. Star Wars 1-3 couldn't match Star Wars 4-6, despite all the CGI. The B-52 bomber was built in 1955, but is still in service today.
Mark of Chaos did everything wrong that Dark Omen did right. You can't tell what unit is which, because they all look alike and pass through each other all the time. The scenes aren't pretty, because the designers had no grasp of colour composition. Everything looks like three-days-old vomit. In DO, even bleak enviroments, like Axebite Pass, look beautiful, because they grey palette is composed of saturated shades of grey, enriched with details like green moss and blue waters. In MoC, you always wonder if there's something wrong with your monitor.

- The interface.
Big buttons in DO, that are always there, you always know when you can click them, and you never misclick them.
Tiny buttons in MoC, that are hidden most of the time, don't tell you what they do, and don't always do what they tell you.

- The artwork.
In DO, you find the Horn of Urgok, and then spend 5 minutes in the book, just gazing at the artwork and reading the description. Every item feels special, because it's represented by a distinctive, beautiful icon, and can be admired in full size in the book. You can drag it to equip it to a unit, and the interface makes a satisfying sound when you do that. All this gives you an almost physical sensation, as if you were physically manipulating miniatures.
Compare that to MoC, where items are just generic fantasy objects with no personality and no artwork beside the bland icons.
And then there's the banners. Every unit in DO has its own, and they're all works of art. Not only are they beautiful to look at individually, and visually enrich the battlefield by their combined presence, but they also make it easy to identify the units. MoC just has the same banner for every unit in your army.

- The spoken dialogues.
'Nuff said. Did anyone ever bother to actually read the dialogues in MoC? Not only were they boring as hell, they were also hard to read because of the awkward scrolling and tiny font.
The dialogues in DO are sprinkled with humour and childish boistfulness. They aren't pieces of high literature, but they don't have to. They're simply light-hearted fun.

- The personal connection between you and your units.
Because every unit in DO has its own artistic representation, banner, personality, abilities, mechanics, leader name, leader head and in-battle spoken messages, and because equipping, leveling and replenishing them is such an involved process, you become attached to each and every one of them. It hurts you in the gut when they get decimated. You feel like Santa Claus when you give them a magic item.

- The tactics.
In DO, you have to plan. You have to be careful. You have to coordinate your units and magic.
In MoC, you have to blob rush.

- The loading times.
In DO, it takes 10 seconds from desktop to battle.
In MoC, or any game made in the last 10 years, you have to look at a stupid loading screen for minutes, until you get into the game menu. Then you have to wait again for your savegame to load. Then you go into battle and have to wait even longer for the battle map to load. You finally finish the battle, and now you have to wait for more minutes for the campaign map to load again. It's bullshit like this that prevents me from feeling excited about Total War: Warhammer. Total War is notorious for its long loading screens.
2  Modifications / Troops / Possible to add more magic items? on: January 31, 2016, 09:45:36 PM
Is it possible to create additional items without replacing any of the old ones? The nes items could just be clones of already existing ones, but with original names, descriptions and icons in the book. Is there am editable file that tells the engine which item does what and what icon it uses, or is it hardcoded inside the exe?
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