Wesnoth Player's rating

[Iris]

I believe 5 is reasonable from an objective standpoint, considering as an example (current issues, regardless of future directions on short or long term):

• Wesnoth's performance is poor when using all animation features, due to 2D-only rendering without any kind of hardware acceleration, which is creating problems in trunk right now.
• The single player AI is prone to committing mistakes an actual human would commit, making it possible for the player to exploit that consistent behavior to his or her own advantage and thus reduce the replayability bonus in all but a few campaigns which have features such as secret locations, items, bonus objectives involving more permanent rewards, etc.
• AIs are not usable in multiplayer, unlike other popular games[citation needed] except for non-playable teams in survival/RPG sort of scenarios.
• There are many user interface shortcomings, visible and not visible, that may affect more those who are more UI-oriented people than those who tend to work more with command line applications — a trait that is unsurprisingly common amongst the same developers who work on the UI code.
• Translations are often incomplete or subpar with English (US)/C's quality.
• Some mainline campaigns aren't completely enjoyable for all audiences for some reasons. I'll always use Northern Rebirth as the poster boy for this point.

I also believe that someone who doesn't enjoy the game wouldn't make an add-on for it.

I'd rate it 5 as well for these and other more subjective reasons* that sadly stem from working in the actual code. Those who only care about the shiny graphics would probably always rate it above 7.

* I'm trying really hard to not edit this post again for replacing my 5 with 4. I have actually even more reasons to complain about Wesnoth, which I often do in my website, ranging from the aforementioned code base, to WML engine design and even to music development directions. I also complain much more about other less evident points, on IRC or more private mediums, and I'm working on some of them already. And even then, I still enjoy the game in essence, mind you.

[norbert]

I believe 5 is reasonable from an objective standpoint, [...]

I have to protest against that 5/10 rating again. Isn't your rating both highly subjective and solely based on "reasons to complain"? The AI isn't great, but there are plenty of campaigns that provide a challenge. (Either in general or by picking the highest difficulty setting.) In single scenarios it's usually possible to increase the computer player's gold. Performance is generally fine; if necessary, CPU hungry features can be disabled. The user interface has its shortcomings, but it's quite acceptable. It's true that not all mainline campaigns are completely enjoyable for all audiences, but many players will find some campaigns enjoyable. You write you enjoy the game, so do many other people, don't you agree Wesnoth is worth at least a 6/10 rating: it's the lowest 'acceptable' rating, you picked the highest 'unacceptable' rating. Come on, repent!

[Dixie]

Oh well, what the hell, I'll give it... say a 6. I'm totally unable to play campaigns, maybe because just the availability of debug mode and/or save/loading spoils it for me.

That'd spoil the fun in possibly 80% of the first-person shooters and sidescrolling platformers out there since the middle of the nineties. Unless the player has a sense of self-control and competitiveness.

Well, I know. I usually manage a full or 3/4ths playthrough, but at some point I just play around with the games possibilities for a while (debug and stuff), and after a short amount of time, it just spoils it for me. It's like I have been to the end of the game's possibilities and get bored with it.

Incidentally, I really feel the periodic RNG whiners' pain: I pretty much can't accept my bad luck in SP either. But I know better than to complaint or side with them, I know it's just me being weird, and that the game is actually pretty good nonetheless. I do think it could help save-scumming if each unit had some pre-generated numbers for his hits, and maybe at some point I will try a test era for this (so that even if you save/load, the hits would be mostly the same, although there would still be some ways to work around and wastes bad number in hopes of generating better ones).


Also, about the "5" notation:

To me, 5 is average. It doesn't mean the whole thing is average: maybe some points are really flabbergastingly awesome, and others are total gamebreakers, and it just balances out around 5. When I was younger, my mother would try new dishes and have all the family rate it on a scale of ten, and I always found it so abherrant how my mom and sis would never rate anything below 6 unless it was totlly uneatable, just because of pre-conceived idea of passing grades. I mean, why even have a scale of ten if you are only gonna use the 6-10 ranks? Worse yet, they'd differentiate by 0.5 and sometimes less when they were around 8-9. What's the point of having the 1-5 grades, then?

Anyway, hm... just my thoughts on it


On a side note, if anyone was really serious with that rating thing, it might be interesting to have several areas to note, say "Single Player", "Multiplayer", "Gameplay", "Graphics", "Modding", etc. and have a total average. Might be... interesting

[norbert]

To me, 5 is average.

But...

Hey fellow wesnothian warriors! On a scale of 1 to 10, what would you rate Wesnoth? My rating would be a 10.

On that scale (1 to 10), 5 and 6 are in the middle: 1~2~3_4_5 | 6_7_8~9~10.

By the way, I give Wesnoth a 9/10.
Only two other games I liked equally well: Prince of Persia 1 (extremely moddable after reverse engineering; not just the layout of levels) and NetHack (ascended twice; played in 2D 'tiles mode'; so addictive that I 'had' to stop playing it).

[Midnight_Carnival]

Was hoping this would be a "where do you rate yourself as a Wesnoth player?" thread.
That could have been funny.
I give Wesnoth a fat zero* (with a one in front of it!) because of simplicity, versatility, adaptability, interactivity and FUN!

* Any references to alegations of obesity in contributors is entirely accidental.

[Jodwin]

I'd say 6.5. I do enjoy Wesnoth when I'm playing it (the last time was quite a while ago...), however it has (had?) some issues that make me lower the score. First of all, I think the notion of difficulty in campaigns is bull. Just giving the AI more gold and/or reducing turn limit on harder settings instead of making the AI a more skillful opponent is bad design IMHO. I realize developing an actually good AI isn't easy, but having the AI becoming smarter rather than more rich on hard difficulty would make for much better gameplay.

I also don't like Wesnoth's storytelling. Most of the campaigns seem to have overly simplistic stories and boring characters to me...only exceptions that I can remember from the top of my head were UtBS and IftU.

Third negative thing, for me, is that Wesnoth isn't exactly my kind of a strategy game (even though I occasionally enjoy playing it). I prefer games with either more rpg aspects in them or games with more grand strategy (that also emphasis the economy more) rather than Wesnoth's small scale battles. But that one's just a matter of opinion.

And last, and this is a big one: I absolutely loathe that in the campaigns you can end up in a map without enough gold and experienced units to finish it. Obviously the maps should be harder if you're poor and don't have good troops, but ending up in a situation where the only solution is to restart and replay +20 scenarios is IMO unforgivable.

[Velensk]

Problem with this thread: There is only a purpose in posting here if you have something to complain about or if you feel like letting everyone know that you have nothing to complain about.

[Pentarctagon]

I realize developing an actually good AI isn't easy, but having the AI becoming smarter rather than more rich on hard difficulty would make for much better gameplay.

So you can imagine my disappointment when i discovered they do the exact same thing for AoE...
That aside, it is completely possible to 'optimize' an ai for a certain scenario by customizing aggression, etc.

I also don't like Wesnoth's storytelling. Most of the campaigns seem to have overly simplistic stories and boring characters to me...only exceptions that I can remember from the top of my head were UtBS and IftU.

ditto, those are actually the only 2 campaigns that i have been able to finish, i just got bored with the rest of them.

Overall, i'd give default wesnoth a 4, but I love the modding capabilities (especially now with lua), which boosts it up to a 7.5-8.
The only complaint I have about the modding is that during a dev cycle tags/keys get added to the game, but don't make their way into the changelog and just as often not onto the wiki.

[Crushmaster]

Probably a five, for various reasons.

Five out of ten? In my country, the Netherlands, that means a work is insufficient. Surely you must've enjoyed it more than that in the past? You joined the forum more than two years ago and it seems some aspects of the game still entertain you (e.g. you're working on Onslaught). Are you sure you're rating Wesnoth itself and not how you currently like it? There are so many (free flash) games out there, why would you even play a game that scores only 5/10 a second time? Even if you no longer enjoy the game but had some weeks of playing pleasure, isn't that sufficient for at least a 6/10 rating?

I rated it that for moral reasons (e.g. - swearing [fixable], women fighting [fixable], etc.), not necessarily for the "game" itself. I am taking everything into account.
In Christ,
Crushmaster.

[artisticdude]

It's hard to give Wesnoth a rating. Do you rate the stable version, which has very few if any obvious bugs, or the development version, which has better/more art/music/features but more bugs? Although I inevitably end up customizing my version of Wesnoth with the latest art and music from trunk (and some not from trunk) anyway, since I don't know how to compile (I'll figure it out one of these days, though...). Which practice would certainly create OOS errors were I to play online. Add another reason to the list of why I rarely if ever play MP matches.

[Iris]

I have to protest against that 5/10 rating again.

I have to protest against you protesting my rating.

I'll leave it at 4/10 since I decided to add the subjective baggage to it to give you actual opinions to disagree with.

[johndh]

Campaigns

Some of the storylines are rather uninspired and many of the levels in the campaigns feel like filler, which is doubly bad because 1.) the level just isn't fun, and 2.) longer ≠ better. Sure, if the last four levels have been a constant gold-training, unit-killing slug-fest, then having an easier filler level can be a nice way to recharge, but some campaigns feel like a poor excuse to string together a bunch of unrelated and uninteresting scenarios by adding a few lines of justification dialogue. This is particularly egregious in (as everyone already knows) Heir To The Throne. I can never get past the first few scenarios in that campaign because I just don't care. In fact, I don't even want Konrad to rule Wesnoth. Sure, Queen Ash is a flawed individual, but couldn't they find somebody better than a punk kid with no qualification, no experience, and no reason to deserve it? On the flip side, Under The Burning Suns is probably the best campaign I've played in any game ever, free or commercial. Descent Into Darkness was quite good, too. Most of the campaigns, though, are average. They're not bad, but they don't stand out with innovative play or captivating stories.

Artwork

This is one area where I can find no fault. The sheer number of unit sprites, portraits, terrain tiles, and other images that have been made for this game is staggering. The standards for mainline are kept consistently high, so the amount of artwork that gets made for the game and doesn't make the cut is even larger. With some community-driven game projects, the developers have to practically beg people to come and make art for them, but the Wesnoth community has members lining up for a chance to submit their work. As someone who does video game art as a hobby, I can appreciate the amount of time and effort that the artists have put into this game over the years, and it's really quite impressive.

Fluff

It's mostly pretty standard fantasy stuff, despite consciously trying not to be. The dwarves love mining and hitting things with axes, the elves like trees and shooting things with arrows, and the human nation is full of knights in shining armor, etc. The orcs are given some interesting development in their backstory, but in game they're pretty much always shown as idiotic, savage brutes that do nothing but invade. In The Hammer Of Thursagan, you fight alongside some orcs, and they're shown to be a little more reasonable than the others, which doesn't really help matters because they're the one sane orc tribe we meet, so clearly orcs who ally themselves with dwarves become intelligent and cultured while the rest remain in the dung age. Trolls are explicitly stated to be much more intelligent, cultured, and peaceful than most people think, but whenever they show up (with the exception in UtBS, where they're portrayed spot-on), they never get shown as anything other than "Thud crush you! You go squish!" I almost expect one of them to say, "M-O-O-N, that spells parade!" While I'm on the subject, I could rant about how nagas and saurians are always portrayed as villains while mermen are always heroes, but this section is plenty long enough as it is.

I could add more sections (like music) and keep going, but I think that's enough. With that said, this game has some outstanding great stuff, and also areas that could really use improvement. Gameplay-wise, I'd rate BfW very highly. The strategy can be very intense, while keeping the mechanics themselves rather simple. This makes it one of those "easy to pick up, difficult to master" games, which I love because I can get the longest span of enjoyment possible. The play is fairly simple to get into and has the potential for tons of variety to keep it from getting monotonous, but at the same time it does get repetitive on occasion. Overall, it's not the absolute most enthralling game I've ever played, but it certainly is among the better ones. I've had a lot of fun with it so far and I plan to continue to do so.

7/10

OT:

I rated it that for moral reasons (e.g. - swearing [fixable], women fighting [fixable], etc.), not necessarily for the "game" itself. I am taking everything into account.
In Christ,
Crushmaster.

Part of me wants to ask what's offensive about women fighting... but my forum sense is telling me to let it go.

[Pentarctagon]

OT:

Part of me wants to ask what's offensive about women fighting... but my forum sense is telling me to let it go.

I'd give your forum sense about a 95% chance of being right in this case.

imo, it would be very good if there was as much work done on improving wesnoth's campaign plots and general storyline as there was on coding/artwork.

[SpoOkyMagician]

When I read the title/first few posts, I misunderstood the topic until I read it a bit more... As far as what I would rate "wesnoth" goes...

Maybe... '6" or '7'...? (6.5 if you want a straight answer...)

Something like that. I never really thought I would even play this game to tell you the truth. When I first tried it, I noticed it was a turned based strategy game. (I thought to myself: "god, turns would probably take hours or even days..." well, I was sort of right... lol but, it wasn't that bad afterall. Plus, the game kind of grows onto you. (so to day) ) Anyway, the graphics are fine, gameplay is interesting, and the re-playability is very high in my opinion. (compared to other games that you tend to lose interest in very fast.) Even with the possibility to customize your own scenarios, campaigns, etc is wonderful. (not many games have this. Even if they do, most of them are pretty boring/too simplistic/etc.) ...I am just rambling on again. I will just stop here...

[Huumy]

I would say 10. I don't know who came up with the idea of the game. But somehow it is in point where there is 6 different factions all in good balance. The game mechanics are simple still offer very versatile and complex play.
Factions are not only balanced but with the brilliant rng "system" depth of this game is... deep.

In short I think this is best turn based strategy game I ever seen. 10