Poll: Advance Wars new look...

[MeTheMe]

I just got the game, Days of Ruin, so I guess I'm a little late, but that seems to happen to me frequently. I have played the other three Advance Wars games, and this deviates from it's brothers on a huge scale. While in the others, war was a game, it was fun for the C.O.s to send countless men to their death just to see who was stronger, but thats changed in this one. War has become more gritty, as you deal with civilians, destruction, and greed. It's defidently more realistic. So, here's my question, do you like the new war mongers, and do you think it should stay this way, or do you think they should go back to the old way it played?

As for me, I do miss the old look, quirky and kind of cute, but this new detail of war seems just as enticing, the realistic attitudes and characters are beleivable and each has a well defined persona.

You may also use this thread just to discuss the Advance Wars seires, I didn't find any thread like this in my search.

 

[AlexHarman]

I have decided not to vote, as I have yet to play one of the newer Advance Wars games, although from looking at screenshots on the website I can see that whilst being in a far grittier setting {and I probably would miss the lush green landscapes or the driving winter snows} it does retain some of that old style Advance Wars feeling {in the way that the units look and such like}... I think that the modernising should probably stop here though, lest they risk losing the classic arcade feel that made the originals so much fun.

 

[irrelevantnugget]

I prefer the new look over the old, but the dialogue should be more serious as well then. If the world is trying to cope with an apocalypse, the last thing we need is a doctor making horribly timed, corny jokes.

 

[Rob Sharona]

Days of Ruin is effectively more of the same (a good thing), so the different visual style and presentation is 100% welcome.

 

[ImperialPyromancer]

NO. Admittedly you don't tend to watch the battle animation after seeing it once for each unit but STILL... Lazy buggers.

The units are made of paper. There's only 2 different styles of units as opposed to 5. It seems dumbed down stylistically with the 'gritty' look, and at the end of the day you feel no more compassion or remorse as you ruthless meat grind your troops to victory.

Admittedly in the other Advance Wars' I did always think it was slightly nasty to portray war, mass murder, in a cute cuddly way with COs who must have been psychotic to take such glee in what was essentially genocide (killing all troops of a different colour to win).

For all of this ranting, I bloody love Advance Wars, and the new one is a great one even if there is no longer variety in unit style.

Coming to the end of this post I've realised that the style has grown on me, so in the end I probably should have voted yes rather than diving in like a pleb. Oh well...

 

[Blu3Forever]

I love it, not too sure about the way the CO powers now work, but this poll is about the style of the game so I voted yes.

 

[MeTheMe]

Blu3Forever, that's a good point, I didn't bring up the new C.O. powers, but I made this thread for discussion as well, so might as well bring it up. I kind of like the new way the C.O. powers work. In the other ones, C.O.s like Hawke and Sturm could just decimate foes without a thought, but this new way, it makes C.O. powers more difficult to use and sort of evens the field a little bit. I haven't beaten the game so I don't know all the C.O.s yet, but that's how I see it.

Saphatorael, I think that was in the good doctor's character, he seems to be one of those people who would rather joke instead of look at the problem directly. It seems he also wants to try soften hard blows about how bad a situation is, his character, in that light, actually makes sense to me.

 

[Same River New Water]

I agree about CO powers. Games of AW and AW2 with evenly-matched COs were fun, but playing against Hawke was just aggravating (and I imagine playing with him felt cheap). Both systems had pros and cons, but overall it's better to have the COs in-field, if only because it gives you another tactical factor to consider, rather than an unavoidable act of god.

My vote isn't on the list: "They should merge the two." I didn't like the new style at first, but I got used to it. I would love it if the next game was a stylistic compromise: exactly halfway between AW & AW2 and Dark Conflict (that's Days of Ruin to you, natch), straight down the line. The earlier games could definitely have benefited from a bit more maturity and a serious edge, but Dark Conflict went too far the other way.

Sadly I don't think there's enough of a market for this game to fully support two separate Advance Wars series without putting Intelligent Systems under pressure to develop them on the cheap. They could alternate, like the Command & Conquer / Red Alert series, but honestly the two styles aren't different enough to warrant it.

My ideal Advance Wars 4 would be set in a world recovering from the apocalypse, still littered with ruins but increasingly overgrown with green and with lots of roads and towns in the process of being built. The characters would have the meat depth of the characters in Dark Conflict (which is not much, let's face it, but it doesn't need to be) but with the light-heartedness of the characters from AW and AW2.

I found Advance Wars quite recently. I picked up Black Hole Rising from eBay, played it solidly and finished it just around the time Dark Conflict came out, which I devoured every morsel of right up until the last mission... and haven't been able to bring myself to finish. I hate the "unstoppable machine that damages your troops anywhere on the board" gimmick.