izigame.me

I really, truly, wanted to love this game. When I first played this a long time ago, I had a lot of fun - it was a difficult, compelling game with a beautiful aesthetic and some really interesting combat. I'd gotten big into Civ 5 at the time, and the comparisons i drew internally, while not as close as I once thought, hooked me in. Eventually though, due to difficulty and save corruption, I shelved it. For about ten years, I kept seeing it in my library, wondering why I had this strange hesitance to jump back into a game that I could only remember fondly - and, a while ago, i decided to bite the bullet and try again.
I was awed by how good it still looked, how few resources it was using to do so. I was enraptured by the story and the characters, and as I played that love deepened - i experienced so much fun in the first half of the campaign, everything felt just right. But, as time grew on, the problems with Eador began to really emerge. Due to story and achievement reasons, I conducted a ritual that essentially made me persona non-grata with all my previous master allies, depriving me of a lot of story and energy - and my insistence on good karma led to the alienation of most of the other Masters - those that loved evil hated me for my good deeds, and those who loved kindness hated me for that ritual. Eventually i got to explore more of the story, but for a long while, i didn't get much.
But the problem with Eador isn't limited to it's story, as that could be resolved easily in my case. The problem comes with it's repetativeness. Lots of the really awesome things, the super powerful elite monsters and awesome spells, happen so late into the game even if beelining them, that you'll often just be killed because you didn't play well enough. You can't reasonably get some of those cool moments, because unless you actively stall for time, you'll just not get there. You're encouraged to explore, to take it all in, enjoy the sandbox - but the enemy seems to have a strange ability to conjure up contracts with guards that don't exist for you, just because they can. In addition, the masters end up fighting all the same - i think the only time i saw something strange and new was when Beleth on his home shard had an ogre hero. That was probably a bug. Even then, the actual troop system is often hilariously imbalanced. Unit tiers render most units obsolete shockingly fast, and yet they're still needed to be fodder to soak important attacks. It leads to a frustrating cycle of knowing that, despite these units costing resources and hypothetically helping - they just exist to die, and be re-recruited. Not to mention that the neutral provinces have the ability to field armies far, far stronger than yours, which *could* be an opportunity for skill expression if it wasn't for the fact that the best form of such is often just min-maxing your hero and hoping for good loot. Is there strategy? Absolutely - but it's often overwhelmed by the game deciding to spawn you in an awful place, or besieging you with random events that make everyone hate you. Not to mention, strategic resources are not just shockingly rare, they're also mostly useless despite what the game wants you to think.
Because you basically can't afford to carry over your progress most of the time, exploration is often pointless - it's a means to an end that can be better achieved and more easily achieved by blitzing the opponent. Everything is so expensive to move across that the super awesome legendary items, or the really cool troops, just have to be left behind. Assuming, of course, you even get them. It's a system that i love, but that ultimately ends up being undone by the lack of real follow-through. All that I could put up with, but, the real killing blow is the crashing. The constant, unerring, crashing. On my last day, i crashed almost ten times in four hours. This is after i installed the unofficial patch, removed all the objects I could and completely disabled and removed my autosaves - i even tried letting the game use more than 2gb of ram, but then it just didn't load. The game doesn't want you to play it. It's actively hostile, in that it's so determined to crash that you can't get into the flow. It saps your enjoyment, because a game like this thrives on those long sessions, those marches and explorations to do awesome things - and it just won't let you do that most of the time.
Eador is a game that, if it was possible to fix, I think could truly be one of my favorite games of all time. But as it stands, despite some of the really interesting and fun aspects of this game and the blast I had to start with, the game ultimately ends up being a sour note - a beautiful palace with barren hallways and empty rooms. A masterwork painting painted onto rice paper. I wanted to love Eador, but I can't - the game simply won't let me. Don't buy this game unless you're willing to ride out the storm. For me, even though I did, I don't think it was worth it. I truly, genuinely, wish it was.