Eador: Masters of the Broken World is a turn-based fantasy strategy game from Snowbird Game Studios. Snowbird had previously released Eador: Genesis back in 2009. The version now released is a remake of that original game, now supposedly more polished and with better graphics.
At first glance, Eador:MotBW looks very similar to other fantasy strategy titles of the past, like the Heroes of Might & Magic series. But, in his preview, Keith Turner – our fantasy strategy hero – thinks it’s “actually quite unlike any title” he has “personally played before”.
Eador:MotBW offers a single-player campaign mode and a custom game mode. The campaign features two distinct views: the astral view and the shard view. You must go through each shard, which has a strategy map all to itself. Each shard has a set of rewards. When you conquer one of them you return to the astral view. There’s also multiplayer, but that seems restricted to tactical battles only.
You will build strongholds in the strategic map, which consist of buildings you add to different districts. There are different building levels, each requiring prerequisite buildings.
Tactical combat also plays on a turn-based fashion. Every army is led by a hero, which fights alongside your army units, similar as in other games like Master of Magic, Age of Wonders, or Fallen Enchantress, but not like in the Heroes series (at least up to the 3rd installment).
Eador: Masters of the Broken World is now available for Windows PC in DRM-free form (meaning yours forever), on GOG for $19,99. It’s also available on Steam and GamersGate (gives you a Steam key).
Before you buy, you may want to check out our review. Unfortunately, we don’t have the review ready as of yet since we got our build a bit late from Snowbird. But, we plan to have the review up in the next few weeks. So, if you want to play it safe just stay tuned for that.
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Well, since I preordered this game I got it today. Haven´t played it yet, I feel a bit worried about some opinions of it in the web saying the game is still with bugs and incomplete. Guess I´ll have to see it for myself, this weekend I’ll try to play it for some time, the first Eador although limited in graphics showed great potential.
Seems like the game is rushed. I haven’t bought it myself yet but what you can see in the forums seems to be reasonable critics about an unfinished product.
One example is Multiplayer which was just implemented a few days ago, was not really tested and is not finished now even if it is just consisting of little skirmishes. There is an official posting on steam forums announcing that it will work next week…
Guess I will pass on that one for some months.
So far it’s 100% bug free! (I’ve played 10 minutes :)
Only bug I encountered so far was the dead orc with 0 life and the battle never ended and I had to auto-battle for it to end because I can’t manually target the dead orc.
If you check gog forums and steam game hub, game is far from being 100% bug free.
Many who bought the game couldn’t even launch it. There was a post on game hub but I see it’s gone now.
It’s sad.
Guys I’ve played this for 40minutes and gave up. The bug issues are numerous and in all honesty it has been released in an alpha state condition… I wouldn’t even class it as post Beta. I’m massicely disappointed as the game shows so much promise and is let down by an early release. Steam forums are absolutely hammering the crap out of the bug situation since it became available a few hours ago. Another prime pre-released disaster. Will shelve for another month, hopefully the company will have addressed some of the issues by then and it will be in a completed and enjoyable state to play.
Hmm not saying you guys experiencing bugs are exaggerating but I purchased the game at noon and have played for at least 8 hours so far today with just a small break for dinner and errands. I have experienced no bugs…no crashes…really no issues cosmetic that I picked up on and certainly no show stoppers.
What kind of bugs are you experiencing? I purchased the game via Steam could that have something to do with it? Are you guys with issues running via GoG copies?
Again I am sure you are experiencing issues but on my machine it has been a pleasant stable experience…really enjoying the game so far.
Not sure if it is intended to be slow but I think I was just used to the ‘fast’ pace of the genesis because of the absence of animations during battle.
I didn’t have any game breaking glitch so far but I had a few bugs (or it is as intended) where the hero would not tell me if he could defeat the enemies or not (it does it in the original genesis but only does it when you invade a province in MotBW and not on encounters/attacking a location in a province).
I also had the game stopped when I was fighting a unicorn. Will sink more hours into it and yes its still like genesis with fancy graphics and cross my fingers there won’t be a heck of a lot of bugs since genesis was really really really a great game and I hope many people would MotBW a shot.
I preordered the game on steam and got Eador:Genesis with it… for 20$ it was a good fun ! Now I played Master of the broken World and I’d say I got mixed feeling…
its beautifull but not always;
the animation are nice but they feel slow (I would have like a fonctional quick movement option);
there is a few nice new feature but some of the good one of the original seems gone;
I know it is contradictory but, the building tree is easier to see yet less intuitive
I’m almost tempted, for now, to get back to Genesis. Maybe it’s gona be good after a bit of ajustment of my part, however, I still feel that it need a good patch to feel finish. In the end, it is still a deep and interesting game.
Still getting used to the fancy graphics. I think I prefer the older graphics but I guess its just because I havent played any eye candies on my pc lately. My complaint so far is that I missed the old battle music and the music during battle doesnt feel like a battle music. I mean it should make me feel like I’m in a battle like in genesis.
Did pick up the previous version of Eador (when GOG had it on sale) but am not happy with the current pricing (and fairly derisory $2.00 discount for existing Genesis owners) particularly since the physical (Russian) version is being sold by 1C for 399 Roubles/US$12.93 at http://www.1c-interes.ru/catalog/all6963/15603823/ As that price includes all the costs related with physical media (manufacture, printing, packaging, storage, transport, inventory management, postage, etc…) to charge significantly more for a digital version (incurring no such costs) seems to be treating customers as mugs.
I think 20 dollars is fair for a starting price, especially as I’m sure we’ll see some discounts before too long. It may be lower in Russia, but it’s a Russian game and Russia has a very different market than here. I think it makes sense for them to charge less for the game in an area where excess income is going to be harder to come by.
killias2: “I think 20 dollars is fair for a starting price, especially as I’m sure we’ll see some discounts before too long. It may be lower in Russia…”
What bothers me most about this is having different prices in the first place. Companies are quick to use “globalization” to cut costs (by using cheaper labour elsewhere) but then display double-standards with regional pricing.
That “piracy prone” regions and formats tend to see the lowest prices (the higher prices of low-piracy console games being the most widespread example) means that honest gamers are being particularly short-changed.
Snowbird’s example here is far from the worst ($20 for a new game is reasonable by most standards) but in playing the regional pricing game, they are also punishing those gamers who want to support developers.
I was going to get it, but put it on hold for now. There is a lot of posts on the steam forum that game doesn’t support widescreen display (cut off part of the game screen), and my laptops are both widescreen. Recommended solution is and external display, but I don’t have any.
Another problem is that some videocards seems not supported(don’t work at all, or produce artifacts), or require some messing with drivers.
I’ll wait and see how it’s going.
I should add as I posted earlier about how stable the game has been for me. I am also playing it on a widescreen pc with SLI 660ti cards…16gb of ram and a pretty hefty CPU. There have been no widescreen issues. What did you read about it not being supported? Again, widescreen works perfectly fine for me? Which video cards are not supported? Is this your personal experience or again something just read? We should really only be commenting on things we can support factually shouldn’t we?
Nop, I’ve just read steam forum, and decided to wait. About commenting – I don’t remember explicit rule “only be commenting on things we can support factually”, we arn’t in the court of law, are we?
I’ll probbaly wait for demo and see if it run om my laptop.
@Serge I have a widescreen display and have the issues you described. It’s not gamebreaking, but it’s annoying to not be able to see certain statistics on certain screens.
@Epyx If “factual support” doesn’t include others’ reports, then practically nothing we believe is factually supported.
I didn’t word it that clearly…I am only saying if you get someone’s opinion on a game and they respond either “I heard from a guy who knows a guy that it’s got this bug but I personally never experienced it” vs “I experienced bug x” which are you going to lend more validity to? Obviously the 2nd statement.
Neither really..
Its still just the internet and everybody can claim whatever they want without any way for you to really validate it.
You are of course suggesting, that second hand information is less reliable, but let’s face it.. unless you know the source, me repeating what I heard somewhere is just as reliable from your POV as me stating something I experienced.
Just because I did not experience a bug, but seen 10 people report it, does not make that bug go away or me mentioning it any less valid.
It always puzzles me to see per-ordering people. Ah, never mind, was gonna rant about the stupidity of it. They will never understand.
Pre-ordering this one nets you eador genesis which is a great game by itself. I guess the game just needs a couple of bug squished and I cross my fingers that there aren’t many bugs to be squished.
It is stupid to pre-order triple A games nowadays but Indie games are forgivable.
I’m confused..is this a paid advertisement? Why put this up without a review? How do we know if the game is any good?
This post is for information purposes, as usual when relevant games get released. It’s also a good place for people to discuss a game with their own impressions, as you can see by the comments so far. And that’s very useful, wouldn’t you say?
And no, it’s not paid, we don’t sell editorial. The only advertising we sell are the banners you see above, below the articles and in the sidebar.
To know if the game is any good I invite you to wait for our review, as I said, to come out in a few weeks. Sometimes devs or publishers send us review codes very late. This was one of such cases.
Informational purposes or heresay? Since you havnt played it where is this info you are providing coming from and is that source one that would be honest about features working on release? Where is media’s responsibility start and stop when it comes to games they admittedly know next to nothing about? Why dont you send back the information release they’ve asked you to parrot and say “sorry, until I cant talk about this game until I play it”. If you have to start your “informational release” with “the marketing PR people told me” then you are advertising whether you want to call it that or not.
BTW Heroes 4 had the heroes fighting along side the army as units. Its one of the reasons why heroes 4 was the best.
Having a bad day or something? :)
“Where is this info you are providing coming from(…)”
We have a preview on the game’s beta. Most of the information about the game’s content found on this post comes from there.
“Why don’t you send back the information release they’ve asked you to parrot and say “sorry, until I cant talk about this game until I play it”
Nobody asked me to post about Eador’s release. This is a news piece about a game now being available. I do this regularly for games I select, normal work part of my editorial. The release date was known for a long time now. Most of the content is taken from the preview we made on January of this year.
“If you have to start your “informational release” with “the marketing PR people told me” then you are advertising whether you want to call it that or not.”
As I said, the decision to post about this was entirely mine. No one from Snowbird asked me to post about their game. I did both the preview and review requests by my own initiative by the way.
“BTW Heroes 4 had the heroes fighting along side the army as units. Its one of the reasons why heroes 4 was the best.”
My bad there. You’re right, I just checked that out. Heroes could fight alongside other troops on Heroes 4. I let myself carry away by the fact that I only played until Heroes 3… I’ll correct that.
Friend, I think your a little over-reacting.
1) Adam’s original post does not contain factual errors or misinformation. If anything, Adam encourages you to wait for a review before buying the game. Trust a guy who works in marketing for a living – that’s as far from advertising as you can go.
2) IMHO, the one of the reasons behind Space Sector popularity is the fact that the game reviews that are being published here are unbiased (unlike several large sites whose names we want mention :-) ) I mean, really, don’t you think that PR people would come up with better promotional story than “if you want to play it safe just stay tuned” ??
3) That last part is purely my personal rant – one of the things that totally ruined HOMM 4 for me, were the totally unbalanced (read – game breaking) heroes that took a direct part in combat. You could easily finish most of the game with an army made of heroes and some dragons. You want fighting heroes done right – remember Master of Magic… Though the latest reincarnation of Elemental (LH) look very promising.
That’s why Heroes 4 was the worst!
They do this with most every game that has just been released wither they have done a review on it or not. A lot of games don’t have set release dates now a days and this site does a GREAT job of informing us when these types of games come out. As far as I know the Distant Worlds series doesn’t give out release dates, they will just release the game when its done and I’m super glad this website is on top of it right when it comes out so I can get it. You don’t need to post a game release without a review, most reviews aren’t done until after the release anyway
But even when there are fixed release dates you don’t have to keep all of them in mind. You can’t actually, or it’s a tedious job at best. You may know a couple of release dates by heart, from your favorite games, but it’s our job here to get you informed when other relevant games get out. I, personally, find that quite useful.
I’m from the time when release dates were a big deal, when they meant a lot. When they meant “Finished & Ready to Play”. Nowadays, unfortunately, they have been losing its importance, with the advent of digital pre-orders (whatever that is, or is for).
I, personally, would like to stay informed when games get out, even when there’s no review on day 1, which is becoming a rare event, as publishers and devs tend to release review builds later and later. At least that’s my impression. But, it seems Snowbird Games has not sent early review codes to anybody, as, at the moment, there are NO reviews from critics available for Eador:MotBW, at least on metacritic.
Adam Solo: “I’m from the time when release dates were a big deal, when they meant a lot. When they meant “Finished & Ready to Play”.”
Funny – I don’t recall that ever being the case in the PC games industry. :)
Back in the 1970s and 1980s (when “issuing an update” meant posting floppy disks to anyone who mailed or phoned asking for one, so getting it right first time was important) release dates were more an aspiration, or so it seemed, rather than a target with some PC magazines running regular “vapourware” charts.
As patches and updates have become less costly to distribute, so the quality of initial releases seems to have dropped. We now seem to be in the situation of having to wait for at least the second or third update to get a game that “works as intended” just when the heavy discounting starts. And publishers have the gall to blame piracy for their business woes, when they promulgate this state of affairs that screws over their biggest supporters.
I’m not from the 70s/80s. My PC time (before that I played on a ZX Spectrum) goes back to early 90’s (Master of Orion, UFO: Enemy Unknown, Dune 2, …). Back then, games were generally released in better shape than now. There were many reasons for why that happened, but I think we can agree with that.
So, early 90’s (pre-mass-internet) there were few patches. But, mid 90’s I think it was ok. Patches were still small and rare. Quality was good. At least that’s my impression.
I think it all changed after the advent of the broadband massified internet, and digital downloads. Like you say, patches and updates have become less costly, and the evil side effect is games released in worse shape because “we can fix it later”. When, they do get fixed… And that’s the real risk here: a probable and gradually decrease in PC games quality. We can’t allow that to happen.
The concept isn’t at all bad, since you can use fast updating to fine tune and balance stuff with player feedback way much faster than before. The problem is one of degree. Many games these days are released very unfinished and extremely buggy, as we all know. Others are released with a few bugs (sometimes important) and with some rough edges still, but that’s ok and normal, I guess.
So, in conclusion, in my time (90’s), when a PC game got released it was a very big deal. Nowadays, judging by some people’s perplexity of why do I post about a game releasing officially, that seems to have lost some of its importance and solemnity.
I think the best would be to have digital downloads and a rapid update cycle (as we have now) but make an effort to still release games officially in a “finished” state, meaning, with few (and non-major) bugs, and complete. Is this too much to ask?
But, the industry will adapt to these fast changes. Particularly the media will need to adapt to these new and more aggressive marketing tactics. If we can’t review games and put reviews up in day one (because we get late review copies and games take a lot of time to review) than we probably should start releasing first impression articles on day 1 or 2 and then concentrate on making a full in-depth review to publish a couple of weeks later. We’ll see what happens.
Man, I want to play something, but nothing is doing it for me, and this seemed like a step in the right direction to keep me occupied for an afternoon.
Suggestions welcome.
HI guys,
Bought the game. Bugs so far encountered:
1) Concurrent use of A spell (i mean use magic arrow twice on different enemy) on separate enemy units during battle, especially sorceror and then clicking the next turn button quickly (while the animation still running) cause the game to to lock-up preventing the computer player from moving its units.
2) Memory leaks (big time – and slows down your system) due to having >2 heroes each going through a mission/quest pop-up window phase.
3) Minimizing game window (alt-tab) causes the system to also slow-down <–This i believe is due to the devs implementing encryption (improperly) of the memory variables for numbers to prevent cheaters. (this also causes a little memory lag, i believe it could be the re-draw / re-initialising of number variablesencrypt/decrypt cycle)
———-
4) The game is not managing system resources properly as i “see” numerous re-cache of the same sprites/files occuring and the previous memory is not flushed properly.
———-THERE YOU GO….MY OBSERVATIONS OF THE GAME——
I like genesis more even if I do not consider the myriads of bugs in MotBW. If I add those as well, then MotBW becomes a sorry excuse for a sequel.
There is no actual gameplay improvement as far as I can tell, the game itself is literally an 1:1 replica of the old one – down to mission maps, with updated graphics, and a UI that changed for the worse (which frankly I never thought would be possible, given that the UI of the first game was not a wondrous piece of sophisticated of UI design either)
I guess that those who liked the original genesis will just stick with that one, as that game – while a little behind in graphics – is at least solid, stable and once you get used to the unusual UI, easy to use.
The new game.. frankly.. should be scrapped and done again.. They can keep the new art, as it is about the only thing thats not worse than the previous game (its not that much better either tbh), but all the other things they changed, they should just reconsider completely.
I agree completely with you !
The “very” few nice change dont worth what got wrong here (for the one who played Genesis)
For new player, i’ll say to wait for patch and look the review again in a few months. The game have potential, but is badly made for now.
Awesome! Looks promising and I look forward to the review.
Ok, played for some hours during the weekend, I only encountered a bug so far, my hero wouldn´t move no matter what I tried to do with him,, had to reload and start the turn again. Battle animations are slow sure, but not game-breaking for me. At 70 % of the battles I fight one unit dies, but I guess that´s what to be expected.
One thing, the auto-updater (GOG) tries to update but I can´t get a connection, anyone with the same problem?
I have the same issue with the auto-updater and I bet many others do too.
Solved it. I had to donwload from a link someone posted on their forums, now it reads the new version. :) Didn´t play it though, but I plan on doing it tonight to see the differences.
Damn,
I am going to get my money back for this.
Didnt expect the performance and bugs that appeared.
Performance: Refer to my earlier post. (to rectify much of that would need a lot of code-rewrite and separate the concurrent functions that also mess up the single play functions)
Bugs: Acceptable BUT with the performance issues, it leave a very bad impression.
I should have paid more attention to what this was.. As apparently it’s simply a reskin of Eador: Genesis while I thought it was a sequel. Well can’t complain really for not doing my homework on that. What I can complain about is the fact that there is a memory leak and ending the turn after using a spell twice causes the game to lock me out of control of my units in battle.
Been playing this game around 10 hours now (star trek game can goto hell) I’m loving it. Massive learning curve hard as nails to understand, but im happy to trial and error via the save games.
Only had one avoidable CTD when i tried to reload a game during combat. The sound effects are fairly subpar lol.
I’m not able to reply to the original thread or your reply for some reason. Short answer I think it is irresponsible of you to link where people can buy the game and imply its ready to be bought without playing it first. I dont know what arrangement you have with the developers and software sales sites but I simply dont believe you put up this story without any benefit. There is no reason for you to be hyping this product without a cut or social perk of some sort. And apparently its another terrible buggy release.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZC6vJLeLD4&list=UUHJM-Vd74Egk1xvGp4BHWBA&index=1
The maximum comment reply depth level is 4. After that level is reached you need to hit reply on the level above and put @ so that people know who you are addressing.
“Short answer I think it is irresponsible of you to link where people can buy the game and imply its ready to be bought without playing it first.”
I don’t know why you are insisting with this. I was already very clear on the purpose of these kind of posts. I’m not recommending the game, or at least that was not my intention. By putting a link to where to buy a game I’m not suggesting the game is ready, good or bad. I’m just saying where it can be bought. That’s all.
This post’s purpose is simply one of information. The GOG and GamersGate links are affiliate links, so, I earn a commission for each sale originated from them, as usual in many links to stores I provide in the site, having I played the games or not.
Now, the only situation where I would accept this kind of harsh criticism would be in a case where I would be recommending a game and linking to a store without having played it. But, when I post about a game I’m not automatically recommending it. By that line of thought nobody could post about any game without having played it before which would be just ridiculous.
As for “There is no reason for you to be hyping this product without a cut or social perk of some sort”.
Since when is posting about a game’s release, hype? Where do I say that the game is good and should be played and nothing like you’ve seen or played before, etc, etc?
I think the post’s last paragraph is very clear. I simply don’t know what else to say about this honestly.
\Edit: I think you may have thought that by describing the game’s features I was somehow transmitting the feeling of having played the final version of the game. As I said before, we previewed Eador:MotBW beta, that’s where the game’s description comes from. But, we hadn’t played the release version at the time this post was published. Again, the last paragraph clarifies that we received our review build very late. And, I, in fact did the opposite of recommending the game, I said “we plan to have the review up in the next few weeks. So, if you want to play it safe just stay tuned for that.” So, I’m sorry if there was some kind of confusion generated by my post but with everything that was said above I honestly don’t have anything else to say about this.
Eno – I don’t know if English is your first language, but what you have posted bears almost no relation to the above article, which is just a news item – not a review and not a preview. Perhaps you should read again what the last paragraph above said:
“Before you buy, you may want to check out our review. Unfortunately, we don’t have the review ready as of yet since we got our build a bit late from Snowbird. But, we plan to have the review up in the next few weeks.”
Given that SpaceSector criticised buggy games in the past (Sword of the Stars 2, Legends of Pegasus) any claim of “irresponsibility” need careful justification. Care to offer that?
As for buggy releases, they sadly seem to be the rule rather than the exception, especially for more complex strategy games and independent developers don’t have the same QA resources that a major publisher might. However Snowbird’s previous product (Eador Genesis) was a good one (and still is, if you can look past the HOMM3-esque graphics) and that should give posters here confidence that the issues reported will be fixed. However, anyone who pre-ordered may want to consider the merits of patience in future – I intend to wait until this is discounted at which point it should be comprehensively fixed too.
Are you really suggestion you dont see the major conflict of interest between having journalistic integrity and profiting off the sales of games you spotlight on your site? Its one thing to review a game and recommend it then say “Hey if you are going to buy it use this link and throw me a bone”. Quite another to parrot press releases about games you admittedly lack any recent info on and stick “buy them here so I get a cut” at the bottom. To me that says you care more about the cut than the customer who in the case will apparently get stuck with a dud. Bet your not offering you cut back to dissatisfied buyers are ya? The mighty advertising dollar owning 99.9% of the gaming media is one of the reasons companies can get away with releasing buggy games like Eador. I’m suppose to believe you are the one honest guy in the bunch and not call a fish wet?
The release of Eador are worthy news. With review or without. Additional advertisement on the site exists here, as it does on any other gaming site and is not directly related to the opinion about this product.
I guess in extreme cases they can withdraw the ad from the site and when it’s a horrible game which scams people the site may not want the ad, but that’s how it works everywhere.
The site needs money from some source and I prefer ads about games which potentially interest me over random ads for porn sites which probably pay the best.
Your opinion might be different, but this is probably not the right place to criticize how the market works in general.
“The mighty advertising dollar owning 99.9% of the gaming media is one of the reasons companies can get away with releasing buggy games like Eador.”
The reason buggy games get released is because *people will buy them* – seemingly despite past experiences. If everyone held off, then we’d see far fewer problem releases – though probably also fewer releases generally.
If you think the gaming media is such a problem, then why not set up your own site/blog and start doing reviews? The effort needed to properly investigate each release (you can’t just say “It’s a buggy POS”, you have to justify everything with detailed examples) plus the pain involved in dealing with substandard games may just give you a better idea of how challenging good games journalism can be.
The site needs money? Why? Most of the better gaming review sites are blog-like and have no ads for the very well known reason that bias and integrity is a problem in this industry.
Astral hype ads like this one cause certain impluse customers to buy games. They say oo I want that and in monetizing that urge Adam is predator to their weakness. It lack integrity. Games arnt my business. Fixing people is. Hence the judgmental attitude towards error.
You are starting to get boring.
This site is about space / 4x games. I do not know of many sites that deal exclusively with this genre. This is one of them.
I have not seen any bias from Adam towards one game or the other.(certainly not more than any of us would have shown in his stead) So I do not know what your problem is dude, but its clearly not with the site or its editors, so why don’t you stop harassing them.
The hell are you talking about? He even said it would be a good idea to wait for a review! And websites use bandwidth, especially as they become more popular, and that costs money. It sounds very much like you have an axe to grind and are simply looking for a convenient target regardless of any wrongdoing.
K I actually played it and while complex and lacking quality documentation/tooltips its worth 20 bucks and pretty fun. That doesnt make it ok to pimp it without playing it first.
ive played around 20hours of eador so far, and from what i’ve played its a fantastic game, im really enjoying it.
if i could boil the custom game down, its hero/army/unit/city upgrade tree’s, with random (mostly) passive encounters at various difficulties, and rewards. <3
and a hell’a lot of depth