I Commend Nintendo for Releasing Three Houses as a Single Game

[Rezzy]

I'm happy that Nintendo decided to sell all 3/4 routes of 3H together as one game.  With Pokemon and especially with Fates, they probably could have packaged them separately and made us shell out $60 for each route.  It's nice to see them throw the player base a bone.

[BZL8]

In the gist of all things, Three Houses really felt like the game Fates wanted to be.

[Gregster101]

Same. I'm so thankful they didn't go the Fates route again with Three Houses.

[Zapp Branniglenn]

It feels like that should go without saying for any game, but yeah we should thank them for not repeating that mistake. Jury's still out on whether True Ending "'Refuse to Choose a Side" DLC is coming our way, so leave those wallets open.

Edited August 14, 2019 by Glennstavos

[Nobody]

I absotely love three houses and think Fates' business scheme was scummy, but the Fates paths are way more distinct than Three Houses' paths. GD, BL and Church routes share all the pre time skip and all but 3 of the post time skip maps. Splitting the game in three just wouldn't fly.

Edited August 14, 2019 by Nobody

[Byrdsfly]

As someone who's new to the series, what happened with Fates?

[Flere210]

I honestly never understood that criticism of fates. Every route had 20 or so chapters and many unique paralogues whitout recycling much content between birthright and conquest, as many unique characters and support conversations as the complete cast of an older game, and a full story that does not reveal everything, but it deal whit the war from start to finish. It's as much value for your money as any older fe game, at least in terms of quantity. It's not like they have 95% of the game in common like pokemon. They have at worst 20% of the content in common.

Three house has 4 route in a game, but more than 50% of the content is shared between them and a crapton of stuff is recycled to the point is impossible to not notice it. Everything feels cheap and it's obvious they were tryjng to cram to much stuff in a single game and had to cut corners everywhere.

Both systems have pro and cons.

[Humanoid]

Yeah, I do appreciate that it's just a single release and that I probably won't bother with the season path, but the situations aren't exactly comparable. It'd be like if all the Fates routes were identical up to the halfway point. I would definitely not pay the same price I paid for the Fates campaigns if they attempted to charge the same for Three Houses ones because they have half the new content.

Then again to be fair, there are 3.5 distinct post-timeskip routes here. So if you boil it right down, there are 0.5 + (3.5/2) = 2.25 games. Pretty good for the cover price no matter how you slice it.

EDIT: I don't know how much content is shared between the post-timeskip stuff to be fair. But it probably cancels out how much Revelation recycled stuff, more or less.

 

@Byrdsfly Fates had three separate campaigns: Birthright, Conquest and Revelation. You bought either Birthright or Conquest as you would any normal game, then the other two were offered as DLC for about half the price. Therefore in the end you ended up paying about the price of two full games to get the three routes. But as pointed out above, the routes are far more distinct to each other than the Three Houses ones are, so it's a mitigating factor.

Edited August 14, 2019 by Humanoid

[Interdimensional Observer]

33 minutes ago, Glennstavos said:

It feels like that should go without saying for any game, but yeah we should thank them for not repeating that mistake. Jury's still out on whether True Ending "'Refuse to Choose a Side" DLC is coming our way, so leave those wallets open.

Odd, I thought the fifth option would be "Settle it in Smash!".

 

21 minutes ago, Byrdsfly said:

As someone who's new to the series, what happened with Fates?

Fates has three routes: Birthright, Conquest, and Revelation.

When you get to the Branch of Fate in Fates, you are given the choice to side with Hoshido- Birthright, Nohr- Conquest, or neither- Revelation.

 

What is the problem?:

If you bought a physical copy of the game, you only get to pick the route it advertises itself to be. So your only choice if you bought Birthright, is Birthright. You made your choice the moment you bought the game.

If you bought a digital copy of the game, you can pick Birthright or Conquest, but whichever you pick, you're stuck with for the rest of your playing of the game, even if you start a new file.

If you want to play the route you didn't pick of Birthright and Conquest, and if you want to play Revelation at all, you have to buy it as DLC. The base game, so one route, costs $40, the other two routes cost an additional $20 each. So the entire game costs $80.

 

15 minutes ago, Flere210 said:

I honestly never understood that criticism of fates. Every route had 20 or so chapters and many unique paralogues whitout recycling much content between birthright and conquest, as many unique characters and support conversations as the complete cast of an older game, and a full story that does not reveal everything, but it deal whit the war from start to finish. It's as much value for your money as any older fe game, at least in terms of quantity. It's not like they have 95% of the game in common like pokemon. They have at worst 20% of the content in common.

 

Some of the maps and characters are shared of course. To be precise on the character side, it's 9 adults and 5 children. Conquest has 18 exclusive adults and 8 children, while Birthright has 18 adults and 8 children. Given each child has a paralogue, that is eight exclusive maps per route from there, plus chapters 6-28, so about 28 in total.

But I do see your point. And even the shared maps, which are 7 in total: Izumo, Boat, Branch of Fate, Opera House, Cheve, Sevenfold Sanctuary, and Ice Tribe Village; tend to play differently. The boat map in CQ and BR is the same, but BR's take is a flier invasion fest, the other is the Shura hunt. And this excludes the shared Paralogues of Mozu and the five shared children.

Further map sharing happens on Revelation with: CQ's Wind Tribe map, BR's Fort Jinya, Sevenfold again, BR's Mokushu Punji Trap Forest, and CQ's Port Dia. So another five maps.

Edited August 14, 2019 by Interdimensional Observer

[Flere210]

I will elaborate a bit to make my point clearer. If you buy just birthright, you get as much content as a Path of Radiance or a Blazing Sword. 

If you play conquest after that, iirc you would not pay the full price, wich make up for the fact that a fraction of the content is shared imo. 

Revelation is the one that may not be worth your money if you already own the other two routes. You mostly get more character interaction and a few maps. I can't assign a value to being able to use everyone and to the fact that is mandatory to play multiplayer efficently.

Radiant dawn has 45 chapters, a complete fates 84(96 counting the shared maps).  I have not counted three houses maps, but i think they will be around 45 too.  They will never make 80 maps for a single game.

Edited August 14, 2019 by Flere210

[Gregster101]

My issue with the way Fates did it is that in order to play through the entire game, you need to pay more than seventy American dollars, and of the three paths, only one of them is actually good gameplay wise, in this case Conquest (and even then it's not that good imo).

[Light Strategist]

1 hour ago, BZL8 said:

In the gist of all things, Three Houses really felt like the game Fates wanted to be.

Three Houses IS what Fates wanted to be. Undoubtedly.

[Florete]

I mean, yeah, cool that it's all one game, but I don't think Three Houses is doing a ton better than Fates in this context.

Three Houses is $60. All three routes of Fates is $80. I haven't played everything in TH yet, but I do know that the first half of each route is essentially the same but with a different cast and altered (but effectively the same) cutscenes, and I've heard that Black Eagles church route is 95% a copy-paste of Golden Deer route. On the other hand, each of Fates' three routes were pretty unique in their stories and maps after the first five chapters (which the game even gives you the option to skip).

You also don't have to pay $80 to play Fates. You can pay $40 to play one route, or $60 to play two.

Is Three Houses being one game really that noteworthy?

[wissenschaft]

4 hours ago, BZL8 said:

In the gist of all things, Three Houses really felt like the game Fates wanted to be.

Yes, it REALLY really does. lol

[NiceLikeChrist]

To be fair they packaged it as a single game because it had no reason at all being separate games. Golden Deer, Blue Lions, and Church routes use identical maps for probably 80% of post timeskip. Add the fact that pre time skip is identical for every route and you get something that should just be one game. There isn't enough variety to justify a Fates type of deal.

Say what you want about Fates but map variety was there. Class/weapon variety was there. Character variety was there. I didn't feel like I got finessed when I bought Conquest after playing Birthright...it WAS a different game.

[IzzyFresh]

Yeah if they tried the Fates thing with this game, it would be far less forgivable. The routes are really not that different in map design. Sometimes different routes will place you in different starting positions, but that's about it.

[UNLEASH IT]

There's probably less unique maps in all four routes of 3H than there is between BR and CQ alone. Hell, if anything, playing 3H made me feel like ISIS was justified in splitting up fates

[PrincessAlyson]

9 hours ago, Florete said:

Three Houses is $60. All three routes of Fates is $80. I haven't played everything in TH yet, but I do know that the first half of each route is essentially the same but with a different cast and altered (but effectively the same) cutscenes, and I've heard that Black Eagles church route is 95% a copy-paste of Golden Deer route. On the other hand, each of Fates' three routes were pretty unique in their stories and maps after the first five chapters (which the game even gives you the option to skip).

You also don't have to pay $80 to play Fates. You can pay $40 to play one route, or $60 to play two.

On that standpoint, yes. I agree. However, I'm still glad its one game and I enjoy the story much better than the story in Fates. I also like that the game portrays all the routes as equal: No matter which side you choose, you usher the continent of Fodlan into a golden age with your chosen Lord character (Edelgard, Dimitri, Claude, or Rhea). Fates essentially said "Choose a side" and then said "But Revelation is the Golden Ending and canon path lol" which really took away the point of choosing.

That's just how I see it. I'm okay with Fates and still play it, but do I think it was a great game? Not really. 

[SSbardock84]

There's one mistake fixed. Let's hope they stop with the alternate routes for the next games.

Edited August 14, 2019 by SSbardock84

[Landmaster]

Eehhh 3H doesn't really seem like you could have done the same thing as Fates. I don't really see how they could have done it with each House being its own game since the branch off isn't quite as dramatic as Fates. Conquest is like the original FE games (much harder) while Birthright is like the newer ones (hub world and slightly easier). They play completely differently, so it made sense~ 3H doesn't have that and the only changes are really just for the story, so it would have been a bit odd, IMO, to sell them separately~

I personally just bought Revelations in the first place so it was basically the same as 3H for me anyway~

[Ertrick36]

I feel like if they sold Three Houses in three-or-four separate "paths", people would have an even bigger conniption about it than they did with Fates.

At least with Fates each path promised 20 unique chapters (well, although Revelation borrowed a good number of the maps, but still).  With Three Houses, the first, like, 10 chapters are mostly the same but with different spins, which only leaves about 10 chapters for each route.

Even with as improved a story as Three Houses has, I still think a lot of people would feel that the routes being sold separately would be unforgivable, especially in this day and age where consumer trust in companies is waning ever so greatly on account of shifty business practices such as microtransactions in fully-priced video games and loot crates in games meant for minors.

[flap]

I think we can mostly agree that splitting Fates was kind of a cash grab and a scummy move in general. Lol at anyone trying to justify that it was really worth buying 3 titles for the "full fates experience", I've seen fanfics better written than that mess.

As many have echoed already, I don't think we should praise Nintendo for doing the right thing that is expected of them, we should condemn them for doing the wrong thing. We can however be happy that they didn't repeat the same mistake.

[Jingle Jangle]

If 3 Houses had the same approach as Fates, it would be more scrutinized. With the majority of maps being repeated in different routes, how similar the first half of the game is regardless of playthrough, possibly needing to buy the other dlc to recruit students from other classes, and cross-class paralogs encourages to buy the dlc. It's for the best 3 Houses alternative routes are not add on content.

[Florete]

23 hours ago, flap said:

I think we can mostly agree that splitting Fates was kind of a cash grab and a scummy move in general.

I don't.

[flap]

Quote

I don't.

 

But.. how can you be so cool and so wrong at the same time?..

Edited August 15, 2019 by flap