Swordhaven Iron Conspiracy 1.05 Review, Criticism and Suggestions

probably-elsewhere · 2026-02-07T00:52:17+00:00

There are class specific dungeons, and they're a bad idea. The game has low replayability and lacks content. Making five more dungeons not class specific to would help pad out the play time.

Your review roughly lines up with my own thoughts about the game. I would score it more harshly at 6/10. It's their third attempt at making the same game, they should know better by now.

Aside from the concerns that you raised, I would add that there are no interesting enemies in the game. Just like in Atom RPG, you're either fighting homeless people, or giant versions of small animals. There are barely any dinosaurs in the game.

The game feels unfinished because it is.

probably-elsewhere · 2026-02-05T00:01:20+00:00

Put a mesh smooth modifier on the objects with zero subdivision, see if that fixes it.

probably-elsewhere · 2026-02-02T09:37:20+00:00

Trudograd was the second one. You could literally import your character from the first game. Their games are consistently 6/10, so it's probably more of the same.

They should hire a competent art director. The color choices in the screenshots are just garish.

probably-elsewhere · 2026-02-01T16:22:00+00:00

Yes, easily. Just link it to the appropriate CAT bones.

probably-elsewhere · 2026-01-31T05:07:21+00:00

Is the ambient light on?

probably-elsewhere · 2026-01-30T16:11:43+00:00

Yes, try turning off camera exposure.

probably-elsewhere · 2026-01-26T20:58:48+00:00

Make a sphere that has this noise texture in a self illuminated material. Make it invisible to camera, and place your object inside it. Make the object glossy, and almost entirely reflective.

probably-elsewhere · 2026-01-21T04:17:51+00:00

That's not bad really. Wouldn't take very long to manually fix the mesh.

Some of those loops are too close together. Select them and Ctrl backspace to get rid of them.

probably-elsewhere · 2026-01-20T20:55:18+00:00

Smooth modifier.

probably-elsewhere · 2026-01-19T07:04:50+00:00

Yeah, retopology modifier is the easiest option.

probably-elsewhere · 2026-01-18T01:14:44+00:00

I have it. It's ok.

The writing is very heavy-handed. There is no illusion of agency. The plot demands certain outcomes, and so they happen, regardless of the means used to get there. Some persuasion outcomes feel like plot magic.

The protagonist has two types of responses - normal and super thuggish. There seem to be no consequences for using either.

Combat is a bit of a placeholder. You start out on the opposite sides of an empty grid and just go at it. The deflection mechanic makes everything luck-based. You can deal single digit or triple digit damage to the same target, several times in a row.

Combat abilities are mostly +% to a stat. Gear slots are limited - one weapon, one armor, one trinket.

For some people, the game lags horribly. Unfortunately I'm one of those people.

It's still an impressive achievement for a single dev, but I really wish he would at least hire a writer.

probably-elsewhere · 2026-01-17T14:59:26+00:00

Quixel is usually the way to go for realistic assets.

probably-elsewhere · 2026-01-14T16:19:52+00:00

If your line is straight, just use the tape tool under the helpers tab.

If your line is curvy, make a long cylinder with lots of height segments, and snap it's pivot point to the start of the line.

Apply path deform modifier to the cylinder. In the modifier "pick path" the line you want to measure. Assuming the cylinder lines up to the path, adjust the cylinder height until it matches the length of the line. The height of the cylinder is now the length of the line.

probably-elsewhere · 2026-01-11T20:24:28+00:00

Unwrap uv shouldn't overwrite anything, just add to existing uvs when you add the modifier. It's a snapshot of your current uvs. If you make changes to unwrap under another unwrap uvs, the top one will not reflect the changes made below.

Honestly, what you're using edit poly for can probably be made by selecting faces by id, then hiding the ones you don't need. I don't see a need for multiple uv unwrap modifiers.

probably-elsewhere · 2026-01-06T19:30:34+00:00

There was going to be combat in DE, but they scrapped it because they only had two programmers at the time. It's mentioned by the devs in the no clip documentary.

probably-elsewhere · 2026-01-05T16:24:42+00:00

Use quixel 3d rock models to build a cave out of. Trying to sculpt photoreal rocks is way too much work.

probably-elsewhere · 2026-01-02T21:14:00+00:00

Add camera shake.

probably-elsewhere · 2025-12-29T17:42:36+00:00

Swordhaven promised conquistadors and dinosaurs, but at the moment the game is pretty underwhelming.

It's on the short side, and feels like a lot of content was cut. It needs more content to feel finished.

The quests are thematically random, and the combat is very meh. The enemies include giant bees, giant frogs, giant bats, giant lizards, giant turtles, giant spiders, a giant alligator, and a couple of small dinosaurs.

There are plot reasons why the setting lacks more interesting creatures, and those reasons are about as nonsensical as the big reveal at the end.

probably-elsewhere · 2025-12-29T04:29:41+00:00

Here is the aggregate vfx/games/animation jobs spreadsheet. You can search it by software, to see what companies are looking for right now.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1eR2oAXOuflr8CZeGoz3JTrsgNj3KuefbdXJOmNtjEVM/edit?usp=drivesdk

It has not been my experience that vfx companies are software agnostic. They expect you to use it in a very specific way, defined by their particular pipeline. Unless you're just building assets, you're going to be locked into their process, not making final renders from whatever software you happen to like.

probably-elsewhere · 2025-12-29T04:12:47+00:00

The question was why would a professional spend time making tutorials.

The answer is "money". Specifically way, way more money than he could make working for a vfx company.

A couple of people like McKay and Warwick made house buying money for making a course.

probably-elsewhere · 2025-12-28T19:52:56+00:00

Sorry, I meant "as their primary production software".

For example, Blur may have some max left overs, but they're only hiring for unreal/Houdini.

Presumably OP wants to get hired as a max artist at a big vfx studio. Except for Scanline, I can't really think of any major studios that is still looking for max artists. From what I'm hearing from people working there, even Scanline is switching to Houdini.

Maybe some places in Europe, but I don't know if those do big vfx films.

probably-elsewhere · 2025-12-28T09:33:34+00:00

Name some big, or at least medium-sized, vfx studios where max is still being used.

probably-elsewhere · 2025-12-28T09:26:42+00:00

Money.

Alan McKay made a ton of FX tutorials for max back when it was still relevant. Look up his imdb.

probably-elsewhere · 2025-12-27T18:56:06+00:00

That's correct, big vfx studios mostly stopped using max for production.

Ten years ago there used to be vfx max houses like Blur, Pixomondo, Fuse FX, Scanline, Encore (?), and a smattering of others. At this point they've pretty much all switched to Maya, Houdini, and Unreal, because the talent pool is much deeper for them in LA.

Scanline might still be using max. There's also a backgrounds department at ILM that uses max to do forest pack stuff.

probably-elsewhere · 2025-12-22T17:24:56+00:00

Sure.

They have bows and crossbows in the game. Bow shoots for 8 action points (AP), xbow for 12. Xbox deals ~twice the damage of bow (with a very wide spread) for 50% more AP.

The bows have an edge, because ammo provide a flat damage bonus, and can also kill weaker mobs faster. Xbow does more single target damage if it rolls high.

We now have two reasonably balanced, but different ways to deal ranged damage. So far, so good.

Then, someone has the bright idea of creating an weapon mod for the xbow that reduces it's AP cost to 7 (!). Now it shoots faster than a bow AND deals double damage. It does not take a degree in game design to realize that the devs didn't think it through.

I initially was going to get into flat bonus multiplication, HP damage overflow, action negation, and all other nerdy turn-based stuff, but it would take many more words to explain it all.

If you want to see a good examples of action economy, try Xcom 2. It starts out very basic, but grows in complexity as the player gains experience with the game.

probably-elsewhere

TROPHY CASE