Might & Magic X Teased by Ubisoft, To Be Revealed at PAX East

[Humanoid]

Y'know, despite HoMM3 being just about an equal contender for my personal favourite game ever, I don't actually mind the direction in which they were *trying* to take HoMM4. Any refinement of the previous formula would be a matter of just trying to improve on HoMM3's already beautiful graphics. Sure, they failed, but getting heroes more involved in combat (especially Might-oriented heroes who were literally just stat sticks) and adding more granularity to positioning in combat for example were progressive moves that I supported. Not excusing the end result, though obviously 3DO being broke had an impact too, but I think the initial premise was mostly sound.

 

It's the same reason that for whatever criticisms I make of Civ5, it's not going to be the aspects in which they were attempting a new game as opposed to a graphical update of the prior instalment.

[Bester]

Well, we do know Obsidian's been working on another publisher-backed deal, and M&M is up their alley. Less than a week until we get some juicy details.

Obsidian? That's some fantasy in real life.

It'll most likely be some shady russian company of three people - Ivan the programmer and Igor the designer and Mitrofan the janitor, not unlike the company that did the heroes 5.

[Hurlshort]

I thought HoMM5 was a decent game, really.  But King's Bounty pretty much took over the throne when it comes to that style of game.  

[Darkpriest]

 

So? Ubisoft ****ed up Heroes when NWC already nailed down the whole formula near-perfectly with III, why would you think their performance would suddenly do a 180 from their established track record with Heroes V & VI?

 

I don't.  But I don't have lack of faith in a game of one series because a different game of a different series wasn't very good.

 

To be honest, I DO have some goodwill there yet, same like Bioware for next ME related game and DA3 until first gameplay footage and playable demo.

 

To be honest I am a bit surprised that people praise HoM&M 3 yet they discredit HoM&M which for me was a very fun experience and with some interesting design plot wise. I liked skill wheel (which IMO is an improved version of HoM&M3 skill sets). They moved to a different world lorewise which was something I did not understand, but still their world was ok in the 5th edition of HoM&M.

 

I've played recently HoM&M 3 and 5 and I did not find that many differences in gameplay

 

The 6th game was a total failure though. I can't even find a place where I would not rave about the game design. The only interesting thing was the story design.

 

Now as far as the M&M games goes I can't remember how long it was since I've played the last one, so I won't mind a reboot and setting them in their new lore. The gameplay is what has my interest and how much RP will be in this game.

Edited March 18, 2013 by Darkpriest

[Cultist]

Heroes of Might and Magic is not the same thing as Might and Magic.

I was talking about publisher and its policies.

[LadyCrimson]

If it's HoMM, not interested. Never did get into that strategy series.

 

If it's the MM RPG series....I'll be interested enough to keep an eye on its progress/release, but it would have to impress me a lot before I'd even think about buying it. After 8, that series went kaput ... some might say it went kaput during #8, simply because 8 was such a retread of the previous games.

 

And if it's connected to UPlay, it's a definite no. Nothing against Ubi (I'm sure it's an ok system, such as they are), but Steam is enough.

[IndiraLightfoot]

What LadyCrimson said: I played them all as some kind of fillout RPG-light in-between various D&D-based CRPGs. For me, it's a game series that bakc then was in the same bag as the early entries in the Elder Scrolls series. However, there were differences: the party in M&M, and the landscapes weremore varied in M&M. The monsters were more like hordes of darkness, so it was hack-n-slash. Often, the levels went up to soaring heights. In one game you were like level 100+ when you started taking on huge Titans and aliens. I liked the scope and for some bisarre reason I liked flying around and then crash down to some yummy chest on a hill with dozens of baddies and release mayhem. In another one, you got play as a lich, and that was a bif plus in my book. All in all, I've had hours of fun with M&M (never played Heroes of M&M), so I'll certainly keep an ye out and hope for the best. In short, fingers crossed for huge and varied landscapes with all kinds of baddies, over which we can fly eventually! It's so over the top that is almost good, it's like some Monthy Python sketches.

 

EDIT: Cultist, your signature video of Gollum is just great! A big thumbs up from me!

Edited March 18, 2013 by IndiraLightfoot

[LadyCrimson]

...and for some bisarre reason I liked flying around and then crash down to some yummy chest on a hill with dozens of baddies and release mayhem.

Hehehe, that was definitely some great fun!

[IndiraLightfoot]

Sorry about the typo on "bizarre", but yes, it's something I have fond memories of. I don't know if it would look better with today's graphics. It worked because of the "empty" 1st-person-perspective. Otherwise, it would involve animation headaches of huge proportions, heh! 

[Bester]

I thought HoMM5 was a decent game, really.   

Why did they change the world completely? The world has been destroyed many times over and they just traveled to another one in a spaceship. But in homm5 they just erased everything, dropped all the heroes I knew from the previous games, dropped everything from a to z, made up a generic world with generic heroes and it was a spit in the face of all the fans as I saw it. The mechanics aren't difficult to port on a new visual engine, there's no achievement in that, but what they did to the story/world was an abomination.

Edited March 18, 2013 by Bester

[Malekith]

 

I thought HoMM5 was a decent game, really.   

Why did they change the world completely? The world has been destroyed many times over and they just traveled to another one in a spaceship. But in homm5 they just erased everything, dropped all the heroes I knew from the previous games, dropped everything from a to z, made up a generic world with generic heroes and it was a spit in the face of all the fans as I saw it. The mechanics aren't difficult to port on a new visual engine, there's no achievement in that, but what they did to the story/world was an abomination.

Well, to be fair Heroes IV "new" world was sheet anyway. I felt the same way as you, but with heroes 4 instead of 5. And from the 2 games i prefered 5

[Humanoid]

I remember the reasoning/excuse for the apocalypse happening at the end of HoMM3/MM8 was that they needed to create a properly unified world for the various franchises to operate in, because they had kind of lost their handle on the existing one (and I recall an example given that Bracada was a frozen ice land in HoMM3 but a barren desert in MM7). Remember that the mainline series had really only joined up with the Heroes series starting with MM6.

 

Seems a rather thin pretext obviously, but yeah, hindsight.

[Sannom]

Why did they change the world completely?

It's called a reboot. They had already started it in Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, they continued with Heroes of Might & Magic 5. You don't need 'reasons' to do it.

 

I never played the game, but seeing others play HoMM 4, I really thought the brand was in need of some re-focusing, with some factions that had no real them or identity to them. Olivier Ledroit brought a coherent visual look, Nival brought back some of the gameplay before the fourth game, etc.

[AGX-17]

 

 

Why did they change the world completely?

It's called a reboot. They had already started it in Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, they continued with Heroes of Might & Magic 5. You don't need 'reasons' to do it.

 

I never played the game, but seeing others play HoMM 4, I really thought the brand was in need of some re-focusing, with some factions that had no real them or identity to them. Olivier Ledroit brought a coherent visual look, Nival brought back some of the gameplay before the fourth game, etc.

 

 

The "reason" is that the devs of DM and HoMM5 had no connection to New World Computing or the original devs of the M&M franchise.

 

Heroes 3 was the pinnacle of the series. Not without flaws, but 4 was a huuuuuge step in the wrong direction, a massive drop in quality compared to 3. 5 is just mediocrity incarnate.

Edited March 18, 2013 by AGX-17

[nikolokolus]

I have very fond memories of HoMM 2 and 3 and MM6 and MM7 and I played some of the later titles like MM8 (meh) and MM9 (gack!) but didn't get into the later HoMM games because of the poor reviews.

 

All that said, there isn't a chance in hell Ubisoft is making a party based, first-person blobber with MMX; if I had to guess I'd think a free-2-play MMO, loaded with microtransactions and facebook tie-ins will be the way they go.

 

I'd like to be optimistic, but this franchise has lost its way since the hey day of NWC, no reason to believe that's going to change now.

Edited March 19, 2013 by nikolokolus

[IndiraLightfoot]

Niko, I really hope you're wrong. It would be quite a fun nostalgia trip to do a first-person party run in a true spiritual successor to the M&M-series.

[Cultist]

HOMM4 crippled the series' story beyond any repair. And the result - reboot. Not quite good story-wise but at lease they recreated mechanics.

 

As for M&M VI revolutionized the game, turning it into one of the first open-world games of that time. M&M VII expanded functionality and choices option but the sries started it descent into sci-fi, with blasters, robots and other crap.

Edited March 19, 2013 by Cultist

[Chairchucker]

Maybe Ubisoft are paying attention to some of this Kickstarter stuff and are thinking that nostalgia might net them a decent pay day. I have only played Worlds of Xeen to any extent but I am cautiously excited about what this could be. Not keen on the idea of Obsidian taking it, though, it just doesn't seem a good fit for them.

[Humanoid]

HOMM4 crippled the series' story beyond any repair. And the result - reboot. Not quite good story-wise but at lease they recreated mechanics.

 

As for M&M VI revolutionized the game, turning it into one of the first open-world games of that time. M&M VII expanded functionality and choices option but the sries started it descent into sci-fi, with blasters, robots and other crap.

It's the other way around really, the series started out with much heavier sci-fi influences that really never left the mainline RPG series. Heck, the gameworlds - VARN, XEEN, etc were basically spaceships.

 

Then Heroes of Might and Magic came along, completely outside the continuity of the RPG. Think of it as Mario Kart alongside the Super Mario Bros series: it took various personalities out of the RPG series, Kastore, Crag Hack, etc, and used them out of context and out of continuity; plopping them down into a generic fantasy world for the sole purpose of facilitating a strategy game. As a pitch it would sound like "let's take our most famous characters and use their likenesses as units in a strategy game!"

 

Of course, what happened was that the mainline series went dormant after MM5, and over five intervening years, the popularity of HoMM overtook that of the RPGs such that when they tried to reintegrate the gameworlds, the louder voice of the strategy game fans unfamiliar with the history behind the property sort of rebelled, and in a way hijacked the Might and Magic name. The clash between the two series, obstensibly of the same IP, is what ultimately led to the ill-fated decision to hit the big red button and institute a brand new gameworld for HoMM4 and MM9.

 

The best example of the issue is when NWC tried to introduce the new "Forge" faction in HoMM3's Armageddon's Blade expansion. This planned (and indeed, I believe, fully completed) sci-fi faction was to be the main theme of the new content, but irate fans believing sci-fi had no place in the series prompted the devs to back down and instead, late in the piece, substitute the exceedingly dull Elemental Conflux faction in its place, with blatantly rehashed versions of existing units and all.

 

 

EDIT: Another example: Crag Hack, the dwarf barbarian, took off on a spaceship alongside some other recognisable names in pursuit of some ancient space god, who is basically a robot, at the conclusion of MM3. They took his likeness - essentially his iconic portrait - and attached it to one of the random Barbarian heroes in HoMM - except as a human because there are no dwarven heroes. He gains his own separate identity via the HoMM campaigns which follow, notably stopping the necromancer Sandro in HoMM3:The Shadow of Death. Then in MM7, which falls subsequent to SoD, the initial, dwarven Crag Hack, crash lands on the same planet, and indeed continent Antagarich, on which HoMM3 occurs, and becomes a driver for much of that game's plot. Messy, so you can see the reasoning for hitting the reset button.

Edited March 19, 2013 by Humanoid

[alanschu]

 

It's the other way around really, the series started out with much heavier sci-fi influences that really never left the mainline RPG series. Heck, the gameworlds - VARN, XEEN, etc were basically spaceships.

 

I actually find it funny how these older games often turn to sci fi haha.  Ultima I had it, and I remember fighting robots in technological pyramids that results in launching a space ship to defeat the big bad at the end of Might and Magic III too haha.

[Humanoid]

Yeah, easy to forget that Ultima 2 was set on Earth, and revolved around the notion of time travel (and laser blasters). And that the antagonist of Ultima 3 was a punch-card computer.

[Cultist]

It's the other way around really, the series started out with much heavier sci-fi influences that really never left the mainline RPG series. Heck, the gameworlds - VARN, XEEN, etc were basically spaceships.

Not in that way - it's ok o mix fantasy and sci-fi. I'm talking about the way it was implemented in M&M VII - you played 90% of the gamewith purely fantasy system and then BAM! - blasters and robots in the last mission, with VERY loose connection to the main plot. Its like in the end of Deus EX: HR you would discover that everything was orchestrated by the leprechaun.

[Humanoid]

I did have that problem too, and indeed I didn't finish the game after getting bored flying over a horde of titans and just holding down the 'A' button to rain death on them from above. It's more a gameplay discontinuity than a plot one though, since the intro movie kind of foreshadows the sci-fi element to an extent.

 

I never got up to where MM6 introduced its sci-fi elements - how did you feel about those?

[alanschu]

 

Not in that way - it's ok o mix fantasy and sci-fi. I'm talking about the way it was implemented in M&M VII - you played 90% of the gamewith purely fantasy system and then BAM! - blasters and robots in the last mission, with VERY loose connection to the main plot. Its like in the end of Deus EX: HR you would discover that everything was orchestrated by the leprechaun.

 

Eh, I find that in these games the sci fi elements typically become known towards the end as well.

[Cultist]

I did have that problem too, and indeed I didn't finish the game after getting bored flying over a horde of titans and just holding down the 'A' button to rain death on them from above. It's more a gameplay discontinuity than a plot one though, since the intro movie kind of foreshadows the sci-fi element to an extent.

 

I never got up to where MM6 introduced its sci-fi elements - how did you feel about those?

VERY subtle, just as messages that devils are actually kreegans, invaders from some far far away, but you never get blasters and fight robots. You just travel to their Hive, killed Queen and prevented reactor detonation. But not in sci-fi way - you just read scroll that localized the explosion.

MM7 - way better system and gameplay but the ending with blasters and droids, who turned out being powerful bows and powerful enemies was so out of place it killed all athmosphere.

Edited March 19, 2013 by Cultist