Might & Magic Heroes VII [official site] may be a bit of a disappointment, but Limbic Entertainment have kept plugging away at it. Now it's kinda sorta maybe a bit-ish like Heroes of Might & Magic IV, if what you liked most about HOMM4 was its story? MMH7 has added a new free mini-campaign penned by HOMM4 (oy, these changing names!) writer Terry B. Ray. It's based on an old script written for HOMM4 long ago, and Limbic are working on a second free add-on based on another.
]]>Heroes of Might & Magic will always hold a special place in my heart for hotseat fun with childhood chums, but the series has lost its way over the years. Even the most casual of glances at Steam player reviews for Might & Magic Heroes VII [official site] will fill your eyes with complaints about bugs, crashes, poor performance, ugliness, and more. Oh dear. Still, developers Limbic Entertainment are plugging away, and it sounds like future updates will bring big fixes for some of its problems, at least - performance and prettiness especially.
]]>Heroes of Might & Magic (or Might & Magic Heroes) is one of those series that has been mediocre long enough that people who remember The Good Old Days cock an eyebrow at the irregular new releases but aren't especially interested because to be honest they'd rather have a proper new King's Bounty: Armored Princess. I may be projecting. Just a touch. I'm talking about me there.
So oh, Might & Magic Heroes VII [official site] is out today, is it? If I could figure how young people do those little face pictures, I'd do one half-smiling and a bit hopeful but quite wary and honestly thinking mostly about tea. Youths, how do you do that?
]]>The closed beta for Might & Magic: Heroes 7 [official site] begins today and we have 3000 codes to giveaway. They're first-come, first-served, and the beta runs from 26th August to 2nd September. To grab one, hop below and follow the instructions.
]]>Might & Magic Heroes VII [official site] is launching September 29th, so sayeth Ubisoft from on high. A second closed beta phase is scheduled to start August 26th in the interim period, running for about a week until September 2nd and letting players try out previously unavailable factions. These are the fan-voted factions, the Sylvan and Dungeon, the result of a voting session that began last year and perhaps a solid name for a pub.
]]>Ubisoft have a fifty page PDF dedicated to TALES OF THE TEN YEAR WAR as background reading for Might & Magic Heroes 7. It's fine and all, featuring words like "succubus" and "exile" and "decided" and "the", but I'm far more interested in their stained glass window design.
I've always liked stained glass windows as storytelling devices so I'm enjoying looking at this one, unpicking the stories as I see them without reference to the PDF at all to see how well it functions as a lore-based press release. It's also just a lovely thing to look at so you should look at it.
]]>The list of games that have caused me sleepless nights (because I didn't go to bed) or hindered my ability to get anything done (because I was playing them) is not a short list, but somewhere near the top is New World Computing's indisputable classic* Heroes of Might & Magic III.
News of an official HD re-release was therefore exciting, though my family, friends and colleagues may have felt otherwise. The original HOMM3 (because really, who types the whole thing out every time) still has buckets of charm and is perfectly playable today, but the idea of re-drawn and re-animated creature sprites plus support for higher resolutions and widescreen appealed.
]]>In my hypothetical Gaming Made Me, playing hotseat Heroes of Might & Magic would be the moment where I discovered multiplayer. HoMM 2, maybe. Then I discovered I could shoot faces in multiplayer, and scampered off in that direction. I haven't played a HoMM in yonks (and hear rough things about recent games), is the point, so I'm glad to see Ubisoft rework one of the classics. Yesterday they announced Heroes of Might & Magic III – HD Edition with a release date of January 29th, 2015.
]]>What would you want in a new Might & Magic Heroes game? (Or a new Heroes of Might & Magic, if you prefer the old name.) When a series is 19 years old, would you rather an exciting new direction, a return to the early days, more of the same, or some sort of mish-mash of two decades' best bits? Recent games in the fantasy turn-based strategy series have been a bit so-so, but Might & Magic Heroes VII sounds promising. Announced today by Ubisoft, it's coming from Limbic Entertainment, the folks who did a decent job of channelling The Good Old Days in Might & Magic X: Legacy.
]]>Might & Magic X, released last week, is a resurrection of the ancient first-person roleplaying series. It's not to be confused with strategy-RPG sister series Heroes of Might & Magic, or Crusaders of Might and Magic, or Warriors of Might and Magic, or Legends of Might and Magic, or Dark Messiah of Might & Magic, or Might & Magic: Clash Of Heroes. Despite the scary number ten suffix and an unhelpful patina of dull lore, you can go in cold on this one, no prior experience of the series required. That was the case for me, and indeed I've consciously avoided tracking what this does or doesn't do compared to the series' past and its rivals in favour of having my own, unadorned reaction to it. Said reaction is below.
]]>Update: this was resolved a day later, after four days of the block. Ubisoft told me Monday that "“We looked into this with BT Infinity and were able to solve the problem. BT Infinity customers should now be able to connect to Ubisoft’s games and services as usual.”
If you were wondering why there's been no Wot I Thinkery of the recently-released Might & Magic X: Legacy on this here website, it's because Games For Windows Live's heir apparent Uplay, Ubisoft's proprietary download store, DRM and online infrastructure, has been preventing me from logging in and playing the game. I am not alone in this - it appears anyone using major UK ISP BT Infinity to provide their broadband is blocked from accessing Uplay, and even many Ubisoft websites. This means any game which requires Uplay (including a raft of recent Assassin's Creeds, Far Cries, Tom Clancies and more) can't be played. Some of those affected have enjoyed the makeshift mercy of Uplay's offline mode; I and many others have not.
Trawling through grumble-filled support forums reveals that Ubisoft have blamed BT (though subsequently deleted the tweet in which they did so), BT have blamed Ubisoft, no-one really knows what's going on and a fix could be any amount of time in arriving.
]]>January: too cold, too dark, too long, to purposeless, altogether too Janny. How shall we light our darkest hour? Videogames, of course. One of the wee blighters that shall attempt to warm our chilled cockles in the earliest days of 2014 is Might & Magic X: Legacy, which resumes the first-person RPG series after an 11 year snooze. After a period of 'open development', it goes to full release on the 23rd.
]]>UPDATE: Helps if you set the trailer live, eh John?
Seemingly exclusive to Rock, Paper, Shotgun, there's a new trailer of Might & Magic X: Legacy game footage below. The classic series returns after an eleven year hiatus, and the first act of it will be available to early-buyers on Monday. Yes, Monday! Blimey, that snuck up from nowhere.
]]>Limbic Entertainment, who are building the handsome new Might & Magic game for Ubisoft, have just announced the start of "Open Dev" for the game. But what does this cryptic phrase mean? Which part of the current community-infused, early-access, crowdy gaming zeitgeist are they actually riffing off here? Well, it's... different. They are allowing us to vote on various aspects of how they develop the game overall. For example, right now you can vote on how a dungeon gets made. The explain: "This week we’ll start with the general concept. The vote will be open until next Tuesday. After you have decided for one general concept, we will go into detail. So stay tuned for the dungeon fine tuning!"
Weird. Is it a gimmick? Time will tell, I suppose. They've detailed all this a bit more in a video, which you can see below.
]]>Oh gosh, delivering bad news is always so difficult. I never know how to soften the blow. Good news first? No, no, that never works. Oh, I know: everything that's ever mattered to you will be gone one day and also Might and Magic Heroes VI has been nigh-unplayable for more than 24 hours. Phew, much better. The rather disturbingly lengthy period of downtime (especially given that the base game's been out for ages) seems to have kicked off around the recent release of the turn-based strategy's new Shades of Darkness expansion. Players have been reporting mountains of issues ever since.
]]>Shades of Darkness is a standalone expansion for Heroes of Might & Magic: Heroes VI, originally due at the end of this month but recently delayed until May 3, by which point you'll have completely forgotten about all of the delicious lore contained in the development diary below. It's extraordinary stuff and quite possibly the most dramatic video of its type in existence. If the repeated use of an angry minotaur's axe-blows as a sort of punctuation doesn't get your blood pumping then the earnest enunciation of the finer points of Dark Elf history surely will: "The Mother of Trees, Brythigga, sacred to the elves and home of the royal dwelling was treacherously burned to the ground."
The good thing about always online DRM is, well, nothing. The problem with always online DRM is, well, everything. Perhaps the silver lining to the cloud that is Ubisoft's UPlay system - the infrastructure for its DRM, DLC and other faintly sinister words which begin with D - being offline for a large chunk of the weekend is that it might cause important people to worry, no matter what their paranoid personal philosophy of IP protection might be, that singleplayer games having a total dependency on remote servers is inescapably flawed in a practical sense.
]]>With Ubisoft's recent announcement that Rayman: Origin's splendid arrival on PC will have the barest DRM for the download version (a single activation - a pointless waste of everyone's time still, of course) and the retail version having none at all (although Ubi have yet to get back to me over whether it will work without the disc in the drive), it makes you wonder if the company is beginning to see the light. With other recent games having only required a single activation, there does seem to be a movement away from their moronic 'always on' system. A system that's proving its idiocy next week, when Ubisoft take their servers down for an indefinite period, meaning any games using it will cease working.
]]>I've spent the last week, on and off, peering at the latest in the Heroes of Might and Magic series. These are some words that express how I feel about this videogame. Disclaimer, I guess: I don’t think I’ve ever played a Heroes of Might & Magic game before, somehow. Maybe a demo in the 90s? I dunno. There you go, anyway: I am writing this from a position of ignorance. Hello, yes, ignorant, that’s me. Hence, I must address you as if you, too, were ignorant regarding this series. You IGNORAMUS, don’t you know ANYTHING?
Might and Magic: Heroes VI, irritatingly and pointlessly renamed from the handy HoMM title the series has borne for years (that much I do know already), is a turn-based strategy / roleplaying hybrid. You raise an army and upgrade the heroes that lead it, you seize towns and resources from across a wide, explorable map, and you complete what could loosely be called quests but really are but one, usually mandatory facet of the real quest - for more money, more resources and more experience points.
]]>Lists! Two of 'em, in fact. But what do these lists do? They compare the top-ten selling PC games of last week on Steam with the top-ten selling PC games of last week at UK retail. What could we learn from them? Nothing, probably. Apart from which game companies became slightly richer over the last few days. Well done, those companies.
]]>The highly anticipated (by me) Might and Magic Heroes VI is out October 11th and, look here, a new trailer has emerged. I was hoping it'd show some detail about the blood and tears reputation system, which might shake up the turn-based gathering and killing, but instead it's mostly earnest humanoids spouting gubbins like: "You have served your emperor and your dragon." I'm going to refer to it as HOMM VI, in keeping with tradition, since the new topsy-turvy title shortens to MAMH. HOMM is a happy if somewhat placid noise, resplendently conjuring mountaintop monasteries and lotus-drenched pools by which archers train in the midday sun. MAMH is how certain northern tribes refer to their mothers. Watch this and decide which is more fitting.
]]>Ah yes, that nagging feeling at the base of my skull was there for a reason: there was a demo of Might & Magic Heroes VI released this weekend. A portly 4.24gb download (some 22,000 Peggles, if my maths be remembered correctly) contains three campaign maps from the full game, and therefore a decent chunk of game time.
]]>Here's a Might & Magic two-news-stories-for-one for you. Below we have the latest trailer for Might IV Heroes Of & Magic or whatever it's called this time. But then there's a surprise - the formerly console-only Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes is now making its way to PC next month. There are details about that below as well.
]]>The series formerly known as Heroes of Might & Magic returns, with a confusingly rearranged name, to a post-King's Bounty landscape. Without access to publishers' long and tedious spreadsheets, I of course couldn't begin to guess whether 1C's good-natured, wilfully silly turn-based strategy/semi-roleplaying game presents any kind of financial threat to HoMM. KB's certainly made hay during HoMM's six-year absence, however. Now daddy's coming back for his crown - but what has he learned? I've been tinkering with some preview code to find out.
]]>QUESTION: Steam claims you can "play the beta now" but it LIES. Is it US only or something?
The Might & Magic series is twenty-five years old. That is a fact that makes me as Old As Time. To celebrate the series' agedness Ubisoft (for they own the name these days) have put out a trailer, which you can see below. There's also word that the Might & Magic Heroes 6 beta kicks off this week. It doesn't look like you can still get a beta key, but that might change. Ooh, I'll poke Ubi and see if we can get some.
]]>The release date of Might & Magic: Heroes VI (much like Total War: Shogun 2, the publisher has decided on a titular reversal) has been confirmed as June 21st. Why be excited about Heroes VI? Good question. The answer is that the arrival of the King's Bounty series would appear to have woken up the Heroes developers like a hot fork to the unmentionables. You can see some of this yourself in the videos below, but 50% of the game's units will be new to the series, it'll have a greater emphasis on RPG elements, there'll be four unique classes for your heroes to evolve into, it'll have bosses and unique levels (the game's most blatant nod to King's Bounty), the art's looking sumptuous and more. Come have a look.
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