HoMM VII

[DrPraetor]

Anyone playing it? Is it any good?

Based on the previews I saw, it did not seem that Ubisoft was hip to the things which made HoMM VI a visually-stunning slow motion (excruciatingly dull, slow motion) train-wreck of a game.

But I really liked HoMM V (I come down squarely in the V > III camp, which is probably not the consensus on this forum), so maybe the curse of the even-numbered HoMM games continues, and VII will be good again?

[Leress]

Here is a review by TotalBiscuit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74GRowG4SSc

[Username17]

Total Biscuit misses a bunch of points. He didn't have a problem with the Heroes VI lack of resource differentiation for example, which is pretty weird considering that Heroes VI had no meaningful choices at all in building your cities or recruiting your army. But his core declarations about Heroes VII seem pretty spot on:

• Heroes VII has no reason to exist.
• Heroes VII is obviously unfinished, not merely unpolished.
• Heroes VII eschews innovation without also being particularly heavily designed.
• There is very little functionality.
• The game lacks any kind of explanation for what the hell is going on with the story or the game and is nigh impenetrable to people who aren't deeply familiar with several games in the series.
• There is very little content and the content they have isn't especially good looking.

Now he does point out that the Heroes fanbase is pretty rabid and conservative and all that. But the flip side of that is that they are very fogiving if you give them what they want. This is a fanbase that would be perfectly willing to accept a game with no map animations in 2015. What they aren't happy to accept is being told that factions are getting cut. I don't understand why that's a thing that is fucking happening at all. It's Heroes of Might and Magic, factions aren't hard to design. You could write up a full unit roster for twenty factions in an afternoon. It simply doesn't make sense to deliver a Heroes title with only 6 factions in it. That's ridiculous.

-Username17

[karpik777]

What they aren't happy to accept is being told that factions are getting cut. I don't understand why that's a thing that is fucking happening at all. It's Heroes of Might and Magic, factions aren't hard to design.

The reason is trivial: money. Designing a faction is easy, but creating the models for all of the units, the town, the heroes etc. raises costs. And Ubi doesn't want to spend more than the bare minimum they need. Of course that helps the game about as much as the decision to make MMX follow in the footsteps of the first Might and Magic games and not the - far more popular - later titles. A decision that basically ended the RPG line, since Legacy didn't bring in enough money for anyone to consider working on anything that would belong to said line.

[Username17]

What they aren't happy to accept is being told that factions are getting cut. I don't understand why that's a thing that is fucking happening at all. It's Heroes of Might and Magic, factions aren't hard to design.

The reason is trivial: money. Designing a faction is easy, but creating the models for all of the units, the town, the heroes etc. raises costs. And Ubi doesn't want to spend more than the bare minimum they need. Of course that helps the game about as much as the decision to make MMX follow in the footsteps of the first Might and Magic games and not the - far more popular - later titles. A decision that basically ended the RPG line, since Legacy didn't bring in enough money for anyone to consider working on anything that would belong to said line.

I understand all that, but it's hard for me to believe that adding a faction really raises costs all that much. Yes, if you want each unit to have their own easter egg idle animation dance or whatever the fuck, the rabbit hole can get pretty deep. But Heroes players don't really care all that much about those things. The thing in Heroes VI where every so often the centaur would play its bow like a violin and make some music happen was cool, but I don't think it made or broke the game for anyone.

There are quite simply a lot of places you can cut corners. Players of the series would seriously accept graphics as simple as King's Bounty Darkside. It wouldn't even be a problem. And not to put too fine a point on it, but that game is made on the cheap by a group of low budget Russians and it still manages to have what are technically a dozen factions of troops in them (even if a good three of those factions are just palette swap "dark" versions of Elves, Dwarves, and Castle Humans). And all of those factions have more units in them than a Heroes VII faction has (except the bandit/pirate group which has the same number). And they don't have less special abilities per unit.

You could seriously do the lineup for a Heroes faction is less than a minute. And fleshing out what unit levels and special abilities each unit had could be done in less than an hour. And defining their numeric stat lines could be done in less than four hours. The cold hard reality is that the entire faction design process from setting heroic skill progressions to defining all the buildings to writing down every game mechanically relevant datum about every unit is a single day's for for one designer. Every faction that has ever appeared in any edition of the game could be fully developed by a team of one fucking guy in two and a half weeks.

Which brings us down to the art. Yes, getting art in there is much more time consuming than setting the variables and writing the word "basilisk" down. But we are also demonstrably willing to accept cities that are not 3d spinning around affairs. They could just be fucking sprites like in Heroes III and people would be OK with that. There are people who pine for 3d cities, but we aren't getting them and all that's left is the hope that the cities fucking look OK. And they can look OK pretty damn easily. You just need to have an image file with before and after versions for each building.

It just isn't very hard. Playtesting this shit is hard, because games go a long time. Fuck, I used to work as a playtester for 3DO and did some playtesting for Heroes 3, I know what a monstrous amount of work that is. But actually making the material people want is child's play. Absolutely all of it could be up in a month even with a small team.

-Username17

[talozin]

Probably the more accurate explanation is not "we can't afford to add more factions", but something on the order of "we could add more factions, but then we wouldn't be able to sell as much DLC."