Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era Announced for 2025
news.ubisoft.com
news.ubisoft.com
It's still early, and the game might turn out great. I think the visuals look promising. But even if Olden Era flops good things might come of it. This genre of game was left for dead ages ago, and a revival of the genre is a good thing for sure. There are two generations of gamers who have never played the originals from the previous millennium, even though the games have held up incredibly well. Revived interest in these games might also encourage indie developers to take a stab at it.
The spells system main difference is to reduce randomness, which again seems like an improvement.
So the area where MORE seems to be happening is in the skill tree section (and the new Faction Law system). I guess that's worth criticizing, but then again if you don't make some new stuff, why bother releasing a new game and not just a HoMM3 reforged version?
If you want to make a game that's better than HOMM3 in some meaningful ways I think you have to start with a much simpler game that shares some of the game mechanics. That means taking features out. Then you build on top of that to take the game in a different direction. If you take HOMM3 as a starting point you end up adding the features that were intentionally left out 25 years ago.
The later HOMM games DID take them in different directions- some of which are amazing on their own, to be fair - but being saddled with the history of HOMM3 held it back, in my opinion. Judged on their own they’re interesting and fun, but as “HOMM3 but better” they fall short.
Learning the original backstory for HOMM3 is eye opening - and one of the biggest rifts in the community is if the original vision is “good” or if what they shipped is “better” - I’ll admit to being in the latter camp, I think.
The Cove is acceptable but feels (to me) like an even more unbalanced version of Conflux - fun to play as not so much against.
I just don’t know if the sci-fi/ Factory town is something I can ever really get strongly behind. And this is from someone who has no problem with tech mods (GregTech New Horizons!) in Minecraft.
If you want to watch just a bit go on twitch. There is often at least one or two HOTA matches going.
You can learn a lot about the game from watching, and it'll improve your play, but it's not at all like a comp-stomp.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMiGHcM6dlw&list=PLnz-Oj9Xf0...
Also HOMM3 evolved over 25 years is arguably just HOTA
This game still has very active pro-scene
Vastly different spell strength plus random spells in mage guilds sucks. Even highly varied random starting artifacts is bad. Utterly useless skills like Diplomacy. There are small and aggravating quality of life issues like the autopathing taking more movement than manually doing things because of the way diagonals work.
I also consider the really abusable monster AI to be a detriment, though some people like this as it lets you access powerful resources "too early."
Thats a feature! It allows skilled players to outsmart the game. Speed up and snowball opponents.
HOMM3 is all about getting to the point where it feels like you are cheating.
Like stack of upgraded vampires, max earth magic and resurect, etc.
That's what made that game so much fun.
The wildly varying hero starting strengths weren’t as fun but I did enjoy how picking up on that taught the game mechanics. I remember HOMM mechanics details better than nearly any series.
Now I have maybe 15 minutes a week.
Big pet peeve also: A Heroes game without a hex grid battle field just feels wrong. Square logic is easier, but come on, get good developers and look at something like https://www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons/ and figure out the logic. It is not magic.
Open-source engine for Heroes of Might and Magic III :
It is a community developed HOMAM3 extension pack, that is being enhanced and has, IMO, many new features while being fully compatible with the game spirit. And they fixed a ton of UI pain points. Coming with a very powerful map editor means that there are community created maps (up to "giant size" -- two steps larger than extra large) that take weeks of challenging play time to conquer.
Pair that with a full HOMAM3 version from "good old games" for about $10 and you will have an unlimited play, no registration, no licensing classic, valid forever. My 2c.
Those computers and disks were long gone, but 3 years ago I found it on GOG, looked up some online maps, found HotA expansion and we are now playing that a couple of hours a week with my wife after work.
If someone told me that a few years ago I would laugh. The game does have a staying appeal.
It’s turn based so there’s no real world time urgency, only one person is actually “doing” anything at a time, so the others can lounge around and talk, and the game is just exceptionally polished (and even balanced with a few tiny house rules like no infinite ball of skeletons).
The addons that stay true to the spirit make it even better.
FAIR WARNING: the online versus play that still is quite active is an entirely different game; you must watch enough to learn what a “break” is and how the online etiquette goes. It’s very interesting because it’s the exact opposite of the favorite strategy of turtling until unstoppable.
Since then I am very cautious when it comes to any new Heroes games. If Ubisoft has its hands in it, I would recommend everyone to first check whether what they deliver is actually working. Do not buy until proven to work. Otherwise they might pull a fraud you.
Ugh. Shut up Ubisoft. No, you’re not going to have meaningful non linear choices in a game like this.
I have a jaded sort of opinion that games like HOMM 2/3 and civ 2 and aoe 2 were really popular at the time because multiplayer was mostly about low skill LAN matches with your friends. On some level the presence of online multiplayer, discussion boards that layout meta ideas, and more common balance patches make strategy games much less fun. Because most people don’t really want to play them proficiently. They want to roll the dice and experiment and try and get an advantage and then give up and restart before finishing 2/3 of the game when the other player starts to snowball.
Also, I really enjoyed those games as single player as well.
Civ is still very popular. RTS has died out, which is kind of sad. I’m not sure exactly why, I think we can make various speculations but it seems it just doesn’t have a proper niche anymore.
These games are just not great for multiplayer. The gameplay of effective, competitive multiplayer is the opposite of what people enjoyed. Grinding out a few seconds off of your aoe 2 feudal age research time sucks. But it’s what matters.
Orienting on serious multiplayer sucks but casual is hard to encourage
Competitive RTS and variants has always been much different than the average player plodding along - my StarCraft games were closer to comp stomps or tower defense than anything featured online. And the tower defense genre covers that more completely for many people.
After that, I saw clearly, how pointless it is, when you don't get important spells like that. But then playing against 6 bots on "king" or similar in a team became a great fun. Oh how they cheat ... or are "lucky". I swear, every single time I play the swamp folk, the computer players end up having more wyverns then I have, because they get all the neutral buildings around their castles. Infuriating!
That was always one of the balance problems; the spells are either insanely powerful or absolutely useless. Summons boat
We'd sometimes meet up and try to take turns to beat a particularly difficult mission, but by the time anyone had a second (imagine!) computer in their house, broadband Internet was getting widespread. My first ever StarCraft LAN was in 2009, IIRC.
I've done both thank you.
In high school I was living very close to the school and me and a group of friends gathered at my PC to play Worms after school and sometimes during school. HoMM took longer so needed more organization.
We’d be deciding to play Action Quake together, or maybe StarCraft or Tiberian Sun/Red Alert, or watch someone play Half Life, or HOMM3 hot seat.
The last would often win out if it was more of a chill night.
I hope to be wrong, and I'll probably give it a chance, but I definitely have no expectations regarding the games.
And this is without taking into account if the game will be any good or not.
[0] http://www.heroesofmightandmagic.com/heroes3ab/forgetown.sht...