A few days ago, Ubisoft announced Might & Magic X: Legacy, and the name is appropos, as the feel, strategy and style of the game harkens back to 1986 with scintillatingly retro gameplay. In short, the game is the original Might & Magic with more modern bells and whistles.​

For one, towns are once again static pictures of people at the location which have basic dialog options. Clicking on, say, the local alchemist brings up a rumor she heard (more or less a tooltip in the game I played), while another option opened up a basic trade screen for potions.​

Leaving the town places the player on what is essentially a giant square-grid map in which players move and turn step by step through the wilderness. If the player get too close to enemies, they become locked in combat.​

From there, the player's four man party can engage the enemy or enemies with melee or ranged combat, cast spells, use items or take a defensive stance. Combat is simple unless multiple enemy types are in combat, when it becomes important to close in quickly to prevent ranged units from allowing melee units to move in and engage.​

Each character has different levels of multipfale skills, from a range of 0 to 25. When characters level, the player is given a few skill points to distribute amongst the skills. Levels range from unskilled to grandmaster. Do you add some points to the Block skill for your heavy melee guy, or do you invest more in his blunt weapon skills? The characters also have a very basic paper doll system for equipping items, as well as a shared inventory.​

Finally, the graphics in the build were functional, and while it may be that the game's visuals will get more polish (one of the death animations is a little over the top and comical), it's unlikely to be on the level of The Elder Scrolls - nor is it aiming to be.​

Might & Magic X: Legacy is supremely faithful to the original 1986 game, gleefully eschewing such modern standard gameplay mechanics as real-time 3D rendering. Instead it harkens back to the days when roleplaying games were as much about tactical strategy as it was about telling a story. Nostalgic gamers will drown themselves in its simple-yet-complex gameplay, and perhaps with the comeback of "retraux" gaming, young gamers may enjoy its style without being turned off by blocky characters.​

I played the demo at PAX yesterday and talked to the lead dev. Heres the info I garnered:

• Plays more like the pre-mandate of heaven games with a grid style movement system instead of free roam.
• there are 12 classes (didn't tell me what they were) and then "advanced" classes for each of them. I suppose this is like the system in 6-7-8 where you do a quest to promote from a Knight to a Champion or whatever.
• there will be 23 dungeons.
• aiming for september release
• there is no training. When you level up you just get your skill points then and there.
• You still will level your skills and have to train to expert, master, and grand master. Expert and master you just go find the trainer and pay gold when you have the necessary skill points, and for grandmaster there will be a quest.
• It will be totally non-linear after the initial area where it teaches you how to play. Kind of like 7, where you were confined to the island until you completed the first quest.
• In the demo you never had more than 2-3 monsters at a time. I asked if this is representative of the whole game, and he said "it depends on the level. Sometimes you will be surrounded, sometimes it is just a few more powerful enemies." Was kind of vague.
• The movement is like Grimrock, but Grimrock was still a real time game. This is turn based 100% of the time, which imo makes the combat much more interesting.
• There is a skill bar, but its not like WoW or other MMOs where you have special attacks... the abilities that were on the skill bar were just melee attack, ranged attack, defend (idk what this did, never used it), and then you can put spells and potions on there too.
• I looked but didn't see any "self" magics in the skill trees of the characters I had, but I didn't pay attention to what classes I had in my party. its possible I just didn't have a character who could learn them.
• No blasters / sci-fi elements.
• There will be hirelings. You can have two in your party at once. They don't fight with you, just provide your party with a bonus. For a price of course.

[...] Yup, my impressions were that its going to be a pretty good game. The graphics look pretty nice, and it "feels" like might & magic. The main thing I'm concerned about is the difficulty. I never felt like I was in any real danger during the demo, although they did tell me my party was intentionally overpowered for this area, so it could be fine in the final game.​