Might and Magic The Might and Magic Discussion Thread

The fake quest is clever but I wonder how many people it drove insane trying to scour every square of the game to find it. It's definitely something that would never be done today.

 

I did it back then I just thought that its bugged and accepted it like that before internet.

 

Might & Magic I
I was playing this using Grid Cartographer, but I gave Where Are We a try and really like the quality of life features (WAW also supports the entire series 1-5)... so I decided to just take my current party and re-explore the maps I've already explored to "catch up" in Where Are We. This also gives me the opportunity to see if I missed anything of note.

It's pretty amazing how quick navigation, combat... well, everything is, compared with Pool of Radiance (which I have been also playing recently using Gold Box Companion). POR is godly, but you do have to set aside a chunk of time to accomplish much of anything in that game.

 

More MM1 spoilaz

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MY NAME IS SHELTEM

That was fun, even though I already knew the answer.

 

I will never catch up to Strange Fellow ;_;

I've finally caught up mapping all the stuff I already mapped, this time in Where Are We (I say finally, but M&M is so fast that it probably only took an hour or so total to get back on track). I ended up missing a secret door in the wilderness that led to a one-way corridor of sorts full of fixed encounters, culminating is a difficult fixed encounter. I beat it once, got a treasure with a silver key in it, but then died getting out of that corridor. Next attempt was even worse, so I put this aside for now.

Instead I started exploring more of the wilderness, and suddenly realized I had never gone back to that cave in C-2 with the acid pools. Now that I have avg party level of 8, this was pretty easy, so I definitely should have done it much earlier. I got a key for my troubles, but don't know where to use it yet, so I'll go back to exploring wilderness areas I think. Good times!

 

Might & Magic X
I was dreading Tomb of a Thousand Terrors, due to a mixture of getting pretty bored with the combat in this game plus a misconception that it was the final dungeon and would be so devious that it would take hours to clear. I just cleared it, and it was waaaaaaay smaller and easier that I thought, so now I regret putting it off. I just got a "point of no return" message, so I think I am finally at the end of the game.

 

newtmonkey the guards are tougher than the monsters inside, not sure i finished it (probably not) but i tried it multiple times until i could kill the two "wraith" or something guarding it, it was tough as hell and once inside, wasn't a piece of cake either.

I'm probably never going to play M&M X again, unless there is some mods improving it.

 

good thing about mmx is that no dungeon felt too long. Or combat encounter trashy

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save for area you are close to enter... you will fight same group of enemies quite often...

 

That was the worst part of the game. All the encounters were the same level of difficulty thus making them all the same tedious shit. Trash fights are needed so you could meet some boss that makes you say "LoL that encounter was really fun and hard!".

 

mods for Ubisoft games? On Unity engine on top of that (which is not that famous for modding support)?
And you want to play that crap again? I rather replay M&M IX that this.

But can confirm that final duneon was massive slog fest, had to take a (coffee) breaks, pity that game went downhill the further you go with progress.

 

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Apparently, I can't get back into the soul maze, as the real Alamar is restored to the throne. He tells me to seek the Inner Sanctum. So that's nice, I guess. He also tells me to live long and prosper.
I noticed that the maze extended beyond just the one 16x16 sector, but I didn't explore past it. Was there anything of note in the other sectors? Were there even other sectors, or did stepping across the edges just teleport me to a different location of the sector I was in?
Also, your comment doesn't make sense to me Sceptic:

What do you need Etherealize for?

 

It's just a good old fashioned wrap around map.

 

Not directly Might and Magic related but I found a video of Jon Van Caneghem promoting his Creature Quest game on a Twitch streamer's show from last year. It's kind of a mess because there is very little chemistry between the streamer and JVC, the streamer doesn't really seem into it and isn't good at faking the enthusiasm you need to promote something like this, and JVC himself isn't doing a great job of selling his own game. And at one point the streamer accidentally exposes the questions that he is supposed to ask JVC during the stream. LUL

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/130150079

If you do want to see a good interview with JVC, he was interviewed by Matt Barton on Matt Chat a while back.

 

What the hell, 3, 6 and 8 hours videos, seems very amateurish at best.
Why* would JVC be interviewed by that guy, is he his nephew or something ?

Also, the game seems terrible, click on the "creatures" attacks buttons, wait for the timer, click again ... Yeah, another android game for the dumb masses ...

(*) Thinking of it, i might have answered my own question ...

 

Might & Magic X finally finished!

I must shamefully admit that this is the first M&M game I have played to the end ;_;

This was a roller coaster of emotions. I loved it at first—that first town and surrounding area, though ultimately linear, leaves a great first impression with colorful graphics, tons of stuff you can't afford yet, and the promise of a massive world to explore. I'd say the first few hours are one of the high points of the game.

The second area of the game is tedious bullshit. The game appears to really open up, but you quickly learn that the only optional stuff are the puzzle caves and "miniboss" monster caves. You have some freedom to explore, but this area in particular is HEAVILY gated by fixed encounters. Going too much out of your way is basically a death sentence.

HOWEVER, once you start getting the blessings the world truly does open up, providing you with multiple dungeons to conquer as you see fit. This is where you'll find some truly impressive equipment, and this part of the game (second half of Act 2/first half of Act 3) is by and far the best part of the game.

Sadly, the last part of the game is pretty lame—especially the final stretch of dungeons that takes up the last, I dunno, 5 hours of the game. The dungeons are boring with only 2-3 different enemies in each, you're at a level where you've already maxed all the skills you care about, and all the equipment you get in these dungeons is garbage. Just keep your Celestial Armor on and mash that attack button, though, and you'll get through just fine.

The final battle, though, is extremely tedious.

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The final battle takes over a bunch of bridges connecting islands and rooms in some cavern. Stepping on a bridge changes the game into battle mode, as there is a chance that the final boss will spawn near/next to you every few steps. The goal is to go from island/room to island/room to fight dozens of enemies to collect doodads, which you then use on some altar to kill the boss.

The first few doodads are not bad. The last couple are in areas where the battles start while you are still on bridge squares, which means you have to deal with as many as 20 powerful enemies while the boss continues to spawn to attack you every few rounds.

Unless you have strong poison resistance equipment (in a game where poison is merely annoying in the first couple of hours, then never seen again until now), you need to keep Regeneration buff on at all times, but the spell lasts only three turns/steps.

Luckily, there is apparently an alternate way to kill the boss, cuz that's how I finished it. The boss runs away and regenerates if you do a certain amount of damage to his health in the first round, but I got lucky once and did just under that amount the first round, then killed him the second lol.

At the end, you get some ending slides that change based on the choices you made during the main quest. That was pretty cool, except the story/characters in this game are beyond boring, so I could barely remember who any of these people are.

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My first attempt through this game left me stuck 1/3rd the way through because I built a garbage party cuz I had no idea what was useful or not. In that sense, I guess the game is old school. On the other hand, if you gimp your party there is really nothing you can do about it but start over, due to fixed encounters/experience and inability to remove/add characters to your party.

This attempt, I went with a Blade Dancer dual wielding swords (with most points spent on perception), Scout dual wielding axes (might pumped), and two Free Mages each focusing on different magic schools (with magic pumped), and didn't have any trouble at all until the final battle.

There's bonus stuff to do after, but I think I'm done with this one. I enjoyed it enough to complete it (finally) and would recommend it to anyone as a sort of light blobber that still plays like a blobber. It's got a lot of problems and I think gated fixed encounters have no place in a true open world blobber, but I would have liked to have seen what M&MXI might have looked like from these guys.

 

Congratulations

Although you're close to heresy :

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Crag Hack !

 

Except him!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Went out like a true bro in the end ;_;

 

I will continue to play Might & Magic 1 (eventually I would like to finish the whole series), but now I am itching to play Might & Magic 6 XDXDXD

 

They aren't related. JVC's company paid the streamer for the appearance. He is a popular streamer so it's like paying a popular TV channel to have an ad appear on it. And the reason the other videos are 6 or 8 hours is becasue that's how long streamers broadcast for. Usually it's just them playing a videogame and talking to people in the chat.

JVC and LB are a tale of two washed up devs: JVC makes a good faith attempt at something derivative and boring. And LB makes a bad faith attempt at something ambitious and interesting.

 

THIS GAME IS SO FUCKING AWESOME


Love the digitized portraits, love the goofy sound effects all over the place, love the music.

More importantly, this game totally sucks you into its world. For an RPG released in 1998, it is so easy to just jump in and play. I'm not even using the greyface patch, and it's fine.

It's cheesy and the combat is not great by any stretch of the imagination, but wow. Everything just sticks in your mind, like visiting a real place. I can't remember any of the dungeons from M&MX even 10 mins after completing them or where anything is in those fucking garbage towns (even with automap that I painstakingly noted every single shop), but after just an hour or two of playing M&M6 I've got New Sorpigal and Castle Ironfist committed to memory. I think a big part of that is that M&M6 lays its town areas out in a way that makes sense. No, I don't remember where the expert bodybuilding trainer is EXACTLY in Castle Ironfist, but I know he's probably in that one area of that town with a bunch of other trainers.

Compare that with M&MX, where trainers are located in temples, shacks, dotted all over the map. I should have brought that up in my minireview up there: the towns in M&MX SUCK ASS. All the useful stuff is spread out all over the map, and it's never a straight line to the shopping district in any town in that game. The inn is always located in one place, the shops all over the map, the spell shop off in the corner, and then trainers all the fuck over the map. It turned getting out of a dungeon and leveling up from something to rejoice, into something to dread.

[edit]
Decline rating from my shadowbro, not too manly to admit it hurts
[edit2]
unless it is decline rating for M&MX, then I'm back in action

 

Menu towns are very underrated.

 

Sadly, that wasn't a design decision they carried forward to M&M 7, but at least you have the Arcomage mini-game to look forward to.

 

then you arrive to free haven and be like: i know that x trainer is SOMEWHERE.
And you scout area you expected it to be.
And then you scout whole city and dont find it.
And then you scout again, this time deploying very thorough method that wont let you skip any building(back door entrance included)

 

Perhaps M&MX was the true successor after all

 

Finding trainers in M&M 6 / 7 was annoying alright but at least, you could fly or cut through town, in MMX, they're designed as fucking mazes and you can't even set warp point wherever you want as you have only one to get back to your dungeon and of course, you can't fly.

I really don't get how someone would think it's fun to get through a town maze just to find a shop.

MMX was so close to be a good Might & Magic game, the little things like this killed it.
You give me no loading time, 2 spirit beacon per skill mastery and you already cut the most annoying parts.

I really think graphic whores are killing the RPG/blobbers, devs pushing to get up to date graphics in fancy engines they don't master releasing buggy games with loading time, that was a fucking retarded CD consoles thing and now, you can't play a modern RPG without it.

Indie devs are our only hope, i don't believe the industry is going to release any decent RPG anymore, focusing on what matters.