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Tags: 3DO; Jon Van Caneghem; Might and Magic VI: The Mandate of Heaven; New World Computing; The Digital Antiquarian
https://www.filfre.net/2025/02/the-crpg-renaissance-part-2-might-and-magic-vi/
https://www.filfre.net/2025/02/the-crpg-renaissance-part-2-might-and-magic-vi/
It’s weirdly freeing to play a game that so plainly answers only to the dictates of fun. Might and Magic VI is a monument to excess sufficient to make a Saudi prince blanch. Whenever I think about it, I remember Gary Gygax’s stern admonition against just this sort of thing in the first-edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide, that staple work of literature of my generation’s nerdy youth.
Might and Magic VI is the perfect riposte for old Gary’s po-faced pronouncements. It lets you advance your characters to level 90 and beyond, by which time they pretty much are gods, able to teleport instantly from one side of a continent to the other and to cover shorter distances by flying high above the mountaintops, raining fiery death from the heavens upon any poor earthbound creatures who happen to be visible below. And you know what? It’s not boring at all. It’s actually kind of awesome. Like Diablo, Might and Magic VI zeroes in relentlessly on the lizard-brain appeal of its genre. We all like to watch the numbers associated with our characters go up and then go up some more, like to know that we’re more formidable today than we were yesterday. (If only real life worked like that…)
The world in which this progress narrative takes place may not be terribly believable even as fantasy goes, but it’s appropriately sprawling. The lovely, throwback cloth map that came in the original box contains no fewer than fourteen discrete regions that you can visit, each of them dauntingly large, full of towns and castles and roaming creatures and hidden and not-so-hidden curiosities, among them the entrances to multiple dungeons that are sometimes shockingly huge in themselves. Although I’m sure some of our modern DLC-fueled monstrosities have far surpassed it in size by now, Might and Magic VI might just be the biggest single CRPG that yours truly has ever played from start to finish.
The game was able to hold my interest for the 100 hours or more I spent with it by giving me so darn much to do. Every town has at least a few quests to see through. Sometimes these are related to the main story line, but more often they’re standalone,. Each of the character classes can evolve into two more advanced incarnations of itself; an archer, for example, can become a “battle mage” and then a “warrior mage.” Doing so entails reaching a certain level and meeting other statistical requirements, then hunting down the necessary trainer and completing a quest for him or her. Your characters’ more granular skills, which encompass the expected schools of magic and types of weaponry alongside miscellaneous talents ranging from “Bodybuilding” to “Repair Item,” also require trainers in order to be advanced to “Expert” and then “Master” status. There’s always something to do, some goal to pursue, whether it’s provided by the game or one you made up for yourself: collect every single spell; pray at every shrine during the one month of the year when you get something out of it. Because there’s no complex plot whose own needs have to act as a check on your wanderings, it’s always you rather than the game who gets to decide what you do next. This world is truly your oyster — as long as you’re tough enough to take on the many and varied monsters that infest every corner of it that you enter, that is.
The toy-box quality of Might and Magic VI lets it get away with things that less sanguine, more self-serious peers would get dinged for. The jank in the engine — and make no mistake, there’s a lot of jank here — feels more like a feature than a bug when, say, you find just the right angle to stand in a doorway, the one that lets you whale away on a group of monsters while they for some reason can’t hit you. Fairly early in my play-through, I found myself in a sewer filled with living oozes that were impervious to weaponry and shot blobs of slime that were corrosive to armor. The sensible thing to do would have been to go away and come back later. Instead of being sensible, I found a stairway from whose top I could throw my one effective spell at the oozes while they were unable to hit me at all. I spent several evenings luring oozes from all over the sewer back to that killing floor, harvesting huge quantities of experience points from them. Sure, it was kind of tedious, but it was kind of great at the same time. Finding exploits like this — exploits that would undermine a less gonzo, more finely calibrated game — is just another part of the fun of Might and Magic VI. Everyone who’s ever played it seems to come away with her own list of favorite ways to break it.
I’m not even all that bothered that the game feels a little bit unfinished. As you play, you’ll probably find yourself exploring Enroth in an eastward to westward direction, which is all too clearly also the direction in which New World built their world. The last couple of regions you’re likely to visit, along the western edge of the map, are deserts filled with hordes of deadly dragons and not much else. It’s plain as day that New World was running out of gas by the time they got this far. But, in light of all they had already put into their world by this point, it’s hard to begrudge them the threadbare westerly regions too much. I’m well aware that I’m not usually so kind toward such failures to stick the landing; this is the place where I usually start muttering about the need for a work to be complete in an “Aristotelian sense” and all the rest. Never fear; we’ll doubtless return to such pretensions in future articles. But in the case of a joyously goofy, loosey-goosey epic like Might and Magic VI… well, how much more of it do you really want? It’s just not a game to which Aristotelian symmetries apply.
Might and Magic VI was released on April 30, 1998. This places it at almost the exact midpoint between Fallout, that first exemplar of a new breed of CRPGs in the offing, and the CRPGS that Interplay would publish near the end of 1998, which would serve to cement and consolidate Fallout’s innovations. For its part, Might and Magic VI can be seen as a bridge between the old ways and the new. In spirit, it’s defiantly old-school. Yet there are enough new features and conveniences — including not just the free-scrolling movement and optional real-time combat, but also such niceties as a quest log, a superb auto-map, and a raft of other information-management functions — to mark it out as a product of 1998 rather than 1988 or even 1993. It sold 125,000 copies in the United States alone, enough to justify Jon Van Canegham’s risky decision to take a chance on it in the midst of the driest period of the CRPG drought. And its success was well deserved. Few latter-day installments of any series have done as good a job of ratcheting up their accessibility whilst retaining the essence of what made their predecessors popular.
Many campaigns are little more than a joke, something that better Dungeon Masters jape at and ridicule — rightly so on the surface — because of the foolishness of player characters with astronomically high levels of experience and no real playing skill. These godlike characters boast and strut about with retinues of ultra-powerful servants and scores of mighty magic items, artifacts, [and] relics adorning them as if they were Christmas trees decked out with tinsel and ornaments. Not only are such “Monty Haul” games a crashing bore for most participants, they are a headache for their Dungeon Masters as well…
Might and Magic VI is the perfect riposte for old Gary’s po-faced pronouncements. It lets you advance your characters to level 90 and beyond, by which time they pretty much are gods, able to teleport instantly from one side of a continent to the other and to cover shorter distances by flying high above the mountaintops, raining fiery death from the heavens upon any poor earthbound creatures who happen to be visible below. And you know what? It’s not boring at all. It’s actually kind of awesome. Like Diablo, Might and Magic VI zeroes in relentlessly on the lizard-brain appeal of its genre. We all like to watch the numbers associated with our characters go up and then go up some more, like to know that we’re more formidable today than we were yesterday. (If only real life worked like that…)
The world in which this progress narrative takes place may not be terribly believable even as fantasy goes, but it’s appropriately sprawling. The lovely, throwback cloth map that came in the original box contains no fewer than fourteen discrete regions that you can visit, each of them dauntingly large, full of towns and castles and roaming creatures and hidden and not-so-hidden curiosities, among them the entrances to multiple dungeons that are sometimes shockingly huge in themselves. Although I’m sure some of our modern DLC-fueled monstrosities have far surpassed it in size by now, Might and Magic VI might just be the biggest single CRPG that yours truly has ever played from start to finish.
The game was able to hold my interest for the 100 hours or more I spent with it by giving me so darn much to do. Every town has at least a few quests to see through. Sometimes these are related to the main story line, but more often they’re standalone,. Each of the character classes can evolve into two more advanced incarnations of itself; an archer, for example, can become a “battle mage” and then a “warrior mage.” Doing so entails reaching a certain level and meeting other statistical requirements, then hunting down the necessary trainer and completing a quest for him or her. Your characters’ more granular skills, which encompass the expected schools of magic and types of weaponry alongside miscellaneous talents ranging from “Bodybuilding” to “Repair Item,” also require trainers in order to be advanced to “Expert” and then “Master” status. There’s always something to do, some goal to pursue, whether it’s provided by the game or one you made up for yourself: collect every single spell; pray at every shrine during the one month of the year when you get something out of it. Because there’s no complex plot whose own needs have to act as a check on your wanderings, it’s always you rather than the game who gets to decide what you do next. This world is truly your oyster — as long as you’re tough enough to take on the many and varied monsters that infest every corner of it that you enter, that is.
The toy-box quality of Might and Magic VI lets it get away with things that less sanguine, more self-serious peers would get dinged for. The jank in the engine — and make no mistake, there’s a lot of jank here — feels more like a feature than a bug when, say, you find just the right angle to stand in a doorway, the one that lets you whale away on a group of monsters while they for some reason can’t hit you. Fairly early in my play-through, I found myself in a sewer filled with living oozes that were impervious to weaponry and shot blobs of slime that were corrosive to armor. The sensible thing to do would have been to go away and come back later. Instead of being sensible, I found a stairway from whose top I could throw my one effective spell at the oozes while they were unable to hit me at all. I spent several evenings luring oozes from all over the sewer back to that killing floor, harvesting huge quantities of experience points from them. Sure, it was kind of tedious, but it was kind of great at the same time. Finding exploits like this — exploits that would undermine a less gonzo, more finely calibrated game — is just another part of the fun of Might and Magic VI. Everyone who’s ever played it seems to come away with her own list of favorite ways to break it.
I’m not even all that bothered that the game feels a little bit unfinished. As you play, you’ll probably find yourself exploring Enroth in an eastward to westward direction, which is all too clearly also the direction in which New World built their world. The last couple of regions you’re likely to visit, along the western edge of the map, are deserts filled with hordes of deadly dragons and not much else. It’s plain as day that New World was running out of gas by the time they got this far. But, in light of all they had already put into their world by this point, it’s hard to begrudge them the threadbare westerly regions too much. I’m well aware that I’m not usually so kind toward such failures to stick the landing; this is the place where I usually start muttering about the need for a work to be complete in an “Aristotelian sense” and all the rest. Never fear; we’ll doubtless return to such pretensions in future articles. But in the case of a joyously goofy, loosey-goosey epic like Might and Magic VI… well, how much more of it do you really want? It’s just not a game to which Aristotelian symmetries apply.
Might and Magic VI was released on April 30, 1998. This places it at almost the exact midpoint between Fallout, that first exemplar of a new breed of CRPGs in the offing, and the CRPGS that Interplay would publish near the end of 1998, which would serve to cement and consolidate Fallout’s innovations. For its part, Might and Magic VI can be seen as a bridge between the old ways and the new. In spirit, it’s defiantly old-school. Yet there are enough new features and conveniences — including not just the free-scrolling movement and optional real-time combat, but also such niceties as a quest log, a superb auto-map, and a raft of other information-management functions — to mark it out as a product of 1998 rather than 1988 or even 1993. It sold 125,000 copies in the United States alone, enough to justify Jon Van Canegham’s risky decision to take a chance on it in the midst of the driest period of the CRPG drought. And its success was well deserved. Few latter-day installments of any series have done as good a job of ratcheting up their accessibility whilst retaining the essence of what made their predecessors popular.
