Might and Magic Might & Magic X Pre-Release Thread

[Mortmal]

No of course not, but could have expected VIP people from various horizons, and not just a few blind fanboys they caught at paxeast.

 

[Crispy]

To be fair, the one guy who says he played M&M back in '86 on his Commodore (lends credit in my eyes) replied that he was very happy with the development of the game so far. I know that's not detailed at all, but his other answers weren't terrible.

Edit: My bad, I misread your assessment of the statements. Still, I'm glad to see anything along the lines of pleasing old-school gamers for M&M X. Even if they're from blind fanboys.

 

[narupley]

I actually know Ari; he's one of the main people behind the Children of the Void fan project. I can definitely vouch for him being a true-blue old-school M&M fan, and he knows what he's talking about. However I wouldn't at all be surprised if a) he choked under the pressure of being in the camera-eye and didn't feel comfortable saying anything but laudable praise, and b) Ubisoft heavily edited his comments when posting them on their site.

 

[Xenich]

Can someone remind me why we are back to fapping cautiously again?

It was mainly due to either misconstrued or even completely false information in those derped-up "previews". The possibility of the entire game being on a non-explorable rail (mostly, hopefully, debunked at this point) and the concept of cities and villages being nothing but static screens (more reliably debunked) being the worst two offenders.

There's also the unanswered questions of number of hours of gameplay, which has dropped from an early quoting of around 25 hours down to 15 (!). This last one I don't believe, either, and would probably require the former two to be true as well for it to be a fact.

On the two french previews, they say its 15 hours for the main quest and 25 hours with side quests. Wich is quite miserable in my opinion, those games, and most old school rpgs were on a few 720ko floppy disks and lasting double than that easily. Nowaday i get hard drives of tera-octets , i wish rpgs had evolved and really use all the new hardware we have now. I suppose its incline, but really small incline, it pains me that we should consider ourselves happy when you can find games from 20 years ago like fate requiring a good 80 hours to finish with similar gameplay, maybe even better gameplay.
Also the "VIP" comments are sickingly postive :http://might-and-magic.ubi.com/migh...s.aspx?c=tcm:154-93317-16&ct=tcm:148-76770-32
is there a codexer admitted there yet ? i highly doubt they will fit in.

Way I look at it is "Well... its a step in the right direction, but you need to do a lot better than this". That is, if we completely stomp it when there has been essentially nothing out there for a long time even remotely close to a true cRPG and there are elements of concepts that are good, it may give the appearance of "They can't be pleased", where they then drop the attempts and rush back to the tardsole crowd with more "Blam, Bling, Powah, Boom!" garbage. Then again, there is always the possibility that those shallow crowds are starting to lose attention in the industry (as they often did with the history of console iterations) and they are adjusting their target audience back to actual "gamers" and not fad crowds in order to retain stability in profit. Either way, I think there is some merit in the work, but it should be scrutinized to proper standards or they will get the impression they can get away with second rate marketing tactics like they do with the zombie generation. I guess basically what I am saying is... intermittent heavy handed slaps as opposed to pulling out the AA12 and going commando. /shrug

Me personally, I am very leery of the game. I like some of the things I see, but I am careful to not let the nostalgia of the appearance of some systems turn me into a "fan" before it has been verified to its actual content and systems. I am willing to concede some lacking aspects if the overall game is directed well, but if I see too many departures in order to attend to aspects which we know are cancer to these games, well... its time for the AA12.

 

[Luzur]

Can someone remind me why we are back to fapping cautiously again?

It was mainly due to either misconstrued or even completely false information in those derped-up "previews". The possibility of the entire game being on a non-explorable rail (mostly, hopefully, debunked at this point) and the concept of cities and villages being nothing but static screens (more reliably debunked) being the worst two offenders.

There's also the unanswered questions of number of hours of gameplay, which has dropped from an early quoting of around 25 hours down to 15 (!). This last one I don't believe, either, and would probably require the former two to be true as well for it to be a fact.

On the two french previews, they say its 15 hours for the main quest and 25 hours with side quests. Wich is quite miserable in my opinion, those games, and most old school rpgs were on a few 720ko floppy disks and lasting double than that easily. Nowaday i get hard drives of tera-octets , i wish rpgs had evolved and really use all the new hardware we have now. I suppose its incline, but really small incline, it pains me that we should consider ourselves happy when you can find games from 20 years ago like fate requiring a good 80 hours to finish with similar gameplay, maybe even better gameplay.
Also the "VIP" comments are sickingly postive :http://might-and-magic.ubi.com/migh...s.aspx?c=tcm:154-93317-16&ct=tcm:148-76770-32
is there a codexer admitted there yet ? i highly doubt they will fit in.

i dunno, i havent heard anything, guess they simply "forgot" us.

 

[Zeriel]

There is a thread on Something Awful where people are trying to out-grog each other and calling this as equivalent to the X-Com FPS

RPG Codex being the most positive critical node about an upcoming Ubisoft game? It will happen in your lifetime folks

SomethingAwful are always a bunch of twats about non-AAA releases. I don't really understand it, but there's the same instinct over at NeoGAF too--they like to pretend they don't need AAA budgets, but the second something isn't a hundred-million-dollar production they shit all over it incessantly.

 

[theSavant]

A few scenes from the PAX video we haven't seen before http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FR5_PQfbc4Q - starting at minute 3:10
But it's really only very few scenes and hardly anything new. I actually do wonder why no game magazine has recorded a full walkthrough of the demo...

 

[Jaesun]

It looks like UBI is spending all their current time promoting Hero's of M&M6(?), so M&M X promotion will probably have to wait until they wrap that up.

 

[Luzur]

To be fair, the one guy who says he played M&M back in '86 on his Commodore (lends credit in my eyes) replied that he was very happy with the development of the game so far. I know that's not detailed at all, but his other answers weren't terrible.

Chuckles? yeah hes an old grognard like me, i know him from the old 3DO might and Magic boards.

btw, how much credit do i have, who played MM1-2 on C64/PC/Megadrive/NES and MM3 on Amiga/PC? must be a boatload.

 

[octavius]

To be fair, the one guy who says he played M&M back in '86 on his Commodore (lends credit in my eyes) replied that he was very happy with the development of the game so far. I know that's not detailed at all, but his other answers weren't terrible.

Chuckles? yeah hes an old grognard like me, i know him from the old 3DO might and Magic boards.

btw, how much credit do i have, who played MM1-2 on C64/PC/Megadrive/NES and MM3 on Amiga/PC? must be a boatload.

Minus credit for playing on the bloody NES, plus credit for playing MM3 on Amiga. On my Amiga 501 I could never get past the intro sequence in MM3 myself.

 

[Luzur]

To be fair, the one guy who says he played M&M back in '86 on his Commodore (lends credit in my eyes) replied that he was very happy with the development of the game so far. I know that's not detailed at all, but his other answers weren't terrible.

Chuckles? yeah hes an old grognard like me, i know him from the old 3DO might and Magic boards.

btw, how much credit do i have, who played MM1-2 on C64/PC/Megadrive/NES and MM3 on Amiga/PC? must be a boatload.

Minus credit for playing on the bloody NES, plus credit for playing MM3 on Amiga. On my Amiga 501 I could never get past the intro sequence in MM3 myself.

the NES was way later, tried MM1 on emulator some years ago.

A501? thats the RAM expansion, yes? yeah MM3 was fickel to get to run on Amiga, but i dunno, i was lucky i guess, it did hang-up on the intro Sheltem Speech some 20% of the sessions, but i guess that was some sound issue.

 

[octavius]

A501? thats the RAM expansion, yes? yeah MM3 was fickel to get to run on Amiga, but i dunno, i was lucky i guess, it did hang-up on the intro Sheltem Speech some 20% of the sessions, but i guess that was some sound issue.

Yeah, A501 was an A500 with an extra half MB of RAM. Needed that to play Dungeon Master.
I played MM2 on the Amiga and it was harder than the DOS version due to not being able to import characters. Also you could find items up to +64, while on the DOS version the max is +32.

So how did the NES version compare to the DOS version of MM1? I know it has prettier graphics, but I have this irrational dislike of ultra conservative corporations with draconian rules like Nintendo that dictate what developers can put in their games.

 

[theSavant]

I paused the video at 5:33 to take a look at the inventory. This is totally "Heroes of Might & Magic". The 2D icons of armor, jewelry and weapons are exactly the same as the ones from the Heroes series (since Heroes 5). Even the amount of equipment slots are the same. Even the menu style (Heroes 6).

I didn't realize until now how strongly they want both worlds bound together. They really want all and everything in the same setting and lore. Obviously they have chosen this universe to be a major label for the next couple of years: continuing parallel development of the HOMM line and the MM line. Now it's clear why there are no Sci-Fi elements and probably never will be. It wouldn't fit into it. If we ever get to see Sci-Fi elements it will probably be sold as an Addon with a different world to explore... like Xeen - but outside the main lore.

Now that I have seen through the minds of Ubisoft I hope we'll get to choose party members from HOMM factions such as from Dungeon, Necropolis, Inferno etc. in the next Might&Magic instance


PS: interesting is also their interest in this universe: I have the feeling they want to invest in a label, that will keep them alive for the next couple of years. That's also why they keep "Assassins Creed" alive, although it should have been stopped after part 3. As they claimed themselves: they can always make a new AC in a different setting, timezone (or something like that) and always call it "Assassins Creed".
Anyways... that said I think we are on the beginning of a new Might & Magic Era...

 

[Infinitron]

I paused the video at 5:33 to take a look at the inventory. This is totally "Heroes of Might & Magic". The 2D icons of armor, jewelry and weapons are exactly the same as the ones from the Heroes series (since Heroes 5). Even the amount of equipment slots are the same. Even the menu style (Heroes 6).

I didn't realize until now how strongly they want both worlds bound together. They really want all and everything in the same setting and lore. Obviously they have chosen this universe to be a major label for the next couple of years: continuing parallel development of the HOMM line and the MM line. Now it's clear why there are no Sci-Fi elements and probably never will be. It wouldn't fit into it. If we ever get to see Sci-Fi elements it will probably be sold as an Addon with a different world to explore... like Xeen - but outside the main lore.

Now that I have seen through the minds of Ubisoft I hope we'll get to choose party members from HOMM factions such as from Dungeon, Necropolis, Inferno etc. in the next Might&Magic instance


PS: interesting is also their interest in this universe: I have the feeling they want to invest in a label, that will keep them alive for the next couple of years. That's also why they keep "Assassins Creed" alive, although it should have been stopped after part 3. As they claimed themselves: they can always make a new AC in a different setting, timezone (or something like that) and always call it "Assassins Creed".
Anyways... that said I think we are on the beginning of a new Might & Magic Era...

That depends entirely on how well this game sells. It's not obvious at all that there's that much demand for "turn-based Grimrock", and HOMM fans might not be that thrilled about it either.

 

[Jaesun]

From the video (as stated the are a Work in Progress):

(Click to see a bigger picture)

Inventory & Equipment


Awards (right side of screen)


Skills (left side of screen)


Does he say anything new we don'y know? Anyways this is still looking good so far.

 

[Crispy]

I like those screens. Simple but clean. I also love how they look on a wide screen.

Still stroking slowly...

 

[theSavant]

I like those screens. Simple but clean.

I agree with that, and actually I don't care anymore if they take most of their GUI and resources from HOMM, as long as we get a good game.

 

[LeStryfe79]

Those screens look like they came straight out of Final Fantasy 4.

 

[J_C]

Those screens look like they came straight out of Final Fantasy 4.

Yeah, because both of them are blue. You are a genius.

 

[Broseph]

Those screens look like they came straight out of Final Fantasy 4.

 

[LeStryfe79]

The light to dark blue color palette within the various rectangles evokes a strong Final Fantasy vibe. This was perfectly fitting for older generation JRPG's. I honestly don't think it fits a classic return to a WRPG series. Also, it doesn't matter what anyone says, this style was popularized by Final Fantasy. Anyone trying to use it today will be called out for it. I thought it best to break the news sooner rather than later.

 

[J_C]

How in the seven hells can a light to dark blue color palette be connected to a game? Oh, you know what, I have a strong Planescape vibe from those pictures. Because..you know...the icons are rectangular in both games.

 

[IDtenT]

 

[narupley]

The light to dark blue color palette within the various rectangles evokes a strong Final Fantasy vibe. This was perfectly fitting for older generation JRPG's. I honestly don't think it fits a classic return to a WRPG series. Also, it doesn't matter what anyone says, this style was popularized by Final Fantasy. Anyone trying to use it today will be called out for it. I thought it best to break the news sooner rather than later.

BUTTHURT ALERT

 

[Damned Registrations]

He's right. The white text on a blue gradient, the multiple windows; this shit was in the first 7 final fantasy games, and similar menus in a lot of jrpgs. (Shining Force, Tales of, Phantasy Star...) Anybody who played them is going to notice it. Though I think it looks fine. It's been a staple for 20 years for a reason.

Also, the HUD reminds me of Diablo. The classic games had bigger interfaces that encompassed the entire screen.