I have dispatched a list of questions about the Shades of Darkness expansion to Ubisoft, so you can expect something to be released soon. Stay tuned...
As we know, there are several problems with the Shades of Darkness release. The devs are working hard on the problems and some things have already been fixed. Work continues. There is, however, one big problem:
- Some users are experiencing full black screens while running the game, running a video or before starting a battle.
- Some users are also experiencing random or 100% crashes, in different situations.
- So far, the devs have not been able to reproduce these issues, using different hardware and settings and running the builds for several hours. Conclusion: the problem must be related to the hardware, the drivers, the configurations, etc. With the large number of players out there, chances are that there are thousands of different combinations.
The devs need your help in order to narrow down these issues and provide potential fixes. They need people who can easily reproduce them or experience them on a regular basis.
If you can do this, please provide the following info:
1. DxDiag report: To generate such a report, just go to START, then select RUN, type DXDIAG and press ENTER. Finally, save the report thanks to SAVE ALL INFORMATION button.
2. The ErrorReporting folder: This folder is located in "C:\Users\%USER_NAME%\Documents\Might & Magic Heroes VI"
Those details are the only way for the devs to understand why these issues happen to such a large number of people. This is a time for you as a Community to shine. To actually help fixing the game. Let's do it!
Oh, and in case you're sitting there thinking: "They should have fixed this months ago and I'm not gonna help them do their job!" ...
Do you want the game fixed or not?
If it was easy correcting these things, they would have done it months ago.
There is finally some news from the Ubi folks about the problems people have been experiencing. Also, the official page lists up a set of installation instructions depending on which version you have:
"Maintenance is now over and missing content issues have been solved.
Yesterday, the Heroes VI standalone Shades of Darkness was officially released.
We have decided to take advantage of this opportunity to fix several existing bugs in all Heroes VI versions..
However some user experience difficulties have appeared with the auto patching system. In order to fix this issue, we strongly recommend you to get the 2.1 version and follow this tutorial.
The music and voice bugs have now been fixed with the Steam version. You may have to restart Steam to get the update.
Regarding issues related to missing content:
- Game not displayed on the Uplay platform (“My Games”).
- Unable to play multiplayer maps & locked campaigns, maps, bonuses etc (servers maintenance will take place in the afternoon in order to fix these issues).
We are currently working to solve these problems and will update you throughout the day with further information. "
Ubisoft have just released patch 2.1 for Heroes VI. While you can check the complete changelog here, the short version is that this patch contains more than a hundred bugfixes, including the infamous Town Screen Nvidia crash.
Patch 2.1 is huge - about 2.1 GB. We therefore encourage players with good DSL lines to create and share torrent files of these, so that players with slow or intermittent web connections can get hold of them eventually. I myself have created torrents for the EFIGS (English/French/Italian/German/Spanish) versions and I am currently seeding them as:
hmm6_2.1_efigs.exe.torrent hmm6_digital_2.1_efigs.exe.torrent (digital version).
The official MMX page has an interview with some of the VIP fans who were present at PAX East in Boston back in March. While TeTsUo gave us a quick recap in the forum a couple of weeks ago, this interview gives us more insight into the views of three more VIP fans, Ari, C_h_u_c_k_l_e_s and socketboy.
The official Facebook page has released a video containing animations of some creatures from the upcoming H6 expansion Shades of Darkness. Some of them are quite funny. I draw your attention particularly to the lurker "ballet dancer".
We have released our second Q&A with the dev team of Might & Magic X: Legacy.
The questions were:
You call this game "Might & Magic X - Legacy". Why have you chosen this name?
You also call it a "classic" RPG, properly old school. What is a classic RPG to you?
Does this look like any of the old M&M games and which ones do you think it resembles the most?
Where does this game fit into the Ashan storyline? Is it a small "side plot" to the bigger story or will it play an important part?
What will the graphics be like? What kind of engine are you using?
Will there be "paper dolls"?
How many developers are actually working on the game?
Since we are talking about old school fans here and not just an old school game, in what forms will the game be released?
M&M fans love modding. Will this be possible? What can you tell us about it?
What about editors? Some fans have expressed concern about the short playing time you have outlined – will it be possible to extend this with user-made maps?
Have fun reading and please ask more questions for the devs - I'll put them on the list so they can be answered in Q&As to come.
The good folks at RPG Codex spoke with Stephan Winter (CEO of Limbic), Julien Pirou and Gary Paulini about the tenth installment of the Might and Magic series. They discuss how accessibility will be a key element of the retro-flavored game:
"One of the strengths of the Might & Magic RPG series is the fact the previous games always aimed for greater accessibility. MM2 introduced the automap feature, MM3 had one of the very first questlogs – maybe even THE first one. The series quickly embraced mouse control, icons and colors to make the information clearer, etc. Thanks to that, a game like World of Xeen remains very playable today and has aged better than other RPGs of its time (not speaking of the technical side of course).
For Might & Magic X - Legacy, we tried to maintain this tradition of accessibility. Accessibility, by the way, is not to be confused with simplification. Accessibility is not about making the game less complex, but making it easier to use and understand. So Might & Magic X has detailed tooltips, clear signs and feedback, drag-and-drop interface, quick-action bar, etc. Nothing extraordinary, but important features players are used to finding in modern RPGs."
We here at Celestial Heavens have been trying to refurbish our site for some time. Since our main site and forum are linked together, the upgrade process is a bit difficult and takes the skill of someone who knows about programming, and because we are a small site without a big budget, we are looking for volunteers.
Specifically, we need a php programmer, preferrably with knowledge of phpbb3 and joomla - although the latter is voluntary.
If you have the skill set, some free time and the desire to help us finish building the new site, please contact us either by commenting in this story or via e-mail: kalah@celestialheavens.com.
As we know, GOG.com have lots of old games in re-released, DRM-free, modern OS-compatible form. Not only that, but a lot of games have also been made Apple compatible. On this page you can find OSX versions of a wide variety of games - everything from "Fallout" games to "Legend of Grimrock" and the "Ultima" series. "King's Bounty" is also there. Happy gaming!
According to a preview by Polygon, sporting an interview with M&M series creative director Erwan le Breton, the game is set for a September release, at least in downloadable form:
"Might and Magic X Legacy is set for release in September as a downloadable title on Windows PC."
It's not every day that the Might and Magic franchise makes the headlines (the RPG series, particularly), but the announcement of Might and Magic X spread quickly across the Interwebs. Here is a quick summary from various gaming news sites:
In the midst of all the excitement of the new instalment to the Might & Magic RPG series, there is also some somber news. The German M&M fansite, Drachenwald, is on the verge of closing down after 14 years.
Wanting to step down for some time, it seems Gunnar has not been successful in finding someone to take over the leadership of the site. That means the site will close this year - unless someone takes over before October. That means no more German M&M community.
For context, Germany is arguably the biggest M&M community in Europe. They also contribute greatly to international sites; I checked our traffic a while back to see which countries our visitors are from. Germany was #2 on the list. I urge those of you who have the ability and drive to lead a website to contact Gunnar for more information - even if it's just to find out what kind of work is involved.
Here is the official announcement of the game that Ubisoft has been teasing during the past couple of days:
Our prayers have been answered it seems. We will hopefully get more information from the PAX Expo during the week-end. Stay tuned!
"After a decade, a Might & Magic® RPG is back with both the unique core formula and a new set of improved and fine-tuned features. The best RPG of its class!
In the wake of the spectacular events in Might & Magic® Heroes® VI, you will play in a party of four adventurers entangled in intrigue and political machinations unfolding in and around Karthal. The city, on the verge of secession, is prey to competing factions vying for its control. Your actions will determine the fate of the city."
After Ubisoft's release of a teaser page a couple of days ago, fans have already jumped to conclusions, both here on The Round Table and at sites such as CVG and RPGwatch. It is certainly not a new theory; the fans have speculated that Ubi might continue the M&M saga ever since they bought the rights to the franchise. Indeed, when Dark Messiah was first announced, it was thought by many to be this continuation.
There is still no official confirmation that MMX is in the works and if it is, there's another question that immediately jumps to mind. Not just who the developer is, like the people at RPG are asking; we already know that Limbic are still working on something for Ubisoft, so it could be them, but we also know that Ubi like to farm out things to a lot of different developers (like Nival, Black Hole and Virtuos for the Heroes games, Arkane, Floodgate and Kuju for Dark Messiah, Capybara for Clash of Heroes and the list goes on). No, my question would be more important than that, namely what kind of game it would be.
What else could it be, though - is the "X" the obvious hint of a new RPG or is it just a generic symbol of something unknown? We can mention some things that count against a new big game - the proximity to the release of the H6 expansion, for one, albeit with the stand-alone factor and the fact that the developers are tired of working with an badly written code. There's also Ubi's willingness to expand the franchise and their use of "M&M" as a prefix of all titles from online card and browser games to DS games - this new thing that's coming might not be what you expect. One thing counting in its favour is the increased M&M related chatter from official channels.
I fired off a few questions to Blue Byte, the team currently developing the Heroes Online browser game. Short and sweet, the Q&A contains the first six questions that popped into my head.
The M&M ComDev has posted a note on the official forum about patch 2.0, possibly arriving in April:
"Back in July 2012, when the revamped townscreens were introduced, the dev team used a specific rendering method to support pixel-precise selection of the buildings. This method at the time worked just fine with the current Nvidia drivers’ version. No related crash was detected, neither by our tests or the community, since the method was supported. In October 2012 Nvidia released a new version of drivers that changed the support of a few methods for some Nvidia devices, leading to the so-called Town Screen crash. This affected several other games across the board, not only Heroes VI. The issue was difficult to pin-point as it had a quite unpredictable reproduction step and unreliable reproduction rate. For many months the M&M team has investigated hand in hand with Nvidia teams, until we came to a breakthrough two weeks ago. We have now fixed our rendering method and so far the fix seems to be rock solid. We still have some tests to run on our end and we hope to be able to release the 2.0 patch beg of April."
Meanwhile, before the patch is released, the only solution to the problem will be to roll back to Nvidia drivers 301.42.
GameSpy have decided to call it quits after 14 years. Starting up in 1999, same as us, they are now shutting down their site which in this time period has become known as one of the biggest PC game websites out there.
For a while, we were also associated directly with them through the forum portal Forumplanet, a part of GameSpy, until we got our own domain in 2005. Rest assured, we will carry on a bit longer.
The reason for their closure is not, they say, that PC gaming is dead. Instead, the site is being closed down for business reasons, leaving the staff to carry on their work in other capacities, at IGN and other places. So you will still be able to read somewhere about what is going on in the world of PC gaming.
Znork has once again been on the move for the benefit of the Might & Magic Community - taking a sneak peek on the upcoming free-to-play game Heroes Online.
For those of you who don't know what is going on, Ubisoft have been working for some years now on the strategy of expanding the Might & Magic franchise. That means not only making big series games like Heroes VI and Dark Messiah, but also smaller games, in an effort to attract a broader audience to the M&M franchise. That means making games for different platforms, making small games as well as big ones, free downloadables as well as all-out retail collector editions, also increasing the range of game types. The results have been mixed - the "crowning achievement" being the success of Clash of Heroes.
Is Heroes Online anything for you? Well, go over to the preview to find out.
There is finally some news from the Ubi folks about the problems people have been 
The official MMX page has an 
We here at Celestial Heavens have been trying to refurbish our site for some time. Since our main site and forum are linked together, the upgrade process is a bit difficult and takes the skill of someone who knows about programming, and because we are a small site without a big budget, we are looking for volunteers.
either by commenting in this story or via e-mail: kalah@celestialheavens.com.
As we know, GOG.com have lots of old games in re-released, DRM-free, modern OS-compatible form. Not only that, but a lot of games have also been made Apple compatible. On 
GameSpy have decided to 
Znork has once again been on the move for the benefit of the Might & Magic Community - taking a sneak peek on the upcoming free-to-play game