The Heroes Round Table

Here in Canada, Future Shop is selling it for $50 CDN until Sunday. According to their website two of the stores in Calgary have copies--don't know if they haven't arrived or already sold out elsewhere. I was gratified that I hit an ad for it as soon as I went to their computer games page.

Ubisoft appears to be doing a much better job of promoting the game than 3DO did (of course, 3DO was short of cash for marketing I guess as bankruptcy approached). I remember HOMM IV being quite difficult to find in stores, whereas with HOMM V the sales rep at London Drugs said they had ordered the ...

I hope that's an indication of buoyant sales, rather than terrible technical problems. Tomorrow's supposed to be the big day in Canada.

I thought the maps in HOMM III & IV were way too big. I never found exploring a map for hours without ever encountering any opposition very interesting.

Yes, I was on the Ubisoft board and a lot of gamers who were not expereinced Heroes players found the demo *very* difficult. For that matter, I remember getting totally screwed in the HOMM IV campaign. I sailed through the first map approaching my hero development in much the same way as I did in pr...

It looks as though the drivers may not be the biggest issue. The determinants are more the generation of card and what you consider acceptable. Personally, I would maintain that you don't need anywhere near the same frame rates on a turn-based game as you would in an action game for a pleasurable ga...

Coldfingers, the fact that antialiasing and anisotropic filtering make no difference to your performance makes me wonder whether the video card is the issue at all. It doesn't seem like it should be your memory or CPU, because you're ahead of me on memory and on par with CPU. Could you have somethin...

I'm not overly optimistic about Fallout 3. While I've enjoyed Morrowind and Oblivion, the great strength of the Fallout games was the high level of NPC-interaction and how the choices you made affected the game world. Bethesda's approach to RPG's is more akin to New World Computing than Black Isle.

Future Shop estimates its arrival date here in Canada at May 25.

Hmm...I would have said HOMM II had very unrealistic, cartoonish-looking graphics and animations. I found them charming, but they moved away from that style with later releases. In addition to the hero skills and the initiative bar, there are a number of small new things in the game. For example, th...

Somewhere else I believe you posted to compare the system requirements of HOMM IV and HOMM V, so I did. The minimum requirement for HOMM IV was PII-300--a CPU that came out in 1997, five years before the game was released. The minimum requirement for HOMM V isa 1.5 GHz P4 and a GeForce 3 with 64 MB ...

Well, it's not a bad choice for the map editor to come with an update. People won't really be able to make top-notch maps until they've played a bit and it'll take us a while to work through the maps that come with the game. It's not like having to wait for a patch to get multiplayer in HOMM4.

Have to add: I hated the HOMM4 battlefield. It was just too difficult to figure out where units would be able to move in one turn, whether you would have line of sight for casting/shooting, etc. I didn't like the HOMM4 sieges much either.

Quite surprised by those poll results, since there always seems to be so much negativity surrounding Heroes IV discussions. On the whole, I think Heroes IV's reception was based more on the poor initial release than the final game, though it suffered in part from the "be careful what you wish f...

Whatever else you say about it, it's hard for me to view a game with such an elaborate skill tree and an ability as difficult to figure out as elemental chaining can be referred to as dumbed down. The interface isn't terribly intuitive, but it's not as bad as all that, and I didn't have any real cam...

Nival really ought to incorporate this as a screen in the game in the first patch. I've been feeling like I was flying totally blind on skills through the demo. Very nice.

I like the Civ series but no--I don't see anything there I would like to add to Heroes except (as others have noted) some kind of diplomatic model. Importing too many civ-type features would interfere with the elegant simplicty of the core game design.

The game I least liked--I honestly didn't even make it through the tutorial-- was Age of Mythology. But that's just because I don't like RTS games in general. The only ones I can think of that I've enjoyed were Dungeon Keeper (and that was mostly for its atmosphere) and the Paradox games like Europa...

I've been playing Oblivion of late--I expect it'll keep me going till HOMM V comes out. It's gorgeous, of course, even on my Radeon 9800 Pro, and combat's a lot of fun--definitely better than Morrowind in that respect. But I can't help but feeling that it could have been so much more than it is. Cyr...

Torment was brilliant. One of the things I remember most vividly is when you're in the Civic Festhall and you learn how you manipulated Deionarra prior to your last trip to the Fortress of Regrets. Strictly as a game, it might not be the best ever, but the quality of the writing was extraordinary.