Well, I can't believe it, but it seems I actually have nothing to do on CH right now.
While I'm not complaining about this at the moment (finishing up another school year and other stressors), when summer rolls around I'll have some extra time to kick around. So I ask you....what's next?
While keeping the subject matter on Heroes 3, please feel free to comment about ideas for improving the site's H3 section, which includes adding new things or making currently existing things better. Please be reasonable with your suggestions and I'll see if I can line up a few projects for the summer.
H3 players have a good reason to be happy this week for all three newly uploaded maps are for this game.
First we have Demon Business by Potman. a nice M-sized SP map with a story.
Second is Xeron Lives by Jake Brutlag. This ain't really a new map since it was posted on old H3Trio site. Because of great design and a very good storyline, this map should find its way to your Hard Drive if it alredy didn't.
And last, but not least, is Tolkien’s Middle-Earth (Allies), created by Yurian Stonebow whom every member of the Round Table probably knows. I think most of you don't need a description since everyone knows about Tolkien's LotR and everyone who visits our forums know that this is one of most anticipated maps for H3.
Seems H3 and H4 maps are starting to appear in great numbers once again, which is great news for those who still have thiese two games installed on their PC's.
First one is "Dragon's Fate" by Jeff, an old H4 campaign but this time in different language. Thanks to Koni, a member of Round Table who offers to translate new and popular maps into German, some people will be able to play one of best H4 campaigns in their mother language.
By the way, if you have H4 and still didn't play "Dragon's Fate", then what are you waiting for? Download and play it! You won't regret it.
The next one is "In Deeps of Eternal Darkness", an H3 SP map made by Artas1984. Most of its battles are sea battles so it might prove to be an unique experience for some players. Also, different playstyle of two playable factions might be a good reason to play this map at least twice.
The third map is "Land of the Dead", an M-sized H4 map made by skiffer3 which has been in our testing section for a very long time and has finally been officialy released. Those who like to play in multiplayer shoudn't let this map go undownloaded.
Heroes of Might and Magic 2- "I went through a tough period a few years ago and the only thing that could take my mind off my trouble was 'Heroes.' The beautiful world, the endless variety, the direct but deep gameplay...I never thought I'd find a turn-based strategy (game) to approach 'Civ,' but Heroes was up to the challenge."
A little love from a celebrity of the gaming industry doesn't hurt. Levine's other favorites are Civilization IV, World of Warcraft, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Beyond Good and Evil.
Celestial Heavens is proud to host the MM7Rev4mod by Big Daddy Jim. This mod has reprogrammed the original Might and Magic VII game to include;
(1) an altered game sequence,
(2) ten new quests,
(3) seven ‘heavily modified’ original quests,
(4) seventeen unique NPCs,
(5) modified overland and ‘dungeon’ areas,
(6) an optional ‘post game’ encounter with a unique set of opponents,
(7) a plethora of minor game ‘tweaks’ and changes.
To play this game, you must have the original Might and Magic VII game installed with the official Patch 1andMOK's Patch. See the ‘ReadMe’ file for installation instructions.
Remember this? GameSpot reviewer Jeff Gerstmann gave a bad review of the latest "Kane & Lynch" instalment, and presto! he was out of a job. Fans stopped short of mailing anthrax to the heads of GameSpot, but the site's reputation as a serious, neutral, independent, true-to-the-fans gaming site took a critical hit. Gerstmann's termination coincided with GameSpot's site being sponsored by the "Kane & Lynch" producers, and the gaming community simply didn't believe these events to be unrelated, as Penny Arcade illustrated like this.
Today, the fans who lamented the popular Gerstmann's termination can smile with glee: Kotaku reports that Josh Larson, VP of games at parent company CNET, the guy responsible for firing Gerstmann, is being given the boot. The departure has been confirmed by Editor in Chief Ricardo Torres. Larson isn't very popular with the GameSpot employees, being more of a business suit than interested in creativity, and one can only guess what's for lunch in the company mess when he departs on April 9th. My guess is cake and champagne.
Valve announced that Ubisoft is putting some of its games on the Steam platform, including Assassin's Creed, Far Cry and Splinter Cell. Games of the Heroes of Might and Magic series will also be sold there, making the "Ubisoft line-up on Steam will be the largest library of titles available from any single publisher or developer."
Update via Games Digest: "Some brilliant chap at Ubi has decided that this offer should be for North America only so here in Europe (and the rest of the world) we will just have to stick to discs and shops and daylight and shit. Lame."
It is nice to see that Sarvi and rdeford, two well known mapmakers in the community, are continuing to make great new maps for H5: Tribes of the East.
Sarvi sent us a new MP/SP map called "Breakout". The Kreegans from subterrain are trying to conquer the lands, and the player(s) require to stop them and... expand their own borders in meantime...
rdeford, Mage of Soquim sent us a SP map called "Mining Tycoon". It is one of those maps that get the titles "Innovative", "Cool", "Complexly scripted"... In other words, if you are looking for a fun map that doesn't depend on usual HoMM gameplay, this is the map for you!
Anyway, your objective is to take care of minning operations (liberate the mines from enemy factions, recruit workers and feed the workers) and crush the greedy enemies.
UPDATE on 2nd March 2008:
Mining Tycoon has been updated with newer version that fixes a certain bug which would appear if you installed a certain mod. If you encountered the bug, please re-download the map. If you did not encounter the bug, still re-download the map.
Gamasutra spoke with Steve Fawkner at GDC 2008 and did what can be described as the post-mortem of the project. It's a nice overview of the current state of the gaming industry. The lessons they learned could benefit a company such as Nival Interactive for instance:
* Time spent polishing is time well-spent. The extra time spent certainly resulted in additional sales. Focus and usability testing makes a difference.
* Good design is still important: A graphically simple game can still sell quite well.
* Focus groups are awesome: the title change, the addition of female avatars, and the shifting of the style to something a little more anime in execution all turned out to be great changes.
* Good QA teams are even better than focus groups: even though a few bugs slipped through, a solid QA team really helps.
Robert DeFord (rdeford) has updated the The Basics of Heroes V Scripting Guide to HoF and TotE standards. The updated guide features new and revised text to incorporate changes added by the expansion packs, new scripting code examples, appendixes to provide information that UbiVal chose to omit from the editor documentation and an extended debugging section, so if you're having trouble getting your scripts to run smoothly, then by all means check it out!.
Great news for all Might and Magic RPG fans out there! BigDaddyJim who’s a dedicated M&M fan, for several months already is working on a mod for Might and Magic VII, changing some of the game elements while adding some cool new stuff. This mod adds new quests, dungeons, alters the monster size and even includes the legendary Vori everybody has been desperately looking for since the release of the game!
While I’ve yet to try out the mod myself, the players here at the Round Table are very impressed. For more information you can visit BigDaddyJim's blog where he’s hosting the mod and has important release notes. The second version of the mod has already a patch released and we can expect more content any time soon. You can download all the necessary files here.
I’ll report more as soon as I’ll finish playing. Have fun!
ComputerAndVideoGames.com reports that new weapons, maps and character classes have been released for the Xbox 360 version of Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. The downloadable content is available for £3.40. Here is an overview of the new character classes:
"The new character classes, Warlock and Paladin, are only accessible for single-player. So says details, the former class weakens enemies from a distance with magic before wading in with a blade, while the Paladin uses Charm and Shrinking spells. Warlock it is then."
I'm not sure if that is the same downloadable content that was released even before the game came out last month, for 400 MS points. And we thought the era of expansion disks was over... Maybe someone should browse the LIVE Marketplace to see if by any chance patch 3.1 is over there...
From Round Table member darknessfood comes a quick review of Might and Magic II for the mobile phone (which has very little to do with the 1988 title). All critics of Gameloft's two Might and Magic games are very positive, so they are a safe purchase for anyone willing to go on a quest while on the bus.
You can find more fan reviews at the top of this page.
I came across a Heroes of Migth and Magic V elf screenshot on Cracked.com (finding any reference to Heroes on a general site is always a surprise), where they make fun of the blade song fighting style originally created for Dungeons and Dragons in order to customize further the elven characters:
Thus, some D&D writer invented Blade Song, a fighting style to really emphasize how effeminate elves actually are. Since the rest of the game design team was unable to come up with anything gayer (we're stumped too), it passed into canon. In various D&D settings, Blade Song is created by elves, "who have blended art, swordplay and arcane magic into a harmonious whole."
I always saw blade song as fighting with lots of pointless running around.
I reopened Celestial Heavens in March of 2001 (because I thought the Astral Wizard news section wasn't updated as often as I wanted to!), which means that I have been active in the community for seven years now. I am not sure how I managed to stick around for so long and, during that period, update the front page more often that not, even during week-ends, holidays and (gasp) Christmas day. That's probably because of you, my dear readers, and the wonderful people who update the site and monitor the forums. The Might and Magic community must remain strong and united, and I hope Celestial Heavens contributes in some way to that ideal.
Of course, this is not a farewell post and I will try to hang on until Heroes VI (the various people I managed to piss off because of my straight talk will be disappointed!). The road ahead will not be easy because of the lack of activity and my new family situation, but that's certainly not a good reason to give up, is it? Long live Heroes!
There is a new, full-featured Web site for the upcoming King's Bounty: The Legend. Available in four languages, it describes the various features of the game, from the characters and the role-playing system to magic and game locations. There are several sections under construction, but with a little luck the publisher won't end up with a half-baked site like MightandMagic.com.
Speaking of King's Bounty, did you know there was a boardgame, released in 1991?
I stumbled upon a a nice Wiki-style site created by community member Cepheus: The Spinward Tales, named after a section of the old Might and Magic universe, contains a series of articles about biospheres, characters and artifacts from the various New World Computing games. It's still a work-in-progress, but I enjoyed taking another look at some of the old character bios and cutscene screenshots. Certainly worth a bookmark.
Tomorrow (Saturday, March 1st) is Fabrice Cambounet's birthday! Since my week-end updates have been scarce during the past few months, I thought I'd post it ahead of time. Our friendly producer has been rather quiet recently. Let's hope we will see him more often in forums with the upcoming release of Kingdoms.
The developer of Titan Quest, Iron Lore Entertainment, closed its doors last week because of a lack of funding, just as the viability of the PC as a gaming platform is a hot topic on the Net. Developer Michael Fitch posted a heart-breaking message on the Quarter to Three forums about how harder it is to develop for the PC because of hardware and piracy:
"(...) the numbers on piracy are really astonishing. The research I've seen pegs the piracy rate at between 70-85% on PC in the US, 90%+ in Europe, off the charts in Asia. I didn't believe it at first. It seemed way too high. Then I saw that Bioshock was selling 5 to 1 on console vs. PC. And Call of Duty 4 was selling 10 to 1. These are hardcore games, shooters, classic PC audience stuff. Given the difference in install base, I can't believe that there's that big of a difference in who played these games, but I guess there can be in who actually payed for them.
Let's dig a little deeper there. So, if 90% of your audience is stealing your game, even if you got a little bit more, say 10% of that audience to change their ways and pony up, what's the difference in income? Just about double. That's right, double. That's easily the difference between commercial failure and success. That's definitely the difference between doing okay and founding a lasting franchise. Even if you cut that down to 1% - 1 out of every hundred people who are pirating the game - who would actually buy the game, that's still a 10% increase in revenue. Again, that's big enough to make the difference between breaking even and making a profit."
Whenever a game company dies, I can't help but think of the demise of New World Computing a few years ago (it seems like yesterday). We'll tolerate posts about piracy in this thread as long as nobody links to a warez site.
Since the Might and Magic series has been plagued by bad reviews during the past few months, it is refreshing to see some good press. I just found out that Might and Magic II is 1UP's Best Mobile Game of 2007. Heck, I'll quote the whole paragraph:
"Give Might and Magic 2 just a few hours and it will give you back a dramatic, memorable story. You'll want to blab all the great plot twists to your friends, but insist that they discover it for themselves. It makes creative use of limited mobile resources to deliver richly detailed graphics, spot-on controls, and a huge variety of action, all in service of the story. With a classic RPG introduction that grows into a sprawling adventure, Might and Magic 2 knows how to use impressive set pieces, like a sinking ship or epic fortress battle, to shock players with sentiment. At times Might and Magic 2 veers towards melodrama, but of all mobile games released in 2007, this one tells an honest story with a lot of heart. We can't wait to see what this series has in store for next year."
You will find their review of the game here, with some screenshots there. The graphics can't compare to a modern PC game, but they make me wish I had a mobile phone to give the game a try.
Seen in a compilation of the best and worst characters of PC gaming at ComputerandVideoGames.com is Xana of Dark Messiah of Might and Magic:
"The Might & Magic universe isn't known for its big laughs, and Dark Messiah is no comedy. Full of names like Phenrig, Menelag, and Kha Beleth, this is earnest high fantasy that should only even attempt carefully considered comedy that springs naturally from the characters of the cast.
Xana is a weak attempt - a dirty wee sex-obsessive who lives inside your brain, trying to get you to be naughty and talking like Hattie Jacques before she passed the sex-kitten baton to Barbara Windsor. She was entertainment, fair enough - but with Xana, you only ever felt like you were laughing at the game and the scriptwriters, not with them..."
Joining her are other Ubisoft icons such as The Prince of Persia and Sam Fisher. The best characters are SHODAN, HK-47, Alyx Vance and LeChuck, among others.
Gamasutra has the official announcement (thanks RPGWatch) of Infinite Interactive's new game in the Puzzle Quest series, Galactrix. This new title will use a hexagonal grid and feature a science fiction story. It is scheduled for a Fall release on the Xbox 360, PC and DS. GameSpot has a detailed preview of the game and a discussion with Steve Fawkner.
The VCMI guys have just announced the release of their latest build: 0.54.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the project, the short story is that VCMI attempts to rewrite the H3 engine in a new fashion, picking up the baton where WoG left off. The aim is to successfully merge both Heroes 3 and WoG within a new program written from the ground up, a new, free and efficient code "promising to put every imaginary change at your fingertips".
Now, as the more perceptive of you might have noticed, build 0.54 implies something not yet quite finished. Indeed, the authors are asking volunteers to come forward and test their new "baby", and to comment and discuss the latest developments, thus helping them polish the program into a finished product.
Celestial Heavens is proud to host the 
Remember 
Robert DeFord (rdeford) has updated the The Basics of Heroes V Scripting Guide to HoF and TotE standards. The updated guide features new and revised text to incorporate changes added by the expansion packs, new scripting code examples, appendixes to provide information that UbiVal chose to omit from the editor documentation and an extended debugging section, so if you're having trouble getting your scripts to run smoothly, then by all means check it out!.
