Can the retro gaming revival bring Might and Magic back?

The role-playing games (I-X) that started it all and the various spin-offs (including Dark Messiah).

Would you buy a retro MM game?

Yes
27
79%
No
7
21%
 
Total votes: 34

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Can the retro gaming revival bring Might and Magic back?

Unread postby Secret_Holder » 12 Sep 2010, 03:22

Seeing as retro/low budget games are doing very well on XBLA, PSN and Steam, one wonders if this is the way to go for the MM RPG's, as cRPG's generally don't sell that well. I would argue, that a good RPG, as MM6 really doesn't need top notch graphics, if the story and gameplay elements are top of the line.
But as everything comes down to brass tax, the question is: Would you buy a MM game, if Ubisoft hired an up and coming developer, to make a MM game, without all the pinache of modern graphics and CGI(as in Oblivion), focusing mostly on the story and gameplay?

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Unread postby GreatEmerald » 12 Sep 2010, 07:27

I have no need for high end graphics, but whether or not I would buy it would depend on the story of the game and gameplay. If it was on Ashan, then thanks but no thanks. Unless it was named something other than MM.

With low budget on graphics it would have even ended up better than with high budget. In the time of DOS games, graphics styles were all fine - you have an artist that draws sprites for you, and you use them. Later on, when sprites began to be pre-rendered, or when models are used, there are problems due to sloppy modelling work (like MMH5/Warcraft) or intentional sloppy modelling work (like TF2). You can even see it in MM games - compare the lowest level mace from MM7 to the lowest level mace of MM8. In MM7, it seems rusty, worn-out, and not very sturdily made; in MM8, it just seems poorly modelled, simply a cylinder with a sphere on top and a few more spheres on it.

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Unread postby Secret_Holder » 12 Sep 2010, 13:46

Yes, story and gameplay would of course be prerequisite for a retro MM game.

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Unread postby Talin_Trollbane » 12 Sep 2010, 18:19

hahah, its never gonna happen.

maybe they release the old games for free or something first, but Ubisoft hiring someone to make a oldschool MM RPG?

i have higher confidence that a nuclear war will start then that happening.
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Unread postby Lord13 » 12 Sep 2010, 18:29

Yeap, gameplay/story/atmoshphere > new shiny graphics. And yes I would love to see a new MnM with the "aged" engine of the previous MnM parts. But, imo always, Ubi will never do that, and I don't trust Ubi for a new MnM rpg part tbh :P
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Unread postby Secret_Holder » 12 Sep 2010, 20:43

Talin_Trollbane wrote:hahah, its never gonna happen.

maybe they release the old games for free or something first, but Ubisoft hiring someone to make a oldschool MM RPG?

i have higher confidence that a nuclear war will start then that happening.
Seeing as you can get MM I-VI for 10$ at gog.com, i'd say that this has already happened

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Unread postby jeff » 12 Sep 2010, 21:53

I voted yes, but on reflection I just don’t see it happening. An RPG as large as a MM6 or a Wizardry 8 will take a lot of man hours to complete especially if they develop a new engine low end graphics or not. I hope I am wrong but I just don’t see any company wanting to do this for what could be a small return. A few fans on a forum are not enough to make a profit large enough to be worth the investment. This is in part why we have had to settle for BDJ, Vlad and others to make their mods. Fortunately those mods have been good.
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Unread postby Tress » 13 Sep 2010, 06:10

If someone would release RPG or any other game for that matter with sub standards for any parameter, be it graphic or whatever, it would get flamed from the same people that now requests them. Besides creating competitive graphics nowadays doesn't nearly cost what it used to be, if someone makes outdated graphics with reason to be more old school then that is just an excuse.
Even back then when RPG genre wasn't in such decline as it is now, retro style game like D.W Bradleys Wizards and Warriors got alot of criticism for outdated game-play. His dungeon lords just proved it second time, that people must keep up with time, even if they make games for narrow auditory.
As for new RPG in MM franchise. Hell yea, just dont make it another consolised fallout 3 or mass effect.
If it was on Ashan, then thanks but no thanks. Unless it was named something other than MM.
As long as they make decent characters I dont care where it is set. DMoMM proved they can create at least some decent characters in mm universe and created decent directing(overall story could be better though), so it doesnt matter if game is set in Ashan or wherever else.

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Unread postby GreatEmerald » 13 Sep 2010, 13:30

tress wrote:As for new RPG in MM franchise. Hell yea, just dont make it another consolised fallout 3 or mass effect.

As long as they make decent characters I dont care where it is set. DMoMM proved they can create at least some decent characters in mm universe and created decent directing(overall story could be better though), so it doesnt matter if game is set in Ashan or wherever else.
They are not the classic RPGs, you can't compare them to MM.

Yes it does matter. A game can have a good story, but if it doesn't have at least some continuity, then why does it have the franchise name?

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Unread postby Tress » 13 Sep 2010, 14:16

They are not the classic RPGs, you can't compare them to MM.
They are not , unfortunately it;s what sells. However as I mentioned other absolute is not a way too. W&W without doubt was aimed at old mm and wizardry players, even more than modern (6-8) m&m parts(in light of true retro games mm6-8 gets too "modern"), hoverer it is bright example of what we are asking here(screw graphics, just give classic game play). Nonetheless I pretty much enjoyed that game.
Yes it does matter. A game can have a good story, but if it doesn't have at least some continuity, then why does it have the franchise name?
If homm4 had some distinct continuity to previous mm parts, then mm9 had absolutely nothing(apart from 1 character that is nearly easter egg ingame and newly thought axeoth) that would tie it in a least to previous games. If they would show me w8 and mm9 without saying which is which, then there is good chance I would say that last wizardry fit in mm universe more than mm9. After failure that was mm9 and partially homm4 they had no choice than to reboot universe. And it doesn't matter that ubi couldn't get decent director to make homm cut scenes.

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Unread postby Avonu » 13 Sep 2010, 14:25

tress wrote:If homm4 had some distinct continuity to previous mm parts, then mm9 had absolutely nothing (apart from 1 character that is nearly easter egg ingame and newly thought axeoth) that would tie it in a least to previous games.
It has, you need to dig a lot deeper in-game to find them. For example:
"I was in meditation, and I had a vision. Two swords, touched each other, and then there was destruction. I wonder what it means?"
BTW - I am playing W&W at this moment. It is enjoyable game after all.
I am playing also Darkensang: The Dark Eye and its sequel (well, I'm planning to fully play it when I finished Dark Eye :P) and both are more then enjoyable. They have modern graphics but still old games mechanics.

So if Ubisoft will ever do next MM game, I wish they look at Darkensang, not at Dragon Age, in ways how to do good RPG game.

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Unread postby Tress » 13 Sep 2010, 14:32

"I was in meditation, and I had a vision. Two swords, touched each other, and then there was destruction. I wonder what it means?"
Even if they toss word there and here, that vaguely refers to previous parts, there is hardly any continuity. Even sci fi part that was dominant in rpg series of mm was omitted apart from one letter that mentioned "ship". I understand that it is really easy to say that chedian is far away from parts where homm4 characters acted but its rather codename for shortcut in writing. If they would have added campaign heroes as some sort of quest givers like in mm6/7 that would give promotions and so on, then it would be whole lot different deal.
Trying to defend continuity for mm9 is just being devils advocate.
BTW - I am playing W&W at this moment. It is enjoyable game after all
It was pretty good imo and I truly enjoyed it, however it had so many flaws and many of them was due to its "classic" roots. Most magazines and sites gave it lukewarm reviews.
I am playing also Darkensang: The Dark Eye and its sequel (well, I'm planning to fully play it when I finished Dark Eye :P) and both are more then enjoyable. They have modern graphics but still old games mechanics.
Well DA is quite good for our day standards, amongst mainstream things like f3(I hope new vegas will be more fallouty) or mass effect. Unfortunately havent had opportunity to play darkesang yet.

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Unread postby Avonu » 13 Sep 2010, 14:55

Problem with MMIX is that it was planned as first of new trilogy as far as I know. There are more hints about Axeoth past, Ancients, the Kreegan, Nicolai future and even maybe about planet Guardian but more would be revealed in next games. IIRC, Framon, the city and realm to west of Chedian has more artifacts and legends about Ancients.
Unfortunately we all know what happened after HIV and MMIX released and we never will know what was future fate of Chedian and Axeoth.

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Unread postby GreatEmerald » 13 Sep 2010, 15:45

tress wrote:After failure that was mm9 and partially homm4 they had no choice than to reboot universe.
There is no such thing. I have never seen a universe that needs rebooting, have you? If you want, you can switch the planet or VARN, but never ever the whole universe!

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Unread postby Corlagon » 13 Sep 2010, 17:27

Avonu wrote:Unfortunately we all know what happened after HIV and MMIX released and we never will know what was future fate of Chedian and Axeoth.
I don't know if I relayed this stuff already, but I suppose it's safe to post it. Might make it easier to empathise with the MM9 team and their intentions:
Timbecile wrote:There were a couple of problems that affected the way MM9 ended up...
I hate to be a finger pointer, as I was the lead designer, and will accept all resposibility for how it turned out. (I've often thought that if I just worked harder MM9 would have been better)
But the truth is that it was mismanaged from the start...here's a rundown of the biggest problems:
#1: 3DO was less than interested in whether the game was good or not...in fact, the only reason they let us even make it was because of its popularity in Europe.
#2: We were depending on staff moving over from Legends...but Legends ended up being very late,..and in 3DO's eyes, MM9 had been in development since the end of MM8, and refused to give us more time. In my mind, Legends should have been cancelled and we should have concentrated on MM9
#3: Senior staff turnover...we went through 2 directors, 2 Lead designers, and 3 redesigns of the game before we ended up with what you see.
#4: NWC not taking the game seriously. In the beginning, when the MM9 director hired staff for his project, the EP of the studio would immediately reassign them to Legends...Legends was in trouble and they needed all the help they could get.
#5: Lack of appropriate testers/test time. Most of our testers were new and had never worked on a game before. Because we didn't give them enough time to get up to speed, we didn't get really good bugs from them until about a week before we were to ship.
#6: Maybe most importantly,...3DO was running out of money. They forced us to ship a half finished product early on an already unrealistic schedule. We had to cut a lot of corners in the design because we knew there was no way we'd finish in time. The fact that we started this game 7 months before we shipped it I think stands as a testament to how talented and professional all the people who worked on it were...this sort of mismanagement often affected the morale of some of the people though, and it was a constant struggle to keep their spirits up and remember that our responsibility was to you guys, the fans, not to 3DO.

Because of #6 though, we did change things that I think had a positive effect on our development.
We had to do things right the first time, so we had to be sure our decisions wre right in the beginning. We created a very extensive level document that was the largest NWC had ever seen, and I think it paid off well. We didn't have to cut any levels for not making the grade (nor could we afford to),..and for the most part, the levels themselves came out beautifully.
Doing things right the first time smacked us pretty hard though. In the name of the promotion lockout bug. We had wanted the player to not have to return to the quest giver to achieve their promotion, but adding that to the branching class system, and you've got a big mess on your hands. I'm sure our testers caught this as a bug, but we thought it was intentional, and really needed someone with some clout to tell us that this approach wasn't working. Poor design from the start (too bad JVC was never around to tell us this wasn't working.)
As far as the NPCs being ugly,...that's a result of switching to a polygonal system instead of sprites. In order to keep the frame rate up, we have to keep the polygon count of the characters low. And lower poly counts = uglier monsters.
When we were making MM9, we thought we had the right approach. We never let feature creep hit us, and we stayed focused on the tasks at hand. At the time, I had high hopes for MM9. We'd heard several people saying it had the potential to be one of hte best RPGs of all time, and if we had as much time to work on it as Bethesda had on Morrowind, reaching that goal would have been well witin our grasp. Unfortunately, 3DO came to us two weeks before we were supposed to go "Beta" (which was no where near even Alpha) and said "we're giving you two more weeks, but if it doesn't go out on that date, 3DO is closing its doors". which I knew meant "We're shipping this game in a month, whether it's ready or not." When you hear that, it's hard to stay focused on making a great game.
For the sake of posterity, my personal favorite was MM7.
Hopefully this clears things up for you a little. And I hope I don't sound too bitter at 3DO
Timbecile wrote:Whether they were really gods or ancients was still up for debate. I never had to answer that question, so I never did. I did think about it from time to time, and came up with a few scenarios. But again, since I never actually had to answer the question, the possibility is still up for debate.
The one thing that I pretty much knew for sure was the 3 Wyrdes were supposed to be ancients. We didn't really get into them in the game as much as I wanted...only one of them actually made it into the game (and was secretly Njam in disguise...)
Timbecile wrote:There was a bunch of other stuff going on in the design doc for the MM10 story we were working on. I actually was pretty excited about it. But, since we never actually made it into a game, I don't think it really counts as being part of the history.
Timbecile wrote:The Sea of Mist story was supposed to originally take place in the same place MM9 did, but when we changed the story and a bunch of the places, They changed a lot of the book around. After that, we always assumed that Praz and his story took place on another continent of Axeoth.

As far as the time goes, that sounds pretty close though I don't really know.. The stories for MM9 and Heroes 4 run concurrently, so if there's a time in Heroes 4 somewhere, that's a good place to start.
Timbecile wrote:After the H3 expansions and MM8, we all knew that the next batch of games were going to take place on a new world. The decision to blow up the old world was made by the Heroes 4 team. I think because they wanted a reason to move all the heroes they had created to the new world.
Timbecile wrote:I probably had as many ideas floating around as you guys do. here's just a few that we came up with for MM9...
(not every idea is ever a good one!)

A Fallout style overhead map
I doubt it would have been very well received, but I'm a huge Fallout fan....it was proposed because we were unsure of how well we could pull off outdoor maps. We thought we were going to have to make them really tiny. (not that they're very big as it is)...this one got killed because we could do it the older way.

The "action pencil"
An idea Keith and I came up with while we were working on when 3DO wanted MM9 to be PS2 only. The hard part of putting MM on console was how do you control an entire party with a little tiny controller? we came up with this rotating pencil idea that you could roll around to select the types of actions or spells you wanted to use. It was actually a pretty neat idea and would have worked pretty well.

"Empires of Might and Magic"
I've been a giant fan of X-Com since it came out. When we were wrapping up MM9 we had a big meeting on the future products we could do, and the idea I brought to the table was a turn based Fantasy game similar to XCom. I drafted a proposal for it, but it went the same way as 3DO long before they did.

There's plenty of others, but most get constrained by the limitations of the game engine. It was really unfortunate that Lithtech didn't do what we wanted it to do. If we had something like the Morrowind engine, we could have done MM9 about 50 times better....(as an example, we almost didn't have day/night transitions because of Lithtech.)
Timbecile wrote:I did write an outline for the MM10 story, but never adapted it into a novel. I wrote a short story based on the MM9 world that I adapted and sent to a few magazines for publication.
Much like The Truth, the MMX plans are out there. :P I guess Tim is the man to ask if you want to know what the sequel had in store.

And I agree that "they had no choice but to reboot" is frankly incorrect on many, many levels.

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Unread postby Secret_Holder » 13 Sep 2010, 19:11

If someone would release RPG or any other game for that matter with sub standards for any parameter, be it graphic or whatever, it would get flamed from the same people that now requests them. Besides creating competitive graphics nowadays doesn't nearly cost what it used to be, if someone makes outdated graphics with reason to be more old school then that is just an excuse.
No. Graphics can also be an artistic decision, driven by lack of funds of sometimes, but an artistic choice nonetheless.

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Unread postby Tress » 13 Sep 2010, 21:10

And I agree that "they had no choice but to reboot" is frankly incorrect on many, many levels.
Perhaps no choice is too strong, but as you quoted Tim's interview it is suggested that game was released "unfinished".Story line too seemed rather rushed and not tied with whole world and you cant really build next floor on rotten one. Perhaps given time mm9 could turn out bearable or even good but that doesn't matter anymore :( and all flaws it have must be taken into account once you check on mm brand in general and make plans for evolving it.
As far as the NPCs being ugly,...that's a result of switching to a polygonal system instead of sprites. In order to keep the frame rate up, we have to keep the polygon count of the characters low. And lower poly counts = uglier monsters.
Well, while I can understand and even sympathize with devs of NWC for most part, this one seems rather cheap excuse. NOLF 2 came out same year as mm9 and I see no reason for Isles of ashes not to look like last level of nolf2. Also even if we take into account that they used bit older version of lithtech we still have avp2 to show for that looked rather nice.
Framerate- make setting adjustable, adjustable video setting are usually first thing that gets added even to tech demos. I could take "no time" for excuse for crude models, but this really don't cut it.

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Unread postby Konfuzius » 14 Sep 2010, 13:24

As 1:1 port with the same graphics I don't think that they would even get a flowerpot.
However if they would make more detailed sprites, more varnished and nicer effects it could work very well.

Sometimes I am REALLY impressed of the results of some guys in the Doom community if you look at monster, map design and the gameflow itself.
Some of you would be impressed if you'd know what a good sprite engine is capable of.

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Unread postby Secret_Holder » 14 Sep 2010, 18:49

We're not talking about a port, but a brand new game.

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Unread postby Deadguy118 » 16 Sep 2010, 23:47

Corlagon wrote: And I agree that "they had no choice but to reboot" is frankly incorrect on many, many levels.
Would you really have wanted Ubisoft to muck with NWC's Might and Magic universe? Even though I find Ashan to be pretty much just Generic Fantasy Setting (tm), you have to remember that this is practically an entirely new group of people working with a license that was purchased from a dead company 2 years previously. Perhaps they could have salvaged the old M&M universe, but would you have wanted them to?

As for the (somewhat derailed) topic at hand: Will Ubisoft bother to make a new Might and Magic RPG? Probably not. Those kinds of games don't sell. But then again, even if they did they would probably try to make it mainstream, so everyone here would hate it anyways.
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