Game News Hell is freezing over: Ubisoft's Might & Magic X is actually a blobber

[catfood]

Holy fuck Settlers 2, Cultures, K&M. That's like some of the best builders ever.

Btw, HobGoblin42 , did you by chance work on Knights&Merchants' pathfinding algorithm? I want to know if I finally found out who the person I've hated so much all these years is.

 

[Crooked Bee]

Hey maybe we'll even see The Immortal II from EA.

That'd be the end times indeed.

 

[Great Deceiver]

The problem isn't whether the game will sell well, it's a matter of perspective - for these big publishers, a niche game selling 500k copies (which would be quite healthy) is unacceptable. Games these days have to pull huge numbers to be considered "viable" by these companies.

Regarding the game itself, I'm not even cautiosly optimistic, despite being a huge fan of the series from the very first game (yes, I owned Secret of the Inner Sanctum on floppies, and played it on my HD-less 8086 XT).

Ubi's mismanagement managed to turn a potentially decent HOMM 6 into utter shit, and shut down a pretty promising lesser-known developer (Black Hole, who made the criminally underrated - and, surprise, undermarketed by EA at the time - Armies of Exigo). By sourcing this out to a third-rate developer of browser games, it's evident they don't really give a shit about the product itself, hoping only to cash in on over-eager fans of the older M&Ms through name recognition alone.

 

[Stabwound]

I think this will end up being an inoffensive, safe, small-in-scope MM3 with a Grimrock polish update. They'll put next to nothing into the advertising budget, it will sell nothing and they'll cross it off the list as a failed experiment. It's pretty hard to screw up a grid-based blobber. It will just fade into obscurity like it is right now.

Can anyone dig up the sales figures for the HoMM games? This page says Heroes V was the best-selling MM game of all time, but I have no idea how accurate that is. I don't know if HoMM6 has sold horribly, either. They did pawn the standalone expansion off to the same German shovelware people as MMX.

 

[Konjad]

shit, I fucking lost it at the Sheltem voice clip. I know Ubisoft are gonna hurt me again, but... but maybe this time it'll be different!!!

Their Anno 2070 game stays true to it's prequels, so there are exceptions.

 

[commie]

shit, I fucking lost it at the Sheltem voice clip. I know Ubisoft are gonna hurt me again, but... but maybe this time it'll be different!!!

Their Anno 2070 game stays true to it's prequels, so there are exceptions.

That's cause of the specific nature of that genre. If they could they would have stripped it and consolised it but their efforts to do so on the DS and Wii weren't that successful so they grudgingly relented.

 

[HobGoblin42]

Ok, all this talk about Hob, and i still don't get if he is one of the dev of MMX or if he is just taking over the thread by talking about some appreciated games he made.

Reading the thread from beginning would be a good idea to get your facts right. Someone brought the former shovelware projects of Limbic (Might&Magic-X Developer) into this thread - another retard did the same with the games my company did - heaven knows why. In defense of Limbic and us I just explained why small developer companies actually have to produce this garbage - not because we love shovelware so much but because we have to build up and run a game studio that could possibly develop their dream project some day. You don't get any development budget without a decent track-record (see various indie RPG projects that failed). For us, after five years of painful industrial game productions, our goal became finally true and I am sure it's very similar for our colleagues at Limbic Entertainment with Might&Magic.

Btw, HobGoblin42 , did you by chance work on Knights&Merchants' pathfinding algorithm? I want to know if I finally found out who the person I've hated so much all these years is.

I've programmed every line of code for this game (that's why single parts of the code lack in polishing). The complete dev team consisted of 2-3 people. I will not touch this code anymore, but a very talented guy is working on a remake since years now.

Since blue byte was phagocyted by ubisoft is there a slightest hope to get an albion 2 someday ?

I don't think so. Because of its epic size Albion was quite expensive in development but commercially not very successful back then. I am still waiting for another Incubation, but I fear this won't become reality either.

Their Anno 2070 game stays true to it's prequels, so there are exceptions.

They did until now, but after the commercial success of Settlers Online, the Anno series is changing to a f2p browser based game as well:http://en.anno-online.com/

 

[DrChopper]

I don't know if you really mean it, but I don't think doing what Limbic do is garbage. Sure, it's a kind of game with a lesser fanbase and maybe not the project they would like to do, but I'm pretty sure if they make give some heart to it then it can become a very fun game. Man, I really hoped to play a new MM game.

From what I have seen from the videos, I don't think you will have only 4 directions to move, I think the arrow on the interface is just there for the oldschool look. The cavern ways look to go to all direction and the player seem to walk too near of the walls. You can see too that in the screenshot with the dwarfs, the character doesn't face directly to the wall but on another direction contrary to Grimrock. I still have very good memories of MM6, one of my favorite rpg ever, but checking some Let's play videos on youtube remember me there was a lot of problem with this gameplay. For exemple, the fly spell who gave the choice to pass quickly on a lot of zones; the hit and run attack with the bow where the monsters have no chance to hit you; the pause bug where you hit a monster on the corner of the door while the monster couldn't; return to the village after every 4-5 big monsters; the lack of strategies (it was more about abusing weakness of the game); sometime you were pulling too much monsters and you had to rebegin; etc. From what I have seen of the video, I think the game will correct a lot of these weakness and the player willl be able to move normally out of combat.

Anyway, I hope they will give more informations today or tomorrow. Stupid approach, you think about to release a new game and you don't give any informations about that.

 

[LESS T_T]

Some details:
http://www.polygon.com/2013/3/24/4140814/might-and-magic-x-legacy-preview-pax-east-2013

Dev said it will be take about 25 hours to complete and released in September as a downloadable title.

 

[Infinitron]

Some details:
http://www.polygon.com/2013/3/24/4140814/might-and-magic-x-legacy-preview-pax-east-2013

Dev said it will be take about 25 hours to complete and released in September as a downloadable title.

This part is interesting:

Might and Magic X Legacy is being co-developed by Limbic Entertainment and Ubisoft Paris. Limbic has experience with the franchise, having made two adventure packs for Might and Magic Heroes 6. But while Legacy is a decidedly old-school game, it is being developed with extensive community input — a relatively new method of making games.

For Heroes 6, Ubisoft offered private, VIP forums to the game's most dedicated players. Like Heroes 6, Might and Magic X Legacy is being developed with an "actively involved" community, said Le Breton. Limbic and Ubisoft showed their fans early concept art and design ideas, and solicited their feedback by letting them vote on features.

Le Breton noted that involving fans is a double-edged sword, because while they have a deep knowledge of the games themselves, they often don't know what they want unless it's put in front of them. They tend to be much better at commenting on something that's presented to them than at coming up with ideas themselves.

"You need to come up with a strong vision at first, and you need to be ready for that vision to be challenged," explained Le Breton.

Anybody know where these "VIP forums" are located?

 

[Gozma]

It's pretty hard to screw up a grid-based blobber.

I don't understand why people would think something like that. It seems incredibly easy to screw up to me. The old M&M games are not good naturally because of the system, they are actually really well designed. M&Ms are basically like open world Metroid/Castlevania games where you need to get X power to do Y thing iterated over and over, except instead of constantly doing one-dimensional backtracking you have two map dimensions of freedom. I am worried that if the devs don't give a shit and have no interest in M&M fundamentals they could easily make a sloppy combination of old blobber designs they quickly ripped off and semiconsciously reiterated shit like MMO design. Stuff like the instant full heal level up from the video is worrying. It could be absolutely fucking awful.

 

[Syl]

Anybody know where these "VIP forums" are located?

http://might-and-magic.ubi.com/heroes-6/en-US/news/details.aspx?c=tcm:19-11494&ct=tcm:6-231-32

Heroes 6 is now officially announced. Something which has not really been announced yet is the fact that we’ve been working with some of you for nearly a year on the game.

Fans and players are key to us on a series such as Might & Magic, so we’ve had a private forum running for a few months where we’re speaking to around 20 fans.

VIP means VIP.

 

[Infinitron]

Damn.

 

[Falkner]

That would explain that one poster on neogaf who seemed to have known something about the game. But since he also mentioned the Codex and incline, he must a member of this prestigious community as well. But who?

 

[aris]

What was wrong with Heroes VI? I played Heroes of might and magic III a hell of a lot as kid, which is probably one of my favorite games of all time, but stopped after the fifth iteration. I have no idea about Heroes VI, I would like to know what it did wrong and (if any) what it did right, so that I can decide whether to try it or not.

 

[Stabwound]

They keep releasing this great high-quality shots. I guess it looks decent. That's a quest log in the top right, so hopefully it isn't too dumbed down with a compass and markers on the mini map.

25 hours sounds pretty small in scope. Even Grimrock took me 20 and I didn't even find much more than 1/2 of the secrets.

 

[Jaesun]

Cool. So it does look like there are 2 slots for hiring NPC's.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Cool. So it does look like there are 2 slots for hiring NPC's.

I was actually surprised there doesn't seem to be any always-on minimap, assuming the lower right corner is for that. Yay for wizard eye.

 

[Jaesun]

Yeah *seems* that way.

Still...... cautiously fapping.

 

[Dorateen]

Yay for wizard eye.

AH-HA!

 

[Arkeus]

Yay for wizard eye.

AH-HA!

 

[octavius]

Le Breton noted that involving fans is a double-edged sword, because while they have a deep knowledge of the games themselves, they often don't know what they want unless it's put in front of them. They tend to be much better at commenting on something that's presented to them than at coming up with ideas themselves.

Yeah, it's much easier to be a critic or even an editor, than to actually create something.
And listening too much to fans resulted in removing all the supernatural stuff from Thief 1 in Thief 2, and introducing the boring Elemental town in one of the HoMM 3 expansions.

But all in all this new M&M game looks promising. UbiSoft did a good job with both HoMM V and Dark Messiah, neither of which shamed the Might&Magic legacy. That was 6-7 years ago, though, and I must admit I don't have any experience with UbiSoft after that.

 

[Grunker]

25 hours for a Might & Magic game? I can't recall spending less than 60 on any of the ones I've played.

 

[Gozma]

Were they really that long on the first runthrough? M&M (3-5 anyway) is the kind of game that can be speedrun in 20 minutes once you know where everything is so I don't have a strong impression of how long they are "supposed" to take.

 

[Grunker]

Were they really that long on the first runthrough? M&M (3-5 anyway) is the kind of game that can be speedrun in 20 minutes once you know where everything is so I don't have a strong impression of how long they are "supposed" to take.

I mostly remember 6-8 which all took me upwards of 100 hours to complete, but I guess I did faff about a lot.

 

[Darth Roxor]

I think MM8 might fit somewhere around those 25 hours, it was pretty short when I played it recently. But all the others were much, much more extensive. Especially WoX and 6.