Last couple of days i felt like playing some retro late 90s/early 2000s 3D RPG that i hadn't played before, so i went to MobyGames and started looking for RPGs released on Windows between 1997 and 2003. Among the obvious results (Morrowind, Gothic, etc) - which i've played before - i saw Might & Magic IX. So i thought, what the hell, let's try it (i already bought it many years ago from GOG together with all the other M&M games).
Note that i never even touched the game before, i only heard that it had some troubled development, it was released in a buggy state and it wasn't as well received as the previous titles but beyond that i had no idea.
I tried the GOG version (which apparently has some community patch already preapplied) and aside from being locked at 800x600 (which i upscale via Gamescope) the only issues i had running it was that i had to lock the FPS at 60 to avoid the game's physics breaking and i had to use a "wrapper" dinput.dll to fix a jumpy mouse problem (i remember this issue with other early LithTech games).
Anyway, i've only played a few hours so i can't judge if the game is good or bad yet, it does feel a bit different from previous M&M games in that it doesn't have the "wackyness" of either M&M3 or M&M6 (the two M&M games i've played the most by far) and the large hordes of easily dispatched enemies have been replaced with smaller numbers of tougher enemies (also those mosquitoes -or whatever they are- are fucking annoying) and there is barely any feedback when attacking someone - they just die after a bit. I don't mind the monsters (mosquitoes aside) but while there writing is still somewhat tongue-in-cheek, the tone feels different.
However one thing that did stand out to me was the visuals:
Now, as i wrote, i've only played for a bit so things might start looking better later, but for a game released in 2002 it looks like some Quake 1 mod from the midlate 90s. I actually think it looks worse than the previous Might and Magic games with the only difference being the use of 3D models for the characters (which weren't that great but that was on the artists) - but the previous M&M engine could already display static 3D models and i remember even in M&M6 there were 3D structures and dungeons, so i wonder if they could have been served better by expanding their own engine to add support for 3D character models instead of getting LithTech (which they didn't even make good use of, even the first iteration of the engine could do better visuals and judging from the skeletal animated models, this is a later revision - probably based on the version Monolith used for NOLF).
Anyway, that's my first impressions, i don't think i'll finish the game, probaby play around for a bit until i get bored :-P, but i was surprised by how it looked especially since from a quick search i've seen a few quotes from the time (e.g. IGN) mentioning how M&M9 looked better than its predecessors.
