My favorite roll-playing game is coming back!
I’ve been playing it since the first one came out for the Commodore 64, and loved every one after that, except for maybe M&M 9.
That’s “role-playing”.
Except when you’re playing Bakeries & Buns, of course.
I played MM6 back in '98, MM7 the following year, gave MM8 a miss and wasn’t overjoyed with MM9 (which played much like Ultima Underworld 2, less than impressive ten years down the line), but if they’ve managed to pick the ball up again I’ll await the next development with much interest.
Happy days. I particularly liked being able to shake the Circus of the Sun down for some serious prizes in MM6… back when I could make a game last until April without feeling like I was wasting time.
I too am waiting. Yup.
New company. UBISoft bought the rights from the Remains of 3DO.
HOMM5 is also due out next year. I look forward to both.
M&M is the only PC based RPG I have ever enjoyed.
HOMM2 & HOMM3 were my favorite War Games ever and HOMM4 was a bit too buggy, I guess that’s what happens as you go under.
I been playing Age of Wonders II SM. Basically it is HOMM.
Might and Magic?
My wife and I will be so, so, SO thrilled! The M&M series has been our favorite series!
Since it’s a new company, I do hope they don’t screw it up. (Read: change the franchise to a style of game that I don’t like.) For instance, they had better keep turn-based combat.
Still, this looks very promising.
HOMM5 is coming out next year?! Holy Crusaders!
I love HOMM2 and HOMM3, but I’m not so het up on HOMM4… they changed the interface too much. I do like the graphics, sounds and music though.
I’ll have to try Age of Wonders… but I think it’ll have to wait for a bit. CivIV is due out soon.
A PC roleplaying game with (usually) a fun storyline in which the good stuff is cleverly hidden for a while, an excellent character-development system, a combat system that copes with everything from bog-standard goblins to dragons that would beat the living shit out of any D&D party you care to imagine, nice gear, spells and so on… do you want to know more?
My wife still plays MMVI. So, on the one hand, Yay! New game!
On the other hand, “Yay. Another poorly-lit, brown/gray/black palette first-person shooter.”
We’ll just have to wait and see…
I can’t do a lot of surfing at game sites from work; what other games were created using this engine?
Sweet! :d
I’m looking forward to this one also (plus the new HoMM.) Might & Magic 2 is still my favorite of the M&M series, with HoMM2 being my favorite in the Heroes line. One of the best parts of the early M&M games was exploring the different areas to discover what the drawings on the maps were representing. And of course, opening up the deliciously rare “black boxes” to find out what was inside - assuming your whole party wasn’t zapped by a trap on the lock.
One of my fondest (and most annoying) gaming memories:
Playing the ever-loving crap out of M&M II to the point that the party was very, very powerful. Powerleveling was to be had at Camp-Kill-U, where they’d throw a couple of ultra-powerful monsters at you. Except, sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes, they threw thousands of pissant monsters at you.
Now, the game allowed you to hold down…mmmm…Ctrl-A, was it? Some key combo like that…to automatically attack whatever was in front of you. Since there was no way for minor creatures to lay a finger on the party, that was a great feature. Only thing was I was playing this on a 286, so each single creature fight took a second or two. I had to tape together some pencils into a tripod, and weigh it down with an inverted coffee mug to hit the keyboard combo.
You face 2,338 Orcs
Attack - You kill 1 Orc
:: Doo-da-do-DOO-da-doo :: music
You face 2,337 Orcs
Attack - You kill 1 Orc
:: Doo-da-do-DOO-da-doo :: music
You face 2,336 Orcs
Attack - You kill 1 Orc
:: Doo-da-do-DOO-da-doo :: music
You face 2,335 Orcs
Attack - You kill 1 Orc
:: Doo-da-do-DOO-da-doo :: music
You face 2,334 Orcs
Attack - You kill 1 Orc
:: Doo-da-do-DOO-da-doo :: music
…
“Bye Mom…I’m going out for a few hours. Don’t touch the computer, please…I’m killing orcs.”
Ahhh, good times…
Ah, yes. “Dragon City Town Council. Interrupt? (y/n)”
Roll-playing can cause a yeast infection…
:: d&r ::
The single best wrinkle you could exploit in MMVI was that an early trip to Free Haven allowed you to park a Lloyd’s Beacon close to a group of houses where, with the aid of some cash, you could get either some serious magical backup, or someone to help you cut excellent deals on your trading, or someone who could Town Portal you all over the place. If you really wanted to rape the game, you could use the hidden Fly scroll in New Sorpigal to get you to the roof of Buccaneer’s Lair, teleport to Dragonsand and enter the “New World Computing” dungeon, where there was nothing tougher than a Goblin King to keep you from a cube that gave you a temporary +256 to Seven Stats and a “cashpoint” that gave you money. Then with the aid of a Gate Master you could hie thee to Free Haven, get Water Expert and Lloyd’s Beacon, return to NWC and put a marker by the cashpoint, and keep refilling your pockets and depositing your gains in a bank until you had enough money to buy loads of gear and spells from every shop within reach. Not that you had to do this if you didn’t want to, but you could.
The two ultimate fiddles in MMIX, one usable early on and the other only late, was that a Banker NPC increased not only “found” gold but cash withdrawals from a bank. So visit a bank, empty your account, re-deposit it, rinse and repeat until you had far more cash than you could ever spend; and that the Divine Intervention spell could be cast as many times per day as you liked if you set it as a Quick Spell and fired it off with a mouse-click instead of via the spellbook. You might think this a blackguardly thing to do, but the game didn’t mind.
But did any of the money they spent make it back into the pockets of the long-suffering 3DO employees whose final paychecks were never paid? It did not.
Not that we long-suffering former 3DO employees are bitter.
(Although as both a Might and Magic fan and a former 3DO employee, one of the sadder parts of the whole 3DO experience was seeing the M&M series gradually go down the tubes, as it was turned more and more from a beloved project into a cash cow.)
I thought I was the only one who analyzed, and was frustrated by, that same idiotic problem. Also, as I recall, that game had a bug where sufficiently high resistances to things like fire and acid and cold would wrap back around to zero. So once you got to 256% fire resistance, you were suddenly getting fried by very low level fire monsters.
Ah. “Half-life 2.”
I heard that looked pretty nice.
:eek:
M&M? HOMM5?
OH…Thanks for the info! I was so upset to hear about 3DO going under…
I loved M&MVI - M&MVIII.
But when M&MIX came out, it gave me a sever case of motion sickness. I’ve never been able play it since. :smack:
I am a huge fan of both branches of the series… particularly the Heroes side, as Heroes I came out just as I started really getting into computer games. I am also one of the rare people who enjoyed Heroes IV at least as much as Heroes III. Mostly, though, I just hope the new games spend the requisite amount of attention on gameplay and storyline, as I really couldn’t give half a damn about how much they improve the graphics.
So far, at least, things look good. Until then, time to kill time 'till Civ 4 by loading up Heroes 4 for a few more games.
I’m quite excited by this, and have been trying to follow it for quite some time. I was a big fan of the series, mainly focusing on HoMM2, HoMM3, and their respective expansions (this is when the company could still create proper expansion packs with actual new content, and not the dreck we saw near the end of HoMM3 (specifically, after Shadow of Death in my opinion), and throughout HoMM4 (both expansion packs combined had less content than Price of Loyalty, let alone the two major HoMM3 collections). 3DO was already infamous at this point for endlessly repackaging the same material in slightly different combinations, but one could sense things were collapsing fast.
I was also very disappointed by Heroes 4. I’ve been playing games since I was born, and I’ve never seen something that appeared nearly that unfinished. Balance problems abounded, documentations was awful, the AI was horrid, multiplayer barely worked, etc. And all we got were expansion packs releasing content for a nigh-unplayable game. What was truly awful is that I got a sense that there was truly a good game hiding inside HoMM4, but it never got a chance to show its face. The thing was rushed out, and the developers whisked away to work on the worst expansions I’ve ever seen.
From what I can tell about HoMM5, it seems to take enormous inspiration from HoMM3, even to the point of ignoring some of the innovations HoMM4 had to offer. I’m very curious how things will turn out with it, and would love to get into the series again (here’s to hopening the thing will have nice system requirements!)
MtV – I’m very curious what you can tell me about the last days of 3DO. I was watching from the outside, and it was gruesome even from there. Care to fill me in a bit?