We caught our first glimpse of Might and Magic Heroes VI at this year's gamescom, but further details since then have been fairly sparse. Fortunately, I was able to sit down with producer Erwan LeBreton at Ubisoft's Digital Day and get a closer look at the game.
Although the Might & Magic franchise has grown to encompass multiple different genres over the years, the Heroes series is best known for its unique blend of turn-based strategy and RPG elements. While Heroes VI appears to remain faithful to the series, preserving many of the gameplay mainstays, great effort has been made to implement changes and improvements that fans have been clamoring for.
Might & Magic Heroes VI (PC) Developer: Black Hole Entertainment Publisher: Ubisoft To be released: 2011
Upon sitting down to start the demo, the first and most obvious improvement was the brand-new engine and art direction for this title. Heroes VI is running on Black Hole's own in-house engine and sports a more realistic visual style, as opposed to the "cartoony" look of Heroes V. Models and textures were sharp and detailed, the effective use of color and contrast in overworld exploration was gorgeous, and the attention to detail in the combat animation blew me away. You may be wondering what type of rig you are going to need to run something like this, but I've been assured that the engine has actually been optimized to run well on laptops!
In terms of gameplay, Heroes VI appears to remain true to the series. The classic gameplay loop of building, exploration, resource collection, combat, and character advancement has been faithfully recreated. Everything appears to have been built from the ground up to be more streamlined and responsive, giving the game a truly "next-gen" feel.
Some of the changes will include:
The new interface is clean and unobtrusive, and manages to make movement and combat a pleasure rather than a chore.
Hero progression has been completely retooled, giving the player more freedom to choose how they build and customize their character. Gone are the days of choosing to take the experience reward and crossing your fingers that you will actually unlock something decent.
Resource gathering no longer requires that you use up precious action points, constantly backtracking to recapture or harvest previously controlled nodes. Once captured, they will now link to a nearby player-controlled fortress and funnel into your stock each turn. Opposing players must physically capture a fortress in order to gain control of linked resources.
Also new is the ability to convert captured cities into any faction that you currently control. There's no more trying to make angels and demons play nice in your party!
If you are a fan of any of the previous Heroes titles, or even RPG and strategy games, this is definitely one to look forward to!
The last HoMM game I played was III and the expansions. I liked it. Good to see that there's a PC developer that cares about people who want to play games on their computer but only have laptops.
Just a random thing. Considering the changes, they do know a lot of the fanbase...basically the only people who play heroes most of the time, liked the original gameplay style because of the stuff they want to change out? Aka gathering, random hero progression. It made multiplayer more fun when you know they wont get the same moves all the time. Il have to see this in action first, or just stick to my heroes 3 and 5 :)
@Worca They have been in touch with veteran HoMM players from the community to determine what sort of changes or improvements should be made to the game. It seemed to play very much like the originals, I think the changes will be welcome.
@mrfrostnova That is the actually title of the game now, not sure why they decided to change it. I was confused at first too! :p
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5:00 AM on 10.01.2010 | 
Let me have this now.
Not exactly sure where that came from but hell yeah, SECONDED!
Oh sorry, I couldn't contain that outburst. :o
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"Thank the maker"
I'm glad I'm not the only one that uses that phrase.
"RAHHHHHHHHHHHH!" *dead*
@mrfrostnova That is the actually title of the game now, not sure why they decided to change it. I was confused at first too! :p