Heroes of Might and Magic V Developer Diary #3

Ubisoft’s official Might and Magic website has been updated with a third developer diary for Heroes of Might and Magic V, this time focusing on the game’s battlefield. A snippet:

We studied the previous games and a worrying tendency was established : the ratio of creature size to the whole combat screen was declining very rapidly with each new version. If we kept such a tendency the average creature would not be more than a speck on the screen in Heroes 5. This is something that you can accept when you have a realtime game with hundreds or thousands of creatures displayed, but not when there are about a dozen. Plus, we wanted to have multiple sizes for creatures, and that would increase this problem again, with the smaller creatures (like the imps) being only a fraction of the others.

Besides this visual question, there was also the major objective of increasing the tactics during a fight. The designers at Nival were planning to give each creature a special attack pattern, like a breath area, or a shooting line. This idea would increase the need to search for specific situations where the position of enemy units would be used against them through a death blow. But for this idea to work, the size would need to be kept under control, to force tighter hand-to-hand brawls and decision-making. This need was from the start in line with the visual issue mentioned above.