Might & Magic Heroes VI Interview

Norwegian site Gamer.no recently rounded up a large batch of community-submitted questions about Might & Magic Heroes VI and sent them off to producer Erwan Le Breton, and lucky for us the resulting list of answers are all in English. A couple that stand out to me:

Why have you removed things that made the earlier games more random? Things like a random selection of skills on hero level up and mage guild? i found this to be one of the challenging aspects of the earlier games. To work with what you get and adapt your strategy from game to game.

I havent played the beta to much, but it seems to me that it will take a lot more time to build up a strong spellbook then before, is this true?

Even so, im still looking forward to the game. Preordered the special edition as soon as i could.

Svar: Thanks for preordering the special edition 🙂

The power of the various abilities have been changed since the beta, in accordance with the players’ feedbacks, and our support of the game will obviously continue after its release.

Concerning our reduction of the random factors, I guess it is a question of “belief”. Our team considers that putting the player in full control, with a full knowledge of the consequences of his choices, what he can gain or lose, is a more “strategic” experience than offering him limited choices based on probabilities, with no clear visibility on his possible development paths.

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Why where so many resources removed?

Less resources equals less fun. One of the fun part of the Heroes of Might and Magic games is to find the right resource. Well, now that fun is gone.

Sorry for complaining, but this is just my personal opinion. There’s more things I want to say, but I won’t whine to much 🙂

Svar: The 4 rare resources have been combined into a single one, called (Dragon Blood Crystals). Its existence is linked with the history of Ashan. In the Mythic Age, when Asha and her children fought against Urgash. The Dragon gods have shed their blood on Ashan, which crystallized in power nexus, also called Dragon veins. The people of Ashan have learned how to extract, and use, those crystals, for magic purposes.

We have three main reasons for this change:

– This brings more strategy to the game. At first, you could think this is the contrary but on former Heroes, each faction had his specific resources to look after and so did not care much about the other guy and his mines. Now that every faction is looking for the same resource, mines possession will be much more strategic as you’ll also prevent the other to take this crucial resource.

– Games with a lot of resources are not strategy games but management games. If you look at Starcraft 2, they have 2 resources. Games such as Settlers VII (7 resources) or Civilization V (32 resources!!)focus more on management. In the former Heroes games, you would often spend a lot of time collecting rare resources that were useless to you just to convert them in the marketplace. This kind of micromanagement was not really the funniest part of playing M&M Heroes…

– It is much easier for map makers. You don’t need to think too much about which resources to place on the map depending on which factions are present.