MIght & Magic Heroes VI Preview

Bit-tech put online a two-pages preview for Ubisoft and Black Hole Entertainment’s latest installment for Heroes of Might & Magic series, Might & Magic Heroes VI, although they don’t sound too thrilled about the title.

It’s these nuances that come from millions of combinations of artefacts traits, skills, spells, upgrades and unit types that give Heroes games their reputation. For example, once you’ve acquired your first skill point for a hero, you can spend a good ten minutes just reading about the function of each spell or trait, and cross-referencing that with all the others. It takes so long, because there are so many skills and there’s no easy way to compare them. This might seem unnecessary, but this old-school method of having to remember what you’re doing is crucial to the depth that Heroes games are intended to provide.

Of course, this is old news if you’ve played a Heroes game before at some point. The new news is that online features have been added to Heroes VI in the form of the Conflux. It seems that in the five years since the last Heroes game, someone’s logged onto that FaceSpace thing and decided that social networking is the future. The Confluence features enable all sorts of social networking features, such as sharing and comparing stats, receiving game news and posting in the message-board-like Confluence Orbs that appear on some maps. There are also more advanced online multiplayer abilities than before.

What’s that, you say? You’ve got the dinner on, cripes is that the time and can you just play offline please? Well, yes, you can, but you’ll then be denied the Dynasty Weapon and Dynasty Trait starting bonuses for campaigns, as well as the exclusive bonuses granted via the Altar of Wishes.