Might & Magic Heroes VII Previews and Interviews

A handful of new previews and interviews regarding Ubisoft and Limbic’s Might & Magic Heroes VII have hit the web, so it’s time to learn a bit more about the strategy/RPG follow-up.

GameSpot starts us off with a preview:

So I gallop about the kingdom, each turn giving me a certain number of movement points to spend in Heroes tradition. I gather wood and gold as I gradually uncover the fog of war, and eventually approach a blackfang vendor who agrees to reveal the area around its towers–for a price, of course. Remember that magical prison? The only way to earn the harpies’ trust is to free them from the wizards, who, as the harpies tell it, often come to laugh and scoff at the creatures’ misfortune. However, the prison’s anchors are guarded, and I must destroy the beastly sentries protecting them before I can grant the harpies their wish.

This is the first of many combat encounters to come, but the flaming salamanders I face in the current turn-based battle are easily dealt with. Imani stands behind the battle grid, waiting for me to issue a standard attack order or perform the one spell available to me, which heals targets over time. On the grid, I move orcish dagger-throwers and soldiers forward, each visible individual representing a larger number of units. Suffering attacks means not just taking damage, but losing those numbers until the entire unit is destroyed. The salamanders are soon toast, but subsequent battles introduce me to new opponents, as well as to new units I can hire for myself. The lizardlike basilisk might be my favorite of these, given the massive amount of damage it does not just during attack, but when retaliating against djinn and genies mounted on hovering magic carpets. It’s most effective when I flank my adversaries, which is a new element Heroes VII introduces.

Attack of the Fanboy follows through with a Q&A:

There are a lot of resources that have been revealed for Might & Magic Heroes VII. Some may feel that it might be an over complication by having so many, how do you reason the implementation of so many different resources?

J: We now have seven, this was kind of a bit of feedback from in part VI where we only had three basic ones or four basic ones. We had a strong request for a deeper focus on the economy part and more resource management within the towns. You can divide these resources into core resources like ore and gold, and these rare resources that you need for special buildings for example. They are equally weighted, some are more rare, rare to encounter, and also are valuable.

E: We tried to reuse the number of resources and have only one rare one, considering we were more of a strategy game and less of a management game in Heroes VI. The community feedback was quite unanimous on the fact they wanted to go back to seven which was the magic number of the previous Heroes title.

IGN goes with something of a mix:

(It’s not innovation. We have no breakthrough features,) says Erwan Le Breton, Creative Director for Might & Magic Heroes VII. This might be an ominous introduction for many series, but it’s oddly reassuring for Heroes, entering its 20th year. The franchise has become something like The Simpsons of the turn-based fantasy strategy world: absolutely essential in the 1990s, wildly inconsistent in the 2000s, and reliably decent, if uninspiring in the 2010s. So hearing that the developers were taking advantage of having six installments of the franchise from which to take the best ideas was probably the best possible introduction to the newest game.

Le Breton describes the series as a (mix between chess and Pokemon,) but that may sell Heroes’ appeal short. At the strategic layer, you move your heroes with their armies around to capture mines, find items, capture enemy castles, and improve your own. Then there are turn-based battles, where you move those dragons and ogres, casting spells from the back with the hero.

PCGamesN does the same:

One of the people responsible for building this new Might & Magic is brand director Erwan Le Breton. He’s a veteran: having worked as a producer on the last four Might & Magic games. HIs work on Heroes VI began with a team brainstorm: what would the perfect Might and Magic game include? Their conclusions: more levels of strategy, an RPG reputation system like the one in Bioware’s games, they wanted to have some of the persistent elements they were seeing in MMOs, like an always connected community of adventurers.

Players hated it.

(The community was saying Heroes 6 was the worst game in the series ever,) Le Breton tells me. (All the changes that I mentioned [.] they said it wasn’t heroes.) They complained that time and money had been spent on new features instead of refining other parts of the game.

(Heroes VI in this perspective was very innovative but it was hard to implement everything in the game and in the end all of us are disappointed with the final product compared to our original vision,) Le Breton says. (It was a question of time, money, and ambition. It was not the Heroes of our dreams.)

4Gamers takes us further:

Regarding the fighting, can rub the experienced professionals in their hands: still your turn-based to work will have to go in defined battlegrounds, though they have added two welcome things that perhaps were already making their appearance in the franchise . On the one hand you can hide behind certain elements and on the other hand loves the game now also consider your position to determine how much or how little damage gets you administered.

The content of this RPG Might & Magic Heroes VII seems to be what was then, thanks to the return of range of talents, currently spread over 10 branches (Leadership, Diplomacy, Defense, Destiny, Explorer, Warfare, …). You accumulated points can then distribute these skills and because there is a solid chunk of variety is available, you can in this way your heroes still make quite unique as you wish. In terms spells seems to be not much has changed, but since we anyway had a huge choice, which is not necessarily call this a downer.

And we cap things off at GameWatcher with a six-minute video preview.