Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era was released on PC – a new part of the popular turn-based strategy series, which is especially popular in Russia. For a long time, the developers could not make a game that would appeal to fans like the unprecedented third “Heroes” (released in 1999). But the ancient era, despite a number of shortcomings, was much better than all its predecessors. Journalist Georgi Berger tells how the new heroes of Might and Magic came to be and explains how they managed to bring back the atmosphere of fantasy adventure for players.
Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era finds itself in an interesting situation when the game needs to compete not with other new products or even with the previous part, but with its version almost thirty years ago. Heroes of Might and Magic III, released in 1999, is still considered an unparalleled game by fans and is still very popular.
In March, representatives of the GOG digital store, the main platform for preserving and selling old video games, He saidthat HoM&M3 (or simply “Heroes”) on their website confidently holds the first place among retro games. In other words, it’s truly a timeless classic. Moreover, with a special status in the countries of Eastern Europe, where their own cult formed around the game long before its global recognition.
This popularity is usually explained by the fact that it was one of the first video games to be officially released in Russia and Poland, with translation into local languages. The ability to play together on one computer came in handy, since only 2% of the population was online in Russia in 1999.
But this is a convenient explanation for the lazy: it is unlikely that any of the Russian gamers of that time would be able to distinguish between the licensed and the pirated version, or the pirated translation from the official version. It is also unlikely that a significant number of the one and a half million copies sold in the world will be in Russia or Poland.
As is often the case with culture, a rational explanation only makes reality duller and, in fact, hardly exists at all. The “heroes” simply exist, specifically the third (when you say “heroes,” the number doesn’t need to be spelled out unless it’s different from the three).
At the same time, in principle, you may not really know anything about the larger world of Might and Magic – except that it is an epic fantasy. Enough background information: It is a turn-based strategy game where hero characters act as warlords under the player’s control. The gameplay is divided into three parts: a schematic map through which the hero can pass through a certain number of cells in each turn; City management screen where you can build new buildings and gather an army; And turn-based battles reminiscent of chess, where there can be hundreds of pawns, and queens can launch fireballs that destroy all three hundred pawns at once.
The essence of the game has not changed since then. In HoM&M IV, heroes were given the opportunity to be on the battlefield themselves (and not just use spells); In HoM&M V, a 3D warp appeared. Parts of the vast world of Might and Magic in which the events take place have changed, as well as some other details, but each time it has been different, and not the same “heroes”.
Released at the end of April in Olden Era, it is actually the eighth game in the series, albeit without a number. However, publisher Ubisoft is rebooting the franchise: officially, this is actually a prequel that returns to the planet Enroth – the setting of the first three parts of “Heroes”, just five hundred years before the events described in them.
But this is official, but in reality, Olden Era is just a final surrender to the perfection of the third part and an attempt to enter the same river without reinventing too much. Fans of the series had been waiting for this approach for twenty years, but the company wasn’t ready and produced clumsy 3D and other modern improvements, which only made things worse. Now Ubisoft has decided to not only listen to fans, but put development in their hands.
It’s only natural and fair that this game is in the hands of fans from Eastern Europe: Olden Era, produced by the Russian-origin studio Unfrozen. Exactly the origin – now the company’s office is located in Cyprus, and employees are spread across typical places of Russian immigration after 2022: Armenia, Georgia, Latvia, Israel, the same Cyprus.
A few years ago, the studio released a tactical role-playing game Iratus: Lord of the Deadthrough which she demonstrated her ability to skillfully capture the spirit of games that appeared at the turn of the century. In their treatment of the new “heroes”, it seems that they managed to find a compromise: there is also 3D with beautiful realistic shadows, but it is implemented only to recreate the image and spirit of the third part. Returning to the world of Enroth enabled the return of many factions and units beloved by players, and the distance of five hundred years enabled the addition of new factions and units. And of course, tell a completely different story.
It takes place on the continent of Gadam, where the young minotaur Gunnar discovers the Hive, a faction of giant insectoid monsters that attempt to enslave everyone else. The campaign is designed in an interesting and new way: it develops non-linearly, and the choice of which heroes and factions to play for depends on the player’s actions. Instead of the typical heroes approach of focusing on one faction in each action, the action more realistically consists of alliances against a single threat.
In addition to the main campaign, there are also several “scenarios” – individual missions in which there is a certain plot, but there is no connection to the campaign or other missions.
Like a true fan, Unfrozen is not only good, but very good at understanding the mythos of the world of Might and Magic, which sometimes gets in your way. Campaigns in HoM&M, especially in the early games in the series, rarely delve deeply into the mythology of the game world. Therefore, you can go through the third part with all the additions and still not notice that the magic in the game is the remnants of ancient technologies, and that the angels are actually cyborgs.
All this, as well as the presence of aliens in the plot, is neatly hidden in descriptions of artifacts and other texts that few people read. Unfrozen sometimes emphasizes these details more clearly, slightly spoiling the process of immersion in a fantasy world with dragons, griffins, elves, unicorns, priests and other typical inhabitants.
However, the value of “heroes” was rarely present in their stories, and the process was much more important. Heroes is all about slow and deliberate resource management, whether that’s steps on the world map, gold and mineral resources when building a city, or units in battle. And here Unfrozen really managed to organize the same addictive process that was in the third part, and even successfully improve it.
Among the big innovations: the emergence of magic and law points that are awarded for interacting with the world and their accumulation in cities with or instead of gold. Magic points can be used to purchase non-combat spells, often making it easier to move around the map or teleport. Law Points allow you to upgrade upgrade lines unique to each faction. These upgrades may relate to the abilities of heroes, the strength and number of certain units, and resource extraction.
The unit upgrade system was borrowed from the games following the third “Heroes”: in one case attack is increased, in another – armor, in the third initiative, i.e. how the unit will attack in battle. All innovations as a whole add a chance, which simultaneously makes the game easier at low levels and makes it almost impossible at high levels (for example, if you make a mistake somewhere and do not boost what you should have).
Let’s say your hero has bonuses to archers. You can add skills that will give you certain bonuses when attacking from a distance. Using stat points, you can upgrade the archers themselves, their ranged attacks, and their initiatives, so you can always be able to go first. Finally, you can take the appropriate artifacts (for example, a bow that removes the damage penalty at a very large distance) and as a result get a hero who can destroy groups of units of a much higher level without getting a scratch.
Another big part of Heroes’ charm is the design, including the sound and interfaces. This is also where Unfrozen succeeds for the most part, although it is not without its faults. Many sound design elements, such as the sound of button clicks and the winding musical violin entries that start and end days and movements, were carried directly into the Olden Era from the third “Heroes”. This seemingly trivial helps bring the player back into the “same” atmosphere.
With the visual part, everything is more complicated. On the one hand, detailed 3D character models with rendered lines no longer look like an angular misunderstanding, as in other parts of “Heroes” with 3D graphics.
On the other hand, there are a lot of details. The ambiguous nature of the older games left a lot to the imagination, but it also gave the artists some freedom. In the ancient era, there was only space and abundance, and the sense of proportion was unfamiliar to its developers. The design of all buildings, characters and units is reminiscent of the style of semi-free mobile strategies: they are presented with such intense lighting and saturated with details that they begin to dazzle the eyes.
This is not just an aesthetic point: the overload of each element sometimes creates an overall feeling of chaos and disharmony on the screen. Which is fortunately not the case with the world map, which is almost identical to the one in the third part (and many of the elements on it are copied directly from there), and 3D effects such as running shadows add volume to it without loading it with anything new.
Heroes of Might and Magic: The Ancient Era will be finished for a long time, something will change in it, but it is already clear that this is a success. On the first day of the game’s early access on Steam Bought 250 thousand times, which allowed the developers to recover all production costs immediately.
You might think that the key to success is nostalgia, but according to a report by the same GOG, a significant portion of buyers of the third “heroes” on this site are young people under 25 years old. Store representatives explain this by saying that the current generation of gamers who grew up on Minecraft and Roblox don’t care about graphics and can appreciate good old games.
A long-standing trend that’s slowly creeping out of the indie gaming world, along with the Olden Era, is almost in the mainstream: good games don’t necessarily have to be a technological innovation and a test of system performance. It’s precisely this kind of necessity that kept Heroes of Might and Magic from the sequel (or in this case, prequel) it deserved. But now a new era has come.
Georgie Berger