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| Thread: Heroes III - 15th Anniversary Week! |  This thread is pages long: 1 2 · NEXT» |
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Storm-Giant
Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
On the Other Side!
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posted February 24, 2014 06:37 PM |
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Heroes III - 15th Anniversary Week!
Hello Heroes,
Today we are glad to announce you a special celebration in the Might & Magic Franchise!
Indeed, 15 years ago on the 28/02/1999, Heroes of Might & Magic III was released.
We wanted to pay tribute to this monument by dedicating an entire week to its glory on our Facebook page! And this might not be our only surprise this year…
Have a look to our menu and join us to celebrate!
https://www.facebook.com/MightandMagic
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Warmonger
Promising
Legendary Hero
fallen artist
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posted February 24, 2014 06:47 PM |
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Storm-Giant
Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
On the Other Side!
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posted February 24, 2014 06:53 PM |
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Warmonger said:
This one, however, makes me feel very old.
Me too...well, not very old since I was a kid when H3 was released, but still, that's a lot of time
It's worth of mention that H3 vanilla was translated into spanish while the expansions weren't - in Heroes 2 too. When my English level was veeeery basic, having the game in my mother language was a big help to know and love this classic of the videogame industry
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Evaline
Known Hero
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posted February 24, 2014 07:34 PM |
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The correct Heroes of M&M III birthday: February 16, 1999 (master CD release date, the game gone gold at this day).
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Roman2211
Adventuring Hero
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posted February 25, 2014 01:49 PM |
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Heroes 3 the best
very much hope to Heroes 3 HD remake (as it happened in AoE2)
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Storm-Giant
Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
On the Other Side!
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posted February 25, 2014 02:57 PM |
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Roman2211 said:
Heroes 3 the best
very much hope to Heroes 3 HD remake (as it happened in AoE2)
I'd love if that was to be the "other surprise" of this year...but I fear yet another spin-off or something like that
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Storm-Giant
Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
On the Other Side!
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posted February 26, 2014 11:06 AM |
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We've got some interviews!
To get the week off to a good start, we are pleased to share you some insights about Heroes of Might & Magic III development!
Indeed, David Mullich (Game Director of Heroes 3 of Might & Magic) & Chris Vanover -Sir Christian- (Associate Director) made us the honor and friendship to relate "The Tale of Heroes of Might & Magic III"!
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The Tale of Heroes of Might & Magic III
By David Mullich
The video game industry is a relatively small and tight-knit community, and most of the opportunities for the games I’ve developed came to me through someone I had previously known. Heroes of Might and Magic III was no exception.
I first met Jon Van Caneghem, the founder of New World Computing and chief designer of most of its games, in 1994. We were both speakers on a panel about “The Art and Craft of Game Design” at the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Jon was familiar with some of the games I had worked on in the past, such as Disney’s “DuckTales” and Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream”, and suggested that we should work together sometime.
That opportunity came three years later when New World Computing contacted me about becoming director for a new sequel in the Heroes of Might & Magic franchise. It was an exciting proposition but also a somewhat daunting one – Heroes of Might & Magic II, which was released the previous year, had just been named the sixth-best PC game of all time by PC Gamer magazine. What could I possibly do for an encore?
That is precisely the question I was asked by Trip Hawkins, president of The 3DO Company, which had recently purchased New World Computing. Trip made it the habit of personally interviewing every key employee joining the 3DO family (in my case, it was a phone interview, since I lived in the Los Angeles area, where New World was located, whereas The 3DO Company was based in the San Francisco area), and he wanted to know what I brought to the party.
Fortunately, I had an answer ready. I had spent about a week playing Heroes II and found it to be a remarkably addicting and well-designed game. However, my one qualm was with the art style. I thought the artwork looked about five years behind the times, and so my focus would be on bringing the graphics up to current standards. Trip seemed satisfied with my answer, and I could only hope that my bosses at New World agreed with me.
It turns out, they did. On my first day on the job, my manager told me that the company was unhappy with its current art direction and wanted me to “secretly” find a new art director among the art staff. So, on the pretense of introducing myself to everyone, I held one-to-one conversations with each artist. They were all capable artists, but one, Phelan Sykes, used our discussion to talk about how unhappy she was with the status quo. “I have found my art director”, I told myself, and as I later discovered, she was also the most talented artist in the company.
Another person I was happy to meet was Greg Fulton, a new employee New World had hired to be the lead designer the Heroes of Might & Magic III team I was putting together. Greg was hired on the same day I was, and we had never met each other previously, but we quickly became fast friends. I told Greg about my plan for upgrading the franchise’s art style from its past cartoony look to one that I called “extreme fantasy.” Greg showed me some artwork from the Warhammer tabletop miniatures game, proving to me that he knew exactly what I meant.
Together we went through galleries of fantasy artwork created by such great artists as Boris Vallejo, Larry Elmore and Rowina Morill, picking out images of heroes, creatures and environments that captured the look we were going after. We then arranged our collection into eight themed factions, up from the six that were featured in Heroes II.
My attention then turned to programming. My team started with only one programmer, George Ruof, who had worked on Heroes II. For the rest, I had to go outside the company, because the other staff programmers were dedicated to the studio’s other franchise, the Might & Magic role-playing game series. Luckily, my search didn’t take long as I was able to bring on two talented engineers who had programmed “I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream” for me at another company – John Bolton, who I assigned to be lead programmer, and David Richey, who I hired as level editor programmer.
Since we were on a very tight development timeframe – fourteen months altogether – we decided to re-use the game engine that had been created for Heroes of Might & Magic II but added the new game features such as upgradeable fighting units, an underground level, a revamped magic system, and many more map objects to visit. However, David Richey completely revised the level editor so that the level designers had a very robust quest creation system they could use to create a wide variety of levels to explore and conduct warfare upon.
I soon found that each of my leads were so talented and got along with each other so well that I realized I was working with a dream team the likes of which I have never again experienced in my thirty-five years in game industry.
Greg Fulton worked very closely with Jon Van Caneghem on creating the stats for all the combat units and other game elements, modeling them first on Excel spreadsheets to test out whether verifying that everything was balanced before being programmed into the game. Greg also managed our assistant designer, Chris Vanover, who under the name “Sir Christian”, was our community manager and did a terrific job keeping the fans updated on progress with the game. In addition, Greg supervised our six-person level design team lead by Jennifer Bullard (Jennifer would later become assistant designer on Heroes of Might & Magic IV and took over community management under the name “Maranthea”).
Systems programmer John Krause, whom I worked with at my previous company; multiplayer programmer Jeff Leggett; and artificial intelligence programmer Gus Smedstad soon supplemented our three-person engineering team lead by John Bolton. (Gus would later become both lead programmer and lead designer on Heroes of Might & Magic IV). As the deadline fast approached and we got into “crunch time”, even General Manager Mark Caldwell came in to join the programming action.
I spent most of my time with lead artist Phelan Sykes and assistant lead artist Rebecca Riel, helping them adapt the twenty-person art team to the new art style as they created over 10,000 pieces of artwork for the game. Thankfully, the art team was more than up to the challenge, including illustrator George Almond, lead animator Adam McCarthy, user interface designer Scott White, and too many other talented artists to mention here. Phelan also oversaw the creation of the terrific cinematics created by our third-party vendors.
I would be remiss if I did not mention audio lead Rob King, who with the assistance of Paul Romero and Steve Baca, created the game’s dramatic music, sound effects and voice over.
I was lucky enough to be overseeing a very well oiled machine that actually required very little supervision on my part. I had few concerns when I left the project for a few days when my wife gave birth to our second son. When I returned to the office, my team surprised me by creating a new hero for the game, Sir Mullich, whose in-game description was, “Generally stoic, Sir Mullich is prone to spasmodic fits of uncoordinated excitement believed to intimidate his troops into working faster.” I was both touched and amused by this in-joke, and allowed them to keep it in the game.
Heroes of Might & Magic III launched on February 28, 1999, in precisely the fourteen months we estimated it would take to complete, a rarity in game development. Even more amazingly, many fans and critics heralded the game as being better than its predecessor. But most of all, I’m proudest of the wonderful team with whom I was privileged to work, many of whom I still remain in contact with fifteen years later. These incredible game developers are the real heroes of Might & Magic.
"Creativity"
By Chris "Sir Christian" Vanover.
I had already done many maps for Heroes III, as I had done for Heroes I and II, including all the writing and flavor text that players would encounter as they played. The tales of Xanthor that were posted on our community forums were also my creation, and it was a lot of fun to be able to craft each new chapter and see the immediate responses that it would generate.
So when the Design Lead, Greg Fulton, told me he wanted to hand off another design task, I jumped at the chance without question. It turned out to be two requests, actually:
1) Come up with names for the eight leaders of Erathia.
2) Write a short bio / backstory for each hero. Each of the one hundred and twenty eight heroes.
*Gulp*
Deep breaths, Christian, you can do this. But I wasn't panicked for the reason you might think. See, when it comes to writing, I can go on and on. But when it comes to names, I'm hopeless. They are my collective Achilles Heel. My own pen-and-paper character names are terrible, and it carried over to the video games that I play: a Diablo Barbarian named Smaash, who was later reborn as my Rock Band drummer. A SWTOR Bounty Hunter named Guido. I used the name Widowmaker because I was a fan of Glen Cook's excellent Black Company series. At one point I even started naming personal characters after Might & Magic characters, including Xanthor, Korbac, and yes, the hated Spaz Maticus (my Bothan Teras Kasi in Star Wars Galaxies).
What I'm getting at is that, when presented with the two tasks by Greg, I very calmly said to him, "You need to know that I'll come up with 128 character bios before I come up with 8 good names." He laughed, but not as much as he did when I had finished the bios, but still needed two more leader names. I think he took pity on me by allowing me to change the names of one of the Knight characters to Sir Christian - my most unoriginal name ever, but I wouldn't have it any other way!
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If you want to discover more former developer’s interviews (including the one and only Jon Van Caneghem!), check out the Might & Magic X : Legacy thread where I (SG) sorted them under the section "Meeting the Ancients"
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fred79
Disgraceful
Undefeatable Hero
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posted February 26, 2014 01:35 PM |
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interesting read. it's nice to see some behind-the-scenes, from the horses mouth, on my favorite computer games.
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Storm-Giant
Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
On the Other Side!
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posted February 26, 2014 01:50 PM |
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Yeah, it was a nice read indeed.
Quote:
Since we were on a very tight development timeframe – fourteen months altogether – we decided to re-use the game engine that had been created for Heroes of Might & Magic II but added the new game features such as upgradeable fighting units, an underground level, a revamped magic system, and many more map objects to visit. However, David Richey completely revised the level editor so that the level designers had a very robust quest creation system they could use to create a wide variety of levels to explore and conduct warfare upon.
This guys on NWC were completely aware of how important the maps (and user maps) could be for the game. Wish Ubisoft put more attention to it
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mvassilev
Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
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posted February 26, 2014 04:53 PM |
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Storm-Giant said:
I had spent about a week playing Heroes II and found it to be a remarkably addicting and well-designed game. However, my one qualm was with the art style. I thought the artwork looked about five years behind the times, and so my focus would be on bringing the graphics up to current standards.
But Heroes II had a great art style - better than Heroes III's, certainly. Its graphics were low-resolution, and that dates it, but in terms of art alone it's the best in the series. Too bad Sir Mullich didn't agree, HoMM III might have been ever better if he did.
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Eccentric Opinion
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Evaline
Known Hero
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posted February 26, 2014 06:50 PM |
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Edited by Evaline at 18:52, 26 Feb 2014.
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Few little-known facts about Heroes II and Heroes III:
1. Wait feature in combat was first implemented in Heroes II (not Heroes III). Sadly in Heroes II it was disabled because AI did not know how to use it. But it can be easily turned on in Heroes II.
2. There are no trench damage, conflux, art combinations and strange looking teleporters in Heroes III RoE.
3. High-quality (Bink) campaign videos are present only in original Heroes III RoE. These videos were removed from Heroes III AB/SoD and later.
4. Heroes III RoE campaigns are broken/corrupted in Heroes III SoD/Complete. Install original Heroes III RoE first if you really want to play these campaigns!
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Storm-Giant
Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
On the Other Side!
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posted February 26, 2014 07:13 PM |
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It’s time for Did You Know: Heroes 3 of Might & Magic!
After hours spent trough fascinating Campaigns and stressful hot Seat games, did you spotted all those mind-blowing facts?
Do not hesitate and share your best Heroes 3 DYK!
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Maurice
Hero of Order
Part of the furniture
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posted February 27, 2014 12:26 PM |
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Evaline said:
4. Heroes III RoE campaigns are broken/corrupted in Heroes III SoD/Complete. Install original Heroes III RoE first if you really want to play these campaigns!
Why? I recently played through the RoE campaigns in my Complete install, and didn't find anything that was "broken". I am not sure what is supposedly "broken" about it.
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Storm-Giant
Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
On the Other Side!
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posted February 27, 2014 06:38 PM |
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What are you greatest Heroes 3 of Might & Magic memories?
- Could it be any specific creature? Bone Dragons, Naga Queens or Imps (we never know…)
- The charisma of Lord Haart or the skin tone of Nagash?
- Or simply leading your armies against friends or the Nighon invasion?
Source
Tomorrow is the big day!
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Maurice
Hero of Order
Part of the furniture
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posted February 28, 2014 10:16 AM |
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For me the greatest memories are probably playing my favorite campaign of the game: The Festival of Life. Strangely, I really preferred playing either Haven or Tower, while Stronghold wasn't my favorite at that point at all.
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RomanZhou
Tavern Dweller
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posted February 28, 2014 10:32 AM |
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Heroes ¢ó £¬a great game£¡
I hope to Heroes ¢ó HD remake,too. £¨as AOE2 and FF X£¡£©
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Storm-Giant
Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
On the Other Side!
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posted February 28, 2014 06:25 PM |
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Looks like IF there is any annoucement to be made, it will be next week.
Believe it or not, it's been fifteen years now since Heroes 3 of Might & Magic release!
Praised by critics and fans, Heroes III became a true monument in the turn-based strategy genre thanks to an insanely addictive & deep gameplay.
Today let’s celebrate!
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Wind_Falcon
Adventuring Hero
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posted March 01, 2014 12:42 AM |
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So know I know who to blame for messing up the masterpiece art style of HoMaM2 
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Sarcyan
Adventuring Hero
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posted March 02, 2014 03:58 AM |
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Edited by Sarcyan at 04:02, 02 Mar 2014.
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Wind_Falcon said:
So know I know who to blame for messing up the masterpiece art style of HoMaM2
Yes, I loved Heroes of Might and Magic 2 art style --great game to learn playing HoMaM, too, great for starters in the series, like me (then I began with HoMaM 3 and never looked back, I have all HoMaM games till V, Heroes Chronicles too bought them at GoG.con, and also purchased all the games based off HoMaM like the new King's Bounty games and Etherlord 1 & 2, also at GoG.
What didn't click with me was how flat castles and buildings looked on the map, but the art style of the game was precious, if you can go past the pixelated graphics regardless of the resolution you play at, it was incredible overall.
Still, Heroes of Might and Magic 3 isn't far off. So many beautiful creatures and the Gremlins look fascinating to me, among many many others. Not to mention how well made are some of the heroes' portraits.
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Heroes of Might and Magic; They aren't only games, they are passions. And feelings. Laura Jackson is the most beautiful woman who has ever existed!! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSBTC1HHN-E
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Storm-Giant
Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
On the Other Side!
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posted March 02, 2014 02:55 PM |
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I do agree that H2 art style was the best, but I don't think it was a bad thing what they did in H3. They dared to change it, into a dark-fantasy theme, and give a new look to the series. Since I liked the change...
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