Oh come ON, Dude! I asked for NO SPOILERS!

It's really not. It's pretty clear around forty minutes in or so. The real spoilers come later.

It's a spoiler. The statement is completely useless to his question and references the game.

I, like zfr, am pretty sensitive to spoilers to games I really want to play. And that sir, was a tiny, hard-to-unserstand, definite spoiler.

Some people, before they read, play or watch something don't want to know anything. Nothing. This time, just "does it tie-in?" Anything more than that doesn't entice them to play, it just mutes the exciting feeling of discovery.

As far as I can tell, spoiler-giving people cannot be taught not to spoil. I have a spoiler-giving friend that just spoiled the end of a movie seconds after I said I hadn't seen it but plan to this weekend. He just doesn't understand how giving away the ending is a spoiler because the exciting part is how they get there.

I admit that your spoiler is barely a spoiler, but it is indeed a spoiler. Take it from a spoiler-sensitive person such as myself.

So having finished the main HoMM5 campaigns, Hammers of Fate, Dark Messiah and playing Tribes of the East now, I have to say I completely agree with VeTrack. Dark Messiah is intertwined with HoMM5 and the stories are quite connected. To be honest I'm surprised someone who played all can call the story completely stand-alone or just token connections.

Of course it has its own story, but it's connected to HoMM 5 just like MM6/7 were connected to HoMM3 and its expansions. It's not like Crusaders (or even MM9) which were preactically not related.