Just a fan of the HOMM and wondering if 6 is any good?

Last I tried and heard, Ubisoft's policies had basically destroyed the development group.
Ubisoft took over updates/dlc, and all I've seen since is low-rank DLC packs for the game. The
game prior to my last play of it was a really good take on HOMM, but needed work in replayability,
strategy and AI. A quick look at Celestia Heaven shows Ubisoft's still trying to patch the game
which is surprising.
But they've also announced a new stand alone expansion in February. So you might want to just
wait.

Edit: It looks like after Black Hole died due to Heroes 6, Ubisoft found a Denmark developer to work on the series, called Limbic Entertainment.

It's fun enough for a while, but it has a multitude of problems.

For example, Uplay. If you have online mode activated, it'll try to synchronize your saves every time you start or end the game, and for me it tried for up to 5 minutes only to fail just about every time. Offline mode doesn't have that problem, but many of the singleplayer features are disabled (only 2 starting heroes per team, many artifacts are disabled). Also, if you use the online mode, it may mess up your offline mode saves (they're separate so you are forced to play the tutorial campaigns for each. thanks to save game mess ups, I had to play through the tutorial campaign 3 times, and then I gave up with the game when it asked me to play through it the 4th time). There's also a player leveling and unlocking feature and I dunno why ("because everything has one", probably). In online mode, you get really annoying achievements constantly: "POPUP WITH FANFARE! YOU WALKED 10 STEPS! NO, REALLY, IT'S AN ACHIEVEMENT, AND I THINK I GOT IT MANY TIMES".

The AI is basically built to run away constantly and snag your undefended towns. This leads to games which you "have won", but it'll take you 2 hours to beat it because you can't catch the enemy. This happens in other Heroes games too, but in this one it started to feel like it was all the game was about.

The Japanese Fish town is just annoying, I think. Including Asian mythology stuff is a nice idea, but the implementation is bad. The towns that have German lore critters don't have an obsession with shouting "schnitzel" (or anything else like that).

But before you have time to get annoyed with all that, it's a fun game. I consider that preordering the limited edition like I did was actually kind of dumb (the soundtrack ain't great, and the tracks are labeled incorrectly to add insult to the injury), but it'd probably be worth it if you found it for $10 or something. In time, it gets really annoying. My friends got annoyed with it much faster than I did.

To be super honest, at first I thought it was great, but that just didn't last.

Did someone say... schnitzel?

Thanks for the information. I was wondering about it myself.

http://www.gog.com/forum/heroes_of_might_and_magic_series/black_hole_heroes_of_might_magic_6_goes_bankrupt_blames_ubisoft

It's been streamlined somewhat but I really enjoyed it. There is now a greater focus on battles
and becoming a non unit losing steamroller of death. All the units for a faction complement
each other and can be more effective if used together. Having a high tier unit isn't an instant
win. HoMM6 has strengthened it's RPG elements in that you are now allowed freedom to select
your Heroe's traits and abilities. Surprisingly, I found this less interesting than the old
system of random development. It's very tempting to build a cookie cutter overpowered hero.

I was initially repulsed by Sanctuary (Japanese fish town) due to their use of Engrish in
cutscenes, but they grew on me. The Kenshi and Kappas are a lot fun to use. Beware, HoMMVI has no
Academy (wizards), Sylvan (elves), or Dungeon (dark elves) factions.

I found enemy hero chasing A LOT easier than HoMM V where I was constantly abusing teleport
spells to close the distance. If you're having problems in HoMM VI you can give your heros
traits that give them more movement points. In HoMMVI you need to control a territory's fort or
town to capture its resources so you won't find yourself having to chase down weak heros. If no
hero will attack you, expand until they are corned and you win.

HoMMVI is not my favorite HoMM, but it makes for good comfort food.

i've recently bought it (found a Collector's Edition really cheap) and played it over the holidays. i have to say i really like it. i found it as addictive as any Civ game and i'd start playing for a few minutes and next thing i knew 3 hours had passed.

i can't tell you how it compares to previous entries in the series, though, because i haven't played those, despite the fact that i own all of them.

and i don't get what the developer's fate has to do with the game's quality. it's a good game.

also, i've never had a problem with uPlay. savegame synchronizing takes a bit of time, but that's it. as far as i know, it's an optional feature anyway.

Not worth it... Its "streamlined" and something just feel wrong when you play it. A friend lent me a copy because uPlay would not work on his computer... Well i went "oh right it works great" until i got a few maps further into the campaign and suddenly all the saves were deleted.

No sadly its simply a bad game and its not worth it.

Everything I've heard about HOMM 6 is that it was rushed to production and not enough bug squashing was done, on top of the dev team going bankrupt.

I haven't decided on 6. For one, I'm not downloading Ubipoop's crappy service to play it, no matter how good the game is, and considering all the negative publicity surrounding it, that makes me even less likely to mess with it.

If it shows up on GOG, it's very likely I'll give it a go, as 5 was actually pretty fun. (Not quite as good as the NWC versions, but still ate up quite a bit of my free time.)

On top of all that, I'm really not a fan of Ubisoft as a company, so it's quite the struggle for me to give them my money in any capacity, so I tend to treat them like I treat EA, which is to buy their games used from Amazon/eBay, so they don't see a single dime from me. >.>

I'd wait for it to be cheap (which is what I'm doing). I played it at a friend's house and it's good. What I like about it is that it has a lot of small new things. I like the squares vs. hexes and I like the different factions. But my friend said it got old fast and he found himself just going back to HoMM 5.

Its nothing fantastic and its drm (iirc).was that always online crap. I picked it up for less than £10 so i dont feel too cheated.

then why did you decide to reply to a thread asking how good the game was?

Because I can, of course! :)