When HOMM4 came out I thought it was a huge disappointment.

All these years later, I'm playing it again for the first time. It's a very different game from HOMM3. But you know what, it's actually pretty fun.

So far, I think the biggest adjustment is just relearning the units. Despite many of them having the same names, the reality is that they aren't the same as they were in HOMM2-3.

- I appreciate that creature growth happens throughout the week now, instead of just on Day 1.
- I love the caravans feature
- Even if you can't do a caravan, you can march a hero-less army wherever you'd like
- I'm not as enamored with the magic system--heroes seem to learn new spell levels far too slowly.

All in all, I'm looking forward to playing through everything HOMM4 Complete has to offer.

I agree with it not being a bad game at all. The main problem that could have been corrected or fixed to avoid the massive negativity was to NOT label it as a Heroes of M&M sequel. Not sure what they could have done with it or how the story line would have been effected but it's main problem is that people did not expect a different game but one more continuing from an already well established series.

There was way to much change way to abruptly and perhaps some of the other issues they had could have been fixed by not having to strive to try to make it a HoMM sequel. For instance I think they tried to cram every creature from 3 along with including more and it's just couldn't work well.

And yes Magic was very weak compared to Might pretty much throughout the game. Might almost always had the edge unlike in 3.

Not to mention crappy AI and no Random Map Gen and very poor balance overall.

Sadly when you try to improve on a series NOT including things that were key reasons why ppl had grown to love the series it's just asking for trouble.

Found a nice background story on HommIV accidentaly by it's lead designer here http://www.tleaves.com/weblog/archives/2005_08.html:

Let's be blunt. Heroes IV failed. What went wrong? If you could fix just one thing with the product (technically -- you're not allowed to say "better marketing!") what would it be?

I think that characterizing Heroes IV as a failure is overly harsh. While it wasn't the enormous critical and financial success that was Heroes III (which, I was pleased to recently learn, was named by PC Gamer magazine as the 25th Best Game of All Time), Heroes IV received good reviews and had its share of fans. The challenge with sequels is trying to make a game that has enough of the same things that made its predecessors fun, yet is different enough that it doesn't feel like the same old thing. Sometimes you strike the right balance, and sometimes you don't (George Lucas, anyone?).
However, things did go wrong on the project, and the two biggest problems were the Forge Town and Legends of Might & Magic. Allow me to explain.

New World Computing's two main franchises were the Might & Magic fantasy role-playing game series and its offshoot, the Heroes of Might & Magic fantasy strategy game series, for which I was the development team's leader for five years. Both franchises took place in the same universe, and their respective designers often worked together to make sure that there were no inconsistencies in the two franchises' storylines and to occasionally intertwine the storylines together.

When we got the green light to do a second expansion game to Heroes III, my lead designer, Greg Fulton, decided to build the game around the "forge" -- a machine capable of building weapons that could dominate the world and featured in the recently released Might & Magic 7: For Blood and Honor. His idea was to create a new type of town for the Heroes series, the Forge Town, where there would be a mixture of fantasy and science fiction elements. So, in this town, orcs would be armed with ray guns and minotaurs equipped with jet packs.

Now, while this mix of fantasy and science fiction had always been a staple of the Might & Magic RPG franchise, it was new to the Heroes series and there was an angry backlash from Heroes fans. As soon as we released the preliminary concept art, the fans became so upset, they immediately organized a boycott of the game and New World management ordered us to come up with a new concept for the expansion. One fan was so angry at us for even considering introducing science fiction elements into the Heroes series that he sent a death threat to Greg. Naturally, this rattled my designer, but when our management made light of the threat, Greg was so incensed that he quit his job.

This left me with no designer for our next big project, Heroes IV, and when I couldn't find a replacement for Greg in time for the project's start, I took the unusual step of giving Heroes III AI programmer, Gus Smedstad, the dual role of lead programmer and lead designer, since he understood the strategic elements of the game better than anyone except for Heroes' creator, Jon Van Cangehem.

As we began planning the design for Heroes IV, Jon (or JVC, as we called him) thought it was time to "completely reinvent" the Heroes series, and he encouraged us to rethink every element of the game. He also thought it was time to scale back the game by reducing the number of town and creature types available to the player.

With those marching orders, Gus completely revised the magic, skill, and town/creature system (my main contribution was the idea of moving the “heroes” off of the sidelines and onto the battlefield during combat). Gus also thought the game engine needed to be redone from scratch (some of the code was quite buggy and dated back to the game King's Bounty, the predecessor to the original Heroes game), although JVC didn't think the time was right yet to go with a real-time 3D engine.

Once JVC signed off on the design, I calculated that the project would require about 6 programmers and 18 months of work. Unfortunately, our parent company, 3DO, was having severe financial problems and ordered New World to begin work on a third franchise, Legends of Might & Magic, but without giving us any additional staff to work on it. Many of New World's best programmers — some of whom I was counting on to work on Heroes IV — were assigned to this new franchise, which also consumed all of JVC's attention for almost two years until it shipped. (Legends was the real failure. It was a total commercial and critical flop as well as being finished a year behind schedule, as I recall.)

So, instead of six programmers to program the game, I had only two — one of whom was also busy with the design work, while the other was also tasked with creating six new Heroes "mini-expansions" needed to supply 3DO with additional revenue. I tried for over a year to beg, borrow or steal additional programmers, but between 3DO-mandated salary and hiring freezes, I wasn't able to bring additional programming help onto the team. 3DO finally responded to our dilemma about six months before we were scheduled to ship the game, and I was given what I needed to hire on a bunch of new programmers in a hurry. However, the problem of the mythical man month (you can't have ten people do in one month what a single person can do in ten months) reared its ugly head, and as a result, Heroes IV shipped with underdeveloped AI and no multiplayer gameplay.

As for the one change I would make if I had it to do all over again, well, that has to do with another problem I experienced during the project. At the completion of Heroes III, my manager criticized me for being too "hands-on" during the game's development and ordered me to give the leads under me more latitude on future projects. While I disagreed with his criticism and thought that my leadership style on Heroes III had resulted in a pretty darned good game, my manager remained firm on the matter.

It so happened my lead game designer and lead level designer on Heroes IV didn't see eye-to-eye on a number of issues. Gus saw Heroes as primarily a strategy game but felt that the level designers were creating game levels that were more appropriate for an adventure game. While I sided with Gus — I thought that the game levels being designed had too much story text, too many artifacts for boosting hero attributes quickly to very high levels, and intricate storylines that conflicted with the premise that the heroes could now be injured on the battlefield — my orders were to let my leads make their own decisions within their own areas of expertise.

While my manager gave me a better performance review for my leadership on Heroes IV than on Heroes III, I felt that Heroes IV was a poorer game in large part due to the conflict between the game design and level design. So, if I had it to do over again, I would have followed the adage "to thine own self be true" and managed things a bit more closely as I did on Heroes III.

I like the HOMM4, maybe because I was not so much attached to the HOMM3. Heck, I think I like HOMM2 even more than HOMM3 which inflated the number of creatures/towns too high.

HOMM4 has nice campaign, really atmospheric with great background texts. If there was fix for balance issues and AI, that would be great. Too bad equilibris mod does not go well with my HOMM4 Czech edition.

I too love the game for what it is, its own game and not another expansion to HOMMIII. Whole franchise saw its apex with HOMMIII. Basically they seemed to have been on a three game cycle. First two games were imperfect visions of what the third would become. After that, and the above article seems to confirm it, they started a new cycle. New game mechanics, new world... If 3DO wasn't in such dire straits, I have no doubt that the game wouldn't have any rough edges.

There were some awesome innovations in there. I especially liked the caravan system. No more need to recruit a hero to serve as a mule for transport of troops from towns to your main heroes and from map buildings to the towns. Classes were interesting. I especially liked how heroes morphed into another class based on their skillset. Combat took some time to get used to, but it was interesting once you figured out the basics. Maps were still colorful, world interesting, all the tiny details were there.

It is my strong opinion that if this franchise stayed with NWC and 3DO - that is if the latter was a healthy company and not out to milk the IP for all it was worth in a bid to keep itself afloat, something that the above article clearly states was happening - we would have seen another timeless classic like HOMMIII. Maybe not right away in IV but in V or VI? Sure.

Once Heroes went to Ubisoft, it all fell apart. Different developers for each iteration. Different ideas and visions. Nival Interactive (folks behind Blitzkrieg) tried to go back to basics with HOMMV, recapture the glow of HOMMIII. But for me Ashan was not an interesting place to visit. Game wasn't as colorful in 3D. All the little details were gone. Witches did not teach you magic in their huts for inscrutable purposes. People did not gift you artifact when you saved them by the roadside. Those little windows, telling their little stories every time I visited some place on the map or picked something up are my fondest part of HOMM games. And all that was gone in HOMM V. Game felt like bare bones version of pre-HOMMIV titles.

HOMMVI is just a mess in every way. Bugs, glitches, draconian DRM, uninspiring campaigns, boring heroes, Ashan (yeah, I really don't like that setting). Dynasty weapons were an interesting idea. If only they were not in-game DRM. But it's the bugs that really prevented me from ever completing the game. I just couldn't play the game on Nvidia card post 301.xx drivers. It would go to black screen whenever I'd start a fight or freeze on town screen. And Ubisoft never bothered to fix it...

Those Forge Towns sound interesting. Too bad it was never implemented. Might & Magic is interesting because you would get a small touch of science fiction now and then. I've never heard of Legends of Might & Magic. What was that all about?

Sorry for the longer post, guys and gals. :)

It's not to surprising you never heard of Legends of M&M as it never really saw great play.

Legends of Might and Magic was a FPS (First Person Shooter) game that played like Counter Strike or Unreal Tournament. It was fun but I think it would have been much better if they had just made it a RPG type of FPS rather than it only being about playing vs other people/teams as it lacked quite a bit. Even thinking of Legends does kind of make me want to play it again but I know it would only be for maybe 30min or so.

One thing I really wish we could find out easier is how much certain games cost their companies to make and how much they made back from it. This is a feature Wiki has on most movies. Just so you could kind of compare and have a bit more basis for comparison. I mean I know there are games I like and have liked in the past that were commercial failures but I cannot be sure by how much or see if perhaps it was because their budget was so much as opposed to it just didn't sell well.

Off Topic here. I recently compared budget and box office profits on 2 movies I really liked, "Now You See Me" had a budget of $75 Million and made just over $351 so did quite well imho. Surprisingly the movie "Ocean's Eleven" had a $85 Million budget to make but made $450 Million. I thought O11 would have had a bigger buget due to all the stars in it but goes to show.

Good posts from all involved. Thanks for the perspectives.

After some more experience with the game, I've gotten the hang of the magic system a little more, and I like it better. It can still be difficult to advance, but there's no doubt that a powerful magic user hero is a huge asset on the battlefield.

Having played 1-5 as they came out, I've probably got a combined 1,000 hours in these games - my favorite series. I don't get into the discussion of 2 vs. 3 or which should I play first, but I do have strong opinions about number four.

the Good
- Campaigns revolve around heroes and their progression/growth, so you get attached and invested in their adventure.
- NWC finished most (all?) of the story writing, so it is relatively strong and a few campaigns are stand outs in the series story-wise.
- Two new features, everyday creature growth and hero-less armies, improve gameplay.

the Bad
- EVERYTHING else.

It has been almost a decade of playing this game off and on, and I can't think of anything else I like about it.

What stands out most after my most recent play through is how uninteresting and uninspired the magic system is.

If it were not a HoMM game, I'd toss it a generous B- grade. As a HoMM game, it gets a D+ - well below the "average" quality established in the previous three games, and, to a certain extent, regained in the ugly but entertaining Homm V.

I wonder do any of you think that the magic system may have been improved any if they only had 3 levels?

Basic Level 1 lets you cast Level 1&2 spells
Advanced L 2 Casts level 3 and 4 spells.
Expert L3 Level 5 spells

In any case I really think they needed to have the number of skill levels for magic reduced from 5.

Also they should never have given Heroes the ability to have FULL Magic Immunity, especially as they made it only vs enemy spells and not ALL spells like Black Dragons. I think a max 75-80% Resistance and Magic Damage reduction would have worked best.

The previous HOMM titles didn't exactly have an exciting magic system either. It was always get spells from the mages guild (or shrines) and thats it. In HOMM3 you expanded on it slightly by giving the hero an option to learn the elemental magic schools. IN HOMM3, my offensive heroes never took wisdom because most of the higher level spells (with a few notable exceptions) were crud anyway. There were much better skills than wisdom to learn.

Compare that to HOMM4 were magic was seperated by faction rather than element as it gave each faction their own magical tactics as well their own units. You could scribe extra spells from scrolls looted from mage's towers on the world map. Your magic school could be buffed with the school's secondary skill which is similar to what the elemental magic skills in HOMM3 did. Finally, each magic school in HOMM4 had another function (charm, summoning, raise dead, sorcery and resurrect) which made magic more than a "once a turn" thing during battles.

The problem was that magic wasn't balanced between factions, especially order magic which was the most OP of them all.

I started playing the HoMM series from the beginning - the good-old HoMM (no number, i.e. 1). I lost many days to that fantastic game. And HoMM II was even better. And HoMM III was even better (though I didn't care that much for that pseudo 3D/isometric view). HoMM IV was MUCH better than any of the previous games, due to simplification/automation of some tasks, and even more, thanks to the fact that heroes took part in battles now. In HoMM IV, some elements of RPG were added, making the heroes much more unique and interesting, as the game progresses.

HoMM V was dreck and VI was never made. Some say that an abomination of a game was produced after HoMM V, but I don't believe it. HoMM V was the last in the series.

HoMM4 was quite different from its predecessor. In some ways it grated, but in other ways I liked it.

I did like the change to the skill system - primary skills, then abilities, but not the five levels of advancement for each. Three was quite enough.

The campaigns were good. They allowed character development, and had decent storylines. My disappointment was that they didn't seem long enough!

Heroes participating in battle seemed much more realistic than them being on the sidelines. Though it did get a little ridiculous when some high-powered campaign heroes - Dogwoggle, anyone? - could take on an enemy army all on their own.

The creatures...ehh, kind of a wash. Losing upgrades was a bummer, and having to choose between upper-level types was annoying, though made for interesting strategy. There was an interesting variety of them though, especially after the expansions.

Overall, I think the game was poorly received because it was _different_. Not necessarily better or worse overall, but with less continuity than some would have liked. But I liked it.

I think that was the source of my original discontentment with the game ten-plus years ago. It was just too different. But having invested many hours in it now, I find that I really, honestly like it.

I'm playing the "Price of Peace" campaign right now and really enjoying the story.

I was planning on doing exactly the same thing. I too want to re-experience the game that I shot down as inferior all those years ago. Now I'm even more excited since your posts, Gammaleak, in the MM forums are always of high value :) I wonder if we'll come to the same conclusion!

Thanks for the kind words. I can't guarantee everyone will take a belated liking to it as I did, but it's definitely worth a fresh look. :^)