So am I the only one who has this weird music glitch in the "Plane between planes" where it plays the menu music instead? When you enter the area, it starts playing the menu track, and not even from the beginning - from quite late in it in fact, because it ends rather soon, and THEN it starts playing the proper "plane between planes" track. Disturbingly enough, Escaton's palace does the same: starts with the menu track and then switches to the "plane between planes" music, even though a different music track altogether is supposed to be playing inside that dungeon. I know there's the weird glitch where the game crashes as you enter Escaton's palace unless you have the music muted, but why does it play the wrong music in both of these areas?

Here's a link to a save right in front of Escaton's palace if anyone's in the mood to check this. Maybe I should contact support?

That would be a new one by me. I'll try out the save in a little bit, when I'm at my computer.

I found this out in a stream I was doing some months back. I was playing with a greyface patch, but before posting this thread I reinstalled the game fresh from the gog 0.0.13 or whatever version and the same thing happened. If it matters, I'm playing on windows 7 64-bit.

I finally remembered to try this out. Sorry about the wait.

Apparently my game was playing the intro music too, and I just didn't notice that it should have been different. I got it on your save and I got it on my old saves as well.

Some notes about your save (probably doesn't matter at this point, though): I'm impressed you did without the bow skill for nearly everyone. I also wouldn't have stacked nearly so many skill points into armor as you did, but I guess it worked fine for you.

The big thing is to be aware that stacking bonuses for skills doesn't help; only the highest bonus applies. Your necromancer had a +17 (alchemy?) and a +24, so one of those wasn't helping you. I'm pretty sure that stacking HP or MP regen doesn't make that better either (again, only the highest applies), so the characters with Regeneration don't need HP regen items, and each characer with spell points only needs one mana regen item.

You can stack stats (ex. Strength) and resistances (ex. Air Resistance) from different items just fine.

That's nice to know about stacking bonuses, will probably make choosing what to give whom easier in the future. To be fair though I usually steamroll these games thanks to dark magic.

I streamed this entire playthrough on my youtube channel, I don't remember what my logic was behind not giving people bows (I guess most guys hit in melee fine enough?). I don't remember most of my decisions to be honest. I was never very technical about these games, pretty casual, though I do love them to bits. (And I usually give everyone bows in 6, and probably in 7 too). I used to play this one from my physical disc, an official russian localization, this playthrough was the first time I played the gog version. I've always considered the plane between planes with its music to be a wonderful ending to the "good M&M games" (even though I don't particularly mind 9), so you can imagine I was pretty disappointed by this glitch.

Anyway, thanks for confirming that the music glitch happens. Guess I should probably contact tech support and point them to this thread. Though the idea is soured by a memory of noticing two music tracks in "Crusaders of might and magic" being switched around in the gog version but having no way to prove it (besides another physical localized disc, and that probably isn't convincing because the localization can always be blamed). I contacted the support back then ut they obviously didn't do anything. At least this time I have proof that something's actually wrong.

Back when I first got MM7, I noticed a similar glitch between the "Castle Harmondale (et al.)" music and the "Emerald Isle" music.

Having bought the games when they first came out, I know that the tunes are actually on the CD itself, in a certain order, and there was probably a glitch in how they were ripped for gog.com.

Since the glitch in MM7 was eventually resolved, I suggest bringing this glitch in MM8's music to the attention of... whoever resolved the glitch in MM7's music.

I don't think this can possibly be a CD ripping error. The menu music still plays in the menu, the PbP music eventually does start playing in PbP (and in Escaton's Palace, while the Escaton's Palace tune does play elsewhere in the game, as it should). And both of those tracks are intact in the mp3 folder. It's some sort of music playback glitch that may have been introduced in the gog version, I think. Everything would've been different if it was just two tracks switched together. I'll contact support on the weekend. Hopefully it's not just a known and unfixable glitch.

Does the menu music play in its entirety? I know there's a grand pause in the middle of it; does it loop back to the beginning or continue to the part that erroneously plays in the Mad Necromancer's Lab and the Plane Between Planes as well?

You know, I'm an idiot. I didn't even check the music files in the mp3 folder somehow.

I'm sorry, I think it totally is a CD ripping error. The menu music track is second to last, and the "PbP" track is the last, and it appears that part of the menu track somehow got moved to the beginning of the "PbP" track. I first checked the menu, and the music looped, though it felt kinda premature, so I went to the mad necromancer's lab (somehow I totally missed the fact that it also played the "PbP" music, and also back when I streamed this game it didn't have this issue... I think I might have had my own music files at that point, edited to loop because the game refused to loop them for me, perhaps because of an extra patch or something; and I might have reverted to the gog music files before the last session of streaming) and found that it does indeed play the ending of the menu track. Then I checked the audio files and found that the last part of the menu track is cut from "14.mp3" and appended to the beginning of "15.mp3".

So, turns out you were totally right the first time. Sorry I just assumed you were wrong there, and thanks for asking those questions in the quote because I wouldn't even have checked the music files otherwise.

Still, one little weird thing remains: Escaton's Palace still plays the "PbP" music track, while it's supposed to play another tune. This one may be related to whatever glitch causes Escaton's Palace to crash the game when you enter it with music enabled, I suppose?

As I said, something similar happened when they first released MM7; the Castle Harmondale and Emerald Isle tracks are the penultimate and last tracks, respectively, on the MM7 CD, and there was a similar error with those tracks.

Eventually they fixed it, so they should do the same with the Menu and Plane Between Planes themes on the MM8 CD.

Welp I finally got around to contacting support for this. Mainly with the mp3 files issue but I also mentioned the Escaton Palace bug (crashes upon entrance if you don't disable the music, and when you enable it later it plays the wrong song), didn't send it as a separate issue because it's been mentioned several times in this forum and I assume other people have sent reports about it and it was just unfixable or something.

I will be glad to see it fixed too. It looks that MM 8 isn't as popular game as previous MMs. Also I must confess, I never finished MM 8 >.< Well, I finished it, but it was express run with cheating :))

It's probably because I never had MM 7 as a kid, and only had 6 and 8, but I like 8 almost as much as 6 (and both of them more than 7). I mean sure, the dungeons are tiny and the quests all seem to be about bringing yet another quest item from a dungeon and not much else, but I think the atmosphere is superbly magical and adventurous, plus I love the colors and the graphics in general, especially compared to the incredibly drab MM 7. Plus, the Plane Between Planes music is probably one of my favorite MM tracks despite its simplicity, just for the mood it builds. In my mind it's a somber, powerful ending to the good MM games. There's just this sense of sadness and finality in this track.

Holy crap this is still not fixed. Can someone else please report this bug? They answered me back when I reported it more than a month ago:

"Thank you for your feedback.
I passed your detailed description of this problem to the appropriate team at our company.
Have a good day."

yet apparently it got lost somewhere. I suppose I could reopen the ticket by replying to the email, but I feel it'd be more efficient if one or two other people reported this bug. This thead has all the info about it, just mind the corrections after the original post. Basically in the "music" folder, part of the second-to-last mp3 file is instead in the beginning of the last mp3 file.