Looks like this is getting announced officially at PAX East!
Hopefully it’s a real M&M and not another HOMM. I know the strategy games are popular, but not my cup of tea.
Cool. M&M V was the one I played from beginning to end. I hope they find a way to bring that sense of slowly unfolding exploration into a modern game.
Yeah, worlds of xeen was the best M&M by a huge margin, IMO. I don’t see how they can get away with a block-based movement in 2013, though, even on mobile. The best we can hope for is a M&M6 type game. Which could be great too.
But lets not get our hopes up. Remember lords of ultima, and wing commander arena for the xbox live arcade. It could be a free2play facebook flash game heavily monetized by microtransactions.
I’m cautiously optimistic. Very much hoping that the use of old images in the teaser logo (not to mention the usage of the numeral rather than a DmC / Tomb Raider - style reboot) indicates that they’re planning to carry on the spirit and legacy of the classic series, rather than just using it as a convenient RPG-flavored brand name for some other project.
I’ve been thinking for a while that things like Etrian Odyssey, Grimrock, and various recent Kickstarters show that there’s enough of an audience to make classic-style RPGs financially viable as long as they’re made with a moderate budget and reasonable profit expectations.
That’s one fate I’m not really worried about, since the Heroes series is still in active development, and it wouldn’t make any sense to jump from VI to X. I think a far more likely concern would be for it to be taken in a more action-heavy direction chasing the financial success of the biggest RPGs of the last few years, like Skyrim, Mass Effect, or Diablo III.
I always liked the M&M RPG series, cheesy sci-fi endings and all. For some reason I didn’t much like Worlds of Xeen, though I know everyone else says it was the best. I seem to recall finding some weird bug that very quickly took me to the end of the game apparently skipping a lot of content, and then I didn’t care to replay it; but it was a long time ago, so that might be a memory of some other game. Anyhow I think I preferred both the earlier simpler games and the later games under the 3do regime with all their Glen-Cook-NPCs and so on. Did anyone ever tell Cook that lots of his characters’ names had been reused for random skill trainers and shopkeepers?
It’s hard to imagine a M&M RPG being done by some random Russian studio though. Presumably there will be the usual 6 elements and 4 party members, the temple of eep or moo or whatever, the obelisks, that sudden transition from weak feeble party to party of veritable gods teleporting and flying all over the map and annihilating whole zones with a single spell…
Yes, World of Xeen was the peak of the series, and hope it would be the source they would go back to for inspiration.
I’m still holding out hope for grid based movement, given that there have been a few recent games to prove that it can be a valid stylistic choice and can be profitable. Probably still a long shot, but not inconceivable.
And they already have a couple of F2P games out or announced under the Might & Magic name, so I’m pretty confident they wouldn’t roll out the X unless they were putting it on a real RPG of some sort.
Block-based movement? Oh god, that’s not what I meant at all.
Actually I was envisioning something along the lines of Skyrim: except you can’t go everywhere right off. There’s things blocking your way from exploring the whole map, just like the Xeen games. If it’s a particularly strong monster blocking your way, you can get strong enough and beat him. Or you could gain the ability to swim and be able to cross bodies of water. Or you could learn to fly and be able to cross mountain ranges that were otherwise unreachable. Or cross lakes of lava. Sort of a layer of exploration that unfolds slowly over the course of the game. That was my favorite aspect of the Xeen games, not the fact that they had block movement, or a party of 4, or other things. But I’m guessing it would be sacrilege to other people to lose those other aspects, especially the party of 4.
I don’t care about the precise party size (which was higher than four in Xeen, I’m pretty sure), but I would definitely expect it to be a party-based RPG. It makes a big difference.
The party size has shrunk over the course of the series. III (and possibly I and II, but my memory’s hazier) had six main slots + room for two hirelings. Xeen (IV and V) had six slots, no hirelings. And VI onward went down to four slots. Like a lot else about the games, I feel like Xeen hit the sweet spot for party size. Eight got cumbersome, and four didn’t leave much space for experimentation and customization after covering the necessities, but six was just right.
That said, though, I’m with Malkav – as long as it is party-based, I’m not going to quibble too much about the precise number.
Agreed, and like others in this thread I’m cautiously optimistic because of the X logo and what it contains. I don’t want a spiritual successor to the M&M series and I REALLY don’t want a game that steals its name but doesn’t belong to the party- and turn-based RPG genre at all. I want Might and Magic.
Would be awesome! I love those games so much - I still regularly play 6-7-8. The music is pretty good as well usually in these games, and the system, while somewhat simple, works very well for me at least. I think M&M 6 is my favorite so far.
As Dave said, no spiritual successor please - we want the real deal!
Aren’t these among the first 3D open world games?
So let’s see, what was the last classic dungeon romp I remember getting an official sequel?
Hmm.
Ah, Bard’s Tale!
What can go wrong?
rezaf
MM6 was pretty early with its 3D. As I recall, this was one of the promotional bullets, “MM6 is a role playing game with a Quake like enviroment.”
Would be great to have a true follow up to M&M, but I’m not holding out much hope for this. Remember many a fond afternoon slogging through the series. I think the last one was the only one I didn’t finish.
In theory this would be nice. But it’s Ubi so it’ll have some stupid non starter drm.
Oh just a thought that turned my dream clouds into rain: f2p mmo? Has ubi dipped into the mmo world ever?
haha and it will run on Facebook :-D
God I loved the M&M series. Please by all that is right and holy make this game properly. Bonus points if they put in playable Acromage! Loved that card game. Please be good! Please be good! Please be good! Please be good! Please be good!
In case you didn’t know - Arcomage can be played on phones these days :-)