Might and Magic X

Whaaaaaa?? I must look into this!

on android you can find hereboth free and paid for app.

Edit: they do call it Archmage instead, though.

Depends what you mean by those terms. By “3D” – if you mean actual 3D polygonal models, like Quake, then the Might & Magic series was actually really late to move to 3D, as only the final instalment was in true 3D. If you just mean “first person perspective,” then M&M was in the 2nd generation of the golden 1980s era of RPGs, after the earlier Wizardry and Bard’s Tale series, and other lesser known games like Oubliette, and the Ultima series featured rudimentary first person perspective for its dungeon crawls. If you mean “smoothly scrolling first person perspective,” the Might & Magic series adopted that features with M&M6 in 1998, 6 years after Ultima Underworld and 4 years after the debut of the Elder Scrolls series with Arena.

I actually think the series peaked with M&M 7, which was basically a cleaned up and enhanced version of 6. I much preferred the series after it introduced the smoothly scrolling world in 6. The Xeen games were a big improvement over 2 and 3 though. They’re all pretty fun though.

I dunno, free movement 3D and party based never really ended up quite that good, imo. It was bearable in M&M>=6 and Wiz8, but still weird.
It’d be cool to zoom out and have GoldBox-style strategic turn-based combat with your six or eight chars on the same map, only to zoom out again into first person 3D when all opposition has been dealt with. Has any game ever done that?


rezaf

I’m not sure if a game has done that. That personally doesn’t sound appealing to me, since I don’t enjoy party RPGs and having to worry about role playing more than one guy. The M&M games are a nice exception to that because they have the immersion of a first person one player character RPG but you essentially are one person with four heads. I can still pretend I’m playing one person.

With exception of non-phone versions of Might & Magic Clash of Heroes, every single Ubisoft Might & Magic seems to have been a dud at best.

If this does turn out to be a Might & Magic 10, will have very, very, very low expectations for this one, particularly after what allegedly happened with Heroes 6.

Heh, I can see how an actual party-based RPG would not appeal to you if you don’t like party-based RPGs … doh!

I get your point, though - party-based vs single-char RPGs are typically very different games I play for different reasons. There’s some middle ground games can tread upon - ranging from independent chars you still control fully (Baldur’s Gate etc.) to chars that act without player involvement (early Fallouts), but there’s clearly a distinction.

Whatever they do, I’m pretty sure they’ll mess it up somehow, though.


rezaf

I agree that M&M7 was the best of the 6-8 engine games (and I never played M&M9, which used Lithtech and wasn’t reviewed well) but the Xeen duology has a special place in my heart. It was so unapologetically gamey.

I think it will be something casual like the ultima reboot by EA… unless this is the big contract that obsidian has got recently.

I am so rock hard right now.

Yeah that’s best and the worst case scenario in one sentence.

Obsidian, doing M&M? And will someone else revive NWC and have them do a new Icewind Dale?

Weren’t UU and Arena using Doom-style 2.5D, though? As in everything was just made up of flat planes? M&M VI did have legit polygonal buildings and caves, sloping ground, etc., it was just the characters and monsters that were still 2D. Not sure if that distinction is particularly worth celebrating, since I still found it to be a step down from Xeen, but it’s something.

Underworld was true 3D, but I believe NPCs were sprites.

Hmm, interesting. I may have to give them another shot.

I actually went back and played M&M 1 again a year or two ago and still had a lot of fun with it. I played the heck out of that one on release and it brought back a lot of memories. The recently released Swords and Sorcery Underworld is a similar game with some updated features that I also enjoyed.

I went through a spell where I played a fair amount of 4 and 5 when they were a bit old and I seemed to have enjoyed them. I bought M&M 6 near release, but didn’t get far with it at all so maybe I should start with 6 and see what I can do with it and 7 for a good older school RPG fix. I did fire up 7 when I picked it up off of GOG in the past couple years and the smoothly scrolling world seemed very disorienting to me. I think I much prefer the tile based movement, but maybe I should give it another chance as I didn’t get far at all and if there is a lot of deep RPG goodness in there I can get used to the interface being a bit foreign to me.

M&M7 is actually a sequel of sorts to M&M3, which I thought was neat. Definitely the best of the 3D M&M games.

Do these games hold up in a modern sense? I can play SC3K/Baldur’s Gate/HoMM3 without gouging out my eyes or anything, but I completely missed this series back in the day. If the story or gameplay’s still good, I wouldn’t mind going back and GOGing them or something now that work is calming back down and I’ve got a big travel reimbursement coming in :)

I would say that M&Ms 3 through 5 do hold up graphically due to their cartoonish 2D graphics. I could see them selling really well on an iPad. M&M6+ are 3D and look rough.

The gameplay holds up fine on all of them. Just don’t expect Skyrim-- like I said earlier, M&M games are “gamey”. You can teleport from fountain to fountain and increase your stats 1000x to beat a difficult battle, the endgames tend to be tied to ST:TNG, lots of the NPCs and locations have real-world referential or jokey names, etc. For me, that’s a lot of their charm.

Agreed. III-V have nice, colorful, chunky 2D graphics that hold up better than the early 3D of the later series. In a similar way, the free-roaming in the 3D ones can feel like a slow, primitive, and ugly version of a modern game, whereas the grid-based movement feels like a functionally distinct approach with its own plusses and minuses. It takes all the guesswork out of ranges, angles, and spacing, and there’s a certain OCD satisfaction in knowing that the dungeon you’re in has some finite number of discrete spaces, and you’ve fully explored it and stood in each one of them to fill out your map.

And despite their age, IV and V came late enough in the series and the genre that they benefit from a good deal of refinement and learning lessons of previous games in terms of their mechanics, dungeon design, and difficulty curve. III is also very good, and is similar in visuals, but I’d recommend it as a next step after you’ve played Xeen and gotten used to the mechanics, since it’s significantly tougher (the moose rats in the first town can easily TPK an unprepared or unlucky party).