It's really not a title party, you can see it when you look down.
Remember that summer vacation when my parents secretly indulged in computers after going to work? Heroes of Might and Magic is one of the most classic turn-based strategy RPGs, which has spread throughout the domestic Internet cafes and home computers at the beginning of the century, and is a major part of the history of video games.
However, to this day, the "Heroes invincible" series has an explosive praise rate, and there is no corresponding market heat - all that have been played are good, those who have not played are too lazy to play, and they are stuck here.
What kind of ups and downs has the "Heroes Invincible" series experienced, and what caused the series to eventually "fall" to this point? If you are interested, then you may wish to check it out in this issue of the [Game Supplement] science column!
>>> The Beginning Before the Legend: The King's Gift
To talk about Heroes, you have to mention its canonical work "Magic Gate" and the company that developed it, NWC (New World Computing).
Back in 1984, when the video game industry was just starting out, a 22-year-old hairy boy named Joan Van Carnegham decided to start a business, pulling in his wife Mikaela and his good brother Mark to establish NWC.
The startup trio are all avid Dungeons & Dragons fans, so their pioneering game, Might and Magic, is naturally a DnD RPG. With modest changes to the DnD rules, Magic Gate received good sales and public opinion, and was classified as a model for early RPGs along with works such as Baldur's Gate.
However, "Magic Gate" does not have eye-catching features, so NWC is not very successful in this period, which makes the entrepreneurial trio always have a lot of nostalgia. NWC developed The King's Gift in 1990, an attempt to incorporate strategic elements of army management into the Dungeons & Dragons-style Western fantasy setting and role-playing gameplay. The game itself is very simple, the process is short, the shortcomings are many, and the balance is poor, but the media and players still give it a good evaluation, thinking that its future is promising.
This also planted a seed in the heart of the NWC: DnD RPG and strategy games, maybe they can really merge together.
But in any case, "The King's Gift" is still a commercial failure. The weak NWC did not dare to bet on the risk, so Joan silently made the "Magic Gate" game for several years, and achieved 1 million copies of high and low sales in a few years.
The "Magic Gate" series would have continued to develop like this, and the "Heroes Invincible" series should not have existed, until Joan's wife, Mikaela, suddenly became addicted to "The King's Gift" one day... Mikaela was addicted to it, and actually began to "urge" while playing, asking Joan to do the sequel to "The King's Gift", and insisted that "this is much more fun than "Magic Gate".
Unable to resist the wear and tear of the ear, Joan agreed to develop the sequel to The King's Gift, adding strategic gameplay such as army recruitment to the "Might and Magic" series. And so, in 1995, the original Heroes of Might and Magic: Strategic Missions was born.
>>> where is the classic "Heroes Invincible"?
Strictly speaking, "Heroes Invincible" is actually a strategically played "Magic Gate", nothing special.
The advantage of Heroes Invincible is that the NWC blends the two gameplay well: if the hero is too strong, it will appear that the army management has no sense of existence, and the hero is too weak and will lose the meaning of existence. NWC took the experience of The King's Gift and managed to capture that balance between strategy and RPG. The fusion of the two gameplays greatly stimulates the player's cool point, after all, who does not like to cultivate several powerful heroes, lead the army of fantasy creatures to attack the city, and eventually become the overlord of the Western fantasy world?
Once the original Heroes were released, it sold 100,000 copies in just two months, which is much better than the main legend of "Magic Gate". Mikaela probably did not expect that she would become a slur, urging her husband to actually promote such a great work.
NWC firmly grasped the new wealth code, simply did not even do the "Magic Gate" canon, and put all its resources into the development of the sequel, so there was the "Heroes Invincible 2" we saw.
Heroes 2 is a landmark piece that single-handedly laid the groundwork for the strategy RPG genre. The second generation not only has exquisite graphics, excellent music, and excellent plot, but also has a large number of races, classes, heroes and props, which can be called a large amount even today.
However, because the development of domestic computers and the Internet is slower than that of the United States, it is not the second generation that really causes a boom in China, but the 1999 "Heroes 3: The Restoration of Erasia".
The graphics of this game are first-class, the exquisite city scenery of 3D modeling to 2D hand-drawn will amaze players, and the elements such as snowy mountains, rivers, forests, and grasslands on the large map are quite scenic and fascinating. The game's plot revolves around 7 large battles, 8 races (factions) with completely different drawing styles, the plot is intertwined and foreshadowing, and each race has 7 basic classes that can be upgraded and 2 major types of heroes to recruit, enough for you to play for dozens or hundreds of hours without getting tired.
With the blessing of excellent quality, "Heroes Invincible 3" still has a lot of popularity today more than 20 years later. Now many people are still looking for the strategy of "Heroes 3" in major forums, discussing the truth behind the plot, and missing the night when they could not extricate themselves from the 8-bit color VGA screen.
>>> the Ubisoft era
Regrettably, the glory of NWC and Heroes didn't last long, falling prey to the capital wars of the '90s.
The game market was chaotic, and many companies had launched their own consoles, and 3DO, the publisher of the Magic Gate series, was no exception. However, these consoles eventually lost to Sony's PlayStation and Nintendo's N64, so the 3DO outsourced to panasonic developed machines was also sent without a doubt.
Thanks to the explosion, 3DO directly acquired the small NWC, and then ordered the NWC to bring a full evolution to Heroes 4 at the same cost as The 3rd Generation, in order to recover its huge debts. "Heroes Invincible 4" allows heroes who can only collect equipment and release magic to join the battlefield directly, which leads to the collapse of the balance of the game, which in turn triggers a sharp decline in sales and word-of-mouth death.
Of course, "Heroes Invincible 4" also has advantages, the ups and downs, twists and turns of the plot with a magnificent soundtrack make the game full of epic, many players can even force dozens of hours to play in order to watch the plot. But that doesn't help Heroes 4 save its reputation, after all, for a game, whether it's fun or not is the most important thing.
The rollover of "Heroes 4" completely broke 3DO's capital chain, and it filed for bankruptcy liquidation in 2003. 3DO not only directly fired all the employees of NWC, resulting in the complete disappearance of the studio in the long river of history, its IP such as "Toy Soldier" has also been sold to companies such as Namco, Microsoft and Take-Two at a low price, and the "takeover" of "Magic Gate" is the Ubisoft that we are all familiar with.
To be honest, Ubisoft was also nervous after taking over Magic, because they didn't know what to do. Unsure of the appetite of fans, Ubisoft decided to give this job to the Russian studio Nival, who decided to recreate the glory of Heroes 3 in a high-definition 3D mode, which is the series reboot "Heroes 5".
Heroes 5 is the first true 3D Heroes 5, and the beautiful city and class modeling has stimulated three generations of fans. Even with some bugs, no one can resist their favorite work being remade into a modern 3D game.
However, Ubisoft is not a company that is satisfied with the status quo, and the French potatoes in this period are still in the stage of "Ubisoft production, must be a boutique", hoping to make excellent works that can change the industry, so they choose to actively seek changes in "Heroes 6"... Unfortunately, the old players didn't like this kind of large-scale change, and the new players also lacked interest in this under-budgeted work, and all that was left in front of it was the cool road.
Since then, Ubisoft's attitude towards Heroes 7 has become very simple and rude: they have found Limbic Studio, which has a deep understanding of the IP of Heroes, and then used a modern engine to reproduce a work that is not much different from three generations at low cost, and then tell a new story... This is 2015's Heroes 7. For veteran players, Seven Generations is undoubtedly a sincere tribute work, but from the perspective of onlookers, the conservative Heroes 7 just shows that the series has become thin and dead, and it is in urgent need of new blood and new vitality.
>>> conclusion
At present, Ubisoft has decided to fully listen to the players' opinions on Heroes 8 and Might and Magic 11 to develop the game, what race to do, what class and even what campaign are decided by the fans, and the development team is only responsible for making the old player's favorite game at the lowest cost.
To put it mildly, this way is not possible to revitalize "Heroes Invincible". A studio can't completely ignore the player's voice, but it can't just do what the player says, but it should grasp the balance in between, just as the NWC grasped the balance between RPG and strategy.
Conversely, how many companies dare to bet on the future of this IP without knowing whether change will lead to success? The demise of Heroes is outrageous, but just as frustrating.
If nothing else, I sincerely wish that the Heroes Invincible series can cheer up and bring players a new experience that belongs to wargame.
>>> Previous Period [Game Complete Record] series of articles:
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