might and magic remaster series

[upuaut2]

i wonder how come this wonderful games havent been redone yet.

[Baleful]

Ubisoft owns it.
Sorry, but I really don't think that they'll decide to spend any money on remastering of classic games of the series.

[Tyler Durden]

Sadly I agree, especially when they've devolved might and magic into a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ mobile game.

[Woofy]

They have added a patch or two and there are some unofficial versions...Would love to see it ReMastered though!

[mpnorman10]

Toy companies do not want great games with deep, engaging strategy and tons of replays.

For them games are something the customer should buy 10 of, actually play 3 of the ten and get bored with those (due to shallow) very quickly and buy more.

[Dreaming Prince]

if nubisoft actually did it, im 100% sure it would suck

[Habba]

Might & Magic didn't sell well enough back in the day, and that's why New World Computing shut down. It is highly unlikely that remasters would sell that much more, especially since the original games work well enough.

[mpnorman10]

The Might and Magic games were wildly popular and sold great, but the definition of "great sales" changed around that time when toy stations, with grossly limited computing capacity, proliferated to much greater numbers than those who owned a computer that games could be played upon. Instead of success being 200,000 units sold it became 5,000,000. That gave the clout to cut off distribution to computer game manufactures who would have remained fine without that cutting of their traditional distribution channels.

They were intentionally destroyed (driven out of the market) so the toy stations could position their games as the "best on the market" and sell many more units for the same price (ex. $40 - a typical computer game price) that computer games used to sell for. There was plenty of money for advertising, paid for reviews and demand for exclusive distribution, leaving computer game companies out in the cold with their customers confused, feeling betrayed and dismayed by the new wave of games dumbed down to fit on a toy station.

The game itself is software, merely 1s and 0s, so if the box and screen shots are impressive... there you go. It is not correct to say Might and Magic games did not sell well enough... it is not that simple, even if that was what the toy companies wanted players to believe. Their number one goal was to convince customers that their games were better than computer games, but they could not do that if games for computers kept being made. For the toy company number one goal of positioning their games as the best, computer game series such as Might and Magic, Ultima, Wizardry, etc., had to die. They did not want to have to answer questions (when a new, even greater Might and Magic game came out) like, "Why don't you port it or make games like that for the toy station you sold me. They had to convince players to accept much, much less for the same price and have advertisements and paid reviewers "prove" there was high value when there simply was not. It was done intentionally, destroying a mini-industry of great computer games in the process. Conditions have improved (more computers and smarter toy stations), but the design techniques back then were largely lost, with bad habits instilled into those who worked on toys, but design techniques for excellent games will one day return through eventual rediscovery.

Eventually the designers trained in cheap, clickity click, dexterity games will stop trying to put that into so-called "Classic" games. Current designers could not make a true excellent classic to save their life. If you hire designers who know one thing they will do that one thing over and over, and think that is what they are supposed to do.

Eventually the toy station designers of dumbed down games will grow old, die and fresh, young designers will realize the great computer games are not old and classic but are actually the core of future gaming. It is a slow transition.

[Habba]

By toy stations you mean game consoles?

Success has almost always been measured by profit. Few of us want to work without a decent salary. Might & Magic VI was initially set to be much larger game (with a lot more dynamic world and complex story). They had to downshift the plans during the development and had to rush on with the release. MM7 was released a year later, with a little bit more than 12 months in between them. That's an incredibly short time for such a big game. MM7 feels like it was done on a much smaller budget, in order to cover the costs of MM6. MM8 releases next year, with less than 12 months apart of MM7.

They released 3 games within a span of 2 years and still went under in a couple of years. That's not a sign of a well-selling product. Might & Magic had a recognizable IP, especially thanks to Heroes.

But to be fair, M&M-series faced a lot of great games back in the day: Baldur's Gate, Diablo, and The Elder Scrolls. They all out-sold M&M, and are big names even today.

"Eventually the toy station designers of dumbed down games will grow old, die and fresh, young designers will realize the great computer games are not old and classic but are actually the core of future gaming. It is a slow transition."

This is just utter nonsense. Game Consoles are the reason why games got big, alongside with mobile. They made gaming easy and accessible. It introduced gaming to people who weren't deeply invested in computers, and in turn introduced a fresh flux of new great ideas to games.

"but the design techniques back then were largely lost, with bad habits instilled into those who worked on toys, but design techniques for excellent games will one day return through eventual rediscovery."

They were not lost. Most games were horribly designed back then, only few games a year actually had a good design in them. Design as a profession wasn't yet a big thing 20 years ago. There were no schools to study game design, there was very little research on the subject, at least when compared to modern times.

Just take a look at MM6, even though it is fun, it's still plagued by bad design decisions. Stats are useless, magic skills are unbalanced, Day of the Gods and Hour of Power spells make everything else obsolete, there's no point in putting skill points in armor skills, Diplomacy is totally useless. Not to mention the controls, which are the most awkward I've ever seen. Playing the game is like playing the piano! What about save-scumming? You can keep saving the game at every turn, and then return to that when you die, rendering death as a mechanic only punishment for forgetting to save the game.

The reason Ubisoft bought M&M license was sole because of Heroes. They made a big effort with Heroes5, which probably was a little bit of a letdown, so Heroes 6 and 7 feels like smaller investment on their part. They've done very well on the mobile, so it remains to be seen what they'll do with M&M franchise. It's been a long time since it made a splash.

Against this observation, M&M remaster sounds very very unlikely. Although M&M fan base seems still surprisingly active, which I think is fantastic. It is my favorite game series of all time as well, and I do wish we could go back to world of MM6 and MM7.

[mpnorman10]

Originally posted by Habba:

By toy stations you mean game consoles?

Yes, I was looking for a general term that did not pick on a particular brand. I like your term, "game consoles" and if you do not mind will use it in any discussions.

Of course you might mind with what you obviously think of my design perspectives. By contrast I found your points well thought out and deftly expressed.

Let's get specific:

A) One of those design principles is exponential ability increases. There are several key design principle that made the (flawed) Might and Magic games great but, IMO, this was the most important. The GM level is much more powerful than the M level which is much more powerful than the Expert level, etc. There is a real sense of accomplishment in achieving those higher levels of key skills. It is not just the new spells obtained, for example, at the GM level of a magic, but also the impact of that level upon the efficacy of the earlier spells.

Contrast that with current rpg design: Let me refer you to the lead designer for Pillars of Eternity proudly explaining (in a video accessable via the game or store page) that one of his key design criteria was linearlty, specifically, instead of huge leaps in ability, making it so a little bit of an attribute for example added a little bit to its benefits, linearly, i.e. no big exponential breakpoints.

B) Another aspect is that of the ROLE playing game, where the role has been essentially killed by making it rather meaningless and foolproof. In the same designer video that lead designer describes his decisions to:

1) change the meaning of attributes, so every character needs all of them and to prevent dump stats and what he derogatorily calls "min/maxing". The entire strategic design of the party characters, the party itself and matching those with one of many game play styles is a whole dimension missing from essentially all current rpg.

2) He also claimed his intent to foolproof the entire character and party design process so any haphazard character/party design could finish the game, The entire front end of designing a party and characters within that party is almost entirely lost. The foolproofing is a perversion that makes all so called achievements of character and party false. Without the possibility of failure all success is just false ego stroking that eventually rings hollow for the players who temporarily buy into it before realizing what is going on.

C) Flying deserves a mention as well. Flying was great in MM6 and MM7, although the Dragon providing flying to the party at the expert level in MM8 was overpowered and unbalanced (as were many other aspects of MM games, some of which you pointed out.

Flying made the game world three dimensional, opening access to mountain tops and adding the vertical dimension to the game in a fun and intimate way.

Yes there were flaws. In addition to the ones you mentioned there was the tedium of repetition facing monsters at sea or wide-spread groups of devils and dragons spread over a wide area.

The skill unbalance and overpower of some skills was flawed as well, as you pointed out, but the well-designed, most important skill types were great.

Finally there were many party restrictions that made the choices when designing parties much too limiting. Wizardry 8 (in a totally different category than Wizardries 1-7), got this a lot more correct in terms of the wide variety of types of party that can be used in the game if focused, consistent and built for a particular play style. In MM7 you almost had to have a Thief in the party. To open chests needed to complete even some of the earliest quests after first arriving in Harmondale, a Master skill level of 8 it needed so it does not explode. The next best, Ninja, gets the Disarm Chest skills way, way too late. Exploding chest strategies are... messy. The party almost has to have a Thief. That alone makes party design way too limiting in MM7, but at least it is not missing entirely or "foolproofed" so it does not even matter much.

Balance that you mention is a snake pit and current designers do not know how to re-balance an out of balance game. The standard method of "re-balancing" is to nerf whatever is powerful, a practice inevitably leading to mediocrity and boredom. For an example let me go to a beloved strategy game, MOO2. MOO3 was a disaster as a sequel (but not bad on its own as a wildly different kind of game). So years later a design team, no longer intimately familiar with the original design used up the same terms and names to create a modern MOO, like a reboot, but from the start removed the tactical battles and high strategic research so key in making the original game great. The later was accomplished by breaking the research levels down into much more incremental steps removing the challenge of choosing the right research at the right time that was so key, i.e. making it easy.

As many powerful things emerged, such as a tech, Megafluxers, which added 25% to the designable size of ships and is very powerful. It was "re-balanced" by making it 15%. That is just one example as the so-called re-balancing changes that sought out whatever was powerful and suppressed it, an inevitable path to boring play.

That is entirely lazy when the greatness of a game can be almost defined by how many widely different viable and powerful choices there are for playing it. When the rpg has flashy characters with different abilities and equipment but the underlying game play is the same all the time, players get bored. It means doing the same things over and over again in the same way. It does not have to be like that; it can be much more dynamic and strategic.

Contrast the Might and Magic games where spells like Flying, Invisibility and Town Portal were game changers. Even overpowered Light Magic provides an end game shift in styles. Could it be done better? Yes and it should, but eliminating non-linearly entirely, removing the front end of "role" design by the player before battles and removing powerful paths of play by making them weaker is... well... the dark ages, and someday rpg games will emerge out of this current dark age and will again be dynamic with many different viable and powerful paths that require excellent design by the player up front, excellent development choices during the game and excellent tactics and strategies to overcome the obstacles of the game.

[mpnorman10]

Hum, no reply... or perhaps he or she disagrees so strongly that any sort of answer would be giving what I wrote too much credit. I can respect that.

My design perspectives and what is being done right or botched currently were formed over years of deep study and I am willing to back up each one with facts as I began to do above. There will always be those who violently disagree or even ridicule, but these points of design are important and especially relevant to the subject of this thread.

If there is a Might and Magic Remaster Series that does not thoroughly utilize the design principles that made the original games great, they will just be more current garbage, shallow, repetitive and unnecessarily limited.

[talemore]

Remaster is just to make the screen widescreen.

This serie had a last attempt to reboot = Might and magic legacy
But there's things that missing. I came for the rpg but I stay for the actions

Without action there's nothing fun with playing rpg and the witcher serie is a proof

[RedVomit]

If Ubisoft did they would probably leave half of it out so you'd have to buy the Council Quests DLC and The Hive DLC for 19.99 each. No thank you.

Still waiting to hear how badly Blizz is going to butcher Diablo 2 Remaster.....