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Might & Magic: Heroes VII Game preview

Game preview 29 September 2015, 09:41

Might & Magic: Heroes VII first impressions

We've decided to take a closer look at the latest installment of the legendary strategy series, created by Limbic Entertainment.

This article was written prior to the game's release.

This text was based on the PC version.

POSITIVE CHANGES:
  1. Bonuses for flanking in battles!
  2. Non-linear campaign structure;
  3. Prettier and more varied maps (in spite of interactive objects sometimes merging with the embellishments);
  4. Changes in towns – mutually exclusive variants of buildings; lords and local garrisons;
  5. Return of classic magic (Mage Guilds in towns, traditional spell schools, etc.);
  6. Return of seven resources;
  7. More atmospheric soundtrack;
  8. A more traditional system of hero development...
NEGATIVE CHANGES:
  1. ... which, however, is too complex and overwhelming;
  2. Much uglier battle visuals;
  3. Uncompelling narrative in the campaign (no more cutscenes);
  4. Several ill-conceived interface solutions.

The last time I had to deal with Might & Magic: Heroes VII – about three and a half months ago – I prophesized that the developers from German studio Limbic Entertainment are in either for a sleepless quarter spent on patching up bugs or a several-months delay of release. As it turns out, I was probably wrong on both accounts. The launch planned for September hasn't been moved. It seems that Ubisoft preferred to spend some quality time on "crunching" and fight the bugs until the very last of them were squashed rather than postpone the release, but... Well, I don't know if it was just a matter of the developer’s inability to deal with all the errors on such short notice or its tardiness, but the truth is that in the newest version, bugs still abound. However, they are not the main topic of today's article. I am going to analyze the elements of Heroes VII to give a preliminary judgment on the individual parts, comparing them with their counterparts from previous installments of the series.

Narrative

The way the campaign was implemented in the tested game version is the biggest innovation as compared to the beta I played before, so allow me to start here. The main story arc of Heroes VII takes place ten years after the events of the fifth installment in the series. The Holy Empire has been torn by a civil war for decades, which led to the devastation of the entire land of Ashan. We learn about the conflict from the perspective of young Prince Ivan Griffin and his unique Shadow Council, consisting of representatives of six different groups: Haven, Academy, Necropolis, Stronghold, Dungeon and Sylvan. When we start the campaign, Ivan, weary of bloodshed, is just beginning to warm up to the idea of abandoning the battle for the throne of the Empire. His advisers unite against his resignation and come up with a brilliant idea, intended to keep the prince’s will to fight – each of them is going to share an inspiring story about their peoples.

Cutscenes are also a means of narration, played out directly on the adventure map, and accompanied by the voiceover of one of the members of the Shadow Council. It’s a poor substitute for the cutscenes seen in the game’s predecessor.

As you might imagine, each of these stories is an individual campaign for each of the playable factions. They all consist of four missions, and we can play them in any order – nothing prevents us from jumping from one story to another. What’s more, from the outset the map of Ashan (as this is the form in which the menu of story mode was executed) shows the seventh campaign with two missions, focusing on Ivan and the decision he made upon hearing out his advisers. It the beginning it is of course blocked, but to gain access we have get to know only two stories. The developer has provided a decent amount of fun. Praise is also due to the nonlinearity – we don’t have to plough through all the story arcs if we want to quickly learn the fate of Ivan.

This is the campaign choice screen. What’s interesting, we can access it at any moment during gameplay, even though there’s not much to do here during missions.

However, I don’t have many good things to say about the way in which the whole story was presented. While the Shadow Council discussions are always accompanied by three-dimensional cutscenes, they only consist of... several static shots each. The characters resemble wax figures sitting at a table, where every few seconds the degree of mouth dilation changes, and sometimes the pose as well, while in the background we hear their lines (quite boring, might I add), and the camera moves rather slowly around the room. Unfortunately, the effect is poor. During missions we deal with a static narrative – meetings between heroes are accompanied, like in Heroes VI, only by windows with characters’ portraits, while their lines can be heard in the background. Much more interesting are the static three-dimensional scenes that are sometimes used to show a single event from the mission (eg. a sea voyage or a siege). They appear briefly, however, and represent a very small part of the applied means of narration.

Those who were hoping to see a further stage of evolution of the quite impressive cutscenes from the sixth installment will be sorely disappointed. In short, the narration looks as if someone wanted to do something that would pass as nice (mainly in promotional pictures and trailers) without consuming too many resources. In my opinion the end result is just poor.

Christopher Mysiak

Christopher Mysiak

Associated with GRYOnline.pl since 2013, first as a co-worker, and since 2017 - a member of the Editorial team. Currently the head of the Game Encyclopedia. His older brother - a game collector and player - sparked his interest in electronic entertainment. He got an education as a librarian/infobroker - but he did not follow in the footsteps of Deckard Cain or the Shadow Broker. Before he moved from Krakow to Poznan in 2020, he was remembered for attending Tolkien conventions, owning a Subaru Impreza, and swinging a sword in the company's parking lot.

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