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In 1998 only 26.2% of US households had access to the internet, but 42.1% owned a PC. Replay value is almost endless: with campaign and multiplayer modes, different factions to choose from and randomly generated maps, the game kept giving (and its players were entertained). Rules are simple - you swap every turn, until someone wins (or you give up). It’s called the hot-seat mode, named after how disgustingly warm the only chair in front of the computer felt after you and up to seven other people sat on it for hours. Sounds like it’d be a perfect game to play with your friends? Well, you’d never guess - you can! LAN multiplayer is good fun, but playing together turn-by-turn on one PC is where the game really shines. There’s still more: training your heroes, sabotaging other players, finding the Holy Grail, fighting rare creatures, solving mysteries, sailing the sea… If you lose your last town and can’t get it back or find another one in seven days, it’s game over. The more towns you have, the more money you get each day, and the more units you can buy each week. Towns from different factions differ in buildings and units. It’s where your fighter units come from, where you train your heroes in magic, and where most of your income comes from as well. More monsters show up on the map, your enemies grow stronger.Īnother layer is managing and growing your town. Every seven days, resources and fighter units renew. Your hero can only move a certain distance within one turn (one day in-game time). The primary layer is turn-based exploration. There’s a lot of layers to the game, both literally and figuratively, as the action takes place underground and above ground on most maps. There will be more heroes among your forces, too: exploring the map, taking over enemy castles, searching for artefacts, claiming mines, collecting resources and encountering random stuff. Your lone hero will now be a general of an army of knights, peasants and mythological creatures. In a couple of hours, if you play your metaphorical cards right (no actual cards involved), this settlement will become a full-blown town with various buildings producing various resources and fighter units. Your hero is standing in front of a small settlement that belongs to you. Pick your scenario (or play on a random map), select your difficulty, and after a couple of seconds, find yourself on a map filled with resources, creatures and enemies. After a bit of a wait, you find the HoMM3 icon on your desktop. Now, imagine it’s 1999, and you just turned on your 128mb RAM, 400MHz PC with an astonishing 10 GB of hard drive space and two (!) optical drives. It was an improvement on all fronts: sound design, custom map building, multiplayer, campaigns, factions and gameplay. The HoMM formula truly reached its sweet spot with Heroes of Might and Magic III. New World Computing was dedicated to giving their fans what they wanted, and it shows. No time was wasted - Heroes of Might and Magic II followed a year later, quickly selling out in all stores which pressured retailers to reorder the product. The first instalment came out in 1995 to a very warm reception from the gaming press and sold enough units to warrant a part two. With the “throw ’em up against the wall and see what sticks” philosophy, New World Computing got something that stuck: Heroes of Might and Magic. Its success inspired New World Computing to create various spin-offs of Might and Magic: Crusaders of Might and Magic, Legends of Might and Magic, Warriors of Might and Magic and, most notably of Might and Magic, Heroes of Might and Magic. Sequels followed, and by 1999 Might and Magic series sold over 4 million copies. The first Might and Magic game came out in 1986 to critical acclaim, partly thanks to first-person 3D graphics and a Dungeons & Dragons inspired party system. It all started with a brilliant RPG series called Might and Magic, created by Jon Van Caneghem of New World Computing.
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