3DO website

[ThunderTitan]

The successful launch of Heroes of Might and Magic IV in March 2002,
provided us with another critically acclaimed source of repeated revenues

Oh man, that's just rich... though i do guess the sales being at about the same level as H5 got (if i recall correctly) it was a successful launch... that completely ruined their reputation... man, did they need someone who understood long term marketing or what.

[Angelspit]

man, did they need someone who understood long term marketing or what.

That was just that, marketing. And many marketing guys don't know a thing about the game they sell. But it's not like they could have said, "yeah people hate our games, the company is in deep sh*t, but hopefully we'll still be around next year!"

[Corlagon]

Well I don't know much about 3DO's sales report integrity, but it's pretty common for producers to be quite open about it when one of their games sells like diseased tripe. I can provide several examples if you need them.

[ThunderTitan]

man, did they need someone who understood long term marketing or what.

That was just that, marketing. And many marketing guys don't know a thing about the game they sell.

They don't have to, all they needed to do is listen to the public's reaction...

[GreatEmerald]

Some more updates:
http://3do.xsa1.com/investors/calendar.html - calendar with 1 event that links to Conference Call.
http://3do.xsa1.com/investors/conferencecall.html - conference call. The interesting thing is that the link here still works! Not sure to what extent and if you can register there, but you could try...
http://3do.xsa1.com/investors/inforequest.html - info request, i.e. Contacts. And a mail link, which is kinda defunct
Also, SEC Fillings link still works, so you might as well check that out.

[UndeadHalfOrc]

I hate salesmen and marketing guys.

Watch the movie Glengary Glen Ross.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104348/
Although it's a very good movie (with excellent performances by Pacino and Baldwin) you'll be left hating salesmen even more.

They are basically professional liars, bullshitters, and con men. At least the most successful are.

Sure they don't sell games in the movie (they sell real estate) but it's all the same.

[GreatEmerald]

Some more from Investor Relations:
http://3do.xsa1.com/investors/pressreleases.html - Press Releases page. Not complete yet, a lot of links will be deleted because they don't relate to MM in any way.
http://3do.xsa1.com/investors/pr_032603.html - "3DO Makes Operating and Financial Progress". Rather ironical that it's the last post before going bankrupt, if you ask me.
http://3do.xsa1.com/investors/pr_022603.html - "3DO Ships Heroes® of Might and Magic® IV: Winds of War™ Expansion Pack to Retail Stores". A release announcement.
http://3do.xsa1.com/investors/pr_021103.html - "3DO Results In Line With Guidance". A quarter report, and they're enthusiastic here, too.

[Kalah]

Hey, you know, if they ever resurrect the company, they don't have to look far for a website history...

[cuc]

Can we talk about those NWC HV pictures here?

I recall from an old Round Table post (StrategyPlanet era) that someone visited NWC, and saw the six HV towns listed on a blackboard. In fact, I'm sure many people here still remember it.

They are:

Castle, Dragon, Fairy, Myth, Necropolis, Wizard


I made those speculations when I first saw those pictures at Heroes Community:

Castle:

There's no Angel render, maybe because it's simply not finished. The Fairy town has 7 units, the Castle town only has 6 now, so there's an open slot.

Fairy:

Catelf - an elf/white tiger hybrid? A unique elf species in Axeoth?

Lionman - I believe this to be a Werewolf. His weapon is a metal claw. It might be a Wolverine reference, just like how H3's fire elemental is a human torch reference, and H2's cyclops is a X-Men reference.

Firewolf - My instinct reaction is, this is a Qilin/Kirin, a sacred Chinese myth creature.

Myth:

This one is hard to guess, as in HOMM, both Warlock and Barbarian towns had used myth themes. However, the concept arts show a Minotaur (always Warlock), a Cyclops (always Barbarian), a Harpy (H3 Warlock, H4 Barbarian), and there can't possibly be both a Barbarian town and a Warlock town. Then there's Valkyrie, a creature that's 1) mythical, 2) more heroic than the Warlock faction traditionally is, 3) from a barbarian culture, 4) more magical than the Barbarian faction traditionally is.

So I think Myth town is a fusion of Warlock and Barbarian.

Dragon:

Even back then someone suggested that a Dragon town might have to do with the long-rumoured return of Dragon Father.

JVC in the CH interview said that they are using H4's idea of each town having its own magic school. Thus there's both a possibility for Dragon/Lizard town to have its own "dragon magic", or for it to have no magic school of its own.

[Corlagon]

Good of you to post that info, thanks a lot! It ties in well with the concept art gathered here, so we might now be able to get a decent picture of how the lineups were structured, if only speculative.

When I get a chance I'm going to go on a web archive expedition for that post you mentioned. I guess it was from 2003?

Anyway, if JVC was involved then there was definitely a connection to Axeoth and the rest of the games' universe; just look at LoMM which was full of lore smatterings from across the series, so the Dragonfather connection can't be too obscure.

[GreatEmerald]

It's been quite a while since I last posted, but I didn't abandon the project and have been working on it in my spare time. I finished the whole Press Releases section of the Investor Relations part of the website:
http://3do.xsa1.com/investors/pressreleases.html
I'll finish off the Press Release Archive soon enough I believe.

In the archive, there are quite a lot of interesting economical/financial things, such as the one-for-eight reverse stock split that was performed, as well as some info on HoMM4.
One mores interesting thing that I found recently is in their logo there: they are using a Service Mark! I haven't seen it used by anyone, and certainly not a company like this... I wonder why it was used, since 3DO really had their name registered, and they do have places to put their trademark on, such as CDs...

EDIT: I just reviewed this thread, and since I recently posted a music video of Dagger Wound Island, it makes me think how the "Lizard town" would look like. If they were to follow their MM8 style, it would be very much like an Aztec town. Would be interesting to see it.

EDIT2: Woah, just found something really interesting! UBUBU's Might and Magic Planet:
http://web.archive.org/web/200104171337 ... 62700.html
Does anyone know more about this?

[GreatEmerald]

Has anyone noticed my edits to the last post?

Anyway, I just found something more interesting.
http://3do.xsa1.com/investors/pr_032502.html - this has a reference to HoMM4 Elite. It appears that it's a special edition that has a membership of their fansite and some special things like cards: http://heroescommunity.com/viewthread.php3?TID=10592 I think the idea could have worked out, although it shouldn't have been released as a limited edition.
http://3do.xsa1.com/investors/pr_020602.html - 2001 third quarter results. The most interesting thing here I believe are the charts showing how much they sold on different platforms. It seems that the PC sales were 16% of all sales in 2000, and only 9% in 2001, with the last quarter of it having only as little as 1% sold there. So folks, don't go selling your games exclusively on consoles or you'll go bankrupt

EDIT: Talking about strategy, to me it seems that 3DO were creating games for a too narrow of an audience. Here: http://3do.xsa1.com/investors/pr_011602.html they mention Cubix: Robots for Everyone which is based on a TV show and thus have no relevance whatsoever to countries that don't have that TV channel as well as when the show stops. Moreover, their "Jonny Moseley Mad Trix" game is also very narrow since it's targeted only at USA and only for a single Olympics game. No long-term value at all. And finally, their High Heat Baseball is also quite limited since baseball isn't popular worldwide (I don't think we even have baseball pitches here in Lithuania), although it's considerably less narrow than the other two. And they are mostly console games (High Heat was one until a port was made, too), and that narrows the field even further.

[GreatEmerald]

Just looked over the Wikipedia article on Trip Hawkins, the CEO and creator of 3DO, and it has some interesting info. For one, Hawkins founded EA Games! I didn't know that, but that shows where he got all those 9 millions to support 3DO back in 2001.
Another interesting thing there is that it's also said there that 3DO suffered from rushed and unfinished games before they went bankrupt.

Also, Dragon Rage (Previously Dragon Wars of Might and Magic) wasn't developed by NWC at all, so that's another reason why they renamed it.

Talking about their website, I've finished around half of the archives up to "3DO Ships Popular Brands for Game Boy(R) Color". The quarter results for 2000 and 2001 are amusing, since although it was their worst hour, they still had positive PR announcements with things like "It was a tougher industry transition this past year than expected, and we are glad that the worst appears to be over"

[Bowerbank]

Interesting looking at that site again. I remember the day trying to get on the 3do forums and they were down with a supposed attack on the forums, then trying the website a few days later and seeing that also had gone, with just ftp info on the 3do address.

[GreatEmerald]

All right, I finished the whole Press Release Archives!
http://3do.xsa1.com/investors/pr_archive.html
From the more interesting things there, you can see the announcement of MM8 (with proof that dragons were supposed to be accessible only late in the game), the fact that since 2000 they offered a digital distribution service (with first products available being the first MM games and Arcomage) and that they made a really flawed assumption "we released 26 games in 2000 compared to 15 in 1999 and got more profit, thus more games = more profit". And the fact that they offered free email accounts ending with @mightandmagic.com for everyone (does anyone here have/had one like that?).

Now I'm working on the Support section:
http://3do.xsa1.com/support/index.html

[GreatEmerald]

I'm now working on the FAQ section of the support pages. The work is quite difficult here, since the original pages used SHTML, which is not downloadable. So I have to change every single link to point to HTML-only pages, which takes some time.

Some of the more interesting things I found:
- Might and Magic I-V games have a patch section. That probably means there were patches for the games, and I'll find out more about them later.
- Arcomage FAQ says that when you play the "flood" card and both players have the same amount of wall, the fact that only the enemy is damaged was done on purpose and named as "benefit of the doubt".
- HoMM3 RoE Patch 1.4 doesn't contain some of the maps that were included in patches 1.1 and 1.2.
- HoMM3 RoE FAQ lists this: "Vampire Lords - Resurrect dead allied troops by replenishing health equal to the amount of damage they inflict on others, once per combat." It seems that instead of regeneration, they were supposed to generate damage points inflicted and the resurrect allies much like archangels.

The FAQs section can be found here:
http://3do.xsa1.com/support/pc_support. ... c-faq.html

[Avonu]

- Might and Magic I-V games have a patch section. That probably means there were patches for the games, and I'll find out more about them later.

http://web.archive.org/web/199706121335 ... nload.html

[GreatEmerald]

Finished the FAQ section:
http://3do.xsa1.com/support/pc_support. ... c-faq.html

MM6 FAQ has a few goodies:
- Mastery of the Dagger was supposed to have a chance of instant kill, but was later changed to the chance of triple damage (that could possibly explain why it was buggy).
- You can reorganise players by clicking on one and then control-clicking on another.
- RPGenie was not correct when he said that raise dead scrolls didn't work. You're supposed to bring the scroll on a character's paperdoll, then left-click, then left-click on the dead character.
- He was again not correct when he said that there were no hints at the fact that you need Master Perception to get to the High Temple of Baa. The hint was in the FAQ on 3DO website
- Having more than 512 points of boosted primary statistics or more than 65536 HP or SP can make the game crash in real-time mode. Not sure if this was fixed in any of the unofficial patches.

MM8 FAQ is also quite interesting:
- The fact that you can see the dragon leader in the cave after he has actually gone to Ravenshore is explained: it's an illusion to keep the greedy away from the treasure. (next time you go hunting for dragon treasure, make sure the dragon is real ).
- The fact that in hardware you couldn't see palette swaps was known to 3DO, but they didn't know how to fix it.

[Avonu]

- He was again not correct when he said that there were no hints at the fact that you need Master Perception to get to the High Temple of Baa. The hint was in the FAQ on 3DO website

Ekhm...

Expert Perception is the key and the doors of Baa will let you be.

[GreatEmerald]

Finished the support section. Too bad that I couldn't recover most of the troubleshooting content, it seemed to be quite interesting. And showed that 3DO did have some computer knowledge, unlike some other companies
I haven't found anything particularly interesting (although what's the "infamous sphinx cursed stairs bug" in WoX?), but I have most of the downloads working.
I'll be taking a break from this project for now, since there are things happening in the Unreal Tournament 2004 scene that I need to pay my attention to