I received an email last night from Eric Newman, who worked an an artist on Heroes Chronicles and Heroes of Might and Magic IV. He went to E3 as well and met Fabrice and another producer. He are his impressions of the Heroes V demo:

"I was given a headset and the first thing came to my ears was very familiar musical styling of Rob King. This alone gave me the feeling I was in the midst of something Heroes. (...) The first thing I was witnessed to was a town screen. Everything of what David said was true. The real-time graphics were gorgeous! The colors were very heroes (A Happy Color Palette). Even the sky had some of the same flair that artist Jeff Bigman took when creating the towns of Heroes IV. (...) Everything animates, structure come alive with little restriction. Trees move in the wind, foliage and the textures were so sharp and detailed you could count the coins in your treasure chest. (...) Everything on this new map is to scale, meaning that everything is of relative size (which was problematic when creating art assets for previous heroes games). This is what we wanted to create in terms of graphics but the powers that be [ed: 3DO] restricted us from doing so.

Next was the combat screens, I like the idea of this being a 3D battle field at times closing in on 1 on 1 battles then switching back to fixed camera to be like a chess game. (...) They kept the concept of heroes on the battle field and involved in the combat, something I remember JVC wanting to remove. Graphically this screen was even more detailed and animated then the previous screens. Hands down I liked what I saw. The few art directed comments I gave the two of them were to add some life and animation to the town screens (show humans interacting with things as time passes). The second thing was to indicate the passage of time on all screens ( a day ending a new day beginning)."

There is another report by Sermil (a.k.a. Ian Barkley-Yeung -- who was a programmer at NWC), a Celestial Heavens regular, in the Comments section of the Mullich Preview. He tells us what he thought of the adventure map view, a concern shared by many fans: "I think the adventure map camera will be OK; you can mostly just leave it zoomed out. My one concern is that you can't zoom out far enough -- it seemed that even at maximum zoom, you couldn't see as much of the adventure map at one time as you could in H4 and H3."