peterb sends words of his interview with former New World Computing designer David Mullich. They talk about old Apple II games, Vampire: The Masquerade (the first game to reuse the Source engine, which will power Dark Messiah) and what went wrong with Heroes of Might and Magic IV:

"I took the unusual step of giving Heroes III AI programmer, Gus Smedstad, the dual role of lead programmer and lead designer, since he understood the strategic elements of the game better than anyone except for Heroes' creator, Jon Van Caneghem.
As we began planning the design for Heroes IV, Jon (or JVC, as we called him) thought it was time to "completely reinvent" the Heroes series, and he encouraged us to rethink every element of the game. He also thought it was time to scale back the game by reducing the number of town and creature types available to the player."

David Mullich was a guest writer on Celestial Heavens a few months ago. You can find his first impressions of the Heroes V E3 demonstration here.