JVC Available?

[hellegennes]

Creating a new studio around JVC sounds really expensive and complicated. Why would Ubisoft pay so much to recruit one person, no matter how important that person may be? What about Ubisoft's own core MM team?

[phamlongtuan]

Creating a new studio around JVC sounds really expensive and complicated. Why would Ubisoft pay so much to recruit one person, no matter how important that person may be? What about Ubisoft's own core MM team?

Expensive but for milking the long time series go on, i think it is worthy for that investment

[hellegennes]

The Might and Magic brand is not Diablo or Warcraft. Its market is much smaller and going after such an idea could very well mean forgetting profits from the IP for a long time.

[Ryder]

Oh hell yes!!! Get him involved as what we are getting served up now is total and utter wank.

[JSE]

Even though I would have chosen different words, I think that in essence we're both quite disappointed by the two Heroes games created in UbiSoft's name so far. With regard to central aspects like gameplay, style, and overall design they are just not on par with any of the games from the NWC era (especially not with H2 and H3 of course).



Having said that, I don't want to insult any of the people involved in these projects: I'm sure they're all talented and passionate about M&M and Heroes. Unfortunately, however, the creative execution in the form of Heroes 5 and 6 apparently does not meet the expectations of many fans. Whenever I talk to other Heroes fans -- in RL or on the net -- they nearly always mention one of the first four Heroes games as their favourite, and whenever I check out gaming networks, it seems like H3 still is the most played multiplayer game of the series by far.



I don't know so much about the actual sales numbers of the individual games but I know for sure that especially H2 and H3 did very well in their day. The market was different and much smaller then, of course, but I remember clearly that H3 was on the top of many bestseller lists around 1999 -- and stayed there for some time. And even though that's 14 years ago, Blizzard had already launched their three big franchises (Warcraft, Diablo, and Starcraft) back then -- so, yes, there was strong competition.



I'm convinced -- and I'm certainly not alone with this view -- that in order to be fully supported by the fan community again, future games of the Heroes series have to be much more in the vein of the original games. They should not be remakes or anything of that kind, though. They can very well be innovative in some areas but they need to rediscover and revive what made the series so great in the first place!



Ultimately, what role could (or hopefully "can") Jon Van Caneghem play in this respect? As the person who not only created the entire series and all its core features but was also mainly involved in the design of its most popular installments, he could be integral in bringing about this renaissance of Heroes of Might and Magic. How great would it be if with Heroes 7 we once again had a true successor to the original games?

[hellegennes]

>>>And even though that's 14 years ago, Blizzard had already launched their three big franchises (Warcraft, Diablo, and Starcraft) back then -- so, yes, there was strong competition.



Competition from what? Blizzard doesn't have a TBS series. The main competitor to Heroes was always Civ. There were some other franchises in the 2000's but they were either not 100% TBS (Total War) or they weren't big players.

[JSE]

Competition in the fantasy strategy department and on the gaming market in general. Heroes 3 actually manged to top several nation-wide bestseller lists in those days.