Hero of might and magic 4
Instead of allowing players to fully upgrade any town, tiers 2,3 and 4 of the creature generators in each town presented two mutually exclusive choices. Here was an excellent replay value improvement. Variety is not variety without distinction.
No more pointless, perfunctory upgrading of creatures to bigger badder versions of themselves, and no more endless varieties of green dragons, red dragons, gold dragons, pink dragons, purple chipmunk polka-dot dragons. Others like minotaurs, which had a chance to block any physical attack regardless of the amount of damage, or medusae which sheared units off the top of a stack regardless of tier, had the opposite effect.Īlso quite importantly, this eliminated creature redundancy. However again, the vast difference in power made some creature special abilities interestingly if aggravatingly overpowered when facing lower tiers, like vampires' lifestealing or gryphons' endless retaliations. However, it left an interesting niche for neutral creatures as intermediates: elementals were somewhere between 2 and 3, zombies between 1 and 2, and so forth. This made the power difference between tiers much more satisfying, but removed the strategic choice of skipping tiers while upgrading a town. Most HoMM games have depended on seven incrementally better creature tiers, each slightly better. However, since HoMM still placed no limit on the number of creatures in one stack, splitting them off into their own armies was pretty pointless, so this promising feature came to nothing in the end. But then is it really a Heroes game? Regardless, I thoroughly enjoyed it and have only recently realized that one thing which drew me to Elemental from the start was this very same feature. While open to abuse and too reliant on micromanagement for lack of automation options, this helped flesh out the world even more, removing the single-minded focus on the "Heroes" of might and magic. Just as heroes could for the first time move around without creatures, creatures could travel without heroes, in any size stack. Some of the magic spells for instance were quite unimaginatively pasted between factions, especially when it came to all-purpose magic missiles. This in itself was good as it allowed for faction alignments for neutral creatures and rooted these distinctions more intuitively into the setting, but unfortunately was not taken far enough. split of previous HoMMs, #4 shamelessly cribbed the magic color system from Magic: The Gathering, with black/white/red/blue/green and nonmagical alignments. Given the HoMM series' emphasis on avoiding attrition, having a combat hero absorbing hits on the front line or using summoning skills for the same reason or any other such measures proved stupidly overpowered.Ībandoning the traditional knight/sorceress/wizard/etc. In fact, balance was almost completely thrown out the window here. Any demonologist was the same demonologist.Īlso since hero survivability depended predominantly on one single "Combat" skill class, this combined with their new overall vulnerability made it too much of a must-have. Unfortunately this removed heroes' personalities, which was counterproductive to Heroes 4's emphasis on a slightly more mature RPG setting. So Life+Death magic = Dark Priest, Nature+Death magic = Demonologist, etc. Instead of developing one core hero class, each hero could mix-and-match skills to become a prestige class. Their main role remained to cast nukes, heals and debuffs just like the invincible, standoffish heroes of previous games, so placing them in the field served no purpose, especially since their spells had no minimum ranges and very limited line-of-sight issues. The biggest shock to most fans was seeing their beloved heroes thrown into the battlefield, open to harm, and though a few years later Warcraft 3 would make this a standard expectation for fantasy RPG heroes, HoMM4's variant was not re-integrated thoughtfully enough into gameplay. Its various features must be addressed in context and occasionally offer some important insights into game design.
#Hero of might and magic 4 series#
It should be viewed as what it was: a last-ditch attempt to revolutionize an aging series by a developer already spiraling the drain after failures with other projects. It was unfortunately geared toward campaign more than freestyle gameplay.īut that all amounts only to saying HoMM4 was an HoMM game with HoMM flaws. It shared their common flaw of a massive build-up of troops actually countering the attrition from which it would logically suffer. Its AI was as sorely lacking as that of every other installment in the series. Objectively speaking, HoMM4 was not a great game.