Last weekend I finished Heroes of Might and Magic V and I’m suitably impressed by the game. The dialog sucks worse than a Thai hooker, there are a few bugs and glitches, the AI leaves a lot to be desired, and so on. But that doesn’t matter, because the game was fun.

The game received mostly so-so scores; and a lot of that was due to the lack of contents. I agree that there were fewer maps for this game than for Heroes III, but I really don’t see how this is a big thing. Maps are expensive to create and test – I fully support the decision to concentrate on other issues than creating content (and possibly make a half-assed attempt at it since they spread their resources). I wonder if the reviews would have been better if Ubisoft (and Nival) had delayed the release of Heroes until the patches were finished; patch 1.4 is out now, and 1.3 not only fixed bugs but also added the map editor. In other words: the lack of maps is history now – user-created content is starting to flood in.

As a side-note speculation: I would love to see some data whether or not this would have improved sales as well. There seems to be evidence that game scores do not directly affect sales, but maybe word-of-mouth for Heroes V would have improved. I’m sure that some old-time players were a bit pissed at not being able to experiment with making their own maps from the start.

Back to the topic of lack of contents. I have not played a single map of Heroes V outside the campaigns. When I was a wee teenager my and some pals used to play hot-seat games for Heroes I and II, and we had a blast. The plethora of maps was excellent back then – in fact, I don’t think I even played the campaigns of those games at all. But then something changed. I started to slowly but inexorably become disinterested in the social aspect of the game; I wanted to gather stuff, build, and see what happens next. Now, with Heroes V, it has reached the point where I wouldn’t be bothered with multiplayer at all since I just want to see how the story progresses. (And build stuff.)

It feels like a betrayal, but I’ve even realized that I enjoy the game better once I turn on the quick combat option. (To explain quick combat: normally, once you enter combat you line up your troops and start ordering them about. This enables you to do some nifty maneuveurs – especially once you learn what troops the AI will favour to target. Quick combat, on the other hand, automatically resolves the battle for you based on numbers an a couple of calculations. Quite many calculations in fact.) Maybe I’m starting to lean toward exploration and tactics rather than strategy and skill-based gaming?

All of this comes together in an obvious conclusion: for me, the lack of content is not a problem anymore. It’s even a boon: I hate long games because I don’t want to invest too much time into a single game. So for me, Heroes V was absolutely marvellous since it was short and to the point. Of course, this is just yet another instance of the does size matter question. (The size of games, the size of games!) As a counter-example I can mention Dragon Quest VIII. I’ve spent a few hours on the game, and I love it. Sorta. It’s gorgeous and fun and funny and pleasant and not too difficult. But I’ll never finish it. I know that I won’t – there’s no way in hell that I’ll find the 40+ hours needed (I assume) to finish the game. I really regret that purchase due to this.

So what we have here is a game that has top notch production values but leaves me unsatisfied. Because it’s too long, and because there is too much content. Ironic, ne?

There’s a lot of talk lately of the pros and cons of episodic content, and whether or not it’s right to be able to buy advances in a game for real money. Screw that: I loved the new Sam & Max game exactly for its short length, and I think I’d actually pay for some way to speed things up in DQ8. No, I don’t want to cheat – I just want speedier progression. It’s like the difference between a walkthrough and a hint.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 11th, 2006 at 12:59 pm and is filed under Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.