Heroes of Might and Magic has a long and storied history on the Mac platform befitting its famously operatic theme music. After a less than spectacular fourth installment, the bankruptcy of 3DO, an asset purchase by Ubisoft, a long development cycle at Russia’s Nival Interactive (they of the critically acclaimed Etherlords and Silent Storm games), and the incredible, unexpected footwork of Freeverse Software, OSX users can rejoice at the miraculous reappearance of our beloved strategy super-hit in its fifth iteration.

This site hopes to serve as a one-stop shop for all things HOMM•V Mac, and thus to help a strong community grow. We’ll keep track of the port, host patches and add-on files, collect the collective wisdom, advocate for an open-beta, digest the news from Ubisoft, and just generally enjoy the game. We also hope to have interviews with our Heroes at Freeverse as well as feature articles on whatever interests the masses, including the crazy and exotic history of HOMM on the Mac platform.

HOMM•V for OSX is intended to be a collective effort, and will be better the more people contribute as commentators, authors, critics, map designers, reviewers, news hounds, and guide writers. Anything that isn’t pathetic or offensive will get its due. Hell, we’ll even post fan fiction if you’ll put your real name to it.

Until I can start assigning content privileges to others, please email comments and submissions to obiter@gmail.com.

Despite some early advocacy on the official HOMM•V discussion boards, including a lengthy account of HOMM’s proud Mac heritage by Richard Hallas (an InsideMacGames writer), the clearest statement we ever got out of Fabrice (the HOMM producer, not to be confused with a fabric softener) on the possibility of the Mac port was some B.S. about economic feasibility. However, it is what Fabrice didn’t say that was more interesting. Conspicuously absent from his response were the even worse B.S. arguments Mac gamers are used to hearing, including the engine being impossible to port to the Mac, ongoing support issues, or the death, burial, and decomposition of the Mac platform in general. Basically, all our hopes were pinned on Ubisoft’s relatively decent Mac support traditionally (including A-list franchises Rayman, Tom Clancy, and Shadowbane), the lack of pejorative and nasty anti-Mac rhetoric from Fabrice, and the apparent economic success of past HOMM ports.

Just when it seemed that our only hope was the unsatisfactory arrangement of dual-booting a new IntelMac into Windows Vista, Freeverse came through with The Miracle:

New York — January 12, 2006 — Freeverse announced today that it will be publishing Heroes of Might and Magic® V for the Macintosh, under exclusive worldwide license from Ubisoft. Currently in development for the PC by Nival Interactive, Heroes of Might and Magic V brings the popular and long running strategy franchise into a new era with cutting-edge technology and a breathtaking, fully 3D animated world. Heroes of Might and Magic V for the Macintosh will be available after the release of the PC game.

Yup, that actually happened.

Now, the inevitable question: when will the port be finished? The closest thing we have is a post by Hippieman from Freeverse HQ on the InsideMacGames forums:

I’ll be more than happy to keep everyone posted on the status of the game. Right now we are waiting on the final PC code so we can get to work on the Mac port.

At this point, the PC version has just entered an open-beta test after a few months closed. This is usually a good sign that gold master status is immanent, and word on the official HOMM•V boards is that product could be shipping by March.

Hopefully we can get a bit more information in the near future out of Freeverse and Hippieman. I’d love to hear how the deal with Ubisoft came about, and a little bit about what we can expect from the Mac port featurewise.

A Word to the Wise(TM) to close this post: if you value your dignity, don’t venture into the official HOMM•V boards. Hearing a Slovakian use broken english to complain about the wing flapping animation on an imaginary angel feels just lame, and there is plenty more mundane, nitpicking and wuss-ified than even that.

The two people at Freeverse closest to the HOMM•V port at this point, Vice President Colin Smith and Director of Support/Game Designer Bruce Morrison, have graciously agreed to an interview by HOMM•V for OSX. Hopefully we can get some juicy details on how the deal for the port came about, what we might be able to expect for the Mac port, and learn a little bit more about the people at Freeverse. We’re happy to find them so accommodating given that they have yet to even see the sourcecode from Nival/Ubisoft. Community support for the win!

Watch this space in the coming days for the interview itself. If you have any specific questions you’d like answered (and are actually answerable at this point), drop them into the comments in the next day or two.

Freeverse Factoid#1: Kill Monty is actually based on Colin Smith’s career as a hitman before joining Freeverse

When bugét American retailer Targé (aka Target) posted the price of HOMM•V for the PC at $19.99 some months ago, it was cause for both elation and concern in the official HOMM•V forums: elation that the next installment of HOMM was going to be cheaper than a mouthful of Slim Jims and a movie ticket, and concern that the game was going to be a crap budget title. Fears that our beloved franchise would replace combat stacks with the targetting mechanism in Deer Hunter and city-building with SimAnt were put to rest today as Target admitted the price was an error, and subsequently canceled thousands of pre-orders. Many gamers woke up to find this email in their inboxes (from the forums at CelestialHeavens.com):

Greetings from Target@Amazon.com,

We regret to inform you that an error caused “Heroes of Might & Magic 5″, which you ordered from the Target@Amazon.com store, to be displayed at an incorrect price.

In accordance with our posted policies on pricing, we are unable to offer this item for the incorrectly posted price. Therefore, we have cancelled your order for this item….

[blah blah blah insert more marketspeak here]…

Sincerely,

Customer Service Department
Target@Amazon.com

So there you have it. Better start saving up the empty beer bottles and lawn mowing money, or No Soup for Yuo!

We mindless cattle have to wait three more days, but Cadillac-driving Gamespy subscribers can now download the HOMM•V open-beta. And with that, beta-tester previews are appearing all over the internet. Angelspit over at CelestialHeavens describes how HOMM•V is clearly descended from HOMM3 in spirit and gameplay, with the new 3D graphics fostering a real sense of playing a living table-top board game. My inner nerd is rocking out harder than Bill & Ted’s Wyld Stallyns.

Your first few turns will be a shock, believe me. The screenshots you have seen until today only gives you a vague idea of what it feels like to be moving around the new Might and Magic universe. The 3D heroes and creatures, more than ever, feel like tangible board game miniatures. Thanks to the fact that you are allowed to zoom and rotate the camera around them, they look alive and, in the case of creatures such as the hydra, truly gigantic.
–Angelspit, CelestialHeavens.com

He goes on to comment that the new combat model is where the most dramatic changes are, with a markedly smaller combat field than previous iterations. The Eurogamer Preview confirms that the new combat field is an 8×10 hex grid, and also notes that unit commands have to be made within a few seconds lest the turn for that unit be forfeit (with different units getting more or less time depending on mythology and the number of moves that can be made). I would expect that this plays out somewhat like the timed combat in RPG games such as Final Fantasy.

Even more incredibly, multiplayer is getting the timed treatment as well in the form of “Ghost Mode”. The longer your opponent takes to finish their turn, the more energy the waiting player’s “ghost” gets to cause havoc by casting curse spells on the enemy, possessing wandering stacks to attack the opponent or add to your army (!), mining additional gold, etc.

I would have been crying in my beer along side some old-skoolers at news of these sacrilegious temporal interventions into the turn-based genre had I not been playing the Sega Genesis version of King’s Bounty the last few days. In that game, a port of the PC original, there are two significant differences from later HOMM games that in some ways made the game more exciting. The first aspect was how the smaller combat board in King’s Bounty, with 5 armies aside facing across 5 or 6 spaces of movement, didn’t detract much from the tactical essence of the encounter while speeding up resolution of the battle. This change makes hero development and adventure map strategy more important, and proves to be a good design choice given that these are the core addictive components of gameplay. Second, the adventure map is played out in “real time”, with a fixed amount of time counting down days as your hero and wandering monster stacks moved freely about the board. This would obviously break many aspects of multiplayer as we have known it in the last few iterations, but for the single player game it was a fascinating mix of the long-term strategic development which defines turn-based game, and more interesting real-time movement. So to find a remix of real-time and turn-based gameplay in HOMM•V is a real treat, and shouldn’t be dismissed as a gimmick out of hand by you purists of the last four HOMM games.

King’s Bounty is a fascinating game not only for its place as the beginning of the HOMM franchise, but also as a bit of a genre-bender ahead of its time. I hope to do it justice in a complete review soon, so stay tuned.

The blathering goons in the official HOMM forums — who read nothing, know little, and don’t understand that this open beta is stripped-down to mainly test multiplayer and server stability — have absolutely nothing to say, so don’t even go there for any info. Gamespot, however, provides a few more details in their hands-on preview.

One clever new feature is the latent “trail” heroes will leave as they travel, with greater heroes who command greater armies leaving a more obvious wake. This is a really interesting gameplay idea because it adds a new psychological element to the game. If you follow the path, will you be learning your opponents intentions, the route to their castles, or walking into a trap? Is it worth the time to trace a path that might fade away entirely, or misleadingly cross with others before taking you anywhere useful? This is a very clever twist on the “fog of war” mechanism where you only get suggestive glimpses as to what your opponent is up to because it actually allows you to manage the deception. Brilliant.

Gamespot also seems to have greatly enjoyed the new duel mode, or what I am calling “HOMM Fighter II Turbo”:

The duel mode will focus exclusively on tactical battles, and it will let you choose from a set of preconfigured armies with a certain makeup of different units, after which you can go at it in head-to-head multiplayer. Each of these armies will be fine-tuned to provide an interesting, but balanced, side to play. We tried out our own duel, and found it to be similar to challenging preconfigured chess games, only slightly faster with 100 percent more fire-breathing dragons.

Hopefully with the all-new lore and history, Nival has made the effort to include M. Bison as a playable hero for dueling.

The two pictures below are some of the newest screens from the official homepage. We are finally getting a look at the interface and castle sieging, and that green cloud is either the result of a gassy horse or the new “hero trail” feature.

Somehow we managed to get Bruce Morrison and Colin Smith of Freeverse to give us their first interview since announcing the port. Are we all just a little too fanatical about this game? Yeah. Should we be worried? Not really. Because when it comes time to diagnose our collective pathology, the standard deviation for comparison is going to be these two “wing-nuts” at Freeverse.

Read on for the full interview.