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.