CelestialHeavens notes that 81,000 copies of the HOMM•V beta have been downloaded from Fileplanet, resulting in a beta key shortage, crying children, and at least one instance of e-Bay extortion. Those are pretty good numbers for what most regard as a half-assed piece of software. So I submit to you, dear reader, the following concern: Who is hotter — HOMM•V or David Hasselhoff? Lets check who takes each category and tally the votes.

Inspires the admiration of enemies and the love of women
Hasselhoff	—
Comes with a great soundtrack
—	HOMM•V
Given new life after terrible accident
Hasselhoff (Knight Rider)	HOMM•V (HOMM4)
Is loved more in Central Europe than anywhere else
Hasselhoff	HOMM•V
Launches cars into the air at the touch of a button
Hasselhoff	—
Deadlier than Chuck Norris
—	HOMM•V (beta)
Usually pictured in underwear
Hasselhoff	—
Retired at the pinnacle of their career
—	—
Has top-notch AI
—	HOMM•V
A multi-million-dollar franchise
Hasselhoff	HOMM•V
Played with by teenage boys
Hasselhoff??	HOMM•V
Results
Hasselhoff: 7	HOMM•V: 7

The numbers don’t lie people — HOMM•V is currently only as hot as Hasselhoff. May these discouraging numbers scare Ubisoft enough to whip its Russian programmers into shape.

We begin a new weekly feature here at HOMM•V for OSX with one of the true unsung heroes of the game. The Peasant has been a dutiful meat-shield in every HOMM game since King’s Bounty, and indeed makes a glorious reappearance in HOMM•V. What explains the longevity of a unit that, by any measure, is stupid as dirt, slow as grandma, and fights three-headed hydra armed with only a rusty pitchfork?

Peasants eat a balanced diet of carbohydrates and beer

A look at the wider picture shows just how unique and endearing the HOMM peasant is. The history of video games has only seen one unit that can match the HOMM peasant for sheer uselessness: that little smiley face from Minesweeper. Like the peasant, the smiley face just keeps on smiling no matter how many limbs and gallons of blood it sees lost to the careless bravado of a heartless gamer. Although you won’t find it anywhere in the manual, the greatest skill of the peasant is the massive glee gamers get from killing their own troops (which is similar to the feeling of out-running old people). Think about it: would anyone even make peasant units if you had to drag a 1000-high stack of their rotting corpses behind your hero for the remainder of the game? No, we like our peasants just fine dead, and just finer dead and gone.

But thats just not enough, is it? No, if you are lucky enough to sacrifice your legions of peasants to a Necromancer that can resurrect them as skeletons, then by God you get to kill those stupid peasants again. Now if that isn’t a sense of duty, I don’t know what is.

And what do peasants get for that incredible sacrifice? Not a whole hell of a lot. Life as a peasant is cheap. The whole idea of a peasant unit is that their life is so worthless that you might be able to defeat a dragon by feeding it to death. And much like the theory that 1000 monkeys with 1000 typewriters will eventually write Romeo and Juliet, 1000 peasants will eventually poke a pitchfork where the sun don’t shine, no?

Yes, the peasant truly is life at its most meaningless. They are born to die terrible, painful deaths twice if their commanding hero has a sense of irony. Nevertheless, there is something heroic in having 1000 farmers happily march to their death merely to satisfy your whim and wisdom. And so to you, the hapless peasant, our salute!

The marketing geniuses at Ubisoft have outdone themselves this time. What do you do when your own gamers write petitions against your game sucking? Apparently you post Developer Diaries that make them look like bumbling detectives in search of a game. Exhibit A: The very first line of the diary.

“The town interface in Heroes 5 has been a typical case of usability versus visual quality.”

You know you are in trouble when the developer defines the problem as one between usability and graphics. This is like wondering if you can design a chess set with so much pointless adornment that it becomes impossible to differentiate a rook from a queen. And thus unsurprisingly, things didn’t work out so well for our developers:

“Another test was made later last year… You would cycle through all of the buildings one by one, getting the view centered on them, switching from one position to the next… see the town details up close and the graphical quality was used to its full extent.”

They had to test this idea? Why would anyone want an interface to work like a slide show of the same eight slides, especially when they have to view those slides repeatedly just to switch between buildings?

The error here is three fold: first, that people play strategy games because of the pretty graphics (they don’t); second, that pretty graphics mean anything beyond the first viewing (they don’t); third, that interfaces are supposed to pretty rather than functional (they aren’t).

In all fairness, this is a core problem of the design world: how does one commensurate the problem of functionality versus beauty? It is an extremely fine balance to determine, but should be easy as pie in games where there are no physical limits. On one hand, the gamer wants to enjoy a user interface that is fast and responsive, and which quickly becomes intuitive. Gamers want the interface to disappear, and the game to merely follow their commands without a second thought; this is why OSX has so many fans. On the other hand, the developers want to get pretty pictures in their reviews to entice candy gamers (those who think with their stomach’s rather than their brains), as well as allowing the gamer to take pride in the quality of the product they have purchased.

The good news is that good games satisfy both desires through flexibility. Instead of thinking “graphics” versus “usability”, the developers should have thought “choices”. Then they would have figured out that you could have both a highly functional, static interface like HOMM3, and the ability to enjoy pretty graphical detail by including, for example, a free-form “city fly-through mode”. Reviewers would have loved it as a bonus feature, gamers would have loved it as a tribute to their momentous cities and the chance to explore them in first person, and the developers would love it because they would only have to put a camera on a cloud and let the gamer float around. Hell, you could even include it as a reward or an unlockable to make the gamer think they’ve accomplished something cool. The point, however, is that the choice of how to play the game and in what makes the game worthwhile remains the decision of the gamer, and not the designer. No designer, no matter how brilliant, can satisfy every gamer through a single, inflexible framework.

If you don’t belive me, Rule 11 of the Gamer’s Manifesto confirms that the problem isn’t an insurmountable design challenge, but rather the design mistake of thinking that graphics sell games:

The cameras in 3D games have actually gotten worse (Mario Sunshine’s camera system wasn’t half as smooth as Mario 64’s) because in the game-making world camera and player controls are decided-on after the game’s pretty artwork. When 3D games were new the only question was, “how can we make the controls as responsive and fluid as 2D?” Now it’s, “how can we show off these really cool-looking trees? That’s what the little sons of bitches care about!”

I still haven’t had the chance to play the beta, but after reading this first developer’s diary, I’m more appreciative of the SaveHeroes.org petition all the time. I have no doubt that HOMM•V will turn out to be an excellent game, but it is scary to see how much it is a product of chance as intention.

And obviously, I can’t wait to read the next Developer Diary!

Hail friendly HOMM•V / OSX fanatics! I’m taking off for a short ski vacation for a few days, but will be back with lots of good stuff as promised, including a big “review” of King’s Bounty, the game that launched 1000 sequels (well, five, but hopefully we’ll hit 1000 in my lifetime). Hopefully we can get a status update from Freeverse too (if there is any status to update with the beta delay). I am also greatly intrigued by the new Nintendo DS game Age of Kings, a turn-based strategy adaptation of the Age of Empires RTS series. It is getting favorable reviews in the 80% range, so I might pick it up and review it for you in comparison to the HOMM series.

Sometimes people wonder who is at the helm of the HOMMV franchise: an ocelot? A garbage man? Alf? It turns out the answer could be a necromancer. Just take a look at the startling evidence I uncovered from the official website and compare it to Fabrice Cambounet’s profile at Celestial Heavens:

Fabrice

Vayshan

Necromancer Vayshan
Likes to Explore: The souls of slain enemies
Personal Motto: Rape, Pillage, Burn
Favorite Book: The Necronomicon from Army of Darkness
Childhood Dream: Pastry Chef

Producer Fabrice
Likes to explore: The French videogame industry
Personal motto: Dance like no one is watching
Favorite Book: Frank Herbert’s Dune
Childhood dream: Pastry Chef

Wow. See how they both wanted to grow up to be pastry chef’s, but ended up doing something completely different? Notice how they are both pasty white dudes? Notice how Fabrice is quite calmly holding a Bone Dragon in the palm of his hand??

HOMMV is being produced by the undead.

Hopefully this means cheaper Bone Dragons.