Sorry about the delays. I still hope to crank out a tasty mega-review soon that’ll explain where I think HOMMV fits within the history and future of the turn-based strategy genre. There might not be much point other than historical completeness, but its mostly written anyway so why not. In the mean time any HOMM aficionado will want to read trusty old Richard Hallas’ IMG review of HOMM. He’s pretty fair and certainly thorough, and ultimately comes out feeling positively about the game by assigning it a 7.75/10.

One thing I entirely agree with in Richard’s review is how HOMMV doesn’t quite reclaim that sense of immersiveness that marked earlier versions. To be emphatic however, this isn’t so much an “old school purist vs. new school innovator” dichotomy as it is a fundamental hallmark of strategy games. What always attracted me to HOMM was its great sense of developmental pacing and unfolding scale. Right off the bat there was stuff to do and AI to skirmish with, but as the game unfolded, the scale just got grander and grander as the pacing built to a crescendo. The map would then climax at a win/lose tipping point marked by a few major battles before concluding with a fairly short denouement.

Ultimately I feel these important qualities are lost because HOMMV is unable to duplicate that grand sense of scale or pacing that made earlier iterations so engrossing and time flow so easily. The early portions of the game are fairly dull and repetitious. Long development times generally lead to all-or-nothing tangles with isolated AI players. Almost every map I’ve played feels sparse in terms of strategic objectives: instead of deep, chess-like branching of options, the path to victory is typically quite linear. The “tipping point” often seems to come quite early in the game and as a result of purely efficient play rather than strategic insight. The remainder of the map is accordingly rendered a drawn-out, snooze-button mopping-up job. Or else you encounter an end-game AI so strong the fight is a bleeding-white attrition march of doom. The tragedy of HOMMV is that properly even pacing and spacing is so fundamentally absent that it minimizes the many very nuanced gameplay mechanics and innovations introduced in the latest installment.

Ultimately I attribute most of this to the shift to a 3D engine. I’m not against a move to 3D but I think Ubi really botched the way they made this move. If you look at how other broadly “strategic” games made the move to 3D — Galactic Civilization II, Sim City 4, WarCraft III — they retain a very strong sense of a “grid”. This is absolutely necessary to maintain proportionality and scale between the objects on the map and a conciseness in the user interface. Without these it is very difficult to foster the sense of flow that makes a game feel engrossing. HOMMV breaks the grid by basically using an engine suited to third-person adventure games with no snap-to points. As a result, the maps are very “natural” but not at all concise, and the player spends far too much time panning and zooming the camera and fussing with extremely basic operations like flagging a mine or entering a town. This is exacerbated by fairly high processing requirements that can lead to stutters and interruptions that also just get in the way of playing a strategy game. The sum of these constant niggling interruptions ruins the flow of the game and takes away what is so fundamental to the strategy genre: an uninterrupted level of pure thought.

I’ve tried to like the game more and have given it many opportunities to hook me but it just hasn’t happened. It’s pretty and it has some great ideas, but it just ends up being tedious. I think most turn-bases strategy lovers will get a week or two of play out of HOMMV before leaving for greener pastures. Bottom line, I think HOMMV could have been the best in the series if the shift to 3D had been done right and by someone who truly understood what made earlier versions so engrossing.

Given all that and the lack of an OSX map editor producing Mac-made maps worth showcasing, I reckon I’ll be pretty much closing up shop on this fan blog once the final review is posted. I’m unfortunately just not terribly motivated to keep playing HOMMV at this point. There might be some use for a Mac-centric page that keeps tabs on the Freeverse port, but I reckon the Freeverse forums will probably suffice for that.

If anyone feels like carrying on this website by all means let me know.

What does one year, one month, three weeks, and much speculation get you? A HOMMV for OSX port, thats what.

Freeverse announced today that HOMMV is shipping for the Mac. As is typical for the HOMM franchise, it was an opera of the most dramatic kind to get this port done. Initially a traditional port using Russian programmers, Freeverse became the first OSX test-case by using new Cider technology to bring HOMMV over. As far as we can tell, the Russians were dumped sometime in the late summer or early fall, meaning the Cider turn-around time was only around 4 months. Not bad! This bodes well for the potential of future ports, though at this point, we’re not sure any other major commercial Cider ports have been announced.

However, it doesn’t bode well for the future of PPC gaming. HOMMV is available exclusively for Intel-based Macs. Freeverse went to some pain however to make sure teh widest available Intel-based Mac profiles would be supported. Minimum system requirements are set as an Intel-based Mac running Mac OS X v10.4.8 or later, 512MB RAM, 2GB free hard disk space, DVD-ROM drive and Internet connection for multiplayer. Gamers with integrated graphics chips, such as MacBook portables and headless MacMinis are said to be able to play the game quite well, albeit with reduced resolution and other graphic bells and whistles reduced. The HOMM series has always been about challenging strategic gameplay, so despite the graphic murkiness, this is well within the realm of potentially good gameplay.

I’ll be posting two reviews early next week. The first will deal with the quality of the Mac port, specifically considering your legitimate performance expectations and other traditionally annoying issues like cross-platform networking. The second review will take a look at the gameplay itself to determine where HOMMV falls in the turn-based strategy canon.

While Hambone may be quieter than an honest politician thanks to an NDA, news about HOMM V for Mac continues apace. For those of you who don’t want to chew through the thread where it’s at here’s an update on what Freeverse’s own Hippieman is saying about HOMM V.

First off, and possibly most exciting, HOMM V will be working on every single Intel Mac. If that doesn’t excite you, it should. Hippieman has reported 60 frames per second (give or take) on MacBooks. MacBook and MacMini users certainly won’t be able to use the higher-end bits of graphical goodness, but unlike the PC version the game will run, and run well, at lower settings. That’s right PowerPC users: you just got an even better excuse to go buy a hot new MacBook!

If that isn’t enough for you, here’s the minimum system requirements for your reading enjoyment:
OS X 10.4.8
Intel-based Mac
512 MB of RAM
DVD-ROM Drive
2 GB of HD Space
Internet Connection required to register the product

Secondly, HOMM V for Mac will be available in two versions: on DVD and downloadable. Unlike many commercial games these days, HOMM V will require a one-time online registration in order to play, but after that you will not have to insert the disc when you want to play. On a scale from meh to freaking cool, this lands somewhere near w00t!.

To play online, of course, you will have to own a legit key, or the Freeverse Pirate Police will hit you like a ton of bricks made out of monkeys.

Networking is reportably PC to Mac friendly (and of course Mac to Mac and Hotseat are available), although there is no word yet whether the Mac version sports the same gamebrowser as the PC version.

Heroes of Might and Magic V is Gold Master and merely waiting for Ubisoft’s stamp of approval to be released via download and DVD.

And if you haven’t wet your pants in anticipation yet, you should go get an exam. Those lucky souls who own Intel Macs are very, very close to achieving HOMM V nirvana.

Like Charlie chowing down on a chocolate bar, earlier this week Freeverse tossed us the golden ticket to unlock the doors of their magical beta-test factory. What does one relatively robust download and one double-click make? One scrum-diddly-umptious OSX native copy of HOMMV. No word on when real chocolate will flow freely from my tap, but I’d reckon Freeverse could do that too (if they wanted).

I’d like to tell you more about the glee-filled hours I’ve already spent peeling back the wrapper on this pixel-perfect Cider port, but unfortunately Freeverse put my man-bits in a jar labeled “Non-Disclosure Act”. If I open my mouth, they keep the jar. Woe. So let it suffice to say that you wouldn’t confuse this genuine Wonka article for just a cheap knock-off. In fact, I have yet to see how you could tell the difference between the OSX and XP versions. Welcome to flavor country.

We can also have the meta-conversation about how lovely it is not to BootCamp. Though I thought I had grown quite accustomed to BootCamping over the last few months of doing so, having HOMM run natively in OSX has compelled quite a few more instances of 30-minute gaming that I never had the compulsion for otherwise. I have to admit this takes the feeling of “serious play” down a notch and gives me a more genuinely playful attitude towards HOMMV in a way that does buttress the bottom line of fun.

Now pardon me, little Oompa Loompas — I have to get back to running the factory.

So, damnable Freeverse, IMG gets an early preview while we’re left out in the cold eh? Bah! They don’t love HOMM like I do! They never will! But hey, if an exclusive is the price for them to pimp your “Big Announcement” week, all the power to you.

The Preview

Anyone who reads this blog prays at this shrine can skip the first 2/3rds of the preview as it’s a rudimentary gameplay primer. The juicy bits confirm that HOMMV is the work of Cider. Presumably this means the Russians originally contracted to port the game got the boot and HOMMV will only be running on MacIntel hardware. Now there is a piece of “big news” that should have had its own day this week! Thanks for coming out G5 owners, enjoy chewing on your wingnuts instead.

While we are making demands, it is a bit of a wonder then why the game hasn’t been released sooner. Cider promised conversions in just a few days (not that anyone actually believed this claim). Perhaps a little more time was needed to port the map editor? Eh? Freeverse? Or to get the small matter of that expansion pack sorted out? Might as well make the MacIntel gamers happy as possible since no one else will be playing HOMMV.

The preview concludes with an encrypted opinion on performance. On a “MacPro 2.66 with 2GB of RAM and the stock NVidia card” framerate is said to wander between 40-50 FPS. Of course, this actually tells us nothing about how a turn-based strategy game performs since framerate is secondary to how responsive the game “felt”, whether map scrolling and zooming were crisp, or how much time the game took to make AI turns in custom scenario maps.

Also, the previewer said that he wasn’t able to get custom PC maps working. As he is a programmer there probably isn’t much hope for the rest of us expecting success. That is a huge bummer as far as I’m concerned. Nival has only released fairly mediocre custom maps in dribs and drabs, and I’m not a huge fan of the scripted campaigns compared to a solid AI showdown as is the best tradition of HOMM gaming.

The Future of Mac Gaming?

The previewer adroitly notes that HOMMV represents the first Cider test case, and we ought not to forget that it was also the first major port announced in the post-BootCamp era. A couple of interesting points can be gleaned from Freeverse’s actions as regards potential future trends in Mac gaming and porting.

First, Freeverse doesn’t seem too concerned about BootCamp gamers as taking away from its potential Mac market. Otherwise, it would have made damn sure to include all the bells and whistles like custom map support and so forth so as to leave no incentive to simply boot up an unrestricted copy of HOMMV in Windows. Admittedly, we don’t have a final word on map support. But there is also no announcement on support for Ubi’s online component or the future availability of the expansion pack. So its not like Freeverse is feeling the pressure here to reassure its market.

Second, the mid-port switch to Cider is telling. Freeverse must have concluded that either the game would ultimately run like crap on a G5, was falling too far behind schedule to make Christmas, or that Intel Macs have been selling briskly enough to provide a sufficient market of potential gamers. If it is the later, it might not be too much of a stretch to anticipate that G5 ports in general are about to go the way of the dinosaur.

As reported at InsideMacGames.com, Freeverse has promised a “Big Week” of software announcements. One is tempted to speculate that testing for HOMMV has been progressing rapidly and that an announcement on a release date is immanent. Perhaps a little Cider is adding to the Christmas cheer?

Whatever guesses we make about that, today’s announcement that the Legions arena expansion pack is being released as a cheap digital download is even more encouraging. Mac ports have a terrible history of supporting expansions within any reasonable amount of time, if at all (it took years to see all the CivIII expansions, for example, and the Sims expansions are delayed by months). I fancy that Freeverse’s endorsement of digital distribution at a very reasonable price could spell good things for potential HOMMV expansions getting ported, especially where Freeverse needs to maintain patch-parity anyway and/or where Cider makes patch and expansion pack updating a snap to convert.

Today’s news from Colin Smith, venerable VP of Freeverse, is good. He let slip today that HOMMV for OSX has entered the first round of feature-complete testing! Congrats to Freeverse for achieving this huge milestone!

This announcement comes just three short weeks after Freeverse tantalized us with a shot of HOMMV running on a Mac of undisclosed CPU pedigree. Hopefully the testing will progress rapidly and we’ll all be able to enjoy an OSX version of HOMMV over the holidays. I’m also looking forward to finding out the fate of an OSX version of the Map Editor and whether player-made maps will be cross-platform. Not to mention which *Mac* platform this game will be running on.

HOMMV anticipates that more news will be forthcoming soon.