RPGWatch Feature: M&M Heroes VI Fan Preview
 

Elvin from the Heroes community offered to write some impressions of Heroes 6 to provide some insight into the lastest installment, after spending considerable time in the beta. Here's a sample from his preview:
Read it all here.
More information.

Where's my Mage Guild you imbeciles?

I'm keeping much more of an open mind about it, but I also kind of wish that they had not gotten rid of mages guilds.

Great review.

Although I really don't enjoy Heroes games as much as I used too. I've enjoyed the Civ 4 mods like Fall from Heaven 2 or the modmod version Master of Mana a lot more. They have more depth and I don't have to buy a trillion soldiers of the same type. If I want that kind of game I'll play the excellent King's Bounty/Armored Princess. All of these games surpass Heroes games in almost every way.

Still a great review and if they are really trying to improve it then I will buy it when everything is packed together into one. Before I read this preview I wasn't going to buy it at all.

Dont understand all the negative vibe here, i think it will become a good game.
Cant wait to play this game.

Can't speak for the others, but I never like it as much as others of its ilk like Age of Wonders or even Master of Magic. Buying units till I had a horde of them in my army was nice at first, but never appealed to me as much as building one unit at a time like in AOW, MoM or the others.

Don't get me wrong, I still enjoyed it a lot. But never as much as the others.

I did not care for Heroes V at all. I'll replay Heroes IV before I'll try that one again. Although, I did enjoy the Necropolis Campaign. I would have preferred a less traditional type of Necropolis campaign like they did in Heroes IV. I Loved Half Dead's campaign because it wasn't the usual "LICH'S RULZ" campaign.

I still have both of the expansion packs for Heroes V, but they remain on my shelves never been played. Maybe I should at least play them once. :)

2 and 3 was the pinnacle of the series, after that things went down hill.

If you played kingsbounty, homm5 is gonna be a let down. I know because i tried to replay homm5 due the fact homm6 is comming soon.

I can't agree on this. HoMM5 was fun, especially the second add-on (first add-on is yuck though).
But King's Bounty is a great game and honestly HoMM6 feels like it's actually trying to beat KB, instead of being "an upgrade" to previous HoMMs. Will it succeed in it, who knows. But the demo is not enough to draw a judgment.

I've played a couple of HOMMs from the series but was never a huge fan. After playing King's Bounty though, this demo just seemed charmless and fussy. The graphics also seemed to be trying too hard. The whole package to me was much blander than what KB had to offer.

I've always been a huge fan of the HOMM series (though more than anything I want a real M&M10 RPG). I played the demo of VI, and I really didn't enjoy it. It felt… soulless. I hated the new town and town interface, the character development had some improvements, but I really didn't prefer it over the old skill system.

I must be one of the few HOMM fans who didn't like King's Bounty much. I played the first one to the end since everyone spoke so highly of it - but I'll take HOMM (3 or 5 especially) over those. I thought it was just nostalgia, but I went back and played 3 & 5 recently and enjoyed those more than the 6 demo.

Thanks for reading the preview, there was a lot to cover but if I did that with each feature separately I feared it would grow too long. Instead I went for a more general look at the whole project and how it is coming along. I suppose it's not a H3 purist's cup of tea but times have changed and I find myself yearning for some change. I have enjoyed every single game in the series for what they had to offer - even H4 - though it's H2, H3 and H5 that I am most fond of. A few years of H5 multiplayer were a blast but eventually I felt it was time to move on.

As to the negative criticism it's mostly a personal sentiment as opposed to good feature or bad feature. Take the magic system, guilds may be missing but your success is no longer dependent on the guild - and in H5 it mattered a LOT whether vs neutrals or in the final battle. You can no longer lose because you could not dispel that pesky puppet master. You cannot lose because you could not counter enemy mass slow with mass haste. And it adds an extra layer of planning because now you have the tools to deal with the random neutrals you had to deal with, you know what you can pick and when. Also I had missed mixing spells from different schools like in H3. H5 was restrictive, most factions were better off with just one magic school so you rarely saw a battle with creative spellcasting combinations, perhaps the reason why I loved academy and necro. Cooldowns were a great way to prevent mindless spell spamming, though it should be reduced for some spells. And finally, it was brilliant to weaken mass spells so that the single spell has a stronger bonus or have magic defense work against the effectiveness of buffs.

Ideally, they would have combined the two systems and make it possible to spend magic points in guilds to learn spells but frankly I cannot complain with the way things turned out. And who knows, mage guilds may yet return in the future. But not in the exact same way we knew them, that's for sure.

- Elvin

I much agree with you, Skaven. I loved Heroes I & II, but beyond that it was WAY too much dependent on sheer numbers and legions of mobs.

Tbh, too often I lost an entire scenario because the enemy overwhelmed me with numbers, I could not compete with because I had spent one or two ingame weeks too much with something else. I too totally skipped H5. I tried it, but at Scenario 5 or so I was in the same trap again. Enemies with millions of mobs overrunning me.

I'll wait for detailled reviews on this.

I personally think that HoMM and Kings Bounty are such completely different games that comparing them directly makes very litle sense. I'm a fan of both lines of games (except for Homm 4) and I find they play incredibly differently and offer differnt things, despite both featuring heroes leading around mobs of troops.

Homm 5 features the most powerful and interesting scripting engine of the Homm 5 series, allowing much more interestng single player maps. However it was very rough around the edges, especially in the initial release. The HoMM 5 expansions did make it ALOT better though.

I tried the demo of Heroes 6, but it did not have the right feeling to me. I couldn't even finish it. Is there any chance I might like the full game? I really want to…

I'm in the beta…

The best thing I can say about it is that the hero development system is much deeper than anything we've seen before.

I don't like how they've reduced the emphasis on town building and resource gathering though. Seems they've reduced the strategic aspects and enhanced the tactical aspects.

Why they couldn't just enhance both aspects, I'll never know.

Also, much like HoMM 5 - it has zero charm. To my mind, the charm was always a huge part of the appeal of the HoMM games.

Well in the demo at least, I didn't really miss the resources that they removed. Wood and ore always seemed like logical resources, but there was never much rhyme or reason about why one structure required crystal and another required sulphur or gems to make. In the end you just had to collect everything you could because you needed it all. So merging all the random stuff you needed to build your higher level buildings into a single rare resource doesn't bother me as much. On the skirmish map I actually found that building up your town required more time and consideration then I was used to rather then less. But the lack of town screen was quite unfortunate.

Amen to that. I started playing H5 again and then got KB, never went back after that so the two expansions are the only campaigns I have never played.

I've played the demo, I dont mind it, will be better once I know what I'm doing. I havent played it that much though because I started playing KB:TL again.

Part one is a good thing then :).
To bad about part 2. And yes i take your word for it.
Nevertheless, iam gonna play this one, just out "i am a fan" sake.

Offtopic: anyone got any idea when kingsbounty 2 is to be expected?

Well armored Princess is effectively kings bounty 2. I haven't heard anything about a sequel beyond that though. I remember being pretty disapointed when Crossworlds turned out to just be a bad addon pack.