Might & Magic X - Review @ Softpedia

I've been having a blast with the game. My biggest issue is that there should be (as others have indicated) some way of fleeing combat. Even if it is like in the earlier games where you are brought to a random location in the area, or even back to the last town you were in. Otherwise you can easily run across enemies far too strong for you (i.e. those two damn specters not far to the north of the lighthouse...).

Aside from that, I find some of the non-damaging/healing magic to be a bit weak. Spells that sleep/stun/push away for only a single turn don't do a ton (or make that caster dedicated to doing that for several turns in a row).

Those specters got me also. Will be going back to try and become a Paladin.

I've probably watched 2 dozen vids on youtube of people playing/reviewing this now, and I've noticed a lot of them don't really understand the "rules" for this kind of game works. Virtually all of them were trying to move their party while they were in the middle of their turn (rather than at the beginning), for instance. I think a lot of the "you can't do this" or "the game doesn't have that" may be coming from the inexperience of the players.

I also noticed every one of them was clearly enjoying the game. Nobody had as much fun as Angry Joe, though. I don't think he's reviewed it yet but I expect it's going to be pretty positive based on the 20 minutes or whatever he livestreamed.

Risine said:

How's the difficulty? In the video, it seems more than easy, very casual, ennemies hits miss or are blocked, or make 0 damage 90% of the time.

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Angry Joe got his ass kicked the whole time and finished with a complete party wipeout. He was playing on the harder difficulty level, though.

CraigCWB said:

I've probably watched 2 dozen vids on youtube of people playing/reviewing this now, and I've noticed a lot of them don't really understand the "rules" for this kind of game works. Virtually all of them were trying to move their party while they were in the middle of their turn (rather than at the beginning), for instance. I think a lot of the "you can't do this" or "the game doesn't have that" may be coming from the inexperience of the players.

I also noticed every one of them was clearly enjoying the game. Nobody had as much fun as Angry Joe, though. I don't think he's reviewed it yet but I expect it's going to be pretty positive based on the 20 minutes or whatever he livestreamed.

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I disagree. I've just tested it again and there's no way you can tell when is the beginning of your turn. If by "beginning" you mean right after the enemy attacks then your statement does not stand, as you cannot move your party after or ahead of enemy's turn.

However, you CAN move your party if and when the enemy disengages you. It happened to me quite a few times when fighting a specific boss. He moved his position (I don't know why) and every time he did that I could move my party as well.

I swear I thought I knew the "rules," but my impression is Limbic f***ed it up, which is why they promised to publish all the documents related to the game's rules and mobs stats. Maybe we will know more when they'll be released in the coming days.

I'll continue to play the game perhaps I'll find out if there's a pattern that you must follow in order to move your party while engaged in a fight Sorry if I'm wrong
I'm going to sleep now, but I'll try and answer any questions, so don't hesitate to ask

One more thought about the graphics. I don't have anything against the game's graphics, it runs smooth on my rig. However, what I don't like is the fact that the environments are barely populated, they look almost empty.

It's like they didn't had time to add more stuff in the game. Every tree/house/rock is stereotypical in all aspects, not to mention the lack of details. How I miss that

Ranger, I haven't played the game myself, yet. It may be you can't disengage once you're in melee. As I recall, there was "flee" button or hotkey you had to press to do that in earlier games. But I'm not even certain of that, it's been nearly 15 years since I've played a MM game. What I saw people doing was trying to move after the "red light" came on but the enemies were still at range. They'd do something like cast one spell with one character and then try to move and complain they couldn't. If it's true you can't flee melee that seems like an odd decision, though in old RPGs fleeing from melee was always highly penalized if not impossible. That may not be a viable design decision in 2014

The difficulty in this game is a little "special".
There are two difficulties Adventurer-Easy and Warrior-Hard.
Now if you want to have a challenging game start on hard.
But the game doesn't give you a real chance to learn.
If you do not know the game mechanics at party creation you will get screwed pretty fast if you aren't lucky or accidently had the right idea.

So what I recommend is to spend some time and read. Think about what you want to do first, and design your group around it. Just throwing your group together and start on warrior will most likely result in failure.

But if you know what you are doing it is challenging and fun.
So my biggest complain about the game is the "weird game mechanics" which aren't intuitive and where you don't have a "good" learning curve.

Alternative of course is to play for 10 hours and then start over. That's always an option.

To be clear, if you are adjacent to an enemy, there is no movement, period.

However, I found one comment above odd. It's very easy to tell when your "turn" is over.

When it's your turn (ie, after the enemies have moved or attacked), your party can execute their actions in any order you wish. You simply click on any of the 4 characters, and execute the action you want. When you do so, their picture will go dark. When your last character goes, then the enemy goes, and all your character pictures are bright again and waiting to take actions.

If you are in battle but not adjacent to an enemy, then as soon as one character takes an action, you are rooted until all other characters take their action for that turn. Once all the character icons are lit up again, you are free to move if nobody is adjacent to you yet.

BTW, doing character actions in customized order is an advanced tactic that should be utilized whenever possible. If your mage is in your last slot and is going to cast a buff or debuff, don't have your first 3 characters attack and then cast the debuff. Click on your mage and get the spell off first. Keeping this in mind throughout all the turns of a battle can make a BIG difference in how effective you are.

Fun game so far, after having played about 8 hours in my usual slow style.

Fantasm said:

To be clear, if you are adjacent to an enemy, there is no movement, period.

However, I found one comment above odd. It's very easy to tell when your "turn" is over.

When it's your turn (ie, after the enemies have moved or attacked), your party can execute their actions in any order you wish. You simply click on any of the 4 characters, and execute the action you want. When you do so, their picture will go dark. When your last character goes, then the enemy goes, and all your character pictures are bright again and waiting to take actions.

If you are in battle but not adjacent to an enemy, then as soon as one character takes an action, you are rooted until all other characters take their action for that turn. Once all the character icons are lit up again, you are free to move if nobody is adjacent to you yet.

BTW, doing character actions in customized order is an advanced tactic that should be utilized whenever possible. If your mage is in your last slot and is going to cast a buff or debuff, don't have your first 3 characters attack and then cast the debuff. Click on your mage and get the spell off first. Keeping this in mind throughout all the turns of a battle can make a BIG difference in how effective you are.

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Yes, I was doing the same thing. Whenever you start a new turn you can take actions with any of your characters and this is a major bonus for those who know about it as they can buff their characters (or debuff the enemy) before attacking.

And yes, a new turn begins right after the enemy attacks/moves.
This game really got me ) Between Blackguards, Avadon 2 and Might & Magic X I can't find time for anything else. And soon Eschalon III goes out ...

Glad to see everyone is having as much fun with this as I am. I've played 5 parties through the first chapter, although just on adventurer. I don't care about the combat difficulty, I just like messing with the builds, clearing the maps, and finding all the secrets

Didn't like it much for the first few hours, but now I find it quite fun. For me it doesn't feel like a might and magic game at all, but still a good RPG as long as I don't compare it to the old games in the series which was by far my favorite rpg's.

Someone at the Codex said:

Everybody thought MM X was supposed to be a child between MM 4/5 and MM 6/7, now it turns out the real father was Wizardry 8 …

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I agree - at least if you're playing on Warrior level.

I think the action mechanics make sense when you think of it. What sense would it make if you could take one action with one character and then move as the action of another character? You move all your party, so all of them must take the movement action. Doing it otherwise would result in odd and unfair situations (for monsters).
And I think it was like that also in the turn based fight mode in old M&M6-9.

The inability of moving while engaged, well, it could be different but it's not totally unrealistic anyway (the characters are too focused on fighting and defending for being able to move away). Also in addition with the inability to flee it makes you pick your battles more carefully.

I only see as a bad design that you can't choose your target in ranged combat, that makes no sense at all.

HiddenX said:

Someone at the Codex said:

"Everybody thought MM X was supposed to be a child between MM 4/5 and MM 6/7, now it turns out the real father was Wizardry 8 …"

I agree - at least if you're playing on Warrior level.

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Wish you hadn't said that. I found Wizardry 8 a depressing game. It seemed like a very mechanical reproduction of a "Wizardry" title, without any of the charm I associated with that franchise. That's exactly what I was worried would happen with MMX.

I like all Wizardry titles
-> played most of them more than one time.

my favourites are:

6,7
8
4,5
1,2,3

I think I liked 7 best. And oddly enough I have better memories of playing that than I do of other games which came out at the same time, which I preferred. A lot of thought went into that title. And speaking of DW Bradley, I liked his Wizards & Warriors unofficial sequel more than Wiz8, too, despite its funky experimental user interface. There were some really interesting dungeons (and etc) in that game. Who puts a detailed backstory into every area, and fills in so much biographical details on local enemy NPCs? Nobody but him.

Yep - Wizards & Warriors was good, too. I have to play it again some time. There are really good dungeons in this game.

Wizards and Warriors? Was that previously called "Swords and Sorcery"?
I think I..."found" a game back then which was during the same time Wizardry 8 was released. But the game was released extremely prematurely.
I remember that I read previews about it which sounded awesome. But the game didn't make a finished impression at all.

Kordanor said:

Wizards and Warriors? Was that previously called "Swords and Sorcery"? I think I…"found" a game back then which was during the same time Wizardry 8 was released. But the game was released extremely prematurely.
I remember that I read previews about it which sounded awesome. But the game didn't make a finished impression at all.

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I don't know if it had another name at some point or not. The wiki on it is almost non-existent:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizards_&_Warriors_(Windows_video_game)

I know it left a very bad impression on me when I first tried to play it. Stupid stuff like killing an enemy and having to hunt around on the ground for each and every item it dropped, including loose coins. Odd behavior from the UI (3D graphics were pretty new then, especially for RPGs, so maybe somewhat forgivable). I didn't get back to it until a year or so later by which time I think it'd been patched a couple times. Still had some wacky stuff going on but it was manageable, and turned out to be quite a good game.