Might & Magic X - MMX Early Access

The digital deluxe on UPlay is £19.99.

That's too much for me for an alpha. I paid £10.00 for the 'completed' Legend of Grimrock on release.

To be honest, I'm bit surprised to see even Ubisoft chose to let the consumers support the game rather than doing so with their own money but I still think the approach is more honest than the case of Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny.

At this moment Uplay-Shop says: Server Error

Yeah, it seems like Uplay is getting hammered. There must be a lot of M&M fans out there. The boxed edition is surprisingly cheap.

This should come as no surprise to anyone. The Kickstarter phenomenon has a lot of lessons for publishers that are willing to listen, and the aspect that publishers probably picked up on first is that people are actually willing to pay to get beta access to a game.

If you're a business guy at a publisher, and you see these two options…

1) Pay a full QA staff to flesh out every bug in your game.
2) Have people pay you money to beta-test your game.

…it's a no-brainer which one you'll pick.

I think there needs to be a push-back from the larger gaming community on this. Paid early access for an indie game is one thing, but paid early access to a game backed by a AAA publisher is nothing short of a money grab, and should be treated as such and shunned by gamers everywhere.

Here some quick first impressions:

Downloaded via Steam w/o problem. UPlay installed and I used my existing play account. Played on a Mac under parallels desktop.

The intro was good (basically what you expect from a RPG).
After starting up the game felt a little bit outdated (grid based movement, its ALL turn based, graphics is not like Elder Scrolls Games). But then I went for the first quest (spiders lair) and finished it.
I liked it. The turn based combat worked. The fight seemed balanced and it felt like Legend of Grimrock on steroids (well turn based of cause). I found an unidentified item some other non special stuff and the party leveled to level 2.
I did not see how skills are really implemented. (I looked for a skills tab: I didn't find it. Maybe its just me..) And during level up there was only a distribution to the main attributes (no new skills).

Some of the popup labels in the inventory show tags like "Token XXXX), which shows that the game is still work in progress (as said in the big disclaimer ).
No crash during my 90 minutes experience.

I am a fan of turn based games and this one looks promising. If the quests and items remain interesting this one will be eating a lot of my available playtime.

In summary: I will continue to investigate...

Hunter42

Moriendor said:

What I think is wrong with all this is that this is a AAA publisher using this feature. Ubi could very easily afford professional QA and a fully polished release version without any need to pre-release the game in exchange for cash in its beta stage….

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It's good that there's still dreamers in the world, they bring a bit of fresh air, but a bit of reality is good stuff too.

Do you really think that each game of a publisher get the exact same investment base? Obviously it's not how it works, it's complex estimations based on possibly weird hypothesis but it can't be different. You can't just throw plenty money in a game you estimate you won't sell that much.

In that case I doubt the publisher put a lot of money in the game, and the dev team isn't that big. So if you forget the publisher for the game type, and the game production cost, it seems reasonable to try a preview release and try apply a bit of G2G approach (game together).

Now should the publisher had refused the game because such path was probably proposed by the dev team? But ok I do understand such approach can generate suspicion, the central problem is, is a (partial) G2G approach and pre release release a good or a bad thing?

EDIT: I don't have the answer to my question but I'd say it's in the movement of rising mass of whining gamers sure they know design better games, and perhaps they does, or not.

EDIT2: Some potential business idea, setup a pool a players consultant specialists, and hire teams of consultants to game designers, publishers and developers. The pool will have spread competencies and preferences in gaming, and would be suggested to hire for technical demo, first tests and so on. And you could hire various pools with different set of specialties. Look like big money on the horizon, start small with some mostly free job for big indies, I'd suggest made some proposal to Kalypso‎.

EDIT3: I'd like a RPG simulation based on EDIT2, still have a lot of nostalgia for the game Game Dev Story (1997 PC Japan only, 2010 ios english version and updated to reflect more modern game history) which is a simple but rather funny simulation where you manage a studio of game developers that starts during the 70's up to the 2000's.

Hunter42 said:

Here some quick first impressions:

Downloaded via Steam w/o problem. UPlay installed and I used my existing play account. Played on a Mac under parallels desktop.

The intro was good (basically what you expect from a RPG).
After starting up the game felt a little bit outdated (grid based movement, its ALL turn based, graphics is not like Elder Scrolls Games). But then I went for the first quest (spiders lair) and finished it.
I liked it. The turn based combat worked. The fight seemed balanced and it felt like Legend of Grimrock on steroids (well turn based of cause). I found an unidentified item some other non special stuff and the party leveled to level 2.
I did not see how skills are really implemented. (I looked for a skills tab: I didn't find it. Maybe its just me..) And during level up there was only a distribution to the main attributes (no new skills).

Some of the popup labels in the inventory show tags like "Token XXXX), which shows that the game is still work in progress (as said in the big disclaimer ).
No crash during my 90 minutes experience.

I am a fan of turn based games and this one looks promising. If the quests and items remain interesting this one will be eating a lot of my available playtime.

In summary: I will continue to investigate…

Hunter42

Click to expand...

TY for the review/positive input. The M&M series has a special place in my heart, so I will definitely watch this one. S.

Actually the pay for beta program for games has been around for a very long time and many games have had it over the past decade or so.

I guess I know what you mean and, as an option for hardcore gamers who want to support their favorite games in exchange of spending their time on alpha/beta testing phase, I think this could become a valid option…well, at least, if such games wouldn't turn out to be total mess, to which no testing phase could bring any justice. So, while the devs still need to do their jobs properly at their ends, to some extent, there appears to be a chance for them with patient players who are yet to be tamed by "polished" products of the movie AAA game makers.

Uplay runs again:

30€ for the Deluxe Version in Germany: Early Access + Sountrack + MM 6 download
Full boxed version in early 2014.

I'm downloading now...

And uPlay Shop is down again. *sigh* This isn't exactly filling me with confindence in uPlay. It was down for the whole of last evening, at least all I got was "Server Error", which is pretty poor by modern standards. Might have been OK, say 10 years ago, but today for a AAA publisher... for shame Ubi, for shame.

I could download and install MM X and MM VI - lucky me

Hunter42 said:

Here some quick first impressions:

Downloaded via Steam w/o problem. UPlay installed and I used my existing play account. Played on a Mac under parallels desktop.

The intro was good (basically what you expect from a RPG).
After starting up the game felt a little bit outdated (grid based movement, its ALL turn based, graphics is not like Elder Scrolls Games). But then I went for the first quest (spiders lair) and finished it.
I liked it. The turn based combat worked. The fight seemed balanced and it felt like Legend of Grimrock on steroids (well turn based of cause). I found an unidentified item some other non special stuff and the party leveled to level 2.
I did not see how skills are really implemented. (I looked for a skills tab: I didn't find it. Maybe its just me..) And during level up there was only a distribution to the main attributes (no new skills).

Some of the popup labels in the inventory show tags like "Token XXXX), which shows that the game is still work in progress (as said in the big disclaimer ).
No crash during my 90 minutes experience.

I am a fan of turn based games and this one looks promising. If the quests and items remain interesting this one will be eating a lot of my available playtime.

In summary: I will continue to investigate…

Hunter42

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Appreciate the feedback!

Please keep it coming

I bought it and played past the town. The bugs i have encountered are minor and are fixed easily. The game is currently unoptimised, so it was a bit choppy until i lowered the settings.

I have no idea how an item breaks in this game though. I had one item break on me.

I think there needs to be a little more variety of enemies. First quest had spiders, elite spiders and a queen spider. But i figured that it was just the quest. Outside the town seems to be brigands(of swordsmen and archer types) and nagas and more spiders. But i guess M&M isnt known for its variety of enemies i guess.

I am having 2 weapons and armor breaking every 3-5 enemies. Seems a bit excessive.

They are just throwing out some incentive to try and drum up more preorders.

That's it , no diabolical scheme here. IMO.

HiddenX said:

I could download and install MM X and MM VI - lucky me

Click to expand...

What DRM you get with MM VI when you buy MMX legacy? Is it only functional through Uplay?

Thanks

SpoonFULL said:

What DRM you get with MM VI when you buy MMX legacy? Is it only functional through Uplay?

Thanks

Click to expand...

I'll test it this evening

MM VI runs without Uplay - it is the English 1.2 version. (At least the readme.txt file says this)


PS:
Link for MM X manual at Steam