M&M: Heroes VII - Last Patch & Limbic Dropped

Might & Magic Heroes VII has been poorly received withTrial by Fire in particular doing poorly. Ubisoft has taken the logical step of dropping Limbic Entertainment as a developer via a public announcement. This follows a patch and hotfix for the game which turned out to be the last patches for the game ever.

Dear Heroes,

Over the past year, we've had the pleasure of releasing the latest game in the legendary Might & Magic series, with Heroes VII and its add-on "Trial by Fire".

We truly hope you enjoyed this new adventure through the rise of the Griffin Empire and we would like once again to thank you for your support. Shadow Councilors, your devotion will be remembered, working with you was an inspiring and memorable experience for all of us.

After 4 years of a close collaboration, our partnership with Limbic Entertainment is coming to an end and as such no further updates will be provided for the title. The forums will remain open to allow you to continue the conversation about the game and keep sharing your best creations.

We would like to thank all the teams involved in this project, particularly our friends at Limbic Entertainment and wish them the best in their future endeavors.

On behalf of the Heroes team, we hope you continue to treasure this series as much as we do and we are looking forward to seeing you again in Ashan!

Thank you,
The Might & Magic team

More information.

Typical Ubi. They had time to implement the Denuvo protection for Trial by Fire expansion and add it to the main game, too, but they could not be bothered to fix anything.

This is the second game in a raw, in the series, abandoned without fixing. And they ask why piracy is so big on PC. NO ONE likes to pay for something and be left with a nonworking or poorly working product. When you screw your paying customers is not realistic to expect them to come back.

If until AC III games were receiving patches until they were in a playable form, afterwards things went downhill. AC Unity left as it is, poor optimization The Crew and Far Cry 4 and Primal, poor optimization on AC Syndicate, no anti-cheat/hacking protection for Rainbow Six: Siege and The Division. And i could go on. Ubi as it is now it doesn't deserve to survive as a company. Its policies are anti-consumer and against the very people that are supposed to buy their products.

P.S.: what i said for Ubi is true for EA, too.

Hmmm… this seems to speak more to Ubisoft's incompetence as a publisher than Limbic's development skills. IIRC, Ubi dropped the previous developer on Heroes 6 too before bringing in Limbic. Seems like a case of a publisher not giving their dev teams enough time to produce a complete, fairly bug-free product - and then playing catch-up after the damage is already done.

Well, at least they're learning from their mistakes. I'm sure Heroes 8 (if there ever is one) will be perfect. Yeah, right.

Bye Bye M&M 11 I think creating a heroes game was too hard for Limbic, it is much harder than creating a fairly simple RPG in Unity.

Originally Posted by GothicGothicness
Bye Bye M&M 11 I think creating a heroes game was too hard for Limbic, it is much harder than creating a fairly simple RPG in Unity.

So i take it that i am not the only one that appreciated Limbic's work on M&M X: Legacy. Even there, Limbic's work was cut short, as they did have another patch planned, but Ubi decided against it. But that was Limbic's most polished product.

Also, i did not forget that Limbic had to patch Heroes VI for both the base game and the Shades of Darkness DLC, each time coming after Ubi dropped the devs (Black Hole Entertainment went bankrupt due to Ubi's not respecting the engagements, while Virtuos stopped development when they weren't paid in time)

And let's not forget how Ubi treated Nival, a competent dev that did a rather great job on Heroes V, despite the whole meddling and late changes. Glad that Nival managed to avoid bankrupcy, but they were really close after developing Heroes V for Ubi (again, Ubi did not paid when they should and treated them poorly).

So, yeah. This is the last time when i get a M&M game published by Ubi (they own the franchise, but they never give it to one of their own studios, like Ubi Montreal, Bucharest or Shanghai).

I haven't bought a Ubisoft Heroes game yet. You just know sometimes how a franchise like this is going to be treated.

I loved the first HoM&M, but when it went 3D, it just lost the appeal. Still played a bit of HoM&M5, but I just didn't like HoM&M6 and never touched HoM&M7. I guess this franchise is dead to me.

Someone here commented about other Ubi games. The Rainbow 6 Siege is, to me, an excelent game and well supported, in my opinion. No need to hate the games just because they're from Ubisoft.

I stopped buying them after HOMM4.
Once UBI took over it became a mess in my opinion.

Originally Posted by Pladio
I stopped buying them after HOMM4.
Once UBI took over it became a mess in my opinion.

Wish I had of followed your lead.

Originally Posted by wolfsrain
So i take it that i am not the only one that appreciated Limbic's work on M&M X: Legacy…

I thought they did a really good job on that game - it was pretty fun. I hoped we'd see another one to follow in its footsteps (though Xulima helped fill that need a lot).

I also really liked MMX, but since I got it in early access, I know that Limbic seemed to really struggle with technical issues. They had real troubles trying to optimize MMX and had to abandon 32 bit Window systems. They also struggled with bugs and other issues. It seems like these same problems with HMM7, but magnified by a lot. Most players seemed to have few problems with the game's content per say.

Good riddance.

I hope this is the last Heroes or Might and Magict that Ubi produces. I hope they somehow sell the license to a more capable producer or anyone just kickstart a well done clone.

Originally Posted by GothicGothicness
Bye Bye M&M 11 I think creating a heroes game was too hard for Limbic, it is much harder than creating a fairly simple RPG in Unity.

M&MXI was out of the question anyway. Sales for M&MX were quite poor apparently, though they said that (quote) "many people played it" (suggesting that many people pirated it). So they decided it was a just one time experiment.

Originally Posted by SSIGuy
Hmmm… this seems to speak more to Ubisoft's incompetence as a publisher than Limbic's development skills.

While I fully agree about Ubisoft, Limbic has also proven their incapability more than once. Though I really liked M&MX, this modest title was technically hampered by too many bugs for its scale, and worse, one of the most idiotic bad performances in a recent videogame. They blamed the Unity engine for that.

However they built Heroes VII on the robust Unreal Engine 3 to the same effect. The miriads of bugs was (is) amazing, even some of them coming back in more recent versions after being patched before. And the performance is terrible for a game that looks rather ugly at times, and just like one generation old most of the time. I'm more than prone to accept a lower graphical level especially in a TBS game, but only if in return we get a fluid game. Not the case.

Also, in Heroes 6 they provided support and one addon, but complained about how restricted they were because Blackhole (the original developers) code and engine was so closed and rubish. Now I wonder if it was actually true or they were just uncapable.

On the other hand their design skills don'tt seem to be very good either, (H7 is quite bad in this respect), though admitedly Ubi has probably a lot to do in this regard.

I blame Ubi completely. Both Nival and Black Hole accounted about their dealings with Ubi. And ubi really should sell the franchise to someone that actually cares about it.

As for a clone, we have King's Bounty and Legends of Eisenwald.

To be honest, i miss that science-fiction element of the pre-Ubi series. It was fun, but also made a lot of sense in the grand scheme of things. Ubi decided to remove that, making a generic high fantasy universe.

Originally Posted by wolfsrain
I blame Ubi completely. Both Nival and Black Hole accounted about their dealings with Ubi. And ubi really should sell the franchise to someone that actually cares about it.

Ubi is the major responsible of course, but that doesn't mean that Limbic have proven to be incapable of delivering a stable and technically decent product. Both Nival and Blackhole worked for Ubi and their games, though weren't that good technically either, were pretty decent and way beyond what Limbic has been able to deliver.

Originally Posted by wolfsrain
As for a clone, we have King's Bounty and Legends of Eisenwald.

Those are similar games, but far from clones.

king bounty >>>> heroes of might and mgic *
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To be honest this has to make you appreciate WB willingness to suppor their games. While you might not like WB games (batmand/shadow of mordor) and some of their patches have been slow - they do in fact fix things. Mind you they aren't like Larian.
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I will state that UBI is by far the worse publisher (uplay is also the worse platform and their support is worse than steam (which is very difficult because steam support is pretty bad). I will still defend EA as having good support and solid platform even if EA patching leaves much to desire (on the pc) but at least they do patch things occasionally.

Good riddance! Russian King's Bounty rules this scene with awesome fun.

Originally Posted by you
king bounty >>>> heroes of might and mgic *
-
To be honest this has to make you appreciate WB willingness to suppor their games. While you might not like WB games (batmand/shadow of mordor) and some of their patches have been slow - they do in fact fix things. Mind you they aren't like Larian.
-
I will state that UBI is by far the worse publisher (uplay is also the worse platform and their support is worse than steam (which is very difficult because steam support is pretty bad). I will still defend EA as having good support and solid platform even if EA patching leaves much to desire (on the pc) but at least they do patch things occasionally.

As for support…My experience with them tell me otherwise. Real support was granted only when i opened a dispute via PayPal. I paid my games via PayPal, money were removed from my card, both my bank and PayPal that money reached EA, but due to a technical error of their site it wasn;t properly registered by the site (but their bank registered the fact that money went in their accounts). Live Chat practically accused me of theft despite me offering to give them proof of purchase, bank extracts and such. The bloody advisor closed my case without doing nothing, deleted the chat log (which is a big no, but unfortunately, i've screenshoted the whole chat). So i've opened a dispute and only then i've got the actual support which checked my claims and admited that i was right and the money were transfered to their accounts, but the transaction wasn't properly registered.

And that was one problem i had. Another was when i've activated my KoA on Origin and i wasn't given the DLC's (which were included in the purchase). Another round, flood with proofs and i've finnaly got the product i paid for.

So, no. EA doesn't have a truly qualified support. Not on the Live Chat level. And those people do not want to forward the issue to a supervisor or to someone that could actually, you know, solve the problem. Despite all that i kept my tone more than civil, but i was really boiling inside seeing people so unhelpful. My only good experiences with Live Chat are linked to an indian guy (dude was really, really helpful and he got all my good will in the survey that the advisors have to send after closing the case) and one american dude.

You probably did not see the new "improved" Origin. They've removed the shopping cart, you have to store your CC on their servers (not happening, there is a reason why i use PayPal), buy one game at the time (because they've removed the shopping cart). And their site now looks like is straight from a bad mobile phone app.

Ubi and Origin have something in common…..neither will ever be on my computer. When I get a hankering for M&M, I fire up the old ones and enjoy.

According to Steamspy Heroes 7 is a disaster with 93k steam owners. In comparison Heroes 6 has over 500k and MMX almost 200k. That's the problem though with buggy releases. I hope this teaches Ubi that releasing unfinished products is terrible for sales in the age of Steam reviews. I'm also betting they invested more money in Heroes 7 than in MMX, since MMX had a cheaper engine and reused alot of resources from Heroes 6.

Originally Posted by Vitirr

M&MXI was out of the question anyway. Sales for M&MX were quite poor apparently, though they said that (quote) "many people played it" (suggesting that many people pirated it). So they decided it was a just one time experiment.

I'm not sure 200k are really all that bad, and I bet they at least broke even with their sales. They were hoping though that the game would sell as well as Legend of Grimrock (that was the pitch from their internal team which won support for the project) which sold 800k copies within 2 years of release, and it obviously didn't do that well. LOG hit the market just at the right time though. Its successor sold about as well as MMX (Again according to Steamspy), probably because the competition was much greater in 2014 than in the years before.