HD Wizards: Heroes Of Might & Magic III HD Announced
With a chunk of redrawn art
In my hypothetical Gaming Made Me, playing hotseat Heroes of Might & Magic would be the moment where I discovered multiplayer. HoMM 2, maybe. Then I discovered I could shoot faces in multiplayer, and scampered off in that direction. I haven't played a HoMM in yonks (and hear rough things about recent games), is the point, so I'm glad to see Ubisoft rework one of the classics. Yesterday they announced Heroes of Might & Magic III – HD Edition with a release date of January 29th, 2015.
What does this HDifying bring? Literal HDness, with support for modern widescreen resolutions, and a load of redrawn sprites. Many revamped re-releases over recent years go wrong when they redraw art, not capturing the original style, but this looks pretty good to me. It'll also offer online multiplayer lobbies using Steamworks.
Unfortunately, HoMM III HD will only be the base game, The Restoration of Erathia, without its expansions. Ubisoft explain in the announcement:
To understand the origin of the project and its development we need to go back to 2003. At that time we asked New World Computing to retrieve their archives for all the Might & Magic titles. We found tons of documentation and data but regarding Heroes III we had nothing but the usable source code of Heroes III Restoration of Erathia.
Boo. Hiss. I wonder how much Future People will mourn our sloppy backups. Many groups are now trying to preserve old games, gaming systems, and source code, but a whole lot is already lost.
Might & Magic Heroes VII is still in development, mind, inverted name and all.
Anyway, here's a look at someone HDifying HoMM 3's Hydra: