Performance & Prettiness: M&M Heroes VII Patch Plans

Heroes of Might & Magic will always hold a special place in my heart for hotseat fun with childhood chums, but the series has lost its way over the years. Even the most casual of glances at Steam player reviews for Might & Magic Heroes VII [official site] will fill your eyes with complaints about bugs, crashes, poor performance, ugliness, and more. Oh dear. Still, developers Limbic Entertainment are plugging away, and it sounds like future updates will bring big fixes for some of its problems, at least - performance and prettiness especially.

Limbic explain that following forum threads asking players for feedback, they "then made a top 10 list of the most frequently requested ideas, sat down and discussed what is actually feasible to add to the game with the various restraints that come with game development." They're working on what's viable.

Agreeing that its desaturated levels "were not satisfying and the game appeared not as colourful and magical as a Heroes title should be", they've tweaked the colour, saturation, and contrast of adventure maps and dang, that looks a lot nicer. I still do not understand why so many games are so drab when all it takes is being a little more free with colour. Do check out the before/after screens on that blog post.

Performance is being worked over too, as Limbic explain they've managed to halve load times and nearly halve RAM consumption. They're also considering removing the level cap, looking at rebalancing, improving the level editor, and working on fixing desync problems in multiplayer.

Some of those changes will arrive in patch 1.4, which is due "in the next few days" is now out, while others will take longer. Whether this all is enough to bring the game into line, I don't know. Any HOMM7 players reading this have thoughts to share with your fellow dear readers?