Almost two years later Ubi Soft dropped the bomb: they appointed a task force to reinvent the franchise - to take the key ingredients of 3DO´s M&M universe and create a new foundation for all M&M games to come. Heroes would be continued with a 5th game - but there's no RPG in the pipeline! The new Dark Messiah of Might & Magic is marketed as an action game with an "RPG-layer" - does this mean it's an action-RPG or is it just a shooter with a few stats?

We had the opportunity to attend presentations of both games at the Games Convention 2005 and talk to to the producers Fabrice Cambounet (Heroes V) and Romain de Waubert de Genlis (Dark Messiah). 

Past Heroes of M&M games were about exploring a world map with a hero, building up a town, raising an army and finally defeating your enemies. This hasn't changed in Heroes V - it will still be the same addictive RPG-TBS hybrid. Ubi Soft contracted the Russian studio Nival as the developer of the new Heroes game and their previous experience with RPGs and turn based strategy games (Etherlords 2, Silent Storm + Sentinels, Blitzkrieg 1 + 2 and more) makes it look like a logical choice.

Fundamental changes are sparse - which is a good thing because it's not obvious where the proven formula needs drastic changes - therefore Ubi and Nival have limited themselves to a technology update plus finetuning of the gameplay and interface.

The times of rather unimpressive ISO 2D graphics are over - Heroes V comes with spectacular 3D graphics. The world looks colorful, highly detailed and classy; perhaps this can to a certain degree be attributed to the involvement of Olivier Ledroit, a famous French comic artist. A picture says more than a thousand words - feel free to browse the screenshots here on RPGDot or download the movies released shortly after the GC to get an idea how pleasing to the eye this game is.

Exploration and quests take place on the world map and not every secret can be uncovered without making use of the flexible camera. It pays off to stop once in a while to look behind a rock or a tree. When you run into an enemy the game changes to the combat screen. Enter another novelty: the battlefield looks similar to a chess board. Hex fields have been replaced with squares, to increase the conflict potential - a hex field has 6 sides, a square is surrounded by 4 sides and 4 corners. To speed things up the battlefield size scales with the amount of troops. Combat is still turn-based with an automatic combat option.

The measures explained in the last paragraph are typical of the direction Ubi Soft is pursuing with Heroes V: idle time has been reduced through clever design decisions in combination with a streamlined interface - the game has been made faster - but not at the cost of complexity.

Multiplayer is no exception. Heroes V will offer 5 MP modes, among them innovations like "ghost mode" and "simultaneous turns". The former means that a player can spend the time between his own moves, maybe minus a certain default time per turn, for exploration and sabotage. This is sort of a penalty for slow play. "Simultaneous turns" is exactly what the name says - all players move at the same time as long as there´s no enemy contact.

The game is already in beta stage, so the targeted release date of February 2006 sounds realistic. Heroes of Might & Magic V is definitely a game to look forward to and so far it seems Ubi Soft and Nival are doing everything right.