Before I tell you about the Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era early access roadmap, I fear I must finally have a tantrum about the terrible word, “roadmap”. Videogame developers, I cannot think of a more flattening, soul-sapping way to describe the process of tinkering with the clockwork of make-believe.
In this case, Unfrozen are planning to add a persistent netherworld to their strategy RPG, stretching beneath every mountain and valley. They are also even now convening a Thieves Guild for surveillance purposes, and breeding unspecified monsters as powerful as lich dragons. If I were going to summarise all that, I would toy with words like Cornucopia or Manifestation or Eruption or Blight. I would go rooting around in the Epic of Gilgamesh for a line that sounds vaguely like a hotfix. Roadmap? You are cultivating a fantasy, Unfrozen, not paving one over. From now on, the only game developers who are allowed to use the word “roadmap” are people who are making games about actual infrastructure. Anyway, let’s dig into the Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era early access cornucopia.
Broadly, you can expect “new neutral creatures, heroes, artifacts, spells, map objects [and] scenarios”, alongside the usual bug fixes and tweaks. The bigger additions are grouped into stages. The first stage, due later this year, will add a co-op team versus mode, more customisation options for the random map generator, and more responses for the emote wheel, plus a hero skill rebalance in line with player feedback.
The second stage will introduce more options for matchmaking, a promised Observer mode that lets you watch other people’s matches or recap highlights, and reworks for Elite classes and alternative Creature Upgrades.
Then cometh Stage 3, which introduces the aforesaid netherworld. “The classic HOMM-series feature, it will allow you to venture into another map level, which exists simultaneously with the main map,” the devs write. “It will include special terrain, its own set of objects, brand new music theme and much more.”
Stage 3 will also include Ironman mode for the story campaign, a big hero specialisation rework, new PvP win conditions, proper match statistics, new neutral tier 8 creatures, and the Thieves’ Guild, which lets you gather info about enemies and the lay of the land. It also bumps up the max level for spells to 5, and adds new evolving art for city models on the global map to reflect your upgrades.
Stage 4, finally, is the 1.0 release, which stirs in the second and third campaign acts, map sharing support, and a mysterious PvE roguelike mode.
All these things sound like worthy additions to a game we HOMM neophytes at RPS have deemed to be fairly enjoyable. Have you been playing? Any anecdotes about lich dragons to share?
I went and looked up the origins of “roadmap” in videogame development parlance, after having the above moan. Seems there is quite a lot to it, actually, in the sense that there is quite a lot of sand in the Sahara Desert.
