Might and Magic

Transcription

If you owned a PC, and enjoyed role playing games the period from the mid eighties to the early nineties was a really good stretch. This was the span between the first mainstream success of the Bard's Tale and the beginning of the generation of unprecedentedly good but much more intermittent releases that started around the time CD-ROM became popular. It was the era that the CRPG boomed, and it's known as the Golden Age. Companies like SSI, Sir-Tech, Origin and Interplay were at their most prolific. Never have there been more RPG's produced with such a frequency by so many different companies. But it's one particular product of the Golden Age that we're going to look at and that is New World Computing's Might and Magic. You may know more about its spin-offs: the Heroes series, Dark Messiah, King's Bounty and others; this series has had quite a lot of spinoffs. But for now we'll just look at the original series of nine classic CRPGs. Let's start in 1986, when computers looked like this "it's now a standard typewriter keyboard with special keys." and software shipped like this "Oh no, what have I done?" And this wonderful ad appeared in magazines for Might and Magic 1: the Secret of the Inner Sanctum. Set in the world of VARN, this first game followed a party of six in their adventures against the villain Sheltem. Massive for its day, the game included five towns and a dozen dungeons and its non-linearity gave the player unprecedented freedom in exploring them. It was the brainchild of a UCLA student, Jon van Caneghem, who wrote the game on an Apple II between 1983 and 86 and mailed out copies of the finished product in plastic bags from his own apartment. From these humble beginnings, New World Computing was born. The game was a critical and commercial success and ports followed to most of the popular and some of the obscure platforms of the day including the Commodore 64, NES, and of course MS-DOS; there's never been a main series Might and Magic game that didn't get a PC release. But the rapid developments of later years would quickly eclipse this first installment. For example, combat had no graphics at all; the interface was entirely text (on the PC at least; some the other ports were a little more embellished). 1988's Might and Magic 2 was a more ambitious take on the formula. It continued from the cliffhanger ending of the previous game where the party passed through a gate into a new world. The sequel introduced improvements like hirelings and trainable skills. it was one of the earliest dungeon crawlers to feature an automap though you had to train characters in the cartography skill to see it. In an unexpected twist, the game ended not with the customary boss battle but with a substitution cipher and a countdown clock, which was one of the factors CGW's long time RPG correspondent Scorpia, an enthusiastic advocate of the first game, criticized in a lukewarm review. Van Caneghem responded in the letters page with a lengthy and trenchant defense. Three years later, in 1991, Might and Magic 3 launched with a shiny new engine. The primary platform was now the PC, and the game was built with this in mind. Graphics were now vibrant 256 colour VGA and mice and sound cards were supported, allowing for the first time a musical soundtrack. But the improvements weren't just cosmetic. Maps were larger, monsters could now be seen from a distance, and ranged weapons were added. Although it featured a new group of adventurers, who would later become significant in the story of Might and Magic 7, it again picked up the plot thread from the previous two games. Despite his near defeat on two prior occasions, the party was still trying to stop the apparently elusive Sheltem. In a bizarre response to her negative review of Might and Magic 2 the developers at the game included Scorpia as a monster, portrayed in a distinctly unflattering light. Might and Magic 3 was the new high point of the series. Unlike the earlier games which have dated to the point of being quite difficult to enjoy, it still holds up pretty well. Might and Magic 4 in 1992, and 5 in 93, finally brought the Sheltem story arc to a conclusion. This pair of games shared an engine with 3, but introduced a technical gimmick that may be unique in gaming history. When both were installed, they combined to form a huge unified game, World of Xeen, containing additional content not found in either of the originals. Adventurers explored, and eventually united, the light and dark sides of a flat world. A later CD-ROM release of World of Xeen added digitized speech... "Alamar, you misguided mechanism, you'll destroy us all!" ...and it's this version of 4 and 5 that's the easiest to find today. In 1996, New World Computing was acquired for thirteen million dollars. The buyer, 3DO, owned by EA founder Trip Hawkins, was in the process of pivoting its business model into publishing, after their first attempt created a console platform... "the most advanced home gaming system in the universe" ...that nobody could afford. Jon van Caneghem, eager to produce a Might and Magic MMO, was enticed by 3DO's technology and experience in online gaming. With the launch of Ultima Online still a year away, they were the only company operating what we would now call an MMO: Meridian 59. And by the way: still running. The first Might and Magic title under the new regime was number six: the Mandate of Heaven. With a five-year gap between releases it needed to be a technological leap forward from its predecessors, and they delivered. 6 was the first in the series with a 3d world and full freedom of movement. Its engine, with creatures and objects rendered as sprites rather than polygons was behind the times even by the benchmarks of 1998 - the same year Half-Life, Thief and Unreal were released - but still, its open world and massive dungeons had few contenders in the genre. If you played it back in the day, you probably still remember it fondly. It was 1998. CRPGs were on the verge of a major revival. The future of the series looked optimistic. But it was not to last. According to John van Caneghem and others at New World, 3DO's bean counters didn't understand the creative aspects of game development and clamped down on anything too risky or innovative. They pushed the company to deliver a new Might and Magic and a new Heroes came every year. So 6 was followed by two direct sequels: Might and Magic 7: For Blood and Honour the next year and 8: Day of the Destroyer the year after that. 7 broke relatively little new ground, but it did refine some of the previous games rough edges, making for arguably the strongest game in the series. Party characters could now be races other than human, and the game featured branching endings depending on the players chosen loyalties. 8 changed the party system entirely. In this game, the player generated a single character at the start with the rest of the party being filled out from a choice of recruitable NPCs. There were more factions in play, and you could add dragons to your team. But despite these changes, the engine had barely been improved since Might and Magic 6 and the now very dated game was a disappointment to many after the high quality of the previous two entries. Nevertheless, this trilogy is still the most accessible entry point to the series, chronicling the war between the Ancients and the Kreegan on the world of Enroth. I know I said we weren't going to talk about Heroes of Might and Magic, and I'm not, except to say that the stories of Heroes 1, 2, 3 and 4 and their expansions tie in elaborately to Might and Magic 6, 7, and 8. There, I'm done, no more Heroes. In 2002, New World Computing released the final game in the series: Might and Magic 9. Jon van Caneghem stepped back from design duties on this installment for the first time in the history of the series, which might have been a warning that things were not going well. Still, with a new 3d engine and a stand-alone story, Might and Magic 9 could have been a perfect entry point for a new set of players. Unfortunately, 3DO's demand to release the game on the last day of their financial year resulted in something that was described even by its designer as "pre-alpha at best", and more harshly by CGW as "Coaster of the Year". Then things went from bad to worse. Before the game's problems could be patched, 3DO laid off most of the staff of New World Computing, and later on in a final surreal twist Trip Hawkins appeared to blame the company's failure on the Iraq War, before filing for bankruptcy and closing the doors permanently. After nineteen years and 36 games, the story of New World Computing was finished, and 3DO was 3D-own... 3D-un. 3-DONE. This idea worked better on paper... But what happened to the Might and Magic MMO that van Caneghem was so keen to make that he sold his company? Well, that project was cancelled just a few months after the acquisition, a casualty of 3DO's volatile priorities. What could have been an early, enthusiastic and innovative entry into a market now worth fifteen billion dollars a year had been unceremoniously discarded. Jon van Caneghem spent time at NCSoft before co-founding Trion, best known for Rift, though he left before its release and doesn't appear in the credits. He then went to EA Victory to produce a new free to play Command and Conquer title but in 2013 that game was cancelled and the studio shut down. Since New World Computing's demise in 2003, he hasn't released a game. The rights to Might and Magic were sold for 1.3 million dollars to a company that had been attempting to get hold of them for a while: then called Ubisoft, now they're more commonly known as f***ing Uplay. At auction, Ubisoft outbid Eidos and Turbine, and yeah, you spotted it, that right there was another missed chance to get that Might and Magic MMO. Ubisoft are still making Might and Magic games today, though their franchise takes place in a completely different setting to the universe in which all of the New World Games occur. They released Might and Magic 10 in 2014, which despite a low budget, received good reviews, but other than its name and genre that game has little in common with the rest of the series; it's a spiritual successor, not a direct sequel. Today, Might and Magic 1-9 as well as many of the spinoffs are all easily available through gog.com. In total the series offers hundreds if not thousands of hours of entertainment and can be picked up for pocket change during a sale. The GoG support forum has links to unofficial patches to remove bugs and add features, like mouselook, to several of the games. The patches for 6-8 are highly recommended, but the unofficial patch for 9 is almost essential to render it playable. And that's it for this episode of Retrohistories. I'm sorry I haven't talked about the science fiction plot elements, or the differences in the various console releases and which are the best ones to play, or Swords of Xeen, or Arcomage and the games that inspired, but I had to draw a line somewhere. Thank you for watching Retrohistories. I'll see you again in the past. Making this video turned out to be a lot more work than I expected I did have a lot of fun making it, though, and I hope you got something out of watching it. Please leave any feedback that you can think of in the comments, I'd love to hear what you thought of it. Thank you so much to the uploaders of all the material that I used. YouTube is an absolute goldmine of archival footage, and there's no way that I could have done a video like this without such a rich collection of source material. I hope the next episode of Retrohistories isn't going to take another six months. If you have a topic in gaming history that you'd like me to talk about I'd love to hear it. If you want more Might and Magic, I've got an ongoing Let's Play of Might and Magic 6 on the channel. As I record, that series is on hiatus, so it's quite a good time to catch up on the first 18 episodes. Thanks again for watching!