Which is best Might and Magic game for someone who haven't played any Might and Magic game?



Heroes of Might and Magic and it's spin offs and inspirations count too.

How can HOMM count if it's a *completely* diff series to M&M? Apart from some familiar names and vague world events they have nothing in common.

Well, then HOMM3 obviously.

In case you want an authentic M&M experience after all, then the World of Xeen I guess. Tho its *old*. Might want to go straight to M&M 6 The Mandate of Heaven.

PS If you want an authentic dungeon crawler from a famed series but not 30 yrs old, I can't recommend Wizardry 8 enough.

Then I would suggest Quest and its expansion.

I've only played MM2-5, but I did enjoy them, albeit none of the games are perfect.

World of Xeen is a nice friendly game at the start, but it suffers from money issues later on; you can't get enough money to pay for the training needed to level, as the cost to gain 1 level scales quadratically, and the game basically stops giving you money; to make matters worse, there's a late game dungeon that demands protection money.

Isles of Terra (MM3) uses a similar engine as the Xeen games, but doesn't have as bad as a money issue. It does have the issue that the Walk on Water spell is rather important, and the default party has nobody who can learn it (only Druids and Rangers can learn it in MM3). It does allow you to hire help, however.

MM2 is a very different engine, and while it's more primitive, I think it has better combat. For one thing, your HP is shown on the main screen during battle (instead of having to press a key to view exact values), and the game actually tells you how much damage you do; I also think the physical/magical balance is better, unlike MM3-MM5 which overly favor physical attacks (especially at high levels).

Stay away from Swords of Xeen, at least until you've played World of Xeen, as SoX has major bugs and balance issues; if you do decide to play it, I suggest playing on the easier Adventurer difficulty. (The harder Warrior difficulty is fine in WoX which is reasonably balanced (aside from the issues mentioned above), but I wouldn't try it in SoX.)

Might & Magic - I recommend starting with VI.
Heroes of Might & Magic - III is probably the best starting point. If you want something a bit newer, V is also really good.

For strategy I'd say Heroes of Might and Magic III.
For RPG/dungeon crawler I'd say Might & Magic III: Isles of Terra (yes, three is the magic number ;) ).
For Action I'd say Dark Messiah of Might & Magic, even though it has nothing in common with any of the other games in the series and might not even count as one of them but it's fun (but sadly, Steam only).

Anyway, it all depends on your preferences. M&M VI is a valid suggestion, too, I just find the style of the older games more charming and felt M&M VI was more of a slog than III, too many enemies, maps too big for me.

It is connected with HoM&M V story-wise and actually concludes the whole Demon Messiah business which started in that game.

I'll second the others - HOMM3 is usually regarded as the best in the series and Mandate of Heaven is a nice jumping off point for M&M - still "feels" like M&M but brings the game just modern enough to not get cumbersome. For an Elder Scrolls analogy - sort of like the jump from Daggerfall to Morrowind. Oooh tell me more - I was almost *finally* deadset on picking up HOMM3 again in this sale and giving it another go after putting it down years ago.

But is the new polish on V enough to get me to try that one for the first time?

I really enjoyed the single player campaigns in V. Decent voice acting, somewhat interesting plot, every town has its own special gimmick and it is obvious that the devs took III as their main inspiration and tried to mostly stay true to it (unlike IV or anything after V) but improved on many gameplay systems.

It also definitely has the best hero levelling system. I still find myself theorycrafting new builds as it has a ton of options. For example, an Elf specializing in Ballista, making it shoot 3 times and enchanting its bolts with Implosion so that the target receives 3 Ballista shots and 3 Implosions (or any other offensive spell) in a single attack.

Download this to see just how many options there are for skills and building heroes in V:
https://www.celestialheavens.com/viewpage.php?id=520

Comparatively, in III, you want the same 5 or 6 skills on every hero, regardless of which town you play or what hero you have.

Here's how I got into them:

MM2 - great game. I had it on Sega, PC, and C64.
MM8 - fun, very relatable to MM2 through the use of elemental planes
HOMM1 - I recommend starting here for HoMM because it's basically an easy tutorial and is really fun. But not fun after you pay the others because they get much better.
HoMM2 - My favorite
HoMM3 - The biggest and just complete Heroes game
Tidbits of the others. MM6 was my favorite. Crusaders is rough. I liked Warriors back in the day, but I wouldn't play it but.
Dark Messiah is very good.
HoMM4 is okay, but not great. HoMM5 is good.
MMX is fairly enjoyable but I couldn't figure out how to beat it and then I really didn't like my 2nd playthrough.

If you enjoy old games, the old ones are still playable. But they are pretty rough


If I was to play without nostalgic reasons, I might play Dark Messiah and HoMM 2 and 3. That's about it.

Might & Magic 6 Mandate of Heaven is the best in the series and only quite doable if you can get over the dated visuals and such.

V is the most newbie friendly

III IV VI and VII are excellent for skirmish purposes

'talkin 'bout homm btw

Just remembered one thing:

If you do decide to go with World of Xeen, and you don't want Clouds of Xeen to become way too easy, don't use any of the pyramids. Using a pyramid will take you to the Darkside, and there you will quickly gain large sums of XP that will take you to levels you aren't expected to easily reach in Clouds, making the game too easy. In particular, I would recommend slaying Lord Xeen and seeing the Clouds ending before you go to the Darkside, unless you want to trivialize Clouds.

(In other words, consider early use of the pyramids to be a sequence break.)

MM 4 or World of Xeen (4+5 combined) is the easiest of the M&M games and most user friendly of the older games. Of the newer (6-9) 7 is probably the best choice.

I would agree that HOMM III and V are the most playable/enjoyable, even if 2 holds a strong nostalgia pull. (I also played 1 at release, but there's no reason to play HOMM 1 over 2)

With the original M&M, it's hard to answer without knowing what you're looking for from an RPG since there's pretty wide variance. The consensus would be NOT M&M IX since it's a buggy mess due to release/finance problems, as much as it had promise. M&M X garners strong disagreement - I loved it but that's not the majority view, and it is certainly very different than 1-8.

Off the top of my head, 1-3 are enjoyable but old school (bust out your graph paper!), the Xeen series (4-5) are a fantastic step forward from 3 and huge, and then 6-8 is another leap forward.

6 still has square based movement, IIRC, whereas 7-8 both have free movement? Is that right?

But if you like RPGs it's hard to go wrong with any of 6-8 imo, though people get divided over that design difference. Xeen (4-5) is the next place to look, just be aware the two games are married together and it's huge and probably a bit puzzling for a first-timer as the place to jump into the series.

Oh, and as Tallima noted, don't overlook Dark Messiah - that actually might be the best place to start for a newcomer even though it's single hero rather than team, just because it will likely be the most familiar in terms of gameplay.