Well I haven't played the game at all, just looked at the screenshots and read about it, and that's more than enough for me. A lot has been said already - basically the gameplay seems rather bad when compared to Heroes 2 and 3.
"ElPixelIlustre: Because in HoMM 2, 3 and 4 it feels like you're in a pretty open world. HoMM 5 in the other hand is full of f*cking corridors. =( image
That's a problem of leveldesigners, not the game itself. But you're right - I've never had that satisfying 'exploration' feeling I got from HoMM 3 and never could quite put a finger on why - this is the reason I think :D"
I think it is a problem with the wasy they built the game. Heroes 2 and 3 were built so that the landscape and entities easily could be combined in wide variety of ways - with great results. They even included editors that could do this which were very easy to use. That is great game design. My guess is that some of the problem with Heroes 5 is that this was not achieved, and probably not considered.
Another thing that is important for me is the graphics. I love the graphic design in Heroes 2 and 3. Especially in 2 which has great fairy-tale graphics. (They look like they could come from some fairytale books for children. And also they remind me of medieval art. Mostly because of the unnatural perspective.)
Heroes 3 has very different but also great graphics. Both games have very well realized graphics, music and sound that adds a lot to the game.
Heroes V's graphics doesn't fit the series at all. they look unimaginative, anime like, flashy - in other words awful.
I bet the music is crappy too. In HOMM3 the a lot music had a late romantic classical feel, very Debussy at times. In HOMM2 they were more classic and with hint of the baroque at times. Both very good and fitting.
I'm happy that Ubisoft has hired a new team to make HOMM6. I hope they go for a new direction in both gameplay and art.

I liked it... well i tried really hard to like it, but in the end was let down by too many things... Tribes of the East adds a lot to like into the game, imo just get it for multiplayer & forget the rest of the series as it works stand alone.
Here's what i dont like with it:
- first of all, 1 of the trailer's originally showed a dynamic battle (creatures flying in and joining the battle)... nothing cool like that ever actually happens in the game.
- mixed encounters were not added till the 2rd expansion
- alternate units were not added till the 2rd expansion
- item combo's were not added till the 2rd expansion
- ai cheats, yet still takes 30mins to take its bloody turn.
- ***skirmish unplayable cause the ai takes so bloodly long***
- singleplayer has lame story, and no stucture to the campaign... as in you cannot pick what side you want, so your stuck with haven 95% of the time.
There definately potential for a good game in there somewhere... but for the time being its just potential, wait and see how well the no.6 does.

And I'm sorry to have to say that, but you fail. No bad blood intended, okay? But I can't let pass a statement like "i saw screenshots, read reviews and decided that this game sucks". The game could suck, and you would have the right to say it, only if you actually tried it yourself.
I've learnt the hard way to be cautious about screenshots and reviews. The last example being King's Bounty : The Legend. Many people say it's a great game and screenshots are designed to make it look great ; I bought it and found that it sucked hard. Boring endless battles, boring endless trips to refill your troops, no castle building, a very interesting but poorly worked out system of "having a wife and kids" and over-flashy graphics that barely conceal the lack of true artistic direction. Not mentioning the very bad localization of the french version, but that's another problem.
Yes, HoMM V has flaws. It even had flaws that should not have been allowed to be in a retail version (I mean the very first version, without the patches), but UbiSoft is a careless editor. Still, HoMM V is a very good game, very enjoyable and doesn't deserve a third of the heat it earned from so-called "hardcore fans". I bet those "harcore fans" are just sometimes narrow-minded people who can't allow a game to evolve in a direction they didn't elect - remember HoMM IV...
So, having played every HoMM game, I stand up and say "HoMM V IS a good game". And that's all I'm asking for.

1) I agree that people should not judge games that they have not actually played themselves.
2) I must be weird cause I did enjoy King's Bounty a lot. I thought the fact that there were limited troops available and that you had to travel a while to get them made the game very good, mostly because it added to a rather hefty difficulty. I like that as HoMM games typically are not very difficult at all. In Kings bounty you had to be very conservative with how you fight, not so much in HoMM. Also, King's Bounty was clearly designed as a single player game. I liked it, but opinions vary of course.
3) I felt that HoMM 5 was a big step backwards from 3 and 4 - but if you fully upgrade HoMM5 with all addons ( especially tribes of the east ) it became a decent game as the addons put all features they took out back in.
I thought it was extremely .. annoying of Ubisoft to take half of Heroes 4 features away, and then add them back in step by step via expansion packs.
Noteworthy features such as:
Factions that HoMM4 had but were mystersiously absent from Vanilla 5
Caravan feature
Multiple creature upgrading paths ( this one especially! HOW COULD THEY HAVE REMOVED THAT ?! )
and much more.
Heroes 5 without addons ? pretty bad.
Heroes 5 with all addons ? pretty good.
Heroes 4 ? Great.
I do respect your opinion and i agree that HoMM 5, properly upgraded, is a good game so don't get me wrong. ( I also prolly mustb e weird for liking heroes 4 xD )

Hehe, Bio2hazard, no, you're not weird at all about liking King's Bounty! My point was just that i bought it because reviews said it was excellent, and finally it just didn't click with me at all. It was a huge letdown for me.
I do understand that it is a solo-play oriented game and I have no problem with it. Most of the time, I play solo anyway. ^_^ It's just that reviews on websites pumped it up for me, as I am a sucker for turn-based strategy games (my brain can't handle the RTS !!) ; and finally, comparing it to HoMM, to Disciples, to Age of Wonders, I was very very disappointed. That's certainly why I'm a little vehement about it. ;)
You do have a very good point in stating that "vanilla" HoMM5 was not a very good game. It had some fundamentals but lacked very important ones. The biggest was certainly the caravan feature, and that's also certainly what earned Ubisoft the bitterest comments from the players. Come on Ubi, how can people play a HoMM game without the caravan feature!!!
Thinking about the absent factions, it was certainly a marketing plan from Ubi, very much in the trend of nowadays games: release a non-complete game and make people pay for the additional features that should have been in the game from the beginning. I just hope they won't make the same mistake for HoMM 6, or i will refrain from buying it until all the add-ons are released and a value pack (ie. discount price) is available. I'm done with paying my games bits by bits! ^_^
And no, you're not weird for liking HoMM 4, I like it too!!

I like HoMM 4 a lot. Main problem of HoMM was that heroes could destroy stacks of dragons by late game. Had they capped the level of heroes, it would have been even better.
I loved HoMM 3, but hated the Wake of Gods unofficial add-on.
I dislike HoMM 5 for the reasons states :
- Poor level design (all corridors - no feeling of exploration)
- Small maps usually => No need to split your armies.
- Slow battles if I remember well.
- TERRIBLE campaign. And I mostly play campaigns. Campaigns in Homm3 were great, campaigns in HoMM4 were great too except for the "with only your 4 heroes, nuke the stack of Dragons" at the end.

Narwhal> it's true that the heroes were overpowered in HoMM4, if you knew how to optimize and use them...

They did already correct one mistake from HoMM5 - Nival is out.
Ditto.

I played all Heroes, from 1 to 5.
When it comes to nostalgics: nothing beats Homm2, when it comes to most hours spent (and best game prolly): it's homm3 and I agree with the few people here that homm4 IS a great game, if you are willing to dig deep enough. It is more complex than any of the other homm's. Homm5 is a good effort and I had some fun with it, but it just doesn't captivate like the others, it has a different feeling. Dunno exactly why though...

Russian developer, squares vs. hexes. That is all.

The only bad thing about Heroes V is the horrible campaign...
Isabelle is most likely the worst video game character EVAR...

Reviving an old topic here, but all right...
It's been a while since I've played Heroes V and I haven't gotten to try out most of the add-ons and expansion packs that people are talking about, so I can't speak to them. I will, however, comment on the base game in a little more detail.
Overall, yes, I can see why some people are complaining. I agree that there are some things that Heroes V just did "wrong." There were some bits of functionality that had been introduced in other games in the series that were markedly absent in Heroes V - things like the ability to caravan units from external dwellings to a major city or from one city to another without the use of a "shuttle hero." But I'm not sure if these features were "forgotten" or deliberately omitted as a design choice. I liked being able to field heroes as super-units, but I can understand how that deliberately went against one of the founding principles of the series, and so I can see how removing that for V makes sense.
A lot of the gameplay issues I've seen people talk about are, I think, just instances of repackaged gameplay conventions, and I don't really have big issues with those.
As for things like the campaign being too linear or what-not, well, it's a campaign. I play it for the storyline and as such, I'm ok with it being linear and scripted and such. It's just a shame that, yes, a lot of the actual story was, indeed, pretty crappy. It was hokey, cliched, and just poorly done. That is a big minus for Heroes V, unfortunately.
But I think the game makes up for it with a lot of its other production values. Personally, I rather like the graphics. They're cartoony which has always been a hallmark of the series. And the music is just beautiful. I've always liked the music in the Heroes games, and Heroes V is no exception. The first time I entered into a Haven-faction city that was fully tricked out, I let the camera do its slow pan and rotate thing, the music hit its crescendo just as the lens flared from the light hitting this angelic statue right in the center of the town... it was an absolutely gorgeous and stirring moment. Very well done.
So, yes, the game has its flaws, but there are some things it does very right indeed, and I enjoyed the experience.

Of course you are right, I could like it and I won't ever know unless I try it. (The same applies for playing a game just a few times.) Time however is short and there are too many good games to try and too many other good things besides. From what I've read and seen so far it seems unlikely that I would like this game much. I could be wrong, but most likely I'm right. The value of my opinion on this game when I have not played it however is arguable but at least I make it clear from my first sentence.
If all you want is just a game with many similarities with the old HOMM games and some new stuff then I can understand that you can enjoy it.
I haven't played HOMM IV either, but for different reasons. While HOMM III was being developed New World Computing announced that HOMM III would be evolutionary and HOMM IV would be revolutionary. I thought the many new feautures like troops being able to explore and fight without a hero and heroes joining the battle sounded exiting. I din't buy it back when it came out but was hoping that GOG.com would release a version (free of the nasty DRM that perhaps is included in the HOMM IV & HOMM III Complete Dvd) but decided against it and instead got hold off the HOMM IV music which I will add to the HOMM III music to sprite up the game for the next time I will play it.
My reason for deciding against HOMM IV was not it's new gameplay, but that it seemed to have been rushed far to early (and in a difficult time for New World Computing). I think it could have made a good game, maybe even on the same level as HOMM II and III, if the designers had got the time and resources they needed. As it was this was not to be (or most likely not to be as I haven't actually played this game :-)
For those that did like the new changes in HOMM IV and/or like the game, perhaps there a couple of hidden gems that you would really enjoy?
Age of Wonders and Age of Wonders II Shadow Magic are turnbased fantasy strategy games that has a lot in common with the HOMM series but also many differences. Like HOMM IV, all units are able to explore and fight on their own and heroes join in the battle.
Like in HOMM the tactical battles are very exiting, the individual units (which there are a great many of with 12 different factions in AOW and 15 in AOW 2 Shadow Magic) often have many different abilities which adds to the tactical aspect without making it too complex.
Age of Wonders also has a description and a unique portrait for each unit (with a few exceptions) that makes the world more immersive.
I love Age of Wonders! Unfortunely it is not very well known. I hope GOG will buy the rights to it and AoW 2 SM. Have you tried Lords of Magic that is sold here? It has RTS battles but the main part of the game is turn based. I haven't tried it yet but I like it's music and graphics style a lot. As with Age of Wonders it is inspired by Master of Magic.
I prefer turnbased games to RTS's too. They have much more strategical and tactical possibilities, and gives me so much more immersion compared to most RTS's (the exeption being some of the really slow RTS's made by Paradox) I really like to make up stories in my head about what happens in my Civilization III and Age of Wonders games. You can't do that in a normal RTS (unless you use the pause button a whole lot).
Besides, I'm not very good at RTS's ;-)
HoMM II and III plays great without it!

I know I'll probably get fed to the dogs for reviving this thread but I have to get this off my chest

I enjoyed V as much as I enjoyed III

there - I said it

Am i the only one that would like to try 6 when its released