I haven't played it but IV was a letdown so I'm all for them changing that formula.

Umm, won't it have Ubi's awesome DRM?

Nope, I'm planning on getting Heroes VI when it's released. As are plenty of others, I'm pretty sure.

I dunno man

I really enjoyed V but VI from what I've seen isn't shaping up to be that good at all, I really hope that it will be good but I fear that Yuubi-saft might "casualise" and dumb down this series

we shall see how things turn out

Psst. Ill let you into a secret. It is dumbed down, they even axed most of the resources

i also believe they said they were adding role-playing elements, so......

The game's great fun, but it's lacking... soul. The music is average, if fitting, the skill tree not all that logical, the translation is ridiculous and most of the focus on the story has been lost. I'll admit, I was pretty young when I played Heroes 3, so I don't know if there was any quality to the story, but I enjoyed getting a new short story every few turns. Not to mention how buggy the whole thing is. The Inferno unit summoning bug went unfixed for months... Makes the campaign pretty difficult when summoning reinforcements is assumed a part of your strategy.

Still, it's been a while since I played it, and I've got it on Steam. The judge is still out on whether it's better or worse than HoMMIV (which I enjoyed immensely, myself), but it's not a bad game, just... soulless, as I said.

Liked HoMM (even V), loved Age of Wonders. 'Nough said.

I should probably post my least favourite thing about Heroes V, and that's Ashan. Ashan is a generic fantasy world that has nothing to do with the worlds of Might and Magic games past, the game is a complete reboot, which isn't really something that was necessary in my opinion.

The problem with Heroes V is that it isn't very fun for a number of reasons.

- They modeled the game so heavily after Heroes III that the entire thing feels like a rehash.
- The new creatures are uninspired. A good example being the Sylvan town. Every creature there is pretty much just Elves with different changes or a direct rehash from a previous Heroes game. No originality at all. And creatures that come from past Heroes games were left pretty much as is.
- They removed many of the touches of the game that gave it character. Sign posts? Gone. Specific sound effects when manipulating different objects? Gone. And I always hated the town screen. In previous Heroes games it was fun looking at the towns. In Heroes V everything is so drawn back and vague not looking anything like a town that it was a chore to visit.
- I didn't hate the aesthetics of the game, but particularly battles never looked quite "right" to me.
- Moving around the map, battles, everything in the game takes longer then in previous Heroes games. Not to mention the horrendous AI turns. That may not sound like much, but for me it's always made the game feel incredibly plodding. One of the basic tenets of a game like HOMM is "I'll quit next turn", but when it takes five minutes to get to the next turn, it evaporates that appeal.
- The game still suffered from a serious Heroes problem. Not every unit was useful. Some units just *sucked*. This has been a problem with every Heroes game.
- The game wasn't optimized nor was it fully patched. Using my quad core 4 gig ddr3 machine, if I turned the camera a certain way (to the ground), the frame rate would dip to five FPS. And *only* in that certain view.

I have some hope for Heroes 6. What it appears they're doing is making King's Bounty but with HOMM"s turn based system. Every unit has specific abilities, both latent & activated that give them a "unique character". Instead of five units in the game basically being all but the same, in theory, every unit in HOMM 6 will be unique with it's own set of abilities. From the battle video they put up, battles seem much faster & have better little details (such as Griffins walking short distances instead of flying everywhere). The initiative bar is gone, and back to the "turn" system from HOMM 1, 2 & 3. I think the goal is to make every unit unique to focus on the battle mechanics more then a map scramble to get various resources. We'll see how it works. I'm cautiously optimistic.

As someone who spent hours hotseating with mates over Heroes II then III, I found 4 completely shit.

Then 5 came out. I was ecstatic! Immediately got it, had fun for a couple of hours then started realising it sucked. (No patch yet).

Gave up on it, lost the CDs...

After the final expansion was released, I decided to buy Heroes V gold. It would NOT run on my DVD player in the computer. I mean, seriously. It wouldn't even read that there was a DVD in my drive. AT ALL. I took it to a mate's and it worked fine, came home tried again. No luck.

So I gave up, pirated it. Played through the first campaign, got halfway through the hell campaign and just got bored.

As many have pointed out:

1.) TOO pretty. Some resources and stuff were hard to see/find.
2.) Waste of time combat - some units were simply annoying and could pwn your top tier units without even trying, making the whole game even more frustrating.
3.) The godawful long waiting times. Seriously, WTF. I used to dread clicking "end turn".
4.) No Sandro the Necromancer. Sad Virama.
5.) Ridiculously overpowered hero - in particular that Undead one with the heal ability - I used to max him out asap in his regeneration and heal - every battle fought, I'd simply get hundreds of skeletons until I was unstoppable. Just too unbalanced IMO.
6.) The corridors. With Heroes II and III the corridors were there but it was EASY TO SEE. I got frustrated having to change my view allllll the FUCKING TIME! It was counter-intuitive.
7.) Many other things but especially that coffee coaster my game DVDs turned out to be, LITERALLY. And that FPS problem - really badly optimized game engine.

There WERE good bits but meh. Heroes III is the pinnacle - here's to hope for VI. PLEASE amaze me.

I'm sorry have we played the same game?

I have played the complete edition of V with all expansions and fixes and the campaign is without a doubt better than III

The game actually has a storyline you give a damn about, every mission something actually progresses something and the game actually has CUTSCENES instead of Walls of Boring text like III (yes I know III also had CG cutscenes but it's not the same)

The ending of the Original V game actually makes sense and ties in well with Dark Messiah of Might and Magic

The art direction is another thing to discuss - some people like it, some people do not

I personally do and think it works very well

All your praises revolve around the Campaigns. I for one have never cared about campaigns in the slightest in any HOMM game. So pretty much everything you listed for "HOMM V being better then III" holds no merit to me. You're not really harping on gameplay. Just frills.

if the gameplay was bad then I wouldn't be liking it now would I?

and may I ask why dont you care about the campaigns? they are one of the most fun thing about the HOMM games imo