First Master of Magic remake gameplay video

[Blake00]

Last Tuesday Slitherine streamed their latest 'Home of Wargamers' event from Venice on their Twitch channel, and what made this one extra special is that they kicked it off by showing live gameplay video footage of the official Master of Magic remake for the first time! For those that missed it and don't want to sift through the whole stream here's just the MoM gameplay part:

[Gaznak]

It's just plain awful TBH. No atmosphere, no style, just yet another modern generic fantasy TBS. First they befouled Heroes of Might and Magic, then Disciples, then Age of Wonders, then Fantasy General, now Master of Magic.

[Artorius]

agree with you Gaznak. also agree with Nauriek's comment on the youtube video itself.

the most immersed i got watching this video was the 2d map view of the city. while i don't personally like the shading / art style of it, it felt hand-drawn; it has soul; it got me immersed. 

i'm not anti-3d, but 3d is so easy to do wrong, leading to a bad aesthetic. they're doing 3d wrong. so many washed out grey colors met with overly contrasted, sharp textures, with jarring slapped-on visual elements like arbitrary, immersion-destroying yellow beams coming from the sky to draw attention back to visually dulled out elements on the world, like encounter zones.

the ui is ugly. the designer doesn't have mastery of color theory or visual design. i realize that sounds lame, but that's the explanation for why it feels so dull, unintuitive, and uninspired. 

so, why circle icons for everything? why do top-right icons have just 3 shades of yellow? what do any of those buttons do? the magic screen: the mana bottles are ugly; dainty, ugly colors, excessive glare, way too too much gradient and transparency causing color/texture clashes, the bottle labels are ugly, the pane background coloring is bad, the paper edge tearing isn't subtle enough. 

making a game is very hard. appealing visual design is very hard. but the game in this video is not great. it's not even good. the classic is more visually-clear. it has more charm/soul. i want to love this game. it needs a pause, a major ground-up visual and interaction design redesign, a new graphics engine (preferably modern 2d), and a 2025 or later release date in my honest opinion. sorry.

[zitro1987]

The saddest part of all this is that they appear to have no intentions of adding or modifying existing content, such as buffing weak spells, races, units, or realms, and not adding racial unique units where they are sorely needed (klackon and orcs kind of stick out badly in this regard)

[Blake00]

Yeah it's hard.. I run the MoM fan social media communities and want the game to succeed so I have to be diplomatic.. but personally I do struggle with the graphics and GUI. There's plenty I like but there's sadly more I don't, and so it really just hasn't lived up to my hopes and dreams of what it could look like. MuHa are doing the best they can and have hinted many times that they've been given a small budget by Slitherine, which explains a lot, since when you remake a game on a low budget this is pretty much the result.

As Gaznak points out it reminds me of the final 2 HoMM games. Ubi spent a lot of money on Nival making HoMM5 and it was a big success. Nival started work on HoMM6 and had to some pretty grand plans (there's some cool leaked teaser shots running around out there) but then Ubi pulled the plug on them because the suits decided that they wanted to increase profits by making the game on a lower budget. They went hunting for some poor small studio with an existing engine desperately looking for work and they found Black Hole Entertainment. HoMM6 was of course a disaster and it destroyed Black Hole. So what did Ubi do next? Naturally they did the exact same thing and got Limbic Entertainment to agree to a no-win scenario of making HoMM7 on a low budget in an existing engine to cut costs. A worse disaster happened and while Limbic barely survived, the HoMM franchise didn't and now Ubi just uses the license to this once legendary successful series on Chinese mobile games. Heart breaking...

Granted I don't sense that big Corp greed and incompetence from Slitherine and MuHa. I see good people in small companies trying to do the best they can with limited resources and finances.. but the footage does unfortunately remind me and others of the HoMM saga disaster and how cheap those games looked compared to what have come before.

I think the biggest disappointment for me watching the video though was seeing they've kept the hard limit of 5 players. Max 5 players in a 4x strategy game in 2022 is.. just.. depressing! Of course the excuse is "we're not making drastic changes to the game" and yet we changed to hexes and literally a day later after I made that max player complaint (and got shat all over by people) it came out that they'd given all units extra movement points to speed up the game breaking heaps of balancing and combat stuff *sigh*, and now I'm hearing rumors that they've changed lots of other things to make new players happy resulting in the old guard getting upset lol. It's a mess.. but they really are in a no win situation as deciding what to improve and what not to is going to set off different people. Best we can hopefully is that the game is as highly moddable as they say it will be and then fans can change it to how they want it, maybe even a lot of the graphics too!