A Legacy Well-Served

In 2003, capitalizing on the success of The Lord of the Rings film series, The Noble Collection issued an official The Lord of the Rings Collector's Chess Set, with pieces so detailed that they were personally approved by the actors in the film. Many sites carry it, and none of them offer this review:

The pieces and board are beautiful, but seriously: chess? If you're so old-fashioned that moving pieces in discrete squares is your thing, I guess you might like this game, but it's hardly likely to appeal to modern players, raised on games like pool, where you can use every point on the game's surface. It lacks the raw energy and visceral first-person action of games like laser-tag and football. Nonetheless, if you grew up in Eastern India during the Gupta Empire of the sixth century and want to relive the glory days of your childhood, this is the game for you.

I have deliberately avoided looking up any reviews of Might & Magic X, so it's entirely possible that I'm setting up a straw man, but I'm willing to bet that the word "retro" appears in the majority of them. I'll bet they talk about its tile-based movement as "old-fashioned" and its turn-based combat as "vintage." I'll bet more than one concludes with the sentiment that the game is likely to appeal mostly to those who grew up playing Might & Magic IV and V. It will be nice, if embarrassing, if I'm wrong.

These reviews--real or imaginary--might be well-intentioned, but they offend me. The idea that any way of constructing a game ever becomes passé offends me. Good game architecture does not exist on some kind of fixed ladder, on which developers only retreat to earlier rungs because they lack the money, or nerve, to reach for the next one. As the years pass, more options become available to them, sure, but a great game doesn't have to use all of those options, any more than Steven Spielberg had to use color in Schindler's List or Michael Hazanavicius had to use sound in The Artist. Both films won the Academy Award for best picture, no one said that the films most appeal to those who grew up in the 1920s.

Despite my own opinions, I recognize the realities of the modern gaming world, and in that sense, Might & Magic X: Legacy is a daring game. It would not be nearly so daring if it were a standalone title. Then, reviewers could dismiss it as a cute retro offering and move on to praising the next game to offer, I don't know, 3D dragons that are holo-projected in your living room, and you battle them with a light saber accessory for Kinect. But as the tenth installment of a major franchise, issued by a major publisher, the game forces players and reviewers to take it a little more seriously.

Shooting at a giant spider across a bridge, in an underground cave. The game features turn-based combat reminiscent of the turn-based option in VI-VIII.

I was excited when I heard about it a year ago. My last experience with a Might & Magic game was the dreadful IX, the last of the original series before 3DO went out of business and Ubisoft bought the rights. Although I never played them, I understand that Ubisoft's previous offerings under the M&M label, Heroes of Might and Magic V, Might & Magic Heroes VI, and Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, received some negative reviews because of a lack of thematic consistency to the earlier games.
 

What I can say is that Might & Magic X: Legacy lives up to its subtitle well in both interface and theme:
 

• The game world is the same as Heroes V and VI (which is unfamiliar to me).

• The tile-based interface feels similar to the III-V series, but most of the screens, shops, NPC portraits, and dialogue feel similar to VI and VII (incidentally, the "deluxe" version of the game comes with Might & Magic VI, which makes its presence on my computer doubly dangerous).

• The skill system is reminiscent of VII-VIII, with certain classes able to receive promotions to "expert," "master," and "grandmaster" in certain skills.

The skill system is a blend of familiar and new skills.

• Each class can get promoted to a higher prestige class, a dynamic that goes back to II and was prominently featured in VI and VII.

• The crusader class has a special ability called "Mandate of Heaven."

• When you click among potential character portraits, they shout "Choose me!" and "Pick me for your party!," a feature found in VII.

• The schools of magic--fire, air, earth, water, light, dark--go back to VI (or earlier?) with the addition of the "primordial" school.

• You can hire one or two NPCs that boost your various skill stats, just like in VI. There are also some plot-related NPCs. None of them fight with you, alas.

Hiring this NPC will boost my "bestiary" knowledge.

• As in IV-VIII, you routinely find barrels of liquids that, when drunk, increase resistance to magic or raise attributes.

• As in all the previous games, random fountains temporarily raise attributes and resistances and restore health and magic.

And of course the opening city is called "Sorpigal-by-the-Sea," complete with a "Goblin Watchtower Inn." I'm sure there are one billion other references that I'm missing, especially since I haven't played the Heroes series.
 

The opening shots of VI (top) and X (bottom). The latter manages to evoke the former perfectly, while still offering updated graphics and dialogue quality.

 
Now, when I say, "tile-based interface feels similar to the III-V series," it would be a mistake to conjure images of those games. Might & Magic X is absolutely not "retro" when it comes to the quality of its graphics. It uses tile-based movement and static screens for their advantages--in particular, the ability to carefully and artfully compose each screen, with excellent graphic detail and lightning. Oh, this is the kind of area where I run into problems, because I don't know modern video game graphics that well, and some jackass will inevitably show up to say "Are you kidding? The graphics look like crap. They should have used blah blah blah technology that was prominently featured in Yada Yada Yada III. Seriously, Blithering Idiot V: Just Shut Up had better graphics in 2002!" So all I can say is they look beautiful to me.
 

If the game has one disadvantage, its that its back story is a little confusing. It takes place on the world of Ashan, and I had to watch the opening montage--again, beautifully-composed and narrated--a couple times before I had a sense of what it was talking about. The world is governed by an empire, which has a religion focused on the worship of ancient Angels, accessible and present in mortal form. One of the Angels, Uriel, used the Emperor as pawns in a game of revenge against an ancient enemy, using "false flag" murders to incite the empire to war. Ultimately, crafty humans saw through "Uriel's Deception" and, I don't know, somehow overthrew him. (The narration says he was punished by dragons, but I'm not sure where they come into all this.)
 

 
The whole episode damaged the legitimacy of both the empire and the church. The empire has begun to crumble as various cities and territories claim their independence. There's talk about separating the government and the religion. Empress Gwendolyn Falcon has proposed reforms, but they've simply had the effect of dividing the conservative nobles from a populace on the brink of revolt.
 

 
Events have "come to a head" on the Agyn Peninsula, dominated by the city of Karthal, which is threatening to secede and join a coalition called the "Free Cities." In this chaos, brigands, pirates, and monsters have started to thrive. The adventuring party has just arrived on the peninsula, on a mission to take the ashes of their mentor to Karthal. They've landed at "Sorpigal-by-the-Sea" only to find that no ship passage is available to Karthal. Thus, they must walk overland, and they can barely move a few steps into the city before their quest board starts filling up.
 

(Some of the names--"Seven Cities," "Free Cities," "Karthal,"--and other thematic elements seem incontrovertibly inspired by George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series.)

Like all areas, the city is a tile-based map, though not a square as in the earlier games of the series. There are back alleys, hidden passages, and other geographic oddities that keep the map from being fully symmetrical. You can't leave the city until you solve one main quest: a bunch of townsfolk have lately disappeared, and it turns out they're being killed by an infestation of giant spiders, headquartered in the caves beneath an old well.

Battling the spider queen. This first "boss" fight was a tough one, and it took me a couple of reloads to get the tactics right.

 
So far, I've only played through Sorpigal and a little of the surrounding wilderness area. There are things I both like and don't like about the game. Sometimes, they're two sides of the same coin, so I've mixed them up below:

Like: The character creation process. It offers a lot of flexibility without becoming so complex you don't understand it. You choose from four races (human, elf, dwarf, and orc) and classes specific to those races. Although each class has advantages and disadvantages, there's enough overlap in skills that you don't feel you're crippling yourself with bad choices.
 

Creating my party leader.

 
Like: Dialogue is only partly-voiced. I "like" this because it means the developers weren't straightjacketed by recorded dialogue and a limited number of responses, the kind of thing that made so many interactions in Oblivion and Skyrim unsatisfying. Don't like: So far, there hasn't been much depth to NPC interaction. There are topic choices, but not really "dialogue options." Like: At least one of the NPCs so far has had special dialogue based on a character's class.

Talking with an angel NPC. Many of the dialogue choices in the game boil down to "continue," unfortunately.

 
Like: Lots of background NPCs that you can't talk to. This makes Sorpigal feel more like a living city than, say, Whiterun, which has a population of about 20, and 12 of them are guards.

Don't like: One thing that was consistent between the first game and IX was the set of attributes. This game had to screw with them a bit: the six attributes are might, magic, perception, destiny, vitality, and spirit. Seriously--"destiny?" Like: Attributes seem to be destined to increase dramatically from the opening. Unlike Dungeons & Dragons games, the Might & Magic series has never been concerned about keeping attribute scores close to their starting position, or within a fixed range. You might start with a might of 9 and wind up with a might of 159.
 

Like: Both the main map and corner automap. It makes it very clear what directions you can go from a square and (through shading) what squares you've already explored. It automatically annotates shops and NPCs, and you can add your own annotations.
 

Like: The game is full of "lore" books that flesh out the game world. So does NPC dialogue. Don't like: The game hasn't been out long enough for some wiki to help me keep it all straight.
 

 
Like: The inventory screen. The characters have a shared backpack, so you don't have to waste a lot of time swapping potions between individuals, or specifying individual characters when buying and selling. Don't like: No evocatively-written descriptions of items like in VI-VIII.

 
Like: Party members offer exclamations and fun comments when they see monsters or treasure. I think this is partly based on the "Perception" skill, too.

Don't like: Everything with which you can interact is made clear when you face it--large text appears on the screen that says PRESS SPACE TO OPEN CHEST or what have you. I think it would be fun if players had to discover some things by clicking on various areas of the screen.

Like: A ton of side quests in addition to the main quests. And there was a laugh-out-loud moment when the guard captain in Sorpigal told me, "Don't worry--I won't ask you to go kill rats in a cellar"--right above a quest that read: "Quest: Spiders in the well." 
 

The game's first main quest.

Like: Almost everything--stats, skills, classes, spell effects, inventory items--are well-annotated just by hovering the cursor over them.

Reminding myself what the "challenge" skill does.

Like: Combat. It plays like the turn-based mode in VI-VIII, with each character taking a turn, followed by an option to move. Between attacks (both ranged and melee), defense, spells, and skills, the characters have more options than in previous games, and the animations for both attacks and spells are pretty. Don't like: No action combat option for the easier enemies you just want to breeze by.

Like: Your "bestiary," covering the hit points, statistics, strengths, and weaknesses of various enemies, slowly fills in as you encounter more and more of them. There's even a quest related to collecting as many bestiary entries as possible.

My bestiary entry for giant spiders is filled in, after I faced about a hundred of them.

 
Like: After Sorpigal, an open game world where you can walk just about anywhere on the peninsula, entering dungeons "out of order" and encountering monsters well beyond your abilities.

Don't like: Having to install extra software on my computer, with a constant connection to the Internet, and a persistent presence in my system tray. I don't know what this frigging "UPlay" thing is, or why I have to log into it every time I want to play the game. I don't have any desire to "connect with others on the Steam community," and I don't know how to turn it off.

The sum of the "likes" far outweighs the "don't likes," and in total, I'm having a lot of fun with this game.
 

Time for a little disclosure: Although I would have doubtless played it eventually, I'm mostly playing it now because Ubisoft was kind enough to send me a free key for the game. They invited me to participate in the pre-release reviews, which I declined, because that's not really what I do, but then they sent me the key on release day (yesterday) anyway. The key was only good for one day, so I had to download it, and after I'd downloaded it, I figured why not check it out, and now my weekend is shot.

I trust my readers know me well enough to know that getting the game for free has in no way influenced my opinion of it. I'd tell you if it sucked. But I'm happy to say that, at least so far, it's a worthy entry in the series, reaching both backwards and forwards. It manages to make loving references to earlier installments while not making players unfamiliar with the previous games feel excluded. I'm not saying it's "Game of the Year" material--I have no idea what else is in the field--but I am saying that it deserves consideration for "Game of the Year," and not simply relegated to some "retro" niche.

I hope Might & Magic X is hugely successful, and more developers--not just indie developers--will realize they can make great games with classic tools. There is room for a great 21st-century text adventure, an iconographic tile-based game with a game world as large and complex as The Elder Scrolls, a game where you type your own dialogue options like Ultima IV or The Magic Candle but against a modern AI. With all this extra memory and storage space, don't just go for better graphics and sound; mash the Infinity Engine games together so I can walk from Icewind Dale to Amn.

This post doesn't interrupt our regular schedule. The final post on Vampyr: Talisman of Invocation will come tomorrow, followed by Sword of Fargoal on Monday. (Fortunately, I have them both drafted, so I can spend most of my weekend on other things. I mean work, of course.) Stay tuned for my "official" review of Might & Magic X: Legacy in 2038!