What about the
VCMI project? If you want to play HOMM3 online with friends, the VCMI remake seems to be the only and/or best way to do so. It's not perfect but I've managed to play some complete matches with it in the past.
It's a fantastic project, a modern source port would open some incredible possibilities for the modding community; Think what the various source ports did for the original Doom and Doom II - for example, Brutal Doom is built on top of a source port with vastly more advanced features than the original game. But last i heard it's far from finished. Once it's a viable alternative, then i'll give it a go for sure. I just hope the community that is building this properly spreads the word so the Heroes 3 modding community is aware of it.
What is it about this game that makes it so replayable and that so many people love it so much? Is there something that I am missing with roaming a map and getting into chess like fights?
The fact that Chess is still massively popular after 545 years speaks volumes to the depth and replay value of just Chess. Combine chess - like mechanics in a video game with a large amount of lore (thanks to the rich history of the Might & Magic series) on its backside - that's
Heroes of Might & Magic.
After that, significantly improve upon the design and overall formula introduced in Heroes of Might & Magic with more carefully balanced content and much improved mechanics -
That's Heroes of Might & Magic II; Take it a couple of steps further with more content and general improvements to certain mechanics - That's its expansion,
Heroes of Might & Magic II: The Price of Loyalty. (later bundled as
Heroes of Might & Magic II: Gold Edition)
Now, take a good long ass look at what worked and didn't work in an otherwise really, really great video game (that's
Heroes of Might & Magic II: Gold Edition), and pour every ounce of your passion and
your very soul into that project by fully exploiting your creative vision and putting your brain to crunch the numbers. And that's exactly what they did. It made
Heroes of Might & Magic II: Gold Edition look like a prototype version of
Heroes of Might & Magic III. Finally, add some fantastic expansions on top of
Heroes of Might & Magic III. And you've got
Heroes of Might & Magic III: Complete Edition.
Heroes of Might & Magic III: Complete Edition is basically a perfected masterpiece. It's
not flawless, nothing created by man will ever be, but what is there has very,
very few flaws. Very, very few inconveniences that get in the way of your experience. It's incredibly intuitive and remarkably easy to get into, yet extremely vast in scope that peeling off its layers of depth to actually master everything about it can take years. The art-style is sharp with highly visible elements that are clearly distinctive. Nothing looks out of place and everything is observable and within your field of vision to fully be in control of (this is a big thing, this is a point i actually
really appreciate). Yesterday i actually tried playing Age of Wonders III, gave it a solid go. Here's the problem. The visual style is cluttered, convoluted; it's frustrating to make out what the Hell is going on and its tiring to look at. The camera system isn't intuitive, and the camera system for the battles is a joke that is inconvenient to manage.
Age of Wonders III is a vastly different game than Heroes of Might & Magic, but they're the same genre and maybe Age of Wonders III has better mechanics than Heroes of Might & Magic III: Complete Edition. Well, unfortunately Age of Wonders III also happens to have a shit ton of inconveniences and unpolished elements that make it much more of an unpleasurable experience
to play compared to Heroes of Might & Magic III: Complete Edition. Which fundamentally will make the game "age" worse than Heroes of Might & Magic III: Complete Edition, which is a ridiculous thing to say given the fact that one title is 5 years old while the other is 20 years old. But there you have it.
The campaign(s), the actual story-driven single-player content is roughly 150 total hours in length and offers high replay value because each campaign offers a
vast amount of approachable actions. Once you're done with the campaign(s), you've got a crap ton of single map scenarios with the same level of quality as the campaign and offering the same replay value - another 100 hours right there. Then you've got the Random Map Generator, which is customizable and .. is basically endless in length, i can't even imagine the amount of hours wasted here. And then, on top of all this you've got the ability to play the game in
multiplayer with friends/family on the same computer in the Hot Seat mode. Well, fuck. You get the gist.
But what about the rest of the series? Well,
Heroes of Might & Magic IV was an unfinished mess of bugs with an ugly art-style of pre-rendered 3D graphics .. because at that time the company (New World Computing) were going bankrupt and firing people left and right, due to poor miss-management by its parent company 3DO (the same guys that made that shitty console). Later on Ubisoft bought the rights to the Might & Magic franchise and saw to the release of
Heroes of Might & Magic V which basically copied the HoMM III formula, with problems of its own. The other couple that release (VI and VII) are soulless, generic, mediocre and boring.
What stretch filter do you use in the HD mod?
I'll go a step beyond and tell you my exact specs:
Mode: (stretchable) 32-bit GDI
Source size: 1180x664
Stretch filter: Scale2x + Bilinear Sharper
System Cursors, Full Screen Mode, HD+, etc. all checked "on".
