Might and Magic Is Might and Magic 6-8 boring?

[muds_animal_friend]

Do you like the combat in the last few M&M games? Don't you think that killing 100 mages, then 100 thieves, then 200 cobras is quite shitty design?

Well, no... not specifically. M&M 6 balances the risk and work versus reward factor well up to a certain level and then hits a slump of diminishing returns. Party progression slows to a crawl, there's no excitement to opening a treasure chest anymore, and tactics basically devolve to nuke spell after nuke spell. It's a rare instance of an RPG that's too long for it's own good. M&M 7 feels like a better length, but its dungeons just aren't as interesting. Basically, killing a 100 of X in early to mid game gains you something tangible, which is working design, whereas killing a 100 of Y by late game is just a tedious series of speed bumps, which is flawed design.

I find Wizardry 8 far more guilty of combat spam given its slower pace, but it has the virtue of more interesting and varied options for late game party development.

 

[theSavant]

Combat is terrible indeed but the games itself are very addictive. At least for me. And I am not speaking from nostalgia. I would say that Wiz7/8 (the only I played) are boring

You got a point. At the very first walkthrough Wiz8 is great because you don't know nothing and have the patience to explore the game from start to finish. But once you played it through you want things to go faster. Much faster. But they don't.
I've spent several attempts on new parties, only to stop at the end of the monastery, annoyed that it already took 2-3 hours to complete this small area (due to slow battles). The combat system of MM6 is much faster in these regards. It doesn't make you wait, but still gives you the option for pausing. Being interactive is what keeps the player on the game, not annoying waiting times.

Considering this issue I'm not so sure that I like pure turn-based games anymore. It's particularly the TBC system which makes it a pain in the ass, once the first walkthrough is completed. Thanks for this post, it cleared up my fanboy-mind regarding TBC games.

 

[rpgcodexusername]

It might be fun to play M&M6 with 4 wizards who are all trained in one school of magic each and alchemy to make healing potions.

 

[octavius]

Hey Octavius whatsup, where is your cat avatar?

Victim of the great avatar purge, I'm afraid.

 

[sser]

I find the games to be really charming and it's just fun to explore the worlds, puzzles, characters, etc.

Actual gameplay can be pretty bad at times, though, particularly the fact that there's a fucking army of enemies around every hilltop. It sometimes felt like I was playing Diablo first-person, gibbing waves of enemies with my fireballs. Sometimes that's fun - like when you're fighting other mages or nasty critters - but a lot of the times you're just mowing down goblins or shitty enemies you've come to overpower.

 

[Turjan]

When I got Might & Magic VI the first time, I finished the game twice in a row. I think that each playthrough took about 150 hours (I usually take my time). First playthrough was with the default party, and the second one with a party of two druids and two sorcerers. The latter proved to be lots of fun .

Not sure why, but M&M7 didn't have the same magic for me. I think the standard fantasy elements like elves made it a bit more boring for me., even if the game mechanics seemed more polished. I mostly played Acromage, and I don't think I ever finished the game, though I played it quite far.

 

[Sceptic]

Basically, killing a 100 of X in early to mid game gains you something tangible, which is working design, whereas killing a 100 of Y by late game is just a tedious series of speed bumps, which is flawed design.

Except that, by the time you hit this late game, you have ways to bypass enemies (Fly) as well as ways to slaughter 100 of Y in a less than a minute (Blasters, or the insanely overpowered Dark spells of late game), so I don't see the problem. There are no speedbumps, except for the ones you purposefully put for yourself if say you decide to kill every enemy on the map but without using blasters and without using spells. Then of course the game is tedious.... but I blame the player and not the game.

Besides even in late game (Dragonsand, Hermit's Isle) you still find artifacts and relics, so you're still gaining something tangible.

I also don't get this weird dichotomy of "it's so shitty I can't believe how shitty it is but so addictive can't stop playing!" If it's so addictive that you can't stop playing then clearly it's not as shitty as you claim it is...

 

[Stabwound]

I've only tried to play MM6 and the combat kills it for me every time. It's just awful and one of the main things you do throughout the entire game. You can't even defend it since the main suggestion people give is "use all magic casters so you can nuke everything."

Thankfully MMX goes back to Xeen format.

 

[Newfag-er]

When I don't finish an RPG, many times it's out of respect. I love the world, my party, and the game so much that I would rather imagine it never ending than derp run to a credits sequence.

probably doesn't mean much to most people here though

 

[Bubbles]

That's a quote from The Big Bang Theory, right?

 

[DaveO]

Whatever the amount of combat is in MM6, it's easily surpassed by the amount of fights you have to go thru in some older RPGs. If you want something done in ~20 hours, go play Phantasie I by SSI.

 

[Invictus]

For some strange reason the older M&M games resonated with me for exactly having a different approach than Wizardry and Ultima; the combat (which is largely the main focus of the game) might not be very strategic (almost papamole) but it is fun, the enemies are well detailed and animated. The puzzles are just about the right amount of challenge and the overall game is generaly lacking in NPC interaction and the stories are not much to write about but the overall experience holds up even today with its cartoony graphics and simple gameplay; those where not particulary deep games but where simply fun.
The games after Xeen tried to be more relaistic in their aproach and they might be good games, but I never felt compeled to try them much.
All this chat of Terra has made me extremly nostalgic and I am seriously tempted to reinstall in my laptop while I take a break from the Grimoire superdemo

 

[muds_animal_friend]

I also don't get this weird dichotomy of "it's so shitty I can't believe how shitty it is but so addictive can't stop playing!" If it's so addictive that you can't stop playing then clearly it's not as shitty as you claim it is...

It's awesome to a point and then it get's shitty and I stop playing. Hardly a dichotomy. Good = I play. Shitty = I stop. M&M 6 is a great for me up to the point when it gets utterly fucking boring due to lack of meaningful party progression and then I restart with a new party because it still features some of the best dungeon design evar. 70% great and 30% why isn't this fucking game over already.

 

[Minttunator]

I played all three of them again just this year and I enjoyed the hell out of them - I even had fun in MM8, despite it having a lot of issues. MM7 would probably rank in my personal top 10 of all time.

That said, I have to admit I didn't finish MM6 my first time through (some years ago) and I've only finished it this once - I wasn't bothered by the monotonous combat overmuch, though. I guess I felt it was just a bit too long and the dungeons, especially, were simply too large and annoying to navigate. I realize this is not a popular opinion, but I actually preferred the more reasonably sized (dumbed down? ) dungeons of MM7. MM8 obviously went to the other extreme with the dungeons being absolutely tiny, in addition to its other problems.

A big part of the tedium you're experiencing probably comes from your build - i.e. playing 4 melee characters in MM6 is really, really painful. Like Stabwound said, using casters and nuking everything is much less tedious (though that doesn't make it good, of course). Combat clearly isn't the strong suit of these games - but I'd say the character system, the world and the atmosphere more than make up for it.

 

[Pope Amole II]

Thing is, combat is not the most important part of M&Ms VI-VIII. Like, yeah, there's ton of it, but it's not the meat of the game - exploration and management elements are. And combat just supplements them - it adds viscousness to the exploration so you just can't go anywhere (as that would've killed the whole point of exploration) and it set ups challenges for management. Combat in later M&Ms must always be perceived like a riddle - like, shit, there's lots of trashmobs here, what do I do with them? And while there's always a simple solution of "grind them out", it's not the proper one.

Also, the open nature of the world and the need to gather resources from all across brings up some interesting logistics and the party system, simplistic that it may seem, creates possibilities for quite a variety of different playthroughs (it's most people's problems that they prefer to use generic and boring balanced builds). And, once you become adept with the game, that trash combat gets resolved pretty quickly, especially thanks to the grayface's doublespeed patch.

They're good games because they actually offer lots of choice and variety, and those are one of the main strength of the RPG genre.

 

[octavius]

Wouldn't the millions of corpses in piling up in MM6 result is some serious problems with environmantal hazards?

 

[Luzur]

play them, or i'll smack ya.

/thread

 

[rpgcodexusername]

Wouldn't the millions of corpses in piling up in MM6 result is some serious problems with environmantal hazards?

That map with hundreds of skeletons, bones take a looonng time to rot!

 

[Luzur]

also, if you want something new you could wait until MM8.5 is out:



its a russian team remaking MM8 (same guy who made that MM6 mod)

 

[Bubbles]

Why?

 

[Dorateen]

Biggest problem for me, and disappointment, with Day of the Destroyer was that they deviated from the classic Might & Magic RPG structure of player-created parties. Is the M&M 8.5 team going to fix that? If so, then it would be worth it.

 

[Luzur]

Biggest problem for me, and disappointment, with Day of the Destroyer was that they deviated from the classic Might & Magic RPG structure of player-created parties. Is the M&M 8.5 team going to fix that? If so, then it would be worth it.

http://www.moddb.com/mods/might-and-magic-viii-echo-of-destruction

i made an update in "Best Might and Magic" thread with the same link btw.

 

[Dorateen]

It looks good, and I watched the youtube video. While the addition of multiple party members is excellent, I get the impression of selecting from pre-generated characters. Couldn't find details about changing the name field at the generation screen to make them truly player owned. It's a small thing, perhaps, but a sticking point for me.

 

[Pope Amole II]

Yeah, it's a great project, the only problem is that, among with the WoG 3.59 and full version of HoTA (with all the campaigns and castles), it'll come out next thursday.