GOLDEN YEARS

At long last, a turn-based strategy legend returns from the far side of the map in HEROES OF MIGHT AND MAGIC: OLDEN ERA

- Jeremy Peel

As you push back the fog of war on the continent of Jadame, you'll often stumble over ruins. Moss-covered standing stones and mana-infused obelisks, cracked open by thick vines and the passage of time. Towering trees of burnt orange and violet jostling for room with kneeling statues, their stone palms turned upward in supplication to a god no one remembers.

It's a fitting backdrop to Heroes of Might and Magic, a turn-based strategy classic which defined the genre before dropping out of it completely.

Original developer New World Computing died in 2003, after which point the series bounced between different studios, never finding a permanent home. Amid diminishing returns, publisher Ubisoft simply stopped making it. For a full decade now, the series has been in the wind. To an entire generation of PC gamers, Heroes of Might and Magic is an ancient mystery.

But that's the thing about the fog of war: you never quite know what's going on behind it. Five years ago, a studio named Unfrozen finished work on Iratus: Lord of the Dead, a well-liked tactical roguelike in the mode of Darkest Dungeon. It impressed more than 500,000 players on Steam, who brought death to the mortal realms at the head of a necromancer's army.

Afterwards, Unfrozen reached for an unlikely next project. "We decided to make something ambitious," says CEO Denis Fedorov. "I'm a huge fan of Heroes of Might and Magic since my childhood, I played every single game. So it was always a dream for me to work on it. We decided, why not try?"

The studio put together a small demo and made a pitch to Ubisoft: it was time to defrost Heroes. "We got the green light," Fedorov says. "It's a pretty great responsibility, because the playerbase is quite huge, and the expectations from the fans are quite high. But we have a vision, and we definitely hope that the project will be successful and satisfy expectations."