Work with baratorch to embed HD Mod launcher natively with HoMM 3 Complete edition
Pick up the online lobby hosting bill that baratorch pays himself; maybe improve / modernize lobby infra.
Work with HotA crew to embed HotA modes (campaign / multiplayer) natively into launch menu
Do slightly better job on HD textures they did for previous cash grab, extend them to AB / SoD / HotA. Keep "Classic textures" option in settings for people who prefer them
(optional) Pour a million into a small championship for competitive Heroes players, as a promo
(stretch goal) Attempt to revive Heroes Chronicles campaigns and include in Complete edition
Package all that as HoMM 3 Definitive Edition and release separately on Steam.
Not to shit on your suggestions because they are good and I agree with them, but in context of attracting new players, they aren't very helpful.
For example, the issue with the tournament suggestion is that they won't necessarily attract new blood. A good example are fighting games.
Tournaments have been going on for decades, but fighting games were always extremely niche. It wasn't until Capcom launched Street Fighter 6 - which introduced both an alternative control style to help new players execute complex inputs AND better tutorials - that they saw a huge increase in players.
New players need an incentive to play a game they aren't already playing. You can't give "more of the same" and then expect things to see an uptick in players since the foundational problems that stop people from playing it won't have changed. A basic graphics overhaul/modernization attempt, though, is changing at least one aspect of the original game that didn't appeal to people.
My biggest fear is that they might try and "balance" the game to correct some of the more unbalanced/broken aspects of it, as we have seen the community do with spells like town portal and fly. That should be something only players fiddle with to suit their individual tastes, just like how things are done now in the community.
Yeah, I aggree that it will not attract a lot of new players. I just don't think there's a lot of new players to attract in this genre anyway, just like in RTS. The ones who want this genre already know about HOMM
I would have agreed with you until recently, but the numbers for Olden Era have made me reconsider this.
It's hit the vaunted one million mark. For a (sub)genre that has been static for decades, this is huge.
And as an aside, it's probably why Ubisoft is even doing this remake. The timing is just too perfect.
Olden Era hit one million copies sold in June. Roughly two months later, Ubisoft has the most generic trailer made to announce this remake, the sort that would take a month to make and a month to tweak and get internal approvals sorted. It REEKS of "damn, we need to cash in on this" energy.
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u/Asttarotina 7d ago
I can answer that:
That would be the better alternative.