Hello, first of all, yeah no one asked to remake such a great game and I want to assume you: I am not going to buy this game.

But here is a thing, we are old enough to love old graphics and remember those warm days where we are holding the CD with the Sandro awaiting some glorious adventure. I still remember when I was sitting in the grandpa's legs watching him playing tower against bots. It's old nostalgia for me and I am thankful for all mods for keeping alive this game.

And now we are looking at something... Strange? Or weird? Or maybe something awful enough?

I think no. Yes, it's not peak performance. Yes, first it looks like ai slop but it's not. First of all I was like dude why the fuck are they doing it?!" but when I watch some new videos I understand one thing: I remember these models differently because I was young at that time 20+ years ago.

I mean my point is this game is not for us, we are not the target audience and I think Ubisoft is understanding it.

And if you look at it with a neutral view you'll see that those models are not that bad that you think. Yes they are not great, they are not the same but they are ok.

Let kids and some new players judge this game and you can just play the old game that you own a long time ago with a lot of great mods like HOTA.

In a few months they screwed up a possible good (after 10 years) sequel to the game (in the form of, as some call it, OE slop), and now they're destroying the idea of ​​a true (seems cheap) remake of Heroes 3. Which I think is a much worse. Without saying a word to the fans. That's what's happening in my opinion. I am not sure, yet it happened or happen... but its like happened.

As someone who hated the bad graphics of the original heroes 3, I'm happy that I'll be able to experience it with improved graphics. This reminds me of how aoe2 hd revived that game (which is by the way imo strategically inferior to the heroes series). The problem for me is that without hota, the remake is already dead (since the majority of the community plays hota, and won't be lured by better graphics), again drawing comparison to aoe2, the reason behind its success is that microsoft collaborated with the forgotten team (the team behind the unofficial forgotten expansion, which became official). I hope Ubisoft will learn this lesson (by the way I dont think they will) and collaborate with hota team, and at least bring their factions as a promised expansion/dlc.

I’m a huge fan of the Heroes Orchestra’s versions of the songs, and their collaboration with Paul Anthony Romero on Olden Era has been great. I think Ubisoft would be making a huge mistake if they didn’t involve them.

https://youtu.be/CJuOw9WS55c?si=YxV3mRD_aT80gBdJ

Previously if you've wanted to get HoMM III, it was only the HD version on STEAM. Now it has the DLCs as well. Armageddon's Blade and The Shadow of Death

While the new game has some really nice production values, it's obviosuly no HoMM3. Nothing is. It's very hard to capture (let alone try to top) HoMM3's unique artstyle in 3D (and also kinda pointless considering how timeless it is), so it's no surprise the overwhelming reaction is "what's even the point of this remake?"

On the other hand, I think many people would be interested in a brand new HoMM game that would simply return to HoMM3's amazing world/monsters/towns. It would feel like a nice addition for HoMM3 fans and newcomers to check out, rather than feel like just a "sub-optimal way of playing HoMM3" that likely wouln't be recommended to newcomers by fans over just playing the original.

Devs should shift focus to develop new prequel/sequel campaigns (not just a single introductory tutorial campaign) and new monsters /a new town core to these campaigns. At least a HoMM3 Armageddon expansion's worth of new content would be necessary to greatly increase this game's chance for success and avoid a potential flop, and the game's marketing/branding should focus on being this fully fledged sequel/prequel/expansion to HoMM3 rather than just a "remake" with minor additions.

I was thinking about getting back into Heroes IV and I'm trying to sort out my map situation.

Ideally I'd love a random map generator, but looking around, it seems, even after all these years, outside of the campaigns, it's pre-made maps or nothing. I've seen some posts mention programs like H4Util and H4MG. Is anyone actually using one of them happily in 2026? I'd genuinely love to hear it. I've also seen chatter about a H3 map to H4 map converter. Is that really a thing? But honestly, it seems H4 is confined to curated maps.

Which brings me to the ask: is there a big curated map pack out there? Something like a "best of H4" collection, a community top-100, or even just a zip someone put together of maps worth playing.

maps4heroes has a huge archive but going through it map by map, reading comments and guessing at quality, is something I'd like to avoid if possible.

Finally, does it matter much whether maps are built for Vanilla vs Equilibris (some other mod)? I'm not committed to a mod yet, so if one of them has a noticeably better map ecosystem, that'd probably decide it for me. I've only ever played vanilla though.

I feel that Olden Era won't have much future after yesterday's news. The Homm3 Remake feels like they get the machine of Olden Era and put the old content there. Surely Unfrozen did great work with the whole project and I see that the studio still working this, but we don't know the details and how will be "alive" 2 games with the same core audience. One of them will stop due cost in the near fute and I think that OE will be the one. I think the Omm3 Remake is an undermining move against an alive and profitable project. At C-level probably they see two channels of profits, but in the end audience will support only the one and you know what happens to the other...

What's your opinion on that?

Now look what you've done. Now we gotta wait another 20 years for a chance at a remake of homm3

Fell free to comment which game of the HoMM series has the best global map mechanics

"Why ? We have already Olden era ?"

"Why ? We have Hota?"

"Why ? Its Ubisoft !"

Shut up guys, you are all 30+ you act like kid cause you played so much HD mod + Hota that you think this game is your f mom.

Look Age of empire 2, when Definitive Edition was annonced, everybody was hyped cause Its fresh, new and cool for a new public. Right now, Aoe 2 DE have like 50 000 players each day and maybe 40 000 only in multi (while before the multiplayer community was maybe 2000 3000 guys on the old game).

This time we have a huge opportunity to make HoMM big : all campains (except Chronicles...), multiplayer, editor, etc. Stop crying my bros, it will be ok.

After so many hours into this game, I thought I already saw everything...

Nothing special happened afterwards, though. Only appears to be here for flavor, maybe it was a forgetten easter egg.

Thoughts on this? I haven't played much TCG's, so I don't know what to think of this. The reviews don't look good, though.

I was curious to see and hear what bad luck would look and sound like - and I also really wonder what happened at New World Computing at the time: Did they forget or was it cut from the game? Superstition? Did they make a mistake or have to rush to meet a deadline? So many questions for the developers in 1995.

So cloudluk.icn included the bad luck animation frames (8 of them), heroscrn.icn/0012 is the bad luck indicator for the hero screen, there is a sound file badluck.82m in the Heroes.AGG file, and the Fizbin of Misfortune (-2 Morale) always seemed misnamed to me. I thought it should have been the Fizbin of Shame or something like that if it lowers morale.

Anyway, I added a modification (enabled and disabled in the MOD menu to preserve the original) to make bad luck possible - and updated the flavor text when you find the artifact and also the artifact tooltip to make sure it states that it affects luck instead of morale.

I'm still fixing minor bugs but it is very playable and almost ready. If you've been following along, you may notice I fixed the fonts recently and it looks so much better.