The Mac has a history with HOMM begining with HOMM2, and stretching right through HOMM4. Just like the rest of you, we are greatly anticipating the next installment of our beloved franchise.

Is Nival using their own engine, or a Ubi engine, to develop HOMM5? Ubi has been quite good at bringing various of their PC games to Mac, but I note that none of Nival's work has made it to OSX.

And would Ubi be willing to contract a port out to a company like MacSoft, Destineer or Westlake Interactive?

Despite their occasional whining to the contrary, Mac players aren't too concerned with cross-platform networking (ie, the ability to play Mac vs. PC, rather than just Mac vs Mac). So please Ubi, don't let that stop you from considering a port!

And don't neglect a potential market! Because of its Linux roots, OSX is attracting a large number of computer nerds, who as we all know tend to be the greatest afficianados of turn-based strategy games. Don't forget that Warlords itself was a Mac game before anything else!

This message has been edited. Last edited by: obiter,

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The Mac has a history ...

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Incorrect grammar. I think you wanted to say "The Mac is history", right?

</me slaps ZakHH upside the head>

Lets all agree that ZakHH's was the first *and last* anti-Mac troll on these forums...

But in all seriousness, HOMM2 and HOMM3 sold well enough on the Mac that HOMM4 was ported as well (though I can only speculate how it sold, given its general crappyness). HOMM is a well established franchise on the Mac, and I've no doubt that HOMM5 could be profitable too.

I certainly have already done my part by contacting the Mac gaming media (www.insidemacgames.com and macgamer.com) to let them know of today's announcement!

Actually, the original Heroes of Might and Magic made it to the Mac, too, in a pretty good quality conversion, so the Mac has had a version of every game in the series to date.

Not all conversions have been good. For those interested, here's my recollection of the history:

HoMM1 was a pretty good port. It failed to run a small handful of third party maps, but that was its only (minor) problem.

HoMM2 was a dreadful conversion of an absolutely superb game. HoMM2 was one of the best of the series, so the fact that the Mac version was rotten was a terrible shame. The Mac conversion had major bugs with the spell system (some spells never appeared), and - unbelievably - failed to support in-game events, so the gameplay was utterly ruined for some maps, particularly story-driven ones. Truly the most dreadful game conversion I've ever seen, and such a pity because HoMM2 itself is one of the best games ever released, on any platform. The 'Price of Loyalty' expansion pack didn't make it to the Mac either.

HoMM3 appeared in an outstanding conversion for the Mac. The only thing missing was the level editor, which was a shame but not a huge loss for most players. The game conversion itself, though, was top notch. The two expansion packs (Armageddon's Blade and Shadow of Death) didn't make it to the Mac on their own, *but* the final big compilation, Heroes III Complete, did. Again, this was a superb conversion (done by the same external programmer who'd done HoMM3), and lacked only the editor. So the Mac offers good support for Heroes III. All third party maps play fine in H3C on the Mac, with the exception of those few that have been made for the unofficial third party Wake of Gods hack. H3 and H3C run fine on Mac OS X in the Classic environment.

Heroes IV is the only conversion that runs natively on Mac OS X. It's a pretty good quality conversion of the original PC HoMM4 (once you've installed a bug-fix patch), but unfortunately it's not the final release of the PC code, so there's a handful of H4 standard maps that it won't play. The majority work fine, though, and the editor was ported as well this time. Unfortunately, though, the expansion packs didn't make it across to the Mac, and there was no Heroes IV Complete (3DO didn't survive long enough for that to happen, I suppose), so you can't play any H4 expansion maps on the Mac.

So that's the position. The Mac didn't get versions of Heroes Chronicls (based on HoMM3) either, but they were reputedly not all that good.

I certainly hope that HoMM5 makes it to the Mac, anyway. I certainly won't be buying a new PC in order to play it, so I'm keen to see a good quality Mac conversion.

Richard, its funny to hear you say that HOMM2 was a crapy port.

when it came out, I was relatively young (I'm 26 now), and simply remember having a blast playing the game. i recognized that some spells "didn't seem to do much" and that custom events were broken, but I was having too much fun with the core game to even notice. and as you said, HOMM3 was perfect. HOMM4 was OK once we got the mac AI bug patch, but i wouldn't even know where to find this patch any more.

i'm not buying a PC any time soon either, so I hope Ubi finds it in their hearts to bring a classic mac franchise home again!

Ubi: don't forget about all the great port tools at MacSoft/Desinteer, Contraband, Aspyr, etc. I'm sure they'd love to hear from you!

OK, I'm done groveling and begging... for now...

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Originally posted by obiter:
But in all seriousness, HOMM2 and HOMM3 sold well enough on the Mac that HOMM4 was ported as well (though I can only speculate how it sold, given its general crappyness). HOMM is a well established franchise on the Mac, and I've no doubt that HOMM5 could be profitable too.

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You have to remember though at that time Mac had 10% of the market share not the 1.8% they currently have. I'm thinking it'll depend on how well Heroes 5 does initially. If it is a huge success my guess would be you'll see a mac port.

Might as well clear up a few misconceptions at this point for those that are interested.

Marketshare
You really have to remember three things about marketshare: (1) the way the number is calculated doesn't necessarily give you the number that is important. 1.8% of what -- all the computers in existence, including businesses? That doesn't tell you what you need to know with gaming, which is what the home-user demographic is. Macs have a much greater marketshare amoungst home users and schools than in the total global units. (2) 3-5% of the market (which is the North American number) is still millions of people. (3) a successful product identifies its niche. the mac demographic tends to unix geeks, people with an above-average education, university students, and home users. those are exactly the kind of people who are interested in plaing turn-based strategy games.

Performance
Performance is a non-issue if the port is half-decent. We use the same RAM, HDs and graphics cards as PC users.

Profitability
Unless Ubi does an internal port (as they have done with Rayman, Shadowbane, and other games), Mac game companies will typically buy the rights to the Mac version of a game, and then fund the marketing, distribution, support, and porting themselves. So, assuming there is an interested port company out there (and there ought to be, given that HOMM is a well established franchise and there are really no other TBS games on the Mac right now), all they need is to cut a reasonable deal with Ubi.

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Originally posted by obiter:
Richard, its funny to hear you say that HOMM2 was a crapy port. when it came out, I was relatively young (I'm 26 now), and simply remember having a blast playing the game. i recognized that some spells "didn't seem to do much" and that custom events were broken, but I was having too much fun with the core game to even notice.

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It's a testament to the quality of HoMM2 that it still managed to be such tremendous fun on the Mac, in spite of the atrocious quality of the port. Because it was still a fantastic game, even with a couple of its most important features not working properly (or at all). There were a couple of third party utilities that helped, too, of course, but the experience was significantly less than it should have been on the Mac even so. (It really is the worst game port I've ever seen.)

For myself, though, I actually played the RISC OS port of HoMM2 (I know, you've never heard of RISC OS... never mind!). Luckily that was a superb port (better than the PC original in some ways, in fact), and it was extended by a port of the Price of Loyalty expansion pack as well in due course, so I managed to have a wonderful time in HoMM2 without needing to own a PC.

In some ways, HoMM2 is still my favourite of the series. I've spent more time playing HoMM3, and HoMM3 really is a technically superior game (same as HoMM2, in effect, but more of it and better!), but HoMM2 definitely had its own characteristic atmosphere which has never quite been recaptured since. I can still enjoy a game of both HoMM2 and HoMM3 hugely when time permits, anyway, which says a lot, given their age and the amount of time I've spent playing them already.

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and as you said, HOMM3 was perfect. HOMM4 was OK once we got the mac AI bug patch, but i wouldn't even know where to find this patch any more.

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Agreed. The Mac H4 AI patch can now be found on Celestial Heavens, incidentally. It did go offline entirely for a while. I bought H4 rather late (I was waiting and hoping for an H4 Complete edition!), and had to obtain the patch via email from someone else who I knew had the game. But it was then made available on CH along with all the various PC patches. (Look under 'US Standard Patches' on the Download/Patches page. The last one in the list is for the Mac.)

Regarding Mac market share, your point is very well made. That 95%+ PC market share includes just about everything that isn't a Mac, including (a) PCs (many of them several years old) that are in use to do admin etc. in businesses and (b) all the non-cosumer PCs that would never be used to run games anyway. The reality is that a far higher pecentage of Macs than PCs will be used to play games, and these machines are owned by the more intelligent and discerning end of the population spectrum; the sorts of people who are far more likely to play games like Heroes.

Another point worth making is that over the last couple of years, when laptops have become really popular and have often been seen as 'desktop replacement' machines, Apple has done tremendously well in relative terms (compared with PC makers) at selling laptops. In fact, Apple's laptops have always been extremely popular; out of all proportion to the oft-quoted market share figure.

There's one other point I'd like to make. Jayce_jta says:

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You have to remember though at that time Mac had 10% of the market share not the 1.8% they currently have.

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That's actually not true. It /may/ have been true in the days of Heroes 1, though I very much doubt that Macs had 10% of the market even then. But Heroes 3 was released for the Mac in 2001 (well, maybe Christmas 2000). This was only just over two years after the release of the iMac (1998), which had itself brought the Mac back from its lowest ever point. The market share figure in 2000/2001 would have looked extremely depressing even so, and I'd imagine that it was far worse back then than it is now in 2005. (Because Mac OS X is a vastly superior product to 'Classic' Mac OS, and now attracts all the Unix geeks etc. aside from the traditional Mac market.) So if a good Heroes 3 port was feasible in 2000, a good Heroes 5 port should certainly be feasible now.

The Heroes series has probably done a lot less well on the Mac in the past than it should have done... but then I believe that it's done far less well than it should have done on the PC, too. Compare Heroes with something like Warcraft, say. Warcraft got an unbelievable amount of hype and unprecedented popularity for a strategy game, but is it really a better game than Heroes? I certainly don't think so. I reckon that Heroes is miles better, myself. (OK, I know they're not really the same kind of game, but my point is a general one.)

Anyway, anyone who doubts that a game can be well worth supporting (to the same standard!) on both Mac and PC simultaneously has only to look at Blizzard's track record. It's a shame that Heroes was never marketed and supported by that company; it could have had a far greater following now if it had been.

I have a new idea. The Mac is so frightfully cool right now, Ubi should port HOMM5 to it just for style points if nothing else.

whatever works...

I agree with Obiter . I am all for a port to the Mac, and I would be the first in line to get it!

Aye. And we want it on Linux too!

Im considering buiyng apple mashine and using it with dualboot with pure Gentoo GNU/Linux with 50% of the hard-drive and 50% would go to Gentoo OSX hybrid (Gentoo distribution using OSX as "kernel") and i'd like to be able to play HOMMV on this current mashine of mine (pure Linux) and on Apple hardware/software too.

I have all four HOMM games for the Mac, so I sure hope the fifth one makes it. Ditto for the Myst series, and the fifth was announced for the Mac, so this makes me hopeful.

I wish nobody had said anything about HOMM2 though...I'm actually playing that right now (stayed up til 5 a.m., bleh) and didn't know I was missing anything. The port itself seems fine as far as technical issues go...runs well under Classic with no apparent bugs or crashes aside from lack of CDDA music. (Which I sort of fixed by importing the tracks into iTunes and playing them in a loop while running the game, but it's not quite the same.) Granted I haven't played the campaign yet...is that where the omissions would be noticeable?

--Eric

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Originally posted by Eric5h5:
The port itself seems fine as far as technical issues go...runs well under Classic with no apparent bugs or crashes aside from lack of CDDA music.

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Er, except it doesn't load saved games as I just discovered. (Took me a while to notice that...when you play "just one more turn" until the game is over, who needs to save?) I think this has to do with virtual memory, which you can't turn off in Classic.

Fortunately it runs OK with SheepShaver, which doesn't have virtual memory enabled at all, at least the OS X version. Not being able to save would be a drag when trying to play the campaign....

--Eric

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I wish nobody had said anything about HOMM2 though...I'm actually playing that right now (stayed up til 5 a.m., bleh) and didn't know I was missing anything.

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5am? Hah, that's HoMM2 alright! It's the only game that's ever done that to me...

I'm sorry to say that you /are/ missing out if you play it on the Mac, though. Aside from the fact that the Mage Guild contents don't randomise properly, with the result that you never see some useful spells (that problem can be fixed to some extent by using a third-party utility), the in-game events just don't work at all, and there's nothing you can do to fix that bug.

There's no big difference between the campaign and regular single maps, beyond the fact that the campaign ones are linked together. The content of the maps is really just the same as in any regular single-map game. In other words, 'events' can (and do) appear in many maps.

By 'events' I'm referring to things that can be set up to happen regularly or that happen when your hero lands on a particular spot on the map. An event may just be a pop-up message to advance the story, or it may give you some free gold/resources or an artifact etc., or you may even lose something or be attacked by a creature stack. Some maps don't use events at all; others (the story-driven ones) rely heavily on them to make sense.

So yes, depending on the map you're playing, you may be missing out on a lot if you play HoMM2 on the Mac. Granted, I don't think events play as important a role as they do in HoMM3 (for which there are some absolutely superb story-maps), but they're pretty important in HoMM2 nevertheless.

The irritating thing is that the editor (which did make it to the Mac with HoMM2, ironically enough) taunts you with events: load any map with events in it, and they show up perfectly plainly in the editor. You can add them, view them and edit them to your heart's content... they just won't actually work when you play the game!

The other annoying thing about the Mac version of HoMM2 is that the expansion pack, The Price of Loyalty, was never released for it. Now, the PoL pack wasn't the greatest game-expansion ever released (in fact it was produced by different people - Cyberlore Studios - and hence doesn't quite fit in, stylistically)... but it's a good expansion even so. It adds quite a few interesting extras (new artifacts, heroes and map objects), extends the Necromancer town with a new structure, and generally paves the way for HoMM3 (which has some PoL features in the standard game). Most interestingly, it adds new town music to replace the existing themes!

This may come as a shock to anyone who doesn't know about it... HoMM2 is the only Heroes game to have two alternative pieces of music for each town. Luckily, the new themes were composed by Paul Romero, just like the previous ones, and are characteristically excellent. For some towns (Knight in particular) I prefer the old music, but for others (notably Sorceress) I prefer the new. And for others I find it hard to say which I prefer. My biggest gripe is that, because the music is CD-audio-based, you have to choose which music you want when you put the CD in. Ideally, if the music had been supplied as MP3s (as in HoMM3 and HoMM4), the game could have picked old or new music depending on whether the map being played was an original or expansion map. That'd have been perfect.

(I wish HoMM2 could be re-released in slightly updated form for modern operating systems, with that feature built in! No actual game changes - just minor improvements like that, and the ability to run natively on Mac OS X and the latest Windows. It's still a wonderful game.)

I do feel sorry for Mac users who love the HoMM2 music, though (and who doesn't?), because they're being deprived of half of the dozen total town themes.

Richard -- you are the HOMM lore master!

You shouldn't be posting to these forums, but rather working on the History of HOMM coffee table book.

I, too would love to see a Mac version. I've been playing (and buying) the Heroes of Might & Magic Games since King's Bounty. Please let there be a Mac version of Heroes V! There are a lot of us Mac gamers eagerly anticipating a new Heroes game, so please don't let us down. And a random map generator and a map editor for the Mac would be wonderful!

Hi, Richard. I think I may have been the one to point you towards a Mac patch for Heroes IV.
Jude

Oh, BTW, Heroes 2 for the Mac will let you load saved games under OS 8 (but not 8.6 or even 8.1, I think). I'm not sure if it's the operating system or the lack of the HFS+ (extended) Mac formatted hard drive that matters.
I don't think it helps with the other bugs you mentioned, though.
I've kept an old 6100/60 with OS 8 just for Heroes 2 and a couple of other old games.
Jude

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Originally posted by obiter:
Richard -- you are the HOMM lore master!

You shouldn't be posting to these forums, but rather working on the History of HOMM coffee table book.

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<Laugh> Well, if someone wanted to commission me to write/produce one, I'd be more than happy to!

The HoMM series is something that's given me a lot of pleasure. HoMM3 is (still) my favourite game (not just favourite Heroes game but favourite game full-stop), though HoMM2 (in its non-Mac versions!) is a close second, and the game that really sucked me into the series. I still reckon it's the one with the best atmosphere overall, and the one where it's easiest to completely lose track of time because you're pulled so deeply into the world.

But HoMM3 is the best in the series for me overall. Incidentally, I wrote a strategy guide for Heroes 3 Complete, which can be found online here:

Heroes III Complete Strategy Guide

Despite its presence on a Mac games site and the Mac reference right at the start of the article, it is of course entirely appropriate to all implementations of Heroes III (PC, Mac, Linux - Linux being the only version I haven't seen myself).

JudeVictor: I don't recall our having been in touch before (at least, I don't recognise 'JudeVictor' as a name) - but we could have been. However, I eventually got hold of the Mac patch for Heroes IV via a rather indirect route that involved Rocco J. Carello (who used to run the Mac Heroes site). After that, having the patch made available via Celestial Heavens was the obvious next step, so now anyone who needs it can download it from there.

As for Heroes 2, I played it occasionally on an original-issue iBook (and Heroes 1 as well), and I don't remember having any problems loading saved games on that machine. (Perhaps I just didn't ever load any saves, though that doesn't seem very likely!) The machine would have shipped originally with OS 8.6, I think, so that doesn't seem to add up... I must admit that I wasn't aware of a problem in loading saves anyway, but then I haven't played the Mac version of Heroes 2 for a long time.

I tried to start a thread on this earlier, but it didn't take off. Count my vote in for wanting a mac OSX version. I have owned all the heroes games including King's Bounty on Mac. I pre-ordered Heroes IV as soon as it was announced, and will pre-order Heroes V the moment it is available. Viva la Macintosh!

i preordered HOMM3 and HOMM4 without even reading a single review! I've always loved and supported the franchise -- how could Ubi let us down?!

Maybe Apple and Ubi could work together to make HOMM an operating system. Might as well -- Mac users are fanatically devoted to both pieces of software.