Haven't read the article but they just added a 770MB update to the 26KB original download and now the game reportedly works.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4921760/Heroes_Of_Might_And_Magic_III/

Hurray! Minimal effort has been achieved!

Wow. When I read the headline I thought it had to be an exaggeration or complaint about poor game quality. Nope, literally forgot to add it.

Hello, just passing by to shamelessly promote !homm@lemmy.dbzer0.com

Also, yeah, usual business when it comes to Ubisoft. Fun story: their first HoMM game, H5 from 2006, had its release date postponed because the fans protested and begged to have it released later. It was horribly buggy, according to the beta players, and the fans wanted the studio to have enough time to fix it.

What on Earth is with the system requirements for this game? It requires a gigabyte of space? Heroes of Might and Magic 3? How's that possible? Judging from the pictures it is not updated or remastered or anything.

It came on a CD, which is max about 700MB; that could easily unpack to a gigabyte.

It'll be 700MB of electron based emulation to run it.

Its surprisingly easy to fudge up this kind of thing if you've seen Steam's back end.

That being said, getting a miscofigured game all the way to launch is kind of wild.

I bought the complete version on Gog and it works on Linux after a small tweak

I recall purchasing this quite a while ago.

...

Ah, it was the "HD" version. I wonder what exactly's different from this one.

This version has all the content and isn't remastered.

Well thanks for that. I had no idea it existed and I love HOMM.

what were you expecting?

Anyone play song of silence? It is like a modern homm3, i think, I'm too young for homm3

I've not played Song of Silence, but from what I've heard it's closer to Total War then HoMM.

You should try Songs of Conquest, which is heavily inspired by HoMM, with some more modern mechanics and QoL. I find it simpler than HoMM in general - might be a good intro into the genre.

Also vanilla HoMM 3 is not really a great way to play the game these days. I'd say Horn of the Abyss is a must, and there are a ton of mods to improve the game. Have a look at the VCMI project if you want to dig deeper.

My favorite is HoMM 5.5, which improves 5 a lot.

There's obviously also Olden Era, which is not bad and a very approachable intro into the series. I've not played much, so my experience is too limited to comment on it.

I think I remember its demo being around a 20MB download (for sure under 100) so the full version was probably way less than a whole CD

Not a fan of Ubisoft and this is definitely an embarrassing blunder but it seems a little petty to leave a negative review when it was only broken for a day after launch.

their first HoMM game, H5 from 2006

They also buried the M&M sci-fi storyline there.

Not petty at all if you just bought an empty game file.

Plenty of games are broken on launch, having to wait one extra day to play a game is a flaw but not the same as a wasted purchase.

• Buy game you want
• Install game
• Play
• There is no game
• Complain
• "Consumers are a little petty these days"

Dude.

Yo, check out this cool website I made: http://localhost:3000/

At this point I just want Ubi to go under and sell the IPs to literally anyone else

The game to not be as large, I assume

"Nice job dev team, now enjoy your vacation because you're all fired."

"Wait no shit come back and fix this!"

Games being broken on launch is a symptom of the industry's rot.

A friend of mine until recently worked for their department that also did risk planning and mitigation. Until they were all let go.

So they basically prepared for stuff like this, and now they're gone, and hey, now not even this basic shit works. Well done, Ubisoft.

I'm seeing an 848 MB split rar archive in at least one torrent for "complete" edition.

This is an 18 year old torrent too, that's not the remastered version which is more like 3 GB.

PCGamingWiki does show 425 MB in the requirements, but that's likely without the expansions.

Maybe I am confusing it for II

Yeah exactly, this means not a single person that wasn't already fired and replaced with exec-level managed talking to Claude existed that could try the game out before setting it to public.

*Activision taking notes*

Sure, but people have the right to be annoyed about it and drop in a negative review.

With a QA? Surely download and install a game is the first basic test case?

Glad you played Songs of Conquest. Their devs did a great job of keeping the homm spirit while also fixing some issues with the games by enforcing new rules and limits. Only complaint is I wish the graphics were just a little bit better.

Do people actually want/like the 3d added to the hmm3 remake? I was pretty instantly turned off by it.

If you don't get that, you are a part of the problem

see all those downvotes? they aren't petty, people are informing you that your opinion sucks.

pretty apt analogy to the bad reviews frankly.

This may be DLC taken to its logical conclusion. Paying for the game gets you a .exe, the game and everything else, is a paid for download.

Soon they will expand the concept, so that paying for the game only gives you the right to pay to download the actual game and any basic tier DLC. You'll be able to purchase the right to buy higher tier DLC for a very (un)reasonable sum.

Heroes 5 was actually a really solid entry, so I appreciate you 2006 fans!

When do they start charging us per download?

Well, they didn't try out the version they were shipping via Steam which is not quite the same thing.

This may be DLC taken to its logical conclusion. Paying for the game gets you a .exe, the game and everything else, is a paid for download.

Stop! My shareholder can only get so erect!

Ubisoft still has shareholders?

"It took courage to do what we did..."

You stealed mine site idea!

I get that, but based on what? 1GB unpacked seems reasonable for a 1999 game that was likely distributed on CDs. Not at all surprising.

Now that they've fixed that, there's a lot of negative reviews saying it's crashing a lot.

I remember playing a Myst-style adventure game around that time and dreading travelling because it meant changing the CD.