Heroes of Might and Magic III Remake: I played the alpha and mostly saw 1999 in higher resolution

I went to the Paris Games Week press evening with one question. Exactly one.

Will you be able to play with several people on the same PC?

I did not get it answered. And that is the best summary I can give of my evening.

Let us start with the annoying part

There was no developer on the stand.

I have no idea how tiresome it is, for somebody who makes a game, to spend an evening answering journalists. I imagine it is not the most enjoyable part of the job, and that the working week does not stop because a trade show opens.

But there was somebody from marketing, and I had a design question. The two do not meet.

This is not holding it against anyone for doing their job. It is holding it against Ubisoft for organising an evening where the press can touch an alpha without being able to ask anybody why it is built the way it is.

For a remake, which is to say for an object whose entire interest lies in design decisions, that is the worst possible choice.

The question, and why it matters

Rewind.

You and your mate crammed onto a tiny desk. One on a beanbag, the other on a cheap folding chair that genuinely folds. And a third playing Xbox while waiting his turn, because there is one screen and the session runs three hours.

That is how an entire generation played Heroes III. And it was not a French peculiarity.

In 1999, 2 per cent of Russian households and 7 per cent of Polish households had internet access. Hot seat mode, the one where you pass the mouse around on the same machine, was not a convenience feature in those countries: it was the only multiplayer mode available. It is one of the reasons this game became a monument in Eastern Europe and is still played there today.

So yes, asking whether hot seat returns is not a nostalgic's question. It is a question about the game's identity.

And the answer is half-buried on the Steam page

Since nobody could answer me in person, I went and read.

The official description says this: face up to eight players online or compete locally in turn-based matches where alliances shift and rivalries form.

"Compete locally." There it is. In writing.

Except that in the feature box on the page, the one Steam fills from what the publisher declares technically, there is a single line: single-player.

The "local multiplayer" and "local co-op" labels you may see on the page are community-applied tags, not publisher declarations.

I am not crying scandal: a store page for a 2027 game fills in gradually, and this contradiction will probably resolve before release. But as I write, the only thing Ubisoft officially declares is single-player, and the word "locally" floats in a marketing paragraph with nobody able to tell me whether it means two players on one machine or two machines on a network.

Those are two very different things, and that was precisely my question.

Now, what I actually saw

It was an alpha. So I am not going to talk about bugs, that would make no sense and it would be dishonest: an alpha is meant to have them.

What I can talk about is what was there.

And what was there is Heroes III.

I am not going to write that it is exactly the same game as twenty-seven years ago, because that would age me far too much. Let us just say it is the same game, and leave the date alone.

I do not say that unkindly. I played it happily, because this game is excellent and it already was. The Snowdrop engine does its job: you move from a fixed isometric perspective to real 3D with a free camera, dynamic lighting, weather, shifting seasons. It looks good, it reads well, and the combat grid stays perfectly clear, which was not a given in moving to volume.

But beyond that, I saw no difference. None.

The levelling mechanic

You will tell me that heroes gain levels, that they earn skills, and that this is a system.

Yes. And it was already there in 1999.

Heroes III's heroes gained experience, rose in level, watched their primary attributes grow and chose secondary skills at every tier. It is one of the original's pillars, and it is what already set it apart from its contemporaries.

So what I saw running in the alpha is that system. Not a reinterpretation, not a variant. The same one.

I spell it out because I could not remember myself, after all this time, what came from the original and what came from the dozens of hours of community modifications I have stacked on top since. Checked: it is original.

The nine factions, and the sum that stings

The remake announces nine factions: Castle, Rampart, Tower, Inferno, Necropolis, Dungeon, Stronghold, Fortress and Conflux.

Now let us compare.

The 1999 game shipped with eight factions. The Armageddon's Blade expansion, the same year, added a ninth, the Conflux. Shadow of Death, the following year, added none.

Nine plus zero equals nine.

In other words, the remake contains exactly the same number of factions as the complete game of the era, with exactly the same names.

And to measure how unambitious that is, you only have to look at what the original itself did: Heroes II had six factions, Heroes III brought eight. The original entry added two factions to its series. The remake of that entry adds none.

The game includes both expansions, and there is a new prologue, an epilogue and cinematics tying the original campaigns into one story. That is a genuine addition, and it is the only one I identified.

What I want from a remake

And there is my whole problem.

A good remake does not redo the game. It looks at what has aged, rebuilds it, and keeps the tone. It is a tightrope act: too much reverence and you have made an overpriced re-release, too much freedom and you betray what people loved.

Heroes III is the age I refused to write above. It has things that have aged, and everyone still playing it knows them by heart: managing creature queues, the readability of information on the adventure map, the town management interface once you own seven of them, the way an eight-player game stretches until it becomes unmanageable.

Those are places where a remake can work without touching the game's soul. Nobody is asking you to change the combat grid or the skill tree. We are asking you to look at why a six-hour session contains two hours of waiting.

What I saw was the same thing in 4K.

I will be glad to be wrong

There is time. The game ships in 2027, the alpha earned its name, and a trade show demo shows what somebody decided to show.

And it is worth being honest about what that means: a Heroes III in 3D with nine factions and both expansions is already a very good game, because the source material is one of the best strategy games ever made. I will probably buy it again. Plenty of people will.

But that is not the same thing as making a great remake, and I think it is worth saying now rather than in 2027.

There is also a chance the answer to my question is yes. That "compete locally" means what I hope it means, and that three of us can once again crowd around one screen.

I would just have liked to hear it from somebody who worked on the game.

Got a Heroes III session on a single screen to tell us about? There is definitely a folding chair in the story. We collect those on the InsertCoins Discord.