Yes, the old NWC Might and Magic setting was wild — even if its sci-fi backdrop was not acknowledged at all in the Heroes games. The world lost something beautiful when Ubisoft got rid of it in favor of a disappointingly generic setting.
To me, 4 — the original one, not the atrocious expansions — is the narrative height of the HOMM series, not matched by any installment before or since. By all appearances, its lead writer knew what he was doing, and it’s damn shame the crumbling 3DO buried promising talent like him under its rubble.
Here’s an interesting interview with him:
https://web.archive.org/web/20151120025039/https://mmh7.ubi.com/en/blog/post/view/lost-tales-q-a-with-terry-ray
And I can identify a lot with the way he writes about Gauldoth Half-Dead. I feel somewhat similarly about Lintian.
But hands down and far ahead in this race for my love like a cheetah running against sloths is Gauldoth Half-Dead. I set out to make Gauldoth the opposite of every necromancer from every fantasy story and he became so much more during the writing process. That’s my favorite thing about being a writer – when characters gain a life of their own. Gauldoth certainly did.
He’s still very real to me, and to this day I do annual searches about him just to see what people have been saying. Despite his horrible life, he’s a philosopher and probably wiser than anyone around him. He is not ruled by a quest for power like most necromancers, but he sees the purpose and usefulness of power. He is neither good nor evil. He sees chaos and order, creation and destruction all as one thing dependent on each other. I wanted him to be a metaphor for all Mankind. Because of that, I think he is the one and only hope for peace in the troubled realms of the Might & Magic universe.
For years, I have been telling my friends I would love to write a Gauldoth book, or maybe a series of books. When I say things like that, I feel like an ancient god who molded a figure out of clay, breathed life into it, and released him upon the world. Gauldoth will forever be my child. May he live and unlive forever.
And then Ubisoft was more interested in HOMM as a brand, an investment, than a creative project. Start with a D&D-clone world, make it just distinct enough to be trademarkable, ship it. Themes? Characterization? What’s that, is it something you can monetize?
It buried the resurrected franchise with mismanagement, but in hindsight, the writing on the wall was there as early as Heroes 5.
