Designing a computer game, at least at, was always about iterating.
Take ideas we couldn’t use or didn’t have time to implement in the previous game and work them into the next one. “We weren’t making a sequel for the first time,” says the game’s executive producer Mark Caldwell.
But as it was, Jon Van Caneghem, the founder of New World Computing and the mastermind of Heroes I and II, approached it as he had his earlier Might and Magic CRPG series, which had seen five installments by the time he (temporarily) shifted his focus to strategy gaming. It would surely not have appeared so quickly - if, indeed, it ever appeared at all - absent the new trend of strategy-game sequels. The scant amount of time separating it from its inspiration wouldn’t have allowed for that even had its creators wished it. Heroes II doesn’t revamp its predecessor to the point of feeling like a different game entirely, as Master of Orion II arguably does. And fortunately for them, this is exactly what they got. They rather bought it because they wanted a game that did what Heroes I had done, only even better. At the same time, though, it strikes me as safe to say that no one bought the sequel out of a burning desire to find out what happens to the sons of Lord Morglin Ironfist, the star of the first game’s sketchy campaign. Its campaign - which is, as we’ll see, only one part of what it has to offer - is presented as a direct continuation of the story, such as it was, of Heroes I. All of these factors cause Heroes II to blur the boundaries between the fiction-driven and the systems-driven sequel. It’s a smaller-scale affair, built around human-crafted rather than procedurally-generated maps, with more overt, pre-scripted narrative elements. But the Heroes series as a whole is also conceptually different from the likes of Civilization and Master of Orion. This means that it doesn’t represent as dramatic a purely technological leap as do Civilization II and Master of Orion II Heroes I as well was able to take advantage of SVGA graphics, CD-ROM, and all the other transformations the average home computer underwent during the first half of the 1990s.
For one thing, it followed much more quickly on the heels of its predecessor: the first Heroes shipped in September of 1995, this follow-up just over one year later. New World Computing’s Heroes of Might and Magic II: The Succession Wars is different from the strategy-game sequels we’ve previously examined in this series in a couple of important ways.
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