Fanstratics (spiritual Heroes of Might & Magic 3 successor)

Blake00

Blake00

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Anyone who's followed my work in the Civ2 forums on the Heroes of Might & Magic 2 mod knows I'm a big HoMM fan and am always on the look out for similar games (eg Songs of Conquest, Silence of the Siren and Songs of Silence ).. Ubisoft has pretty much ruined the HoMM franchise with the disastrous unfinished releases of HoMM6&7 however thankfully the franchise lives on through awesome fan mods & maps, along with new spiritual sequel games made by other companies (eg the rather excellent looking Song's of Conquest game coming soon). One of these HoMM like indie games I've been following the development of is the rather terribly named 'Fanstratics' which is making made by HoMM3's (many peoples fav in the series) lead designer Gregory Fulton. He plans for his game is be very similar to HoMM3 but naturally be set in a different original universe with new faction lineups. Over the last couple of years he's been emailing out newsletters where he answers fan community questions about HoMM3 & Fanstratics and tells stories. Some of the stories he tells about the New World Computing days in the 90s while they made the HoMM and Might & Magic RPG games are a joy to read (although they can go on for a bit lol). If there's any fellow HoMM fans here maybe you'll enjoy them too...

Here's links to all the newsletters he's sent so far with some pics and some sporadic comments (taken from my posts on other forums)...

Newsletter 1...
https://www.fanstratics.com/fstnewsletter01



Newsletter 2...
https://www.fanstratics.com/fstnewsletter02



Newsletter 3...
https://www.fanstratics.com/fstnewsletter03



Newsletter 4...
https://www.fanstratics.com/fstnewsletter04



Newsletter 5...
https://www.fanstratics.com/fstnewsletter05



Newsletter 6...
https://www.fanstratics.com/fstnewsletter06



Newsletter 7...
https://www.fanstratics.com/fstnewsletter07



Newsletter 8...
https://www.fanstratics.com/fstnewsletter08



Newsletter 9...
https://www.fanstratics.com/fstnewsletter09



Newsletter 10, 11 & 12...
https://www.fanstratics.com/fstnewsletter10

https://www.fanstratics.com/fstnewsletter11

https://www.fanstratics.com/fstnewsletter12

Newsletter 13...
https://www.fanstratics.com/fstnewsletter13

Newsletter 14... There's a rather amusing piracy story.
https://www.fanstratics.com/fstnewsletter14

Newsletter 15... Gotta love the story about "Phil" lol.
https://www.fanstratics.com/fstnewsletter15

Newsletter 16... Sounds like there's been some setbacks...
https://www.fanstratics.com/fstnewsletter16

Newsletter 17... interesting story about Greg's take on the death of 3DO
https://www.fanstratics.com/fstnewsletter17

Newsletter 18...
https://www.fanstratics.com/fstnewsletter18

Newsletter 19. Greg reckons Early Access in 2023... hmmmm... righteo.. anyway... there's another 3DO story here where Greg buries Trip and a few other people he clearly didn't think much of lol!
https://www.fanstratics.com/fstnewsletter19



Newsletter 22...
https://www.fanstratics.com/fstnewsletter20



Newsletter 21...
https://www.fanstratics.com/fstnewsletter21



Newsletter 22... Looks like old man Greg (Mighty Boosh FTW) has got another long story for us about that time he got pizza in 1979... so long in fact this is just part 1 of the story lol.
https://www.fanstratics.com/fstnewsletter22



Newsletter 23... The 'big' finale to the pizza hut story arrived lol... Man his stories really keep going and going don't they haha.. although he did successfully trigger a lot of nostalgia for me as much like him I remember getting my first 286 computer with no VGA card lol, all the hours I spent tinkering with stuff learning how to edit config sys and autoexec bat to eek out those extra bits of conventional memory some memory hog games like Master of Magic needed lol. Also reminded me of the first time I discovered Might & Magic 3 and then MM4&5 World of Xeen, however by then it was late 90s, so they were less technically amazing but I loved playing them nonetheless.
https://www.fanstratics.com/fstnewsletter23

Newsletter 24...
https://www.fanstratics.com/fstnewsletter24



Newsletter 25... no stories this time but apparently the next one is gonna be a 2 parter again lol
https://www.fanstratics.com/fstnewsletter25



Newsletter 26 27. Sounds like Greg is still pretty unwell and not making much progress due to long covid messing with his heart. Got a new story though about his first day at NWC and dealing with "Wario" lol!
https://www.fanstratics.com/fstnewsletter26

https://www.fanstratics.com/fstnewsletter27

 
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Interesting. Im a big HOMM fan. HOMM3 is probably my most played game of all time. And i still boot it up today and it holds up pretty well i think. The series went downhill in HOMM4. HOMMM 5 was a decent reboot. HOMM6 not so much. And 7 was an abomination. Hopefully they are going back to basics and recognising that what made HOMM3 so good was not so much the story, it was the strategic gameplay that made it so good. Not read all of them, but sounds like this guy knows the bits that made HOMM3 great. So hopefully with a bit of license we may get something good.
 
Pretty similar for me. I started way back at HoMM1 so I still have a lot of nostalgic love for it and play it every few years even though the sequels are technically superior. Loved HoMM2. HoMM3 is my favourite of course. While HoMM4 felt like a step backwards I actually really enjoyed it. HoMM5 was great after patching and gave me hope that ubisoft would do a good job continuing the series. Then HoMM6 happened.. I still can't finish that game due to a bug they won't fix and I spent so much money on the collectors version of that. Then stupid me did the same and spent big on the HoMM7 boxset and we know how that went too.. death of the franchise sigh...

Although thankfully fans keep things going with endless amazing mods and scenarios for nearly all the HoMM games and hopefully some of these spiritual sequels/spin offs will be good too (eg Songs of Conquest and Fanstratics).

Speaking of Fanstratics, Newsletter 29 is here! This time Greg talks about how amazing Fallout 1 was and how no one at NWC was interested in it which he found worrying.

https://www.fanstratics.com/fstnewsletter29

 
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Newsletter 31 is here. Greg continues with part 2 of his story about... oh man I don't even know it's about anymore lol. Something about takin a dump in the dark and a good game needs a heavy game box lol! Think he's running low on material. :lol:

https://www.fanstratics.com/fstnewsletter31

 
Newsletter 33 is here. Greg tells another story about the joys of working under 3DO management back in the day and what was the beginning of him deciding to leave NWC.

https://www.fanstratics.com/fstnewsletter33

 
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Newsletter 34 is here. This time Greg tells the story of his first time discovering WinAmp & MP3s and how 3DO being cheap forced NWC to develop their own MP3 decoder for Heroes 3 so they could get the whole thing on one disc.

https://www.fanstratics.com/fstnewsletter34

 
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Songs of Conquest doesn't look good imo..plenty negative reviews on steam (usually there aren't so many).
Again the high price for early access (really annoying trend..make your game first then take full version style money).

Homm3 was my favorite game too (before Civ4), hopefully they can improve but it's not very promising when i see the usual steam early access nonsense.
 
Ahh that reminds me, I was going to make a separate Songs of Conquest thread but I forgot.. oh well. Anyway yeah when just looking at screenshots of Songs of Conquest I wasn't blown away but once I saw videos of everything in motion I was far more impressed with it's look. As for Gameplay yeah I guess I'll find that out later lol.. it's interesting, when you scroll down to the steam reviews area there's mostly negative ones at the top and some make some good points however the overall rating is still "very positive" so it can't be that bad haha.
 
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Newsletter 36 is here. This time Greg talks about the whole lost Heroes of Might & Magic 3 Complete source code situation mentioning how it has actually been found and given to Ubisoft in 2019 (wow I missed the news on that) to fix up their HD remake yet nothing has occurred. Also noticed people seem to be voting for it in this steam thread and getting the usual PR marketing responses from Ubisoft lol.

https://www.fanstratics.com/fstnewsletter36

 
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Newsletter 38 is here. This time Greg tells part 2 of the story about making the Heroes 3 Demo map and says that due to his health issues this will be the last of the Heroes Recollection stories for some time so he can focus more on Fanstratics development.

https://www.fanstratics.com/fstnewsletter38



I've said it before in this thread and was about to say it again "WTH is with so many (normally non-humanoid) creatures being humanoid with a random weapon in their hand?" but Greg actually states here that he's going with anthropomorphic design directive so I guess that explains that. Not a huge fan of it as I just see the below lol.. and I find myself reminded of HoMM5 replacing lots of fantasy creature slots with elf chicks in bikinis and other humanoids sigh.

1696489006018.png
 
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Newsletter 39 is here. This time Greg has stopped the stories for a while making it not really much of a newsletter anymore and more of a memo lol. This months unit reveal is the banshee...

https://www.fanstratics.com/fstnewsletter39

 
Newsletter 40 is here. No stories and as usual another creature from HoMM lore has been converted/anthropomorphised into a humanoid with a weapon sigh... this time it's the War Hog...

https://www.fanstratics.com/fstnewsletter40

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