Might & Magic X: Legacy Developer Chat Q&A

Ubisoft and Limbic have slapped up the many questions and answers that were covered in their latest developer chat for Might & Magic X: Legacy. There is a total of 25 questions that lead to some pretty good information, so I'll go ahead and quote three of them:
2. Will there be an option for real-time combat as in previous M&M games, or is this game only turn-based?

[Marcus] We didn't plan such an option deliberately out of two reasons. We wanted to put a focus on two core mechanics of the gameplay: tile-based and turn-based. To be honest I cannot speak for the technical feasibility of adding a real-time option. But from the design perspective having a real-time game that allows switching to turns makes more sense compared to our situation, which would be the other way around.

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7. My question: I know a lot of other people have expressed this as well, but to be specific, do you have plans to make the gameplay as fast as it was in Xeen? This game is supposed to be a successor to Xeen, and one of the biggest advantages of the turn-based, grid-based world is that you could get around it very quickly if you wanted to. For example in Sorpigal, after you explore it for the first, second, or third time, you really want to get around it as quickly as possible. Or like, if all your weapons break and you need to get back to town, sell your stuff, and get back out there. I don't want that round trip to take a whole 5 minutes or so. Xeen did this wonderfully, and I think it would be a big mistake not to make MMX competitive in terms of speed. That probably means having the option to turn off the monster animations, etc. What say you all?

[Stephan] First off: Yes, we are aware about the "slow gameplay speed"" in some situations. Basically I think we face two issues at the moment: Number ONE is the monster movement speed when it is the monsters turn.

This is something we want to speed up. It simply takes too long and feels like ""nahhhh I have to wait" and it causes downtime. So this needs to be improved. We already started it (in fact we have a speed up option for quite a while now) but it is not yet polished. We had some issues with it as we need to change animation speeds and such. Nevertheless: yes, this is something we acknowledge and we will improve. Just one note of caution though: It will be "faster" but it will not be the exact insane speed like in Xeen.

The other gameplay speed related topic is "Movement speed". The movement could feel more "fluent/instant". I am not sure if and what we tried about this yet but again we see your point.

I hope this answers the question. At least you should know that we read this feedback frequently on various communities and some of the VIP fans exactly mentioned the same over and over again. So I guess you are right. ;)

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20. What about spell system? Are you going to rework it? Or at least change that number of useless spells?

[Marcus] There was a question on the spell system. What we are going to do is to apply a final balancing in terms of numbers (damage, duration, range, mana costs). There will be no fundamental changes to the spells, their mechanics and their distribution to the different schools of magic as these need to match the Ashan universe so that MMX integrates well into the Might & Magic brand. There will be spells that feel useless, but still contribute to the overall game experience.