" The Goldilocks Principle in Fantasy Strategy The Digital Antiquarian
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The Goldilocks Principle in Fantasy Strategy
19<br>Jun
Although I’ve played way too many games for way too many hours over the way too many years I’ve been writing these histories, it’s safe to say that I haven’t spent more time with any one game than Heroes of Might and Magic II. Partly this was down to circumstance. Heroes II showed up on the syllabus just as I was embarking on one of my periodic digressions, a long series about international communications networks and how they culminated in the World Wide Web. Without the need to write in detail about a new game every fortnight, I was freer than I usually am just to play whatever I felt like playing. And what I felt like playing at that time was Heroes II. I beat every single Heroes II scenario in my Heroes of Might and Magic Millennium Edition set, some alone, some in multiplayer mode with my wife Dorte, who became almost as obsessed as I was. I must confess that my usual rule of no more than two hours of gaming per day was strained at times, shattered completely at others. But we were still in the midst of the pandemic then and there wasn’t much else for me to do with my free time, so I figured it was okay to set self-discipline aside for a while. Maybe it was even good experiential research, in that it re-familiarized me with that strange hungover feeling you get when you’ve spent hours and hours peering into an imaginary world behind your monitor screen — like butter that’s been scraped over too much bread, to steal a phrase from Tolkien. (For what it’s worth, I’ve found that the best cure for this condition is the same as that for a conventional hangover: a long walk in nature.)
I played and enjoyed Heroes III a lot as well, but not quite as much as Heroes II. Again, I’m sure that this was down to circumstance as much as anything else. By the time I got to that game, the pandemic was over, I was busier with real life again, and my two-hour rule was firmly back in place. Then, too, I had played a lot of Heroes of Might and Magic by that point, and was perchance finally growing tired of the basic concept in the abstract. So, when I say that I don’t like the more conventionally "gamer-dark" Heroes III art style as well as the previous game’s brighter, more cartoony vibe, and say that I am not entirely convinced that its new factions and other additional complexities really add that much to the experience, take that with a grain of salt. My opinion might be just the opposite if I had encountered these games in the opposite order.
Anyway, all of this had led me to ask two questions. Why did I find these particular games so appealing, given that I’ve never been all that hugely taken with world-conquering strategy games in the abstract? And what else is out there in a similar vein that I might also enjoy?
To try to answer the first question first: I think I like the unreality of fantasy strategy. I’m not at all averse to games that depict the real world, mind you, but I do start to have a problem when such games tackle weighty subjects in a thoughtless way. Call me a woke snowflake, but I just don’t want to play a Nazi general preparing Europe for the Holocaust or a Spanish conquistador subjugating the native inhabitants of the New World. I know too much about what those job descriptions entailed. I have no objection to playing a wizard, however — not even an evil one. For I know that the elves and dwarves he kills do not and never have actually existed.
The rest of this article constitutes the merest beginning of an answer to that other question I asked, about what else is out there when it comes to turned-based fantasy strategy. As most of you doubtless know, games fitting this broad description have been around since the dawn of personal computers. Knowing that I couldn’t possibly play all of them, I decided to confine this investigation to the late 1990s, the era of Heroes II and III and the period we still find ourselves in in the larger chronology of these histories. I picked out three examples of the species that are generally regarded as worthy: Warlords III, Age of Wonders, and Disciples: Sacred Lands. Let’s give them each a spin and see how we go, shall we? Maybe one of them will turn out to be Just Right for me or for you.
As the name would imply, Warlords III is the third entry in a series, one that was designed by the Aussie Steve Fawkner and developed by a little Australian studio called Strategic Studies Group. But just to keeping things from becoming too straightforward, there are actually two games that bear the name of Warlords III, both of them published by Red Orb Entertainment, a brief-lived subsidiary label of the venerable Brøderbund Software. Warlords III:...