https://unfrozen.studio/tournament/

Over the past few weeks we’ve noticed that quite a few community-run tournaments are already either in progress or slowly on the rise. We’re incredibly happy to see that the competitive spirit lives within the community and is being spread across Olden Era! It also happens that this perfectly aligns with our plans.

过去几周，我们注意到大量由社区自发组织的赛事正如火如荼地进行，或是正崭露头角。看到这份竞技热情在社区中蓬勃生长并在《上古纪元》中蔓延，我们倍感欣喜！这也恰好与我们未来的规划不谋而合。

We’re happy to announce that, together with Behemoth’s Lair, Ubisoft and Hooded Horse, the first official Olden Era tournament, The Alvari Cup, will begin on August 1st 2026! You can check out more information about the tournament on its :OE_PvP: official webpage!

在此，我们荣幸地宣布：携手 Behemoth’s Lair、Ubisoft 及 Hooded Horse，首届《上古纪元》官方赛事——“阿尔瓦里杯”（The Alvari Cup）将于 2026 年 8 月 1 日正式打响！更多赛事详情，请前往官方网站查看！

16 invited participants will compete against one another in a Single Elimination, Best of Three format over the next few weeks, showcasing their Might and Magic, with the ultimate victor claiming the grand prize we’ll reveal very soon!

本次赛事将采用单败 BO3，16 位受邀选手将在接下来的几周内捉对厮杀，尽显兵法与魔法的博弈。最终的冠军赢家将斩获我们稍后揭晓的终极大奖！

In the future, we plan to host more official tournaments, including open format tournaments, where everyone will be able to sign up! We will continue to take care of both PvE and PvP environments simultaneously and we are constantly reading your feedback!

展望未来，我们计划举办更多官方赛事，包括开放报名的全民赛事，届时人人皆可参与！我们将持续并行深耕 PvE 与 PvP 生态，同时也将时刻关注大家的每一条宝贵反馈！

bilibili，youtube

来源：CH（英），vk.ru（俄）

• #1 Were you familiar with the games in the series before you were approached to create Ashan?
• #1 在受邀参与创建亚山世界之前，你对这个系列的游戏熟悉吗？
• I had a general video game fan’s knowledge, of course - Might and Magic was legendary, so it was impossible not to be aware of it. I wasn’t a particular fan of the series, though, so I had to get myself up speed for the actual work, in order to make sure anything I did was properly respectful of the intention of the world. Our mission was never to recreate the old continuity, but rather to create something new with the same sensibility.
• 当然，我作为一个普通游戏玩家有所了解——《魔法门》是传奇系列，不可能没听说过。不过我并不是该系列的死忠粉，所以为了实际工作，我必须恶补相关知识，确保我所做的一切都充分尊重这个世界原本的立意。我们的使命从来不是复刻旧有的世界观连续性，而是在保留同样气质的前提下，创造出全新的东西。

• #2 What were the main sources of inspiration for creating the world of Ashan?
• #2 创造亚山世界的主要灵感来源是什么？
• I am absolutely a book omnivore, so listing the fantasy novels I’ve read and whose DNA got extracted to inform my contribution to Ashan would take a very long time. Erwan was the big GRRM, fan, while my tastes ran more towards Raymond Feist’s Midkemia (which was a game world before it was a novel), Steven Brust’s Dragaera, Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain, some Robin Bailey, some Robin Hobb, some Lloyd Alexander, some Fritz Leiber…I am an omnivorous and fast reader, so there were tons of fantasy novels that all, I think, served as inspiration.
• 我绝对是个博览群书的杂食读者，如果要列出所有我读过、并且其基因被提取出来融入我对亚山世界贡献的奇幻小说，那会是一份很长的清单。埃尔万是乔治·R·R·马丁的狂热粉丝，而我的口味更倾向于雷蒙德·费斯特笔下的米德凯米亚（它最初是个游戏世界，后来才成为小说）、史蒂文·布鲁斯特的德拉加利亚、劳埃德·亚历山大的普莱丹，还有一些罗宾·贝利、罗宾·霍布的作品，以及弗里茨·莱伯……我读书既杂又快，所以我认为海量的奇幻小说都在不同程度上提供了灵感。

• #3 As far as we know, the development of Heroes 5 was carried out in parallel with the development of the world. Did this significantly influence the design of the world? Were there any things you would have liked to add or exclude, but due to the development of Heroes 5, it was unacceptable?
• #3 据我们所知，《英雄无敌5》的开发与亚山世界的构建是同步进行的。这对世界设计产生了重大影响吗？有没有哪些你想添加或删减的内容，却因为《英雄无敌5》的开发而无法实现？
• It was even more complicated than that. The mission was to build the world of Ashan from the content that had already been built for Heroes as well as Dark Messiah. So we were asked to take this epic strategic campaign spanning kingdoms with a ton of different beasties, and then merge it with the world of a First Person Stabber that was originally intended to be something else entirely, to create a coherent whole that could not only encompass both of them, but also serve as a setting for anything else that came down the pike. It really was an incredibly complicated assignment, and there were moments when I had to reach out to Arkane on Dark Messiah and say things like “This part of the dungeon has an altar to the war god. We have no war god in our universe,” and see how things went from there. But stuff like that always provides an interesting challenge, and having the walls of the creative sandbox built so solidly really allows you to stop spending time trying to define stuff. Instead, you know your boundaries and can get right to the fun part of coloring within the lines.
• 实际情况比这还要复杂。我们的任务是基于《英雄无敌》和《黑暗弥赛亚》中已经制作好的内容来构建亚山世界。也就是说，我们要把一个横跨诸国、充斥着各种怪物的史诗战略战役，与一个最初为完全不同的项目设计的“第一人称刺杀游戏”的世界融合在一起，打造出一个不仅能容纳两者，还能作为未来任何作品舞台的连贯整体。这真的是一项极其复杂的任务，有时我不得不联系《黑暗弥赛亚》的 Arkane 工作室，提出诸如“地下城的这部分有个战神祭坛，但在我们的宇宙里根本没有战神”这样的问题，然后看他们如何回应。但这种事总能带来有趣的挑战，而且既然创意沙盒的边界已经筑得如此坚实，你就不用再浪费时间去界定各种设定了。相反，你清楚自己的界限，可以直接进入“按规矩填色”的有趣环节。

• #4 Were there any attempts to more closely tie the worlds into the old universe (Enroth, Axeoth)?
• #4 是否有过尝试将这个世界与旧宇宙（恩洛斯、阿克斯）进行更紧密的关联？
• No, the mandate was clear from the beginning to create something new. We were to be true in spirit but to be 100% different in detail. And I thought that made a lot of sense. Doing a fresh version of something people already loved would focus the conversation on whether we’d gotten the old stuff right, instead of the games themselves. By making that sort of clean content break, we could let people judge the new games on their own merits.
• 没有，从一开始指令就很明确：要创造全新的东西。我们要在精神上保持忠实，但在细节上做到百分百的不同。我觉得这非常合理。如果只是在人们已经热爱的旧作基础上翻新，大家的讨论焦点就会变成“我们把旧设定还原对了吗”，而不是关注游戏本身。通过这种彻底的“内容切割”，我们可以让玩家单纯根据新游戏自身的优点来评判它们。

• #5 Did you have any plans for including additional factions besides the main nine?
• #5 除了主要的九大阵营外，你是否曾计划加入其他阵营？
• I had secret notes for one other faction that, near as I can tell, never saw the light of day anywhere. I’m not going to say what it was, but you can probably look at some of my other work in the TTRPG and fiction spaces and make a decent guess….
• 我还为另一个阵营写过秘密笔记，据我所知，它从未在任何地方公开过。我不打算透露具体是什么，但你可以看看我在桌面角色扮演游戏和小说领域的其他作品，应该能猜个八九不离十……

• #6 Why are the gods in Ashan dragons?
• #6 为什么亚山世界里的神祇是巨龙？
• Again, that came out of the desire to do something different with the world. All of us in that core trio had read a zillion fantasy novels that all followed the same tropes, and the commonality of the Greek/Norse pantheon mashup by way of D&D clerics was something we really wanted to avoid. So we flipped the script a little – who are the most powerful non-human critters in the fantasy space? Dragons! Why not make them gods and try something new in terms of what stories we could tell.
• 这同样源于我们想要在这个世界里做一些与众不同的事情。我们核心三人组都读过无数遵循相同套路的奇幻小说，那种通过 DND 牧师体系拼凑出来的希腊/北欧混搭神系实在太常见了，我们非常想避开这一点。所以我们稍微反转了一下剧本——奇幻领域中力量最强大的非人类生物是谁？巨龙！那为什么不让他们成为神明，从而在叙事上尝试一些新的可能性呢？

• #7 As far as we know, Ashan also has subfactions (for example, Orcs from the steppes of Ranaar, Desert Orcs of Sahaar, Island Orcs from Pao, Orcs of the Black Skull clan). Did you have any plans for additional subfactions for other factions that never made it into the games?
• #7 据我们所知，亚山也存在子阵营（例如拉纳尔草原的兽人、萨哈尔的沙漠兽人、帕欧岛的岛民兽人、黑颅氏族的兽人）。你是否曾计划为其他阵营设计一些未能实装到游戏中的子阵营？
• One of the secrets no one will tell you is that a lot of time, ideas like that emerge out of the moment. You think them up in response to a specific narrative need, you write them down, and then you realize how subconsciously you've created something that absolutely fits with what has gone before. And you do that a few times, and you realize there’s a pattern, and away you go! So I’m not going to say anything about planning, just that maybe things got created in a way that allowed for further growth and expansion to meet upcoming potential story needs. And I would have loved to see how they came out.
• 有个没人会告诉你的秘密：很多时候，这类点子都是灵光一现的产物。你是为了应对特定的叙事需求才想到它们，随手记下来，然后才意识到自己在潜意识中创造了某种与此前内容完美契合的东西。这样反复几次，你发现了其中的规律，于是顺势而为！所以我不会谈论什么预先规划，只能说这些设定的诞生方式本身就预留了进一步成长和扩展的空间，以应对未来潜在的剧情需求。我很乐意看到它们最终会发展成什么样。

• #8 Erwan Le Breton told us that one of the commandments of Ashan, passed down to all teams working on Might & Magic games, is NO GUNPOWDER. What is your opinion on this? Did you ever imagine that gunpowder or some other technological advance would one day come to Ashan (a reference to the forge that never came out for Heroes 3)?
• #8 Erwan Le Breton 告诉我们，亚山的一条戒律——“严禁火药”——被传达给了所有《魔法门》开发团队。你怎么看这点？你是否设想过有一天火药或其他技术进步会引入亚山（指《英雄无敌3》未推出的 Forge 阵营）？
• I am all for keeping this particular bit of chocolate and peanut butter separate. The most important thing in worldbuilding, in my opinion, is internal consistency. You make the rules of your world to allow that world to hold the stories you want to tell there, and you stick to them to create possibilities. That’s always felt stronger than air-dropping in new elements that might be cool for a moment but that cause fundamental damage to a world’s narrative premise, and cause players to lose trust in the thing they love. So I was all aboard for no gunpowder. If someone wanted fantasy with gunpowder, there’s tons of stuff that offers that, but it never made sense in what we were doing, and I liked that.
• 我非常赞成把巧克力和花生酱分开吃。在我看来，世界观构建中最重要的是内在一致性。你制定世界的规则，是为了让这个世界能够承载你想讲述的故事，并且你需要坚守这些规则来创造各种可能性。这远比空降一些可能一时很酷、却会对世界叙事前提造成根本性破坏、导致玩家丧失对所爱事物信任的新元素要强得多。所以我完全支持“无火药”的设定。如果有人想要带火药的奇幻，市面上此类作品多的是，但这不符合我们正在做的事情，而我恰恰喜欢这一点。

• #9 Are there any other Ashan commandments that game developers had to adhere to?
• #9 还有其他游戏开发者必须遵守的亚山戒律吗？
• It was less a commandment and more a goal, but something we all agreed on 100% was that the world had to feel lived in, and not like we just unwrapped it from the plastic for the next game. So many fantasy worlds feel like they start when the main character steps on stage, and we wanted to go 100% the other direction. Ashan was intended to have history and stories beyond the golden path of the games, legends and myths and heroes who were part of the shared culture of the world that characters reacted to as if it were part of the world, and that they’d known those stories their whole lives.
• 与其说是戒律，不如说是一个目标。但我们百分之百达成共识的一点是：这个世界必须让人感觉是有生活痕迹的，而不是像刚拆封塑料包装准备迎接下一局游戏那样崭新。太多奇幻世界给人的感觉是直到主角登场才开始存在，而我们想反其道而行之。亚山本应拥有超越游戏“黄金路线”的历史和故事，那些传说、神话和英雄应是世界共享文化的一部分，角色们对其的反应应当像是早已熟知这些故事，仿佛它们与生俱来就存在于他们的生活中。

• #10 Which games' plots have you been directly involved in?
• #10 你直接参与了哪些游戏的剧情创作？
• The only game plot I was directly responsible for was Dark Messiah, which was a fascinating experience. I got brought into the Might and Magic space and was simultaneously tasked with working on worldbuilding in a way that would reconcile Heroes and Dark Messiah (not an easy task!) and develop and write the narrative elements for Dark Messiah, which necessitated some very intense conversations about stuff the team had already put in the game that absolutely violated the world strictures that we were putting together. And I remain very proud of the Prophecy of the Dark Messiah that I wrote.
• 我唯一直接负责的游戏剧情是《黑暗弥赛亚》，那是一次迷人的经历。我进入《魔法门》领域时，同时接到了两项任务：一是以能调和《英雄无敌》与《黑暗弥赛亚》的方式进行世界观构建（这绝非易事！）；二是为《黑暗弥赛亚》开发和撰写叙事元素。这期间必须进行一些非常激烈的讨论，因为开发团队已经在游戏中放入了一些与我们正在构建的世界规则严重冲突的内容。我至今仍为我自己撰写的《黑暗弥赛亚预言》感到自豪。

• #11 Is Heroes of Might and Magic a beautiful fairy tale or a dark fantasy?
• #11 《魔法门之英雄无敌》是一个美丽的童话，还是一部黑暗奇幻？
• I think it’s very much a tragedy, honestly, in the best and most historical sense. It’s a story of kingdoms and of people, and how the failings of one affect the other. You have incredible moments of heroism, and of villainy. There’s strength and there’s weakness. The fantasy setting is perfect for framing something like that, because fantasy is in a lot of ways an allegorical form, and that makes telling these big stories easier and more natural.
• 老实说，我觉得它更像是一部悲剧，而且是那种最经典、最具历史厚重感的悲剧。这是关于王国与人民的故事，讲述一方的失败如何影响另一方。其中有令人难以置信的英雄时刻，也有邪恶的时刻；有力量，也有软弱。奇幻背景非常适合承载这样的主题，因为奇幻在很大程度上是一种寓言形式，这让讲述这些宏大的故事变得更加容易和自然。

• #12 What is your favorite creature, hero, and faction?
• #12 你最喜欢的生物、英雄和阵营分别是哪个？
• Now you’re asking me who my favorite child is, and I can’t answer that without making a liar of myself. What I will say is that I loved and still love the work we did, and I think our iterations on standard fantasy tropes were unique and interesting. The goal was always to look at what the shorthand was for orcs or elves or whatever, and then go “Nope, not that, what can we do instead?”
• 这就像问我最喜欢哪个孩子，我要是选了一个就是在撒谎。我能说的是，我喜欢并且至今仍热爱我们所做的工作，我认为我们对标准奇幻套路进行的迭代既独特又有趣。我们的目标始终是审视兽人或精灵等种族的固有刻板印象，然后说：“不，不要那个，我们能换个什么新花样？”

• #13 This is a bit of a strange question, but which universe is your favorite—Enroth, Axeoth, or Ashan?
• #13 这个问题有点奇怪，但你最喜欢哪个宇宙——恩洛斯、阿克梭，还是亚山？
• I’m just glad that all three bring players joy. I’ve never been interested in competing with folks who make other versions of games I’ve worked on. I’m just glad to have been able to work on stuff that could support different visions and continue to make players happy after (or before) my contribution. Do I love Ashan? Sure! But Ashan was the best for the games it supported but that’s all; “best” overall doesn’t really exist.
• 我很高兴这三个宇宙都能给玩家带来快乐。我从来没兴趣和我参与过的游戏的其他版本制作者竞争。我很庆幸能参与到能够支撑不同愿景的工作中，并在我的贡献之后（或之前）持续给玩家带来欢乐。我爱亚山吗？当然！但亚山只是最适合它所支持的那些游戏而已，仅此而已；所谓的“最佳”整体上其实并不存在。

• #14 Looking back, would you change anything about Ashan now or leave things as they are?
• #14 回首往事，你现在会想要改变亚山的某些设定，还是维持现状？
• The one thing I would have changed, I think, is to have given ourselves more time. The original creation of Ashan was something that came together really quickly, and while it was absolutely fueled by some fantastic inspiration, as a writer I always want more time to iterate and polish and see what secondary ideas fall out of the initial burst of creativity. I think the setup of the world really holds up and speaks for itself, but like anything, I think it could have benefited from more iteration and polish.
• 我想改变的一点，就是给我们自己更多的时间。亚山世界的初始构建完成得非常快，虽然这绝对是源于一些绝妙的灵感迸发，但作为一名作家，我总是希望能有更多时间来迭代和打磨，看看最初的创造力爆发后会衍生出哪些次要的点子。我认为这个世界的基础设定经受住了时间的考验，本身已足够说明问题，但就像任何事物一样，我觉得它能从更多的迭代和打磨中获益。

• #15 Do you still follow the games in the Might and Magic universe? What is your opinion about the new games?
• #15 你现在还会关注《魔法门》宇宙的游戏吗？你对新作有何看法？
• I don’t follow the franchise closely, but I am always happy when another project gets announced. It means that people are still enjoying something that I worked on, and that that what I did maybe inspired other folks so it’s very much a living thing. I hope they keep making Might & Magic games, in whatever incarnation, for a long, long time.
• 我不会密切关注这个系列，但每当有新项目宣布时，我总是很高兴。这意味着人们仍在享受我参与创作的作品，也许我的工作还启发了其他人，所以它如今依然鲜活。我希望他们能继续制作《魔法门》游戏，无论以何种形式，持续很长很长时间。

• #16 Would you participate in another Might and Magic project? It doesn't have to be a game, it could be a book or something like that?
• #16 你会参与另一个《魔法门》项目吗？不一定是游戏，也可以是一本书之类的？
• If the call went out to me and the project was interesting, I’d be thrilled to dive back in. When you create a world, you’re really creating a possibility space for stories, and I think there’s a whole lot of wonderful stories still to be told in that world.
• 如果有人向我发出邀请，且项目有趣的话，我会非常激动地再次投身其中。当你创造一个世界时，你实际上是在创造一个用于讲故事的可能性空间，我认为在那个世界里还有许多精彩的故事等待被讲述。