30周年回顾 第七章 新的开始

Chapter Seven

"New Beginnings"

In August of 2003, during a bankruptcy auction of 3DO's holdings, the development rights to the Might & Magic and Heroes of Might & Magic franchises were purchased by the game publisher Ubisoft for a bargain basement price of 1.3 million dollars. Curiously, they didn't choose to pick up the rights to King's Bounty, the game from which Heroes had originally evolved, leaving it available for Russian game distributor 1C to later snap up and begin creating new Bounty spinoffs of their own—much to the confusion of fans of the franchise who were familiar with its history.

2003 年 8 月，在 3DO 公司资产的破产拍卖中，《魔法门》和《魔法门之英雄无敌》系列游戏的开发权被游戏发行商育碧以极低的价格（130 万美元）购得。有趣的是，他们并没有选择购买《国王的赏金》——《英雄无敌》之起源的版权，它被俄罗斯游戏分销商 1C 收购了下来，并开始开发自己新的《国王的恩赐》系列衍生游戏——这让对这个系列的历史非常熟悉的粉丝们感到困惑。

Following the 3DO sale, representatives from Ubisoft reached out to Heroes' creator Jon Van Caneghem and asked if he'd be willing to help sort through the old New World Computing materials and make sense of it all. Caneghem didn't have it in him. The loss of his creations was still too raw and too painful to deal with, and despite Ubisoft's significant financial offer, he turned them down. He would be taking a step back from the industry as a whole for a short while until he regained his creative footing.

在 3DO 被收购之后，育碧公司的代表与《英雄无敌》的创作者乔·万·坎内根取得联系，询问他是否愿意帮忙整理原 NWC 公司的旧有资料，并理出剧情线索。但坎内根并不愿意这样做。失去他所创作的作品对他来说仍然太过痛苦和难以接受，尽管育碧给出了丰厚的经济补偿，但他还是拒绝了。他将要短暂地从游戏行业退出，直到他重新找回创作的灵感为止。

In Paris, all that was left of New World arrived in a few jumbled cardboard boxes with very little in the way of an explanation. Heroes' new producer at Ubisoft, Fabrice Cambounet, was left with something of an archaeological project to see if the boxes contained anything that could be used in the new production. "I think there were like two or three boxes of CDs mostly," he recalled. "I was the one in charge of browsing through all of the content. So there were a lot of build versions, 2D assets, masters, et cetera, et cetera..." Unfortunately, while he found a lot of interesting production artifacts, there was little that could be of direct use in the development of the new game. Even before receiving the materials from 3DO, the decision had already been made that Ubisoft would be translating Heroes into a fully 3D game. "We were really starting over. We drew a lot of inspiration from the previous games, of course, but we couldn't use the older assets. Some of the things like the hero portraits and the interface might have worked, but again, all of those elements were going to be replaced."

在巴黎，NWC 的所有遗留物品都被装在几个杂乱无章的纸箱里运了过来，而且几乎没有附带任何说明。育碧公司的《英雄无敌》新制作人法布莱斯·坎鲍奈特接手后，面对的是一个类似考古学般的任务，即要查看这些纸箱里是否装有可用于新作品的物品。“我记得大概有两三个装的都是光盘的纸箱。”他回忆道，“我是负责浏览所有内容的人。里面有各种各样的建筑版本、2D 资源、母版等等等等……”不幸的是，尽管他找到了很多有趣的制作成果，但其中几乎没有可以直接用于新游戏开发的部分。甚至在收到 3DO 提供的材料之前，育碧公司就已经做出了决定，把《英雄无敌》改编成一款完全 3D 的游戏。“我们真的是从头开始。当然，我们会从之前的游戏中汲取灵感，但我们无法使用旧有的那些资源。其中那些英雄的肖像和界面之类的东西或许还能用作参考，但同样，所有这些元素都将被替换掉。”

In many respects, Cambounet was seen as the ideal candidate to lead the Ubisoft reimagining of Heroes. In 2000, he'd stepped away from Ubisoft for a few years to work with Westka Interactive, who had been developing a port of Heroes III for the Sega Dreamcast. For reasons related to the technical limitations of the console hardware, it wasn't possible to make the faithful one-to-one port that New World Computing had wanted. After twelve months of development, the Dreamcast project was shut down. "It was too complex for the Dreamcast," Cambounet said. "We'd done a lot of work on the UX, on all the windows, on all the extra choices we had to adapt for the screen. But in the end, the Dreamcast was not powerful enough. It didn't have enough memory, basically. So it was dropped during production."

在很多方面，坎鲍奈特都被认为是领导《英雄无敌》游戏重续工作的理想人选。2000 年，他暂时离开了育碧，去韦斯特卡互动公司工作，该公司正在为世嘉 DC 主机开发《英雄无敌3》的移植版本。由于该主机硬件的技术限制，无法按照 NWC 公司所期望的方式进行完全忠实的一比一移植。经过 12 个月的开发，DC 移植项目最终被叫停。“对于 DC 来说，这太复杂了。”坎鲍奈特说，“我们在用户体验、所有窗口、所有必须为屏幕而调整的额外选项方面做了大量工作。但最终，DC 的性能还是不够强大。根本上讲，它就没有足够的内存。所以在制作中途，这个项目被放弃了。”

Cambounet returned to Ubisoft around the same time that the Heroes license was acquired. His passion and experience with the IP made him a logical choice to serve as the project's producer. More than that, his time working at a third-party development house had given him the perspective he was going to need to manage Heroes' newly appointed external team based in Russia.

坎鲍奈特在《英雄无敌》游戏开发权被收购的差不多同一时间回到了育碧公司。他对该 IP 的热爱以及丰富的相关经验，使他成为担任该项目制作人的理想人选。不仅如此，他在第三方开发公司的工作经历，还让他拥有着管理位于俄罗斯的新设外部团队所需的视角。

Roughly a month before Cambounet began panning for gold in New World's boxes, the developers at Nival Interactive in Moscow caught wind of Ubisoft's plans to make the next Heroes of Might & Magic. Before Ubisoft even began soliciting requests for proposals from potential development teams, Nival fired off their pitch for why they should be the ones to bring the venerable king of fantasy turn-based strategy games back to life. Their team was unique—one of the first big game developers in Russia. Virtually every person at Nival claimed to be rabid fans of the franchise, which, given the overwhelming popularity of Heroes in eastern Europe, likely wasn't an exaggeration. Since its founding in 1998, Nival had already shipped eight popular games, two of which—Etherlords and Silent Storm—had been well regarded in the world of turn-based strategy games. They would be shoo-ins to win the development contract.

大约在坎鲍奈特开始在 NWC 的盒子里淘金的前一个月，莫斯科 Nival 互动公司的开发人员就得知了育碧公司要制作下一部《英雄无敌》系列游戏的消息。在育碧甚至还未开始向潜在的开发团队征集提案之前，Nival 公司就迫不及待地提交了他们的方案，阐述了为何应该让他们成为使这款广受赞誉的奇幻回合制策略游戏重获新生的团队。他们的团队独具特色——是俄罗斯最早的一批大型游戏开发商之一。Nival 公司的每一位员工都自称是该系列游戏的狂热粉丝，鉴于《英雄无敌》在东欧地区的超高人气，这种说法或许并非夸张之辞。自 1998 年成立以来，Nival 已经发行了八款受欢迎的游戏，其中两款——《苍穹霸主》和《寂静风暴》在回合制策略游戏领域颇受好评。他们无疑是赢得开发合同的热门人选。

In a July 2005 interview on the Celestial Heavens website, Alexander Mishulin said of the project, "[Heroes] has enough innovations in it to keep several game designers occupied for a couple of years." He wasn't exaggerating. They would have nearly two and a half years to bring Heroes V to market (a development freedom for which Jon Van Caneghem would likely have killed at 3DO). At the time, Mishulin was Creative Director of Nival Interactive (which shortly thereafter would drop the word "Interactive" from their name to simply become Nival), and he would serve as the lead designer on Heroes V. His goal for the game was to make the gameplay more “mature.” He wanted to offer the player more strategic and tactical options, but he also wanted fans of the previous games to feel at home with the new experience that they hoped to provide.

在 2005 年 7 月“Celestial Heavens”网站的一次访谈中，亚历山大·密苏林谈及该项目时说道：“《英雄无敌》中包含了足够多的新颖元素，足以让好几位游戏设计师忙活上几年。”他并非夸大其词。他们花了近两年半的时间才将《英雄无敌5》推向市场（以这种开发自由度，能把 3DO 时期的乔·万·坎内根开心死）。当时，密苏林是 Nival 互动公司的创意总监（该公司不久之后便去掉了“互动”这个词，就叫 Nival），也担任着《英雄无敌5》的首席设计师。他对于这款游戏的目标是让游戏玩法更加“成熟”。他希望为玩家提供更多战略和战术方面的选择，但他也希望前作的粉丝们能对他们所期望提供的新体验感到舒适自在。

Cambounet described the working relationship between Ubisoft and Nival as fairly typical for an interaction between a publisher and a third-party developer at first. “Nival was mostly in charge of the gameplay decisions, but Ubisoft was still involved a lot in that as well. So this was me and an associate producer checking in regularly with Nival. But then we had to report to the stakeholders inside Ubisoft every five or six months to make presentations about what was done and get approvals to move on to the next step. So Nival was on kind of a tight leash because we didn't really know them. They had a good track record, and they were really enthusiastic, but we hadn't made a game with them before, and we still needed to make sure they went in the right direction," Cambounet said. The unusually close eye that Ubisoft kept on Nival was largely because of the perceived value of the Heroes franchise. "This was a substantial IP that Ubisoft wanted to build on, so there was actually a lot more involvement in choosing the factions and choosing the creatures, for example."

坎鲍奈特描述了育碧与 Nival 之间的合作关系，起初这种关系对于发行商与第三方开发者的互动而言是比较典型的。“Nival 主要负责游戏玩法方面的决策，但育碧在这一过程中也参与颇多。所以当时就是我和一名副制作人定期与 Nival 进行沟通。但后来我们每五到六个月都要向育碧的股东汇报工作进展，并进行相关展示，以获得继续推进下一步工作的批准。因此，Nival 的工作受到了较为严格的限制，因为我们并不了解他们的情况。他们有着良好的业绩记录，态度也非常积极，但我们之前从未与他们合作开发过游戏，所以我们仍需要确保他们朝着正确的方向前进。”坎鲍奈特说道。育碧对 Nival 采取如此密切的监管措施，很大程度上是因为《英雄无敌》系列游戏具有不可估量的价值。“这是育碧想要进一步开发的重要知识产权，因此在选择阵营和生物种类等方面，实际上我们参与的力度要大得多。”

Fortunately, Mishulin's goals for Heroes V fell very much in line with Cambounet's. "I think the major challenge was in deciding how to push the sequel," Cambounet said. "There's a formula when making a sequel penned by Sid Meier, the designer of Civilization. He said, 'You keep one third, you improve one third, and you make one third new.' That's the smartest recipe." When it came to rationing out how each of those thirds would be apportioned, Cambounet and Mishulin had many choices about the directions in which they could proceed.

幸运的是，密苏林为《英雄无敌5》设定的目标感觉与坎鲍奈特的设想非常契合。“我认为最大的挑战在于如何推进续作的开发工作。”坎鲍奈特说，“在制作续作时，席德·梅尔（《文明》系列游戏的设计师）有一套固定的模式。他说：‘你保留三分之一，改进三分之一，另外三分之一则要全新创作。’这就是最明智的方案。”在如何分配这三部分的内容比例方面，坎鲍奈特和密苏林有很多不同的发展方向可供选择。

A chief priority for Mishulin was to bridge the ideological divide that had developed between fans of Heroes III and Heroes IV. "The two games had drastically different approaches to how Heroes were used on the battlefield, how armies worked, or how the zone affects their behaviors. We set a goal to bring players from both sides together and make an experience that would be interesting and appealing to both. We tried to reintroduce the idea of having the hero on the battlefield, but in a different way. Not like in IV when you were wandering around with a whole party of heroes, but instead as an additional battle force."

密苏林的首要任务是弥合《英雄无敌3》和《英雄无敌4》的粉丝之间所形成的意识形态分歧。“这两款游戏在战场上英雄的使用方式、军队的运作方式，或者区域对它们行为的影响方面有着截然不同的处理方式。我们设定了一个目标，就是要让双方的玩家团结起来，创造出一种对双方都具有吸引力且有趣的体验。我们试图重新引入让英雄出现在战场上的概念，但采用的方式有所不同。不像在《英雄无敌4》中，你带着一整队英雄四处游荡，而是将其作为额外的战斗力呈现出来。”

On a more practical level, Nival and Ubisoft had to unify their development philosophies in order to create a coherent game. For the most part finding common ground wasn't difficult, and Mishulin became a vocal advocate of Ubisoft's practices. "We adopted a lot of their practices into our own development culture because we were still a smaller studio. It structured our understanding how game development should be done, what phases you should go through, how you should set up production in a proper way, what things should you check on during different stages of the development." He became especially fond of Ubisoft's theme-driven design process. "When we started working on the game, we spent a lot of time discussing what the meaning of the game was. That was something new. What kind of philosophical question or idea should govern how we crafted the storyline, and the action, and the gameplay? What element or vision of the game unites everything into a very digestible form? Ideally this idea would guide the development and tie together the narrative and the mechanics."

从更实际的角度来看，Nival 和育碧必须统一他们的开发理念，以打造出一款连贯的游戏。在很大程度上，要找到共同点并不困难，密苏林也成为了育碧做法的积极倡导者。“我们把他们很多的做法融入到了我们自己的开发文化中，因为我们当时还是一家规模较小的公司。这让我们明确了游戏开发应如何进行，应该经历哪些阶段，应该如何以恰当的方式组织生产，以及在开发的不同阶段应该检查哪些事项。”他尤其喜欢育碧以主题为导向的设计流程，“当我们开始开发这款游戏时，我们花了很多时间讨论这游戏的意义是什么。这是种全新的尝试。应当用什么样的哲学问题或理念指导我们构思故事情节、行动流程以及游戏玩法呢？游戏中的哪些元素或理念能够将所有部分整合成一种易于理解的形式呢？理想情况下，这个理念应当能够引领开发进程，并将叙事和机制紧密结合起来。”

The one thing the pair knew for certain was that they would not be changing Heroes from a turn-based strategy game to a real-time game, even though real-time games were dominating the strategy category at the time. "The turn-based genre gives you time to think the situation over and to implement the best solution possible," Mishulin said. "So I would call it the most thoughtful gameplay among all genres. Real-time games also make you think but because you are so tied to the time factor you have to do it fast—and usually you really can't afford to waste precious time on tactics. You think more globally, building your strategy." Cambounet agreed, saying, "We wanted to have something more dynamic in the battle stage and move not to real time, but to something that was more fluid. We spent a lot of time working on that so that you'd have time to react and to reflect, but the player wouldn't have to micromanage each unit."

这对搭档唯一确定的是，他们不会将《英雄无敌》这款游戏从回合制策略游戏改造成即时战略游戏，尽管当时即时战略游戏在策略类游戏中占据了主导地位。“回合制游戏能让你有时间仔细思考局势，并采取最佳解决方案。”密苏林说，“所以我认为它在所有游戏类型中是思考性最强的玩法。即时战略游戏也会让你思考，但因为你受到时间因素的限制，所以必须迅速完成——通常你真的不能浪费宝贵的时间在战术上。你会更从全局出发，构建你的战略。”坎鲍奈特也表示同意，他说：“我们希望在战斗阶段能动态性更强，而不是改为即时游戏，只是感觉要更流畅一些。我们为此投入了大量时间，以便玩家有时间做出反应和深思，但不必对每个单位进行微观管理。”

A primary concern for the Heroes V development team was how the game was going to be adapted into a fully 3D environment and how that shift might impact the gameplay. They wanted to make the best use of new technology, but also wanted to avoid wandering too far afield so that longtime players wouldn't feel alienated by the experience. "We worked it so that it still felt like a 2D game with regards to exploration and how players understood the topology of the maps," Mishulin said. "Our approach was to do things in a fairly conservative way so that it was simple to map and for players to understand. If it worked and everyone enjoyed it, we thought we could try something more aggressive or different the next time, but the important thing was to introduce the new technology."

《英雄无敌5》开发团队的主要关注点在于如何将游戏转换为完全的 3D 环境，以及这种转变会对游戏玩法产生何种影响。他们希望充分利用新技术，同时又不想偏离得太远，以免让长期玩家对这种体验感到陌生。“我们通过这种方式来确保游戏在探索以及玩家对地图拓扑结构的理解方面仍感觉像是一款 2D 游戏。”密苏林说，“我们的方法是采取相当保守的方式来进行操作，以便于地图绘制和玩家理解。如果这种方法行得通，大家都喜欢，我们就会考虑在下次尝试更激进或不同的方式，但重要的是要引入新技术。”

While the shift to 3D would end up affecting nearly every aspect of the game, its effects would be felt particularly strongly on the game's battle arenas. Before a single centaur, ogre, or necromancer could spill blood on these fields of glory, different departments of the team were battling it out over every square pixel of virtual real estate. "The art department wanted to use the 3D camera to show off the creatures and zoom in when they were making attacks or using their abilities," Mishulin explained. “To do that, we'd have to trade off and have smaller arenas, which would take away some of the sense of scale and the epicness of the confrontations from the design perspective, but that also changed the balance of the overall game. The smaller the arena is, the more you're concentrating power. Decisions are more impactful because with less space, how you're positioning those units becomes much, much more important. If you make tactical mistakes, they have a bigger impact on the game. You're either making a huge mistake or making a very, very good move. So, your decisions are amplified, but it also makes the game a little harder. We spent a lot of time weighing what would make the best impact. I spent days writing emails back and forth with Fabrice and arguing about the reduction of the size of the battlefield, but I guess Ubisoft research showed that arenas should be bigger, so we finally found a compromise. We have these huge siege maps that feel huge. They're big, and they allow all of all the creatures to be on the battlefield with these huge siege towers and everything, while the usual encounters could be smaller.”

虽然向 3D 转型最终会对游戏的几乎所有方面产生影响，但这种转变对游戏战斗场地方面的影响会尤为明显。在任何一只半人马、食人魔或者亡灵巫师踏上这些荣耀之地之前，游戏团队的不同部门就已经对虚拟土地的每一个像素点展开了激烈的竞争。“美术部门希望利用 3D 镜头来展示这些生物，并在它们发动攻击或使用能力时进行特写镜头拍摄。”密苏林解释道，“为了实现这一点，我们不得不做出权衡，缩小战场的规模。这样一来，从设计角度来看，就会削弱那种规模感和战斗的宏大感，但这也改变了整个游戏的平衡。战场越小，就越需要集中力量，决策的影响也就越大，因为空间越小，如何部署这些单位就变得更为至关重要。如果发生战术失误，对游戏的影响也会更大。你要么犯下重大错误，要么做出非常出色的操作。也就是说，你的决策被放大了，但这也让游戏变得更难了一点。我们花了大量时间权衡哪些措施能产生最佳效果。我和法布莱斯连续几天通过电子邮件来回交流，争论缩小战场规模的问题，但我想育碧的研究表明，战场应该更大一些。所以我们最终找到了一个折衷的方案。我们做了些巨大的攻城战战场，感觉非常宏大。它们很大，能让所有的生物出现在战场上，还有那些巨大的攻城塔等等，而常规的遭遇战则可以规模更小一些。”

Along with using the new environment to communicate scale and scope, the development team wanted to improve how important game information was passed along to the player. In previous iterations of the series, the order in which units would move had always been concealed, which made planning some tactics more challenging. Heroes V sought to make the process more transparent. “We reworked initiative and provided an initiative bar that displayed all the creatures and their orders of movement. You didn't have to guess anymore. You could see when units were going to move, and it made it simpler to plan. When you used magic that slows down enemies, you could see which ones were being pushed further down on the initiative bar. It was very visual, and a little bit like how the Japanese games handle it. A lot of JRPGs did this for the party-based RPGs. It served the combat very well, and worked perfectly for helping to communicate how initiative functioned.”

在利用新环境来展现规模和范围的同时，开发团队还希望改进将重要游戏信息传递给玩家的方式。在该系列的先前版本中，单位的行动顺序一直被隐藏起来，这使得某些战术的规划变得更加困难。《英雄无敌5》试图让这一过程更加透明。“我们重新设计了主动性机制，并添加了一个主动性条，上面会显示所有生物及其行动顺序。这样你就无需再猜测了。你可以根据这个系统提前预知单位的行动时间，这使得作战计划的制定变得更加简便。当你使用能减缓敌人速度的魔法时，就能看到哪些敌人在行动条上所处的位置更靠后。这种方式非常直观，有点像日本游戏中的处理方式。许多日本公司在基于队伍的角色扮演游戏中都采用了这种设计。这种设计对战斗非常有利，而且非常适合用来表现主动性的运作方式。”

As the dev team wrestled with these early technical considerations, Nival found itself in a bit of a holding pattern regarding what factions and what troops they would be allowed to use in their campaigns. “Ubisoft was very, very involved in those choices. Heroes was now a Ubisoft IP, so they internally wanted to update the world, the heroes, the characters, and the backstory which left Nival waiting on us,” Cambounet explained. Although Ubisoft had the rights to the narrative aspects of the Heroes universe, they didn't have anyone assigned to manage it. “Nival had begun working with the factions without any background game lore, so things were being created in parallel. That was a big issue for them. They didn't have context. We should have had the story first, then the characters, then the concept art, but it was all being created at the same time. They were going crazy saying, ‘Hey, when is this thing going to be settled? When will we have the real name of this character?’ It was a big disruption because the story needed to weave between the factions and the heroes so that it made sense within the campaign.”

在开发团队努力解决这些早期的技术问题时，Nival 公司发现自己在决定哪些阵营以及哪些部队能够被允许用于其战役方面陷入了僵局。“育碧在这些选择上参与得非常非常深入。《英雄无敌》现在已成为育碧的自有品牌，所以他们内部希望更新这个世界，包括英雄、角色以及背景故事，这使得 Nival 公司一直得等待我们。”坎鲍奈特解释道。尽管育碧拥有《英雄无敌》宇宙叙事方面的版权，但他们并没有分配专人来管理它。“Nival 在没有任何背景游戏设定的情况下就开始制作各个阵营了，所以各种内容是同时进行创作的。这对他们来说是个大问题，他们没有背景信息。我们应该是先有故事，然后是角色，再是概念艺术，但所有内容都是同时创作的。他们简直要发疯了，不停地问：‘嘿，这件事什么时候能解决？我们什么时候能知道这个角色的真实名字？’这造成了很大的混乱，因为故事需要在各个阵营和英雄之间相互交织，这样整个战役才能显得合理。”

The enormous job of creating the new Ubisoft Heroes universe would fall to Erwan Le Breton, who was already part of Ubisoft's centralized HQ Editorial marketing team. Prior to being handed the keys to the Might & Magic universe, he'd been responsible for managing every fantasy, horror, supernatural, or science-fiction related property in Ubisoft's massive portfolio (apart from the very successful line of Tom Clancy-branded games). “They came to me saying, ‘Oh, by the way, Erwan, we now have Might & Magic, and we already have two games in development at two external studios,’ ” Le Breton recalled with a chuckle. “‘Since you're the fantasy guy at HQ, can you explain what Might & Magic is? We've got a box from 3DO full of CD-ROMs and that's basically it. We don't know what it's about and we need to give feedback to these teams about what they've been doing.’”

于是，创建育碧新的《英雄无敌》宇宙这一艰巨的任务交由艾万-勒布雷东承担，他原本就是育碧集中化总部编辑营销团队的一员。在接手《魔法门》宇宙之前，他曾负责管理育碧庞大作品库中所有与奇幻、恐怖、超自然或科幻相关的作品（除了非常成功的汤姆·克兰西品牌游戏系列）。“他们来找我说：‘哦，顺便说一下，艾万，我们现在有了《魔法门》系列，而且我们已经有两款游戏由两家外包工作室在开发了。’”勒布雷东笑着回忆道，“既然你是总部的奇幻专家，你能解释一下《魔法门》是什么吗？我们有个箱子，装满了 3DO 的光盘，就只有这样。我们并不清楚它的具体情况，可我们还要对那些团队目前的工作给出反馈。”

Le Breton was already somewhat familiar with the franchise, and had played the Might & Magic VI RPG as well as Heroes III and Heroes IV, but he committed himself to learning as much as he could about the existing universe before reporting back. After compiling his findings, he would explain that Might & Magic and Heroes technically existed in the same universe, but the science-fiction underpinnings of Might & Magic had never been referenced in any of the Heroes games. He recommended that going forward, they should stick to a pure fantasy universe. As he then dug into the work that had already been done at Nival with Heroes V and at Arkane Studios for Dark Messiah of Might & Magic, he tried to address problems that had already cropped up. “I saw the two projects sometimes contradicted each other, or they were missing things. Yes, they'd drop names about people and places in the world of Might & Magic from the pre-existing games, but I was afraid they would infuriate fans because the references were so wrong. My recommendation then was that we own it completely. It's now Ubisoft's IP. We needed a new setting that we could control one hundred percent. I created a list of things that we needed to keep from the original titles, emblematic things like factions, the races within them, the political agenda that was associated with them. People loved them, and we should keep them, but we'd have to reinvent them. This was before the whole Avengers Marvel Cinematic Universe, but the comics had been doing that for a long time, and I thought we should take inspiration from that. The critical part would be managing the expectations of the pre-existing community of Heroes fans. Otherwise, we'd get lynched by the mob—tarred and feathered, whatever. They knew more about the IP than we did."

勒布雷东对这个系列已经有了一定的了解，他不仅玩过《魔法门6》这款角色扮演游戏，还玩过《英雄无敌3》和《英雄无敌4》。但在汇报之前，他决心尽可能多地了解这个现有的宇宙背景。在整理完自己的研究成果后，他解释说，《魔法门》和《英雄无敌》实际上属于同一个宇宙，但《魔法门》的科幻元素在《英雄无敌》系列的任何游戏中都未曾被提及。他建议今后应该坚持打造一个纯粹的奇幻宇宙。随后，他深入研究 Nival 工作室为开发《英雄无敌5》以及 Arkane 工作室为《魔法门之黑暗弥赛亚》所做的工作，试图解决已经出现的问题。“我发现这两个项目有时会相互矛盾，或者存在遗漏之处。没错，它们会从之前的游戏里引用《魔法门》世界里的人物和地点，但我担心这些引用会激怒粉丝，因为这些引用是完全错误的。我当时的建议是既然我们已经完全拥有了它，现在它已经是育碧的知识产权了，就需要一个我们能够百分百掌控的新设定。我还列出了我们需要保留的那些原作中的内容，比如诸如派系、种族、它们的政治理念之类具有代表性的元素。人们喜欢这些内容，我们应该保留它们，但我们需要对其进行重新打造。这发生在漫威电影宇宙的整个《复仇者联盟》系列之前，但漫画界早就一直在这么做了。我认为我们应该从中汲取灵感，关键在于要管理好现有《英雄无敌》粉丝群体的期望值。否则，我们就会被愤怒的群众包围，以至于身败名裂——他们对这个 IP 的了解比我们更深入。”

Impressed with his recommendations, Ubisoft asked Le Breton to assume control of the narrative "reboot" of the Heroes universe. He happily accepted the role and began to assemble a creative think tank of writers, game designers, and artists—many of whom he knew through his prior work in the comic book industry. His association with writer Kurt McClung in particular would soon have a major impact on the mythological framework of the new universe. McClung had hired a fresh-out-of-college Le Breton to help collate and distribute lore books for the world of Karn, which was the setting for an immensely popular play-by-mail game called Quest. "He went and talked to all the fancy people," McClung said. "He talked to everyone, and we got two illustrators for the interior and a cover artist. And we created this book to sell in stores. It was pretty novel because it was almost all user-generated content." This world-building experience would unquestionably shape Le Breton's approach to his new task at Ubisoft.

由于对他的建议印象深刻，育碧公司邀请勒布雷东负责“重启”《英雄无敌》系列的故事创作工作。他欣然接受了这一角色，并开始组建一个由作家、游戏设计师和艺术家组成的创意团队——其中许多人都是他之前在漫画行业工作时结识的。尤其是他与作家库尔特·麦克伦的密切合作，会对新宇宙的神话框架产生重大影响。麦克伦曾聘请刚从大学毕业的勒布雷东来协助制作和分发关于卡恩世界的传说书籍——卡恩世界是一款广受欢迎的电子邮件游戏《使命》的的背景设定。“他去见了许多时尚的人。”麦克伦说，“他跟他们所有人谈，我们为内页和封面聘请了两位插画师，还制作出了这本书在商店销售。这确实非常新颖，因为几乎都是二创的内容。”这次世界构建的经历无疑影响了勒布雷东在育碧新任务中的工作方式。

Along with his professional contacts, Le Breton solicited input from people in the Heroes fan community, including future Heroes writer Julien Pirou. "I think Julian probably hated us at first. He'd be out there saying, 'Oh, those Ubisoft guys! What are they doing?!" But after a while when we interacted with him, he understood that we were craving information, and we were willing to bring stuff back from the old days, but in a new format. Eventually he joined us. Now he knows more about the world of Ashan that we created together than even me or the lead writer."

除了与业内同行保持联系外，勒布雷东还向《英雄无敌》粉丝社区中的成员征求意见，其中就有该游戏未来的编剧朱利安·皮乌。“我觉得朱利安一开始可能很讨厌我们。他可能会说：‘哦，那些育碧的家伙！他们在搞什么鬼？！’但我们与他交流了一段时间后，他明白了我们其实是在渴望获取信息，而且希望将往日时光以新的形式重现出来。最终他加入了我们。现在，他对我们共同创造的亚山世界的了解，甚至超过了我以及首席编剧。”

To help him create the new Might & Magic universe, Le Breton tapped Richard Dansky, who was well-known for his work developing traditional pen-and-paper RPGs for White Wolf. Together the two of them would create the new Heroes setting of Ashan with help from an informal tiger team—an ad hoc force of the most inspired lore masters from across the Ubisoft organization. "What was weird is that we had the Might & Magic IP development team in Paris, and then the developers in their own respective studios in other countries. There were like six or seven of us managing the remote teams while we met—sometimes two or three days a week—to work on brainstorming ideas for Ashan. It wasn't corporate. It was more like a TV series writers' room, with the showrunner and the collaborators. And we'd be together all day in a meeting room with posters and Post-Its all over the wall, exchanging a lot of ideas and having heated discussions about the color of some specific dragon. And you'd be feeling like, Really, I'm getting paid for this? And we'd have these lunches together, but because we're in France, we're getting out of the office to a fancy restaurant for two hours, so it was a great time. Of course, we also had to keep in mind that this had to go into a game, so it had to be practical. We had to figure out how much money it would cost to realize in the games, so we had the constraints of the production."

为了帮助自己构建全新的《魔法门》宇宙，勒布雷东还邀请了理查德·丹斯基加入团队。理查德因负责为白狼公司开发传统的纸笔角色扮演游戏而闻名。两人携手合作，并借助一支由全育碧最具灵感的背景故事精英组成的、非正式特别问题小组的力量，共同打造了新《英雄无敌》中亚山世界的设定。“奇怪的是，我们只找了巴黎的《魔法门》知识产权开发团队，然后各国各工作室的开发者都找上了我们。我们六七个人负责管理远程团队，每周大概开两三次远程会议，共同构思关于亚山的创意。这不是一个正规的组织架构，更像是一个电视剧编剧室，有节目负责人和合作人员参与其中。我们整天都在会议室里开会，墙上贴满了海报和便签纸，大家交流着许多想法，还就某些龙的颜色进行了激烈的讨论。我就会想，这真的是我领工资的工作吗？我们还会一起吃午餐，但只限于我们在法国的人，会离开办公室去一家高档餐厅聊上两个小时，那是一段非常美好的时光。当然，我们还得考虑到这必须融入到游戏中，所以必须具有可操作性。我们得计算出在游戏里实现这一功能需要投入多少资金，因此也有制作方面的限制条件。”

To assist with realizing the look of his new universe, Le Breton turned to Olivier Ledroit, a renowned illustrator who had first become famous for his comic book series, The Dark Moon Chronicles. Le Breton had been able to contact the artist through mutual connections in the comics industry, and both Cambounet and Le Breton felt that Ledroit's dark, gothic, H.R. Giger-influenced style would be well-suited to the direction in which they intended to steer the Heroes franchise. Ledroit already had some experience working in the computer gaming field, but was particularly drawn to the ideas that were being proposed for Ashan.

为了表现他新宇宙的视觉效果，勒布雷东求助于奥利维耶·勒德罗，这位知名插画家最初因《黑月历代记》系列漫画而声名鹊起。勒布雷东是通过他们在漫画行业的共同联系，接洽上这位艺术家的。坎鲍奈特和勒布雷东都认为，勒德罗的作品受汉斯·鲁道夫·吉格尔（瑞士知名的超现实主义画家、雕塑家及设计师）影响，具有阴暗的哥特式风格，非常适合他们想要引领《英雄无敌》系列走上的发展方向。勒德罗已经有一些涉足电脑游戏领域的经验，但他被关于亚山世界所提出的想法深深吸引了。

While Le Breton and his team had great respect for the original Heroes universe, they wanted their new setting to reflect the narrative sensibilities of the time. In the decade since the release of Heroes I, the public's taste in fantasy had shifted from the more lighthearted fare of the early '90s to the grittier vibes of the early twenty-first century. The Ubisoft team was determined to provide what the public seemed to want. "That was the trend at the time, and a lot of movies and television shows were pushing that idea along. Game of Thrones was like history, but with a bit of magic and some dragons thrown in. So that's what people were expecting from a modern fantasy setting." The shift in tone would take many people by surprise. Jeffrey Spock—who became Heroes V's new lead writer following Richard Danksy's shift to the Tom Clancy's team—recalled that it took a little while to adapt to what Nival was looking for. "I tended to make things that were less dark, less bloody, less savage, you know. My stuff was a little more Star Wars-y than Game of Thrones-y, but the Russians were definitely way past that. I mean, they were looking for a much darker, grimmer, more emotionally depressing, destructive story," Spock recalled. He broke into a grin. "You know, my sister is a professor in Russian studies in the US and her definition of a Russian comedy is a book where everybody doesn't die in the end. I mean the whole European view and literary world is just much harsher and darker and grimmer. I'm coming in as this American guy who wants to write this nice fantasy story. And there's great differences of opinion, not just on the flow, on the plot, but on the style and the intensity and that kind of thing. And, so, I was happy to leave those final decisions about the tone to Ubisoft because I was a junior. I didn't feel it was my place to try to dictate, and I think they had a better view for the community and the players."

虽然勒布雷东及其团队对原版《英雄无敌》系列有着极高的敬意，但他们希望自己的新设定能够反映当时的故事叙述风格。自《英雄无敌1》发布以来的十年间，公众对奇幻作品的喜好已从 90 年代早期那种较为轻松的类型转变为 21 世纪初那种更具粗粝感的风格。育碧团队决心提供似乎有更多人想要的东西。“这是当时的趋势，很多电影和电视剧都在推动这一理念。《权力的游戏》就好像是一段历史，但融入了一些魔法和一些龙。所以这就是人们对于现代奇幻设定所期望的。”这种风格的转变可能会让很多人感到意外。在理查德·丹斯基转入汤姆·克兰西团队之后，担任《英雄无敌5》新编剧的杰弗里·斯波克回忆说，一开始他需要一段时间来适应 Nival 所期望的风格：“你知道的，我倾向于创作一些不那么黑暗、不那么血腥、不那么野蛮的作品。我的作品更像《星球大战》风格而非《权力的游戏》风格，但俄罗斯人显然已经超越了那种程度。我的意思是，他们所寻求的是一种更黑暗、更残酷、更令人情绪低落、更具破坏性的故事。”斯波克咧嘴一笑，“你知道么，我姐姐是一名研究俄罗斯的美国教授，她对俄罗斯喜剧的定义是：故事的结局里所有人物都没有死。我是说，整个欧洲的观念和文学艺术都更加冷血、黑暗和残酷。我进团队时作为一个美国人，本想要写一个美好的奇幻故事。结果就有了很大的意见分歧，不光是行文和剧情，还有风格和强度等等。所以，我非常高兴能把这些风格的最终决定权交给育碧，因为我当时还只是个新手。我觉得我无权去强行规定，而且我认为他们更能了解整个社区以及玩家们的想法。”

Another goal of the Ubisoft writing team was to create a universe that felt more internally consistent. "If there was a magical creature in the world, we wanted there to be a reason for it," Le Breton explained. "We didn't want to add something just because it was in the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. We might borrow a creature from mythology, but we'd say, 'Okay, who created those guys? A god? Wizards doing experiments? When did they appear in the timeline? What was their purpose? How do they behave as a race?'" Le Breton credits his deep, anthropological approach to the world of Ashan to his love for the pen-and-paper RPG called RuneQuest. "RuneQuest is a master class in worldbuilding. Everything makes sense. You have cookbooks for trollkins and anatomy books for the trolls. There's a culture there. There's a civilization there. That's what I wanted to do with Might & Magic. We wanted everything to have a backstory and an explanation for why things exist in the world."

育碧编剧团队的另一个目标是构建一个更加内在逻辑自洽的宇宙。“如果这个世界中存在某种神奇的生物，那我们希望要有其存在的合理原因。”勒布雷东解释道，“我们不想仅仅因为《龙与地下城》的怪物手册中有这种生物就将其加入进来。我们会从神话中借用一种生物，但我们会说：‘好吧，是谁创造了这些家伙？是神？还是巫师在做实验？它们是何时出现在时间线里的？它们的目的是什么？作为一个种族，它们的行为方式又是怎样的？’”勒布雷东将他对亚山世界深刻的人类学研究归功于他所热爱的、名为《符文之旅》的纸笔角色扮演游戏。“《符文之旅》是构建世界的典范，一切都有其合理的解释。那里有巨魔裔的烹饪指南，还有巨魔的解剖学书籍。那里有文化、还有文明。这就是我想在《魔法门》中实现的。我们希望一切都有其背后的故事和存在的原因。”

The team was determined that the underlying mythos of the universe be something unique, not just a recycled version of something they'd seen in other games. They devoted a considerable amount of time to the creation of the world's gods. "We didn't want the traditional pantheon of 'This is the elf god, this is the halfling god, this is the dwarf god... ' We didn't want the spiritual entities to be human, or human looking, and they wouldn't be related to any of the races that you expect in fantasy. They could have just been disembodied spirits—something you can't represent in a drawing, or that have no physical aspect—but we wanted to have statues and avatars visible in our fantasy world, so we needed something emblematic. Of course, dragons are pretty much the most emblematic creature in fantasy. They're often depicted as something simple, just like a stupid Godzilla-slash-monster-kaiju-beast, but dragons are more than that. Dragons talk. They're smart, and they can live long enough to be practically immortal. So why not just make them gods, beyond human understanding? They naturally would have avatars that are like the dragons we know, but they'd be capable of speaking or interacting with others by telepathy. And so, the Dragon Gods became the thing that made the most sense for us in the development."

这支团队认定，整个宇宙的底层神话必须独具特色，不能只是对其他游戏中所见过的内容进行重复利用。他们花费了大量时间来塑造这个世界的神明。“我们不想采用那种传统的神系模式，比如‘这是精灵之神，这是半人马之神，这是矮人之神……’我们不想让这些精神实体具有人类的形态，或者看起来像人类，并且它们也不会与你所预期的那些奇幻世界种族有关联。它们可能只是无形的精神存在，无法通过绘画来表现，或者没有实体形态——但我们仍希望在我们的奇幻世界中能看到它们的雕像和化身，所以我们需要一些具有象征意义的东西。当然，龙无疑是最具奇幻象征意义的生物了。它们通常被描绘得非常简单，就像一个愚蠢的哥斯拉式怪物一样，但龙远不止如此。龙会说话。它们很聪明，而且能够存活足够长的时间，几乎可以被视为不朽的存在。所以为什么不干脆把它们设定为神明，超越人类的理解范畴呢？它们自然会有类似于我们所熟知的龙的化身，但它们能够通过心灵感应进行交流或与他人互动。因此，在开发过程中，龙神成为了最符合我们逻辑的选择。”

The lore team's fixation on dragons was partly shaped by Dragon Seed, a comic book penned by team member Kurt McClung. Le Breton had randomly run into his former boss at a wedding and specifically wanted McClung aboard his new team because of the comic book. McClung recalled Le Breton saying, “Hey listen, I've been working at Ubisoft for a while now and I'm working on this game. We're rebooting this universe and we need a writer that can help with it. Because of your Dragon Seed book, I think I can bring you in because in the world we're building, there's a pantheon of dragons."

背景故事团队对龙的痴迷在一定程度上是受到了团队成员库尔特·麦克伦所创作的《龙之种》这一漫画作品的影响。勒布雷东在一次婚礼上偶然遇到了他的前上司，对方也正是因为这部漫画，特别推荐麦克伦能加入他的新团队。麦克伦回忆勒布雷东曾说：“嘿，听着，我在育碧工作了一段时间了，我正在开发这款游戏。我们要重新打造这个宇宙，所以需要一位能协助我们工作的编剧。因为你的《龙之种》这本书，我认为可以把你也请进来，因为在我们正在构建的世界里，存在着一个龙的神系。”

The primordial dragon Asha would be established as the creator god of the universe and god of order, set in opposition to her brother Urgash who was the great god of Chaos. Their ongoing battle would create the framework for the battles among mortal men. "What I really appreciated about Asha was that she's a cosmic dragon god. Not like an elemental dragon god or a metallic dragon god, or chromatic or whatever. She's cosmic, life and death, because she's associated with so many things that are cool—like the number eight. The number eight could be an hourglass, so it's time, and if you tilt it, it's infinite, which is space. So, she's really like the cosmic incarnation. And then everything came together. Like yes, she could take many shapes, including a Kali-like goddess with eight limbs or a spider. Everything. It all made sense."

原初之龙亚莎被确立为宇宙的创造神和秩序之神，与她的弟弟鄂加斯（伟大的混沌之神）形成对立。他们持续的争斗将为凡人之间的战斗奠定基础。“我真正欣赏亚莎的地方在于，她是宇宙中的龙神。不像什么元素龙神、金属龙神、色彩龙神之类的。她是宇宙、是生命与死亡，因为她与很酷的东西都有联系——就像数字 8。数字8可以是一个沙漏，所以它代表着时间；而如果你倾斜它，它就变成了无限的象征，也就是空间。所以，她简直就是宇宙的化身。然后一切都合而为一了。比如，没错，她可以呈现出多种形态，包括像迦梨女神那样的有八条肢体的形象，或者说一只蜘蛛。所有的一切，都合情合理了。”

While Le Breton concentrated on the larger canvas of the gods and the timeline of the universe, Jeffrey Spock had the responsibility of working with Nival to craft a workable narrative for Heroes V. "Erwan and Richard had done a really interesting job structuring the universe, so it made it very easy for me. When I came in it was like, 'Okay, what factions do we want to use?' We picked Haven because that's a faction everybody wants to play. It's the humans. They also wanted to have elves and demons. And of course, each faction had its own play style, its units, but also its faction mood and attitude, and sort of moral philosophy. So, it was very easy to come in when a lot of this had been predefined." Le Breton affirmed that the Haven faction was central to his plans for the universe. "The whole faction, with the knights and the angels, became the cornerstone of the new universe. It was kind of a no-brainer for us. The whole Holy Empire thing came right from Might & Magic III." Le Breton also was a big fan of the Academy, and wanted to make sure it was also adapted for the new game. "We loved the Genies and the Titans, so we decided our version would be like something out of the Arabian Nights, with constructs of different sizes, statues, and inanimate objects. And the Academy would have the spirits. That helped us create this faction with two schools. The first would be like Harry Potter—the spirit school—and the second would be focused on alchemy, crafting, and enchanting. It was all influenced by the original faction, the way it was designed and the spirit of it."

勒布雷东专注于描绘神灵以及宇宙的时间线这些宏大主题，而杰弗里·斯波克则负责与 Nival 合作，为《英雄无敌5》创作一个可行的剧情框架。“艾万和理查德在构建宇宙方面做得非常出色，这让我的工作变得非常轻松。我刚接手的时候，心里就想：‘好吧，我们要用哪些派系呢？’我们选择了圣堂，因为这是个所有人都想玩的派系，是个人类阵营。他们还想加入精灵和恶魔。当然，每个派系都有其独特的玩法风格、单位，但还有阵营氛围、态度以及某种道德哲学。所以，当很多这些内容都已预先设定好时，我接手起来就非常容易了。”勒布雷东肯定地说，圣堂派系是他构建宇宙计划中核心的部分。“整个派系，包括骑士和天使，成为了新宇宙的基石。对我们来说，这几乎是可以无脑加入的。整个神圣帝国的概念直接源自《魔法门3》。”勒布雷东也非常喜欢学院，还想确保它也能纳入全新的游戏。“我们都喜欢灯神和泰坦，所以决定我们的版本会像《一千零一夜》故事里冒出来的那样，包含各种不同尺寸的构造物、雕像以及无生命的物体。而且学院还要有灵体。这帮助我们创建了这个拥有两个学派的派系。第一个学派类似于《哈利波特》中的灵类学派，而第二个学派则侧重于炼金术、制宝以及附魔。这一切都深受原来的学院派系影响，包括其设计方式以及整体氛围。”

Because they were tremendous fans of the previous games, Nival wanted as many references to the pre-Ubisoft universe as they could get away with. Spock did his best to cater to that desire. "We all definitely wanted to put something fun in there for old-school fans, so that long-time players could see that there was respect for what had come before. That was very important. We tried to keep a lot of the original units from Haven and Inferno, but we were also upgrading things and putting our own spin on them. And there's a bit of a balancing act there. Our Haven quest line for Heroes V was definitely a nod to a quest line in Heroes III where the guy starting out as the hero ends up coming back as an undead, so his fiancee takes over the faction. That was a very deliberate reference. I don't want to call it fan service, 'cause that sounds kind of cheap and manufactured, but we wanted touch points, echoes, reverberations from the previous games."

因为 Nival 对之前的游戏非常喜爱，他们就希望能在游戏中尽可能多地融入系列前作中的元素。斯波克竭尽全力满足了他们的这一愿望。“我们当然都想为老玩家加入一些有趣的内容，这样长期玩家就能看到我们对之前作品的尊重。这一点非常重要。我们尽量保留了圣堂和地狱中的许多原有的单位，但同时也在对其进行升级，并赋予了我们自己的特色。这其中也有一定的平衡考量。我们《英雄无敌5》中的圣堂任务线，确实是对《英雄无敌3》中任务线的致敬，即那个一开始作为英雄的人最终变成了亡灵回归，而他的未婚妻接管了这个阵营。这是一个非常刻意的致敬。我不想称之为迎合粉丝，因为这听起来有点廉价且生硬，但我们确实想要保留前作中的那些感人时刻、反响与余韵。”

In his informal role as intercessor between the world that Ubisoft was creating and what Nival wanted him to write, Spock said that his working relationship with the team in Moscow was generally good. There were times, however, when things would become a little more contentious. "They had a couple of brilliant designers, a brilliant writer, another assistant writer, I mean we were surrounded with talent, but there was a lot of friction too. It never got to the point where we just stopped talking to each other, but sometimes they'd look at my idea for the scenarios, and we'd each come up with alternative ideas for how the plot could flow. Then we'd compare notes and as we looked at each other's ideas we would go, 'That's ridiculous.'" As much as possible, Spock attempted to find common ground with the remote team, but sometimes felt a little self-conscious that the Russians knew more about the history of Heroes than he did. "The Russians just loved the IP. They loved Heroes I through IV, and were huge fans of what had gone before. And a lot of really good ideas came from them—particularly about the demonic character, the sort of femme fatale of the whole thing—because they were very deeply steeped in the lore and the styles of the factions and that kind of thing, but it wasn't always smooth sailing. It wasn't just about familiarity with the brand, but also differences in culture, in the closeness to the dev team—though I did get to visit Moscow, I think three times, over the course of development. Once was in February. I remember we'd come out of the subway on the way to the office, and on the building across this little plaza from the subway exit, they always had this sign up there that showed the temperature of the day. It was something like minus seventeen, and I'm thinking, What am I doing here?! What is this?!"

作为育碧所构建的世界与 Nival 希望他创作的内容之间的沟通桥梁这一非正式角色，斯波克表示，他与莫斯科团队的合作关系总体上还算不错。然而，有时情况也会变得有些复杂。“他们有几位才华横溢的设计师、一位出色的编剧、另一位助理编剧，也就是说我们周围都是人才，但同时也存在着很多摩擦。我们从未走到不再相互交流的地步，但有时他们会审视我为剧情构思的设想，而我们每个人也会提出关于情节发展方式的其他想法。然后我们会交换意见，当我们对比各自的想法时，我们会说：‘这太荒谬了。’”斯波克尽可能地试图同这个远程团队找到共同点，但有时他会感到有点难为情，因为俄罗斯人对《英雄无敌》系列的历史了解得比他更多。“俄罗斯人非常喜欢这个 IP。他们喜欢《英雄无敌》一代到四代，而且对之前的剧情也非常了解。有很多非常好的想法都来自他们——特别是关于恶魔角色方面，就是那种典型的‘致命女郎’式的人物——因为他们对各个派系的背景和风格都有着深入的了解，而且还涉及到各种细节。但并非一切都一帆风顺，这不仅仅关乎对该系列的熟悉程度，还涉及到文化差异、与开发团队的亲近程度——尽管我在开发过程中去过莫斯科三次，但只记得一次是在二月。我记得我们从地铁出来后前往办公室的路上，穿过一个小广场对面的那栋大楼时，大楼旁总是会挂着一块牌子，上面显示着当天的气温：大概是零下十七度，我当时心想：我在这干什么？这是什么情况啊？”

In one instance, Nival's passion for another IP could have landed Ubisoft in some very hot water with a rival publisher, but thanks to Fabrice Cambounet's swift intervention the problem was averted before disaster could strike. "I think it was probably six or eight months into development, but it was pretty clear that the people at Nival were big fans of Warhammer, you know, by Games Workshop. I'm also a big Warhammer player, so I know the license. It was very clear that Nival was heavily drawing on references from Games Workshop. I mean really, really a lot. If they'd only been making references, that would have been fine. But there were a couple of factions—mostly the Dark Elves and the Wood Elves I think—which were direct copies of the Ents and the Archons, so that wasn't going to be okay. And I flagged the issue pretty early on, saying, 'Hey, we're gonna have a lot of IP issues, particularly with Games Workshop'—Games Workshop was very, very protective of their IP in all kinds of genres—so I had to spend quite a lot of time to make Nival understand the issue, and to redo the concept art, and sometimes even redo the 3D models because we couldn't move forward and publish the game with content directly copied from Warhammer."

有一次，Nival 对另一个 IP 的狂热追求差点让育碧陷入与发行商竞争对手的严重麻烦之中，但多亏了法布莱斯·坎鲍奈特的迅速干预，问题得以在灾难发生之前得到解决。“我记得大概是在开发的第六还是第八个月的时候。显而易见的是，Nival 团队的成员都是《战锤》的忠实粉丝，你知道的，就是 Games Workshop 那些。而我也是《战锤》的狂热玩家，所以我对他们的授权很熟悉。很明显，Nival 大量借鉴了 Games Workshop 《战锤》的元素。我是说真的，真的很多。如果他们只是进行一些引用的话，那倒还好。但有几个派系——我想主要是黑暗精灵和木精灵，它们完全是《战锤》中树人族和黑暗灵族的直接翻版，所以这显然是不行的。我很早就指出了这个问题，说：‘嘿，我们会有很多知识产权方面的问题，尤其是和 GW 有关的—— GW 在各种类型的作品中都非常严格地保护他们的知识产权——所以我得花很多时间让 Nival 理解这个问题，重新制作概念图，有时甚至要重新制作 3D 模型，因为我们不能直接使用《战锤》中的内容来继续制作并且发布这款游戏。”

The issue over the IP infringement wouldn't be the last time that Cambounet found himself in a tussle over the game's visuals. He vividly recalled an incident while he was presenting the team's progress to his supervisors on the project. "It was during one of our first presentations before the stakeholders. After I got done, the creative director at Ubisoft just looks at us and says, 'Do you guys realize that this is very ugly, what you're doing?' And everyone fell off their chairs. I'd been working on the project for a little less than a year. And I just hadn't seen it that way, because I was looking at it as a prototype. It wasn't a really big issue yet, but when you took a step back and watched what was going on, for sure it wasn't really impressive. For a game of its time, it just wasn't holding up to everything else that was out there. So that was a big shake-up at the time, and I had to go back to Nival and say, 'Okay, we need to push the bar quite a lot and update the visuals.' We didn't have to restart anything from scratch, but we mostly needed to push the quality of the 3D models quite a bit."

关于知识产权侵权的问题并不是坎鲍奈特在该游戏视觉效果方面遭遇的唯一一次争执。他清晰地记得在向项目主管汇报团队进展情况时发生的一件事。“那是我们在向股东们做首次汇报的时候。我讲完之后，育碧的创意总监看着我们说：‘你们难道没意识到你们正在做的东西非常丑陋吗？’所有人都惊坐了起来。我参与这个项目的时间还不到一年，我当时并没有意识到这一点，因为我当时只是把它当作一个原型来看待。当时问题还不是很大，但当我退后一步，观察正在发生的事情时，肯定会觉得当时做得并不怎么好看。对于那个时代的《英雄无敌》来说，它根本无法与市面上的其他作品相媲美。所以那在当时是一个重大的变革，我不得不回去跟 Nival 沟通并表示：“好吧，我们需要大幅提高标准，并更新视觉效果。我们不必从头开始一切，但肯定需要大幅提升 3D 模型的质量。”

Part of the concern over the visual quality of the 3D models stemmed from the fact that with Heroes V, the players would be seeing them more closely than ever before. The fully 3D environment meant that it was now possible for the game cameras to behave cinematically, which in turn opened up new narrative possibilities for the designers. In Heroes IV, the storytelling had been handled by a profusion of text pop-ups. With the new Heroes V engine, in-engine cutscenes could now do a lot of the narrative heavy lifting to make the storytelling experience more exciting and immersive, allowing for the narratively rich universe of Ashan to be brought to life. "The intro cinematics were done externally with a company in Hungary, which was pretty good," Cambounet explained. "But we didn't spend enough time initially to push the bar for the in-game stuff. We followed up this big, pretty CGI extravaganza at the beginning, but then the first in-game cinematic was very blocky. No animation, and it had very short cuts between one person talking to the other. It was really a letdown because I didn't realize the state of the first two or three cinematics until it was too late. I think if they'd been that way in the middle of the game they would have been okay, but at the beginning there should have been a lot more polish. The idea had been for cinematics to be spread throughout the game to push the story forward, but we couldn't sustain the quality across the entire title."

对 3D 模型视觉效果的担忧部分源于这样一个事实：在《英雄无敌5》中，玩家将比以往任何时候都更近距离地看到这些模型。完全的 3D 环境意味着游戏镜头现在能够以电影般的风格进行拍摄，这反过来又为设计师们开辟了新的叙事可能性。而在《英雄无敌4》中，故事叙述还是通过大量的文字弹出窗口来完成的。借助新的《英雄无敌5》引擎，游戏内的过场动画现在能够承担起大量的叙事重任，从而让故事叙述体验变得更加刺激和沉浸式，使亚山这个拥有丰富叙事内容的宇宙得以生动呈现。“开场的动画是由一家位于匈牙利的公司外包完成的，效果还不错，”坎鲍奈特解释道，“但起初我们没有花足够的时间来提升游戏内内容的水准。我们在开头进行了这场规模宏大、特效精美的动画展示，但随后游戏内的第一段过场动画却非常粗糙，没有动画效果，而且人物之间的对话切换非常生硬。这确实很令人失望，因为我直到很晚的时候才意识到前两段或三段动画的落差。我认为如果在游戏中期保持这种风格的话应该会没问题，但放在游戏开始时，就应该做更多的打磨与完善。原本的设想是让动画贯穿整个游戏过程，推动故事的发展，但我们在整个游戏过程中无法保持一贯的高品质。”

The constraints of what was possible with the cutscenes at times frustrated Jeffrey Spock, but during the production he'd learned how to adapt to the limitations of the tool and of storytelling in general for a game-playing audience. "The good fortune was that I had Erwan and the other people on the team to bring me along and advise me and say, 'You know, Jeff, this scene is like three times too long. You have to cut it down, but keep the gist of it.'" Despite these limitations, Spock enjoyed the opportunity to watch as his characters and storylines came to life. Rob King, who had continued to serve as the sound design wizard behind the Heroes franchise, invited Spock to travel to Los Angeles to watch and direct the game's voice talent. "Rob King was amazing," Spock said. "He'd managed to line up people who'd worked on The Simpsons and Disney movies. Just this incredible roster of names. I'd be thinking I'd written the hell out of a scene, and an actor would read the line and I'd think Oh, God! That doesn't sound good, but then they'd change it, and it would become ten times better. Then I understood how they earned all their money, because they'd have the whole character and acting angle to bring in, and then Rob could work his magic."

对于过场动画的可能性限制，有时会让杰弗里·斯波克感到沮丧，但在制作过程中，他学会了如何适应这种工具的局限性，适应用一般意义上的叙事方式去满足游戏玩家。他说：“幸运的是，我有艾万和团队中的其他人陪伴着我，为我提供建议并说：‘你知道吗，杰夫，这个场景太长了，有三倍那么长。你得删减掉，但要保留其核心内容。’” 尽管存在这些限制，斯波克还是很享受看着自己的角色和故事情节变得鲜活的过程。罗布·金一直在《英雄无敌》系列中担任音效设计的魔法师，他邀请斯波克前往洛杉矶探访并指导游戏的配音演员。斯波克说：“罗布·金太棒了。他成功地召集了曾在《辛普森一家》和迪士尼电影中工作过的人员，简直就是一长串令人惊叹的名字。我原本以为自己把一个场景写得非常精彩，而在某个演员读了这段台词后，我会想：‘哦，天哪！这听起来可不太好。’但随后他们会修改它，然后它就会变得好上十倍。因此我明白他们是如何赚到那么多钱的，因为他们会代入到整个角色和表演情绪中去，然后罗布就能施展他的魔法了。”

After getting past a few of these early stumbling blocks, the team dived headlong into their wish list of features that they wanted to improve. Thanks to an exponential increase in home internet installations, multiplayer could be exploited in ways that hadn't been practical for previous iterations of the game. Between 1998 and the start of production on Heroes V, the number of households equipped with an internet connection in the U.S. had risen from twenty-six percent to fifty-five percent, and of those, broadband connections had increased from nine percent in September of 2001 to nearly twenty percent in October of 2003. While Cambounet shared Jon Van Caneghem's view that Heroes should be a primarily single-player game, Nival would experiment with the introduction of three new multiplayer “modes” to attempt to make the experience more fun, with Ghost Mode offering the most promise for a new experience.

在克服了前期的一些障碍之后，团队便全身心地投入到他们希望改进的功能清单中。由于家庭网络安装数量呈指数级增长，以往版本游戏所难以实现的多人游戏方式可以得到充分利用。从 1998 年到《英雄无敌5》第五代游戏的开发之始，美国拥有互联网连接的家庭比例从 26% 上升到了 55%，其中宽带连接的比例从 2001 年 9 月的 9% 上升到了 2003 年 10 月的近 20%。尽管坎鲍奈特与乔·万·坎内根一样，认为《英雄无敌》应主要是一款单人游戏，但 Nival 还是尝试新增了三种多人游戏“模式”，旨在让游戏体验更加有趣，其中的“幽灵模式”最具创新性，有望带来全新的游戏体验。

The problem with turn-based multiplayer games had always been that the playing speeds and styles of different people could sometimes leave players stuck twiddling their thumbs for extended periods of time as opponents finished their turns. For this very reason, Caneghem had avoided devoting any serious time to the development of multiplayer features during the New World era. With Heroes V's Ghost Mode, however, players were given a way to resume play while their opponents made their moves. The longer an opponent took to complete their turn, the more actions a player was able to accomplish during Ghost Mode. In addition to keeping players occupied, this provided a great incentive for everyone to finish up their turns as quickly as possible. In some ways it was one of the most innovative new ideas in Heroes V, but the implementation would meet with mixed reviews from fans who liked the idea in concept, but felt that it needed extra balancing.

回合制多人游戏一直以来存在的问题在于，不同玩家的行动速度和方式有时会导致一些玩家长时间无所事事地发呆，等对手完成他们的回合。正是由于这个原因，在 NWC 时期，坎内根没有投入太多精力来开发多人游戏的功能。然而，在《英雄无敌5》的“幽灵模式”中，玩家有了一个可以在等对手行动的同时继续游戏的方式。对手完成回合所需的时间越长，玩家在幽灵模式下就能完成更多的操作。此外，这既能让玩家保持忙碌，也为所有人尽快完成自己的回合提供了极大的动力。从某种程度上说，这是《英雄无敌5》中最具创新性的新想法之一，但它的实施却遭到了粉丝们褒贬不一的评价，他们虽然喜欢这个想法的构想，但认为还需要进行额外的平衡调整。

In addition to the new features that they hoped would make gameplay faster and more engaging, the designers also wanted to provide players with an easy-to-use editor that would allow them to build their own scenarios. It was, after all, a tool that had shipped with every major release in the franchise since Heroes II, and Le Breton in particular was a major proponent. “I modeled a lot of Warcraft III maps myself to create RPG scenarios. I also did some in Neverwinter Nights, so I'm really heavily into user-generated content," he said. The team shared his enthusiasm for the editor, but Ubisoft had reservations. “At the time, they weren't into user-generated content because of the potential for copyright issues and other legal problems. When they were measuring the cost versus benefit, they told us, 'We don't think it'll bring us much, and there's a lot of costs and risks associated with it.' Ultimately, the publisher would relent and allow for an editor to be given to players with Heroes V, but Le Breton said it was intentionally hobbled. "Heroes V was a bit moddable. The rest of the games are less so just because it's got to be something that you plan for from the start. You have to support it until after launch. If you don't do that, there's no way you can provide interesting tools for your community, and only hardcore modders will extract your code. But if you don't support it, you don't get them. It's hard." Though his pitch for the tool had been a hard-won victory, Le Breton's position on user-generated content would be vindicated in the years to come. "Single-player games that ship with modding tools are similar to multiplayer online games in that they have a long tail. They still sell for the original price eight years after release because there's so much fan-created content. There's always something new, and those games live on and on and on. We knew from our own experiences that a lot of role-players are content creators or game masters or storytellers, and that they'd use our stuff if we gave them the tools."

设计师们除了加入能加快游戏进程、并使其更具吸引力的新功能之外，还希望为玩家提供一个易于使用的编辑器，以便他们能够自行构建游戏场景。毕竟，自《英雄无敌2》以来，地图编辑器一直是该系列每一代的标配工具，而勒布雷东本人更是这一工具的主要支持者。他说：“我自己制作了很多《魔兽争霸3》的地图来创建角色扮演游戏的场景。我还曾在《无冬之夜》中制作了一些，所以我对用户创作的内容非常热衷。”开发团队也认同他对编辑器的热情，但育碧公司则有所保留。“当时他们并不支持用户创作内容，因为存在版权问题和其他法律风险的可能性。在权衡成本与收益时，他们告诉我们：‘我们认为这不会给我们带来太多好处，而且这其中存在很多成本和风险。’”最终，这一发行商做出让步，在《英雄无敌5》中为玩家提供地图编辑器，但勒布雷东表示，该编辑器是经过特意限制的。“《英雄无敌5》的可修改性较强，而后面几款游戏则相对较差，只是因为这必须是从一开始就规划好的内容。在游戏发布之后，你仍需继续为其提供支持。如果不这样做，你就无法为你的玩家群体提供有趣的功能性工具，只有那些资深的模组开发者才能够提取出你的代码。如果你不提供支持，也就无法获得这些开发者，这确实很难。”尽管勒布雷东为这款工具所做的宣传取得了不小的成功，但他对于用户创作内容的看法在未来几年里将会得到证实。“附带模组工具的单人游戏与多人在线游戏类似，它们都有较长的生命周期。即使在发布八年后，它们仍在以原价售出，因为有大量玩家创作的内容。总会有新的东西出现，这些游戏会一直延续下去。从我们的自身经验来看，很多角色扮演玩家都是内容创作者、游戏管理员或故事讲述者，如果我们给他们提供工具，他们就会使用我们的产品。”

The responsibility of engaging with the fan community in advance of the game's release fell principally on Cambounet's shoulders. It was a job that would consume almost as much of his time as the production of the game itself. "Nowadays there are a lot of people working on community management, answering fans, sharing information, and making sure the fans are fed new game content. But we didn't have any of that at the time. I did most of it, and was reaching out to the communities, building forums, and working to bring them all kinds of things. And I'd been talking with the fans for two or three years to establish trust, to make them come to the office, see the alpha stage, and discuss what they thought and what they expected. And we'd use that to inform the development. Today that would be a full-time job for someone, but I was doing that on top of my duties as producer. And that was great. I really loved it, but it was quite a lot of work." In particular, Cambounet remembered a lot of outreach to fans in Eastern Europe. "Part of it was reaching out to communities in Russia, in Poland, in Hungary, so we had contact with the players there and took their input into account. There was also the fact that Nival was the distributor in Russia, Poland, and Hungary, so they also kept that enthusiasm level high in those places during development. And the fact that they were the distributors there ensured that they'd remained focused on the quality of the end result."

在游戏发布前与粉丝社区进行沟通的责任主要落在了坎鲍奈特的肩上。这项工作几乎占据了他与游戏开发同等多的时间。“如今有很多人从事社区管理工作，他们要回答粉丝的问题、分享信息，并确保向粉丝们介绍新的游戏内容。但当时我们并没有这样的安排。我承担了大部分工作，还与各个社区进行联系，建立论坛，并努力为他们提供各种内容。我与粉丝们进行了两年多的交流，以建立信任，还让他们来到工作室，观看测试版，并讨论他们的想法和期望。然后我们以此来指导游戏的开发。如今，这会是一份全职工作，但我当时是在担任制作人之外还做着这些工作。这很棒，我真的很喜欢，但工作量确实很大。”坎鲍奈特特别对与东欧粉丝们的沟通记忆犹新：“其中一部分工作是与俄罗斯、波兰和匈牙利的当地社区进行接触，所以我们与那里的参与者取得了联系，并将他们的意见纳入考虑范围。此外，因为 Nival 是俄罗斯、波兰和匈牙利的分销商，所以在开发过程中他们也在这些地区保持了高昂的热情。而且他们作为当地分销商这一事实确保了他们始终专注于最终成果的质量。”

Between Cambounet's determined promotional efforts and the warm responses that Ubisoft had received from fans to trailers and demos, the game was generating quite a bit of preliminary buzz. "I think the overall expectations of the players were really high. In the months leading up to the release, Heroes V was the number one most anticipated game on IGN, and that was a really big deal for Ubisoft. It was still a relatively average product in terms of the actual marketing we'd done, and it was in a niche genre. It's a strategy game, and it's a turn-based strategy game, which made it a niche within a niche. But the fact that there were such high levels of expectation from the players signaled to Ubisoft that this might really turn into kind of a hit."

凭借坎鲍奈特坚定的推广举措，育碧从粉丝那里收到了对预告片和演示版的积极反馈，这款游戏已经引起了相当大的初步关注。“我认为玩家的整体期望值非常高。在游戏发布前的几个月里，《英雄无敌5》是IGN上最受期待的游戏，这对育碧来说意义重大。就我们实际所做的营销工作而言，这款游戏在实际表现上还算普通，而且属于一个小众类型。这是一款策略游戏，属于回合制策略游戏，与粉丝社区的互动策略使得它在小众领域中又有了更小众的定位。但这款游戏能取得如此高的玩家预期值向育碧表明，这款游戏可能真的会大获成功。”

For the team, the fan response not only boosted their egos, but also proved that the spiraling cost of the project had been worth Ubisoft's expenditures. "There were like ten or twelve amendments to the contract, because we raised the bar bit by bit," Cambounet said. "That was another part of my job—to build trust in what we were doing. That was reflected by the fact that we invested more and more and more within relatively small limits compared to the budgets that were given to an Assassin's Creed game or similar titles. The development timeframe was relatively normal for a game like that, because it was a pretty complex game, and we had to do a lot. But the budget increased about threefold from the start to the finish. So that reflected Ubisoft's growing trust that we were going to deliver something good."

对于团队而言，粉丝们的反应不仅提升了他们的自信心，还证明了该项目不断攀升的成本投入没有白白浪费育碧公司的预算。“合同里有大约十到十二处修改，因为我们逐步提高了标准。”坎鲍奈特说道，“这也是我的另一项工作——建立对我们所做之事的信任度。这从我们投入的资金越来越多、越来越多，而与为《刺客信条》游戏或类似作品所设定的预算相比，投入额度却相对较小这一点上就能体现出来。开发周期对于这样一款游戏来说相对是比较正常的，因为它是一款相当复杂的游戏，我们确实做了很多工作。但是预算从开始到结束增长了约三倍。这表明育碧对我们的能力越来越有信心，相信我们会做出出色的作品。”

As it would turn out, all the hard work that Cambounet had poured into generating goodwill among fans would turn into an important alliance as he struggled to get more time to finish and polish the game. "We were supposed to be released before the end of the fiscal year, so that was before the end of March in 2006. But the game was still buggy. Very, very buggy. I was pushing hard to get an extension and publish after the March deadline we'd been given. But the powers that be wanted to have the revenue from it within the fiscal year. So there was a lot of work. I reached out to the community and the players at large to push for the extension, and I told them it would be bad for the game if we released it in its current state, with too many bugs. And I was able to use our status as the most anticipated game on IGN to help make our case. It bought us an extension of a couple of months and allowed us to get the game into a more stable state."

结果证明，坎鲍奈特为赢得粉丝好感所付出的大量努力最终转化为了一项重要的同盟关系。当时他正努力争取更多时间来完成并完善这款游戏。“我们原本计划在财政年度结束前发布这款游戏，也就是在 2006 年 3 月底之前。但游戏仍然存在很多漏洞，非常多的漏洞。我极力争取延期发布，希望能在我们本来的3月截止日期之后发布。但管理层希望游戏的收益能在财政年度内实现，所以有大量工作要做。我联系了社区的众多玩家，请他们帮忙推动延期。我告诉他们，如果我们在当前状态下发布游戏，会有太多漏洞，这对游戏不利。最终我得以利用我们作为IGN最受期待游戏的地位来支持我们的主张，这为我们争取到了几个月的延期，并使我们能够将游戏调整到更稳定的状态。”

By the night that the game was due to be completed and sent off for verification before being duplicated, the team had been working nonstop for weeks. Cambounet was at home, but checking builds for the game as fixes were submitted for approval. Although it was the middle of the night, he was up talking to Alexander Mishulin at Nival about his concerns over the balance of one of the very early missions in one of the campaigns. "I was telling Alexander, 'I think this mission is really, really, really hard,'" Cambounet recalled. "'I don't think anybody is going to pass it.'" Mishulin assured him that the problem was fine, and that the player just had to complete a set of very specific actions in order to win. Cambounet expressed his doubts, that no one short of a hardcore fan would ever think of what Mishulin was suggesting, but at last allowed himself to be convinced that what he was being told was true. "We approved the gold master and it went out. The very first feedback we get, we're told that this specific mission couldn't be completed. We had to do a release patch, a zero patch to add a very easy level of difficulty so that you could switch whenever you wanted, so that you would be able to pass this mission. It was a last-minute brainteaser that we had to figure out before the game was approved and released."

在游戏预定完成，只待通过审核即可投产的那天晚上，开发团队已经连续工作了数周。坎鲍奈特当时正在家中，但仍在检查游戏的版本，等待对提出的修复方案进行审批。尽管已是深夜，他仍保持清醒，还在与 Nival 公司的亚历山大·密苏林交谈，就其中一个战役中早期任务的平衡性问题表达了自己的担忧。“我跟亚历山大说：‘我觉得这个任务实在是太难了。’”坎布努特回忆道，“‘我觉得没人能完成它。’”密苏林向他保证问题不大，玩家只需完成一系列非常具体的操作就能成功。坎鲍奈特表示自己对此存有疑虑，认为除了铁杆粉丝之外，没人会想到密苏林所提出的建议，但最终还是接受了他所听到的是实情。“我们批准了正式版，然后将其发放出去。我们收到的第一批反馈就是，那个特定的任务无法完成。我们不得不发布补丁、一版首日补丁，以增加一个‘非常简单’的难度级别，这样玩家就可以随时切换难度级别，并能顺利完成那个任务了。那就像一个最后关头的智力题，我们本该在游戏获得批准并发布之前解决好它。”

While most of the team felt certain that the game was going to do well, Jeffrey Spock remembers what it was like waiting for the first reactions to come in from fans. Up until that point, Heroes V had been the largest and most notable game that he'd worked on, and he admitted to feeling a little terrified about what people were going to say. "I was sleeping badly and everything. Then, for whatever reason, Heroes of Might and Magic V is reviewed in the New York Times, which I didn't expect. I don't think anybody expected it. And they have all these comments about the writing and the New York Times equated it to sort of B-movie dialogue. And I was like, 'I'll take that!' But then there were also some reviews that were saying it was just awful, overwritten. Somebody else said, 'It was efficient. They kept the game moving along, and I enjoyed it.' So, you know, you're getting this whole gamut of reactions and having these mood swings in every possible dimension. I'm more used to it now, but the bad ones are still a bit of a stake in the heart. But you learn to roll with the punches, and for every bad review you go find a good one to soothe your ego a bit. But yeah, I remember the level of tension, and waiting for the reviews to come out, and then going through and trying to only find the good ones. Heroes VI was easier. The expansions were easier. But Heroes V, I mean, there was a lot of market coverage, and that had me manic depressive for a couple of weeks."

虽然团队中的大多数成员都坚信这款游戏会大获成功，但杰弗里·斯波克却记得等待粉丝们给出第一波反馈时的情景。在那时，《英雄无敌5》是他参与制作的规模最大、最受瞩目的作品，他承认自己对此感到有些惶恐，担心人们会怎么说。“我睡眠质量很差，整个人都状态不佳。然后，不知道什么原因，《魔法门之英雄无敌5》的评测出现在了《纽约时报》上，这出乎我的意料。我认为没人预料到这一点。上面有各种各样对剧本的评论，《纽约时报》总结说是类似电影B级片的对话。我当时就想：‘好吧，我可以接受！’但也有一些评论说剧情简直糟糕透顶、冗长乏味。还有人说，‘它很不错。游戏剧情的推进很顺利，我很喜欢。’所以要明白，你会收到五花八门的反馈，而且会经历情绪的全方位波动。现在我几乎已经习惯了这种状况，但那些负面的评价仍然会让我感到很痛心。不过我学会了随机应变，每当收到负面评价时，我都要去寻找一些正面的评价来稍稍安抚一下自己的情绪。不过，嗯，我记得那种紧张感，还有苦苦等待评测结果的时刻，以及仔细查看评论并努力只挑出正面的那部分。《英雄无敌6》的时候就好多了。资料片也好多了。但《英雄无敌5》呢，我得说，它的市场覆盖面挺大的，这让我精神恍惚了好几个星期。”

Heroes V would prove to be a very successful first outing for Ubisoft's revamped series, surpassing 350,000 units by the end of June 2006. In France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, it would reach number one on the sales charts, and Metacritic would give the game a score of 77 out of 100. A massive promotional push by Ubisoft drew large crowds for signing events, and Cambounet has fond memories of meeting the public. "We had this big deluxe collector's box with an art book filled with the concept work of Olivier Ledroit. He was there with us and signing the boxes in Paris. Those deluxe editions sold out in a couple of days. They'd made quite a number of them, but they sold like crazy. That was a great event."

《英雄无敌5》最终被证明是育碧公司重新打造的系列游戏中首部大获成功之作，截至 2006 年 6 月底，其销量已超过 35 万份。在法国、德国和英国，该游戏在销量排行榜上位居榜首，Metacritic 给这款游戏的评分达到了 77 分（满分 100 分）。育碧公司大规模的宣传活动吸引了大量观众参加签名活动，坎鲍奈特对与公众见面的经历有着美好的回忆。“我们推出了一个大型的豪华收藏版，里面有一本装满奥利维耶·勒德罗概念作品的艺术集。他和我们一起在巴黎签售这些盒子。那些豪华版在几天内就销售一空。他们制作的数量不少，但销售情况却异常火爆。那是一次很棒的活动。”

Ubisoft would follow Heroes V up with two expansions, firstly Hammers of Fate, which would ship in November of 2006 and introduce dwarves into the new setting of Ashan as well as give players access to the powers of rune magic. A second expansion, The Tribes of the East, would follow in October of 2007 and bring orcs into the fray.

育碧公司在《英雄无敌5》之后又推出了两部资料片，首先是《命运之锤》，该资料片于 2006 年 11 月发行，将矮人引入亚山世界的新设定中，并让玩家能够使用符文魔法的力量。第二部资料片《东方部落》于 2007 年 10 月推出，将兽人也加入了战斗。

我用王国换英雄 - My Kingdom for a Hero

For an old-school Heroes player, signing into Might & Magic: Heroes Kingdoms for the first time might have felt a bit alien. There's no sign of the traditional overland adventure map, the main browser window in which the action was framed looked like a Farmville-esque city building game from Facebook, and it lacked the visual gloss of Heroes V. From a lore standpoint, it existed in a timeline that diverged from the darkest possible ending of Dark Messiah of Might & Magic, and most of the Heroes flavor derived from the inclusion of its five factions: Haven, Academy, Necropolis, Inferno, and Sylvan.

对于一位传统的《英雄无敌》玩家来说，首次登录《魔法门之英雄无敌：王国》可能会觉得有点陌生。游戏中没有传统的大陆探险地图，主浏览器窗口中所呈现的场景看起来像是一款类似脸书上的《开心农场》那样的城镇建造游戏，而且它缺乏《英雄无敌5》那种视觉上的华丽感。从故事设定的角度来看，它所处的时间线来自于《魔法门之黑暗弥赛亚》中最为黑暗的分支结局，而《英雄无敌》系列的大部分特色都在于其包含的五个阵营：圣堂、学院、墓地、地狱和森林。

Kingdoms was conceived by Heroes V's Fabrice Cambounet, who partnered on the project with designer Marc Blondeau. “We had been toying with a web-based game for some time, initially with a pirate setting,” Cambounet recalled. “But after a while we switched to the idea of using the Heroes universe. It was a perfect fit for a strategy game in a persistent world. Its relatively slow pace allowed for more long-term thinking.” Despite its obvious differences from earlier single-player versions of Heroes, he felt that the multiplayer format added new depth to the experience. “You had to care about progressing your city and army, conquering your local area for resources, and then expanding on a world map with other players—friends and foes. The game clearly had several layers and steps along the journey, and also different factions that changed things quite a bit.”

《王国》这款游戏由《英雄无敌5》的制作人法布莱斯·坎鲍奈特构思，他与设计师马克·布隆多共同参与了该项目的开发。“我们之前一直在尝试开发一款网络游戏，最初设定是海盗题材。”坎鲍奈特回忆道，“但过了一段时间，我们转而采用了《英雄无敌》宇宙的设定。这对于一个持续运营的策略游戏来说非常合适。其相对缓慢的节奏使得玩家能够进行更长远的思考。”尽管与《英雄无敌》系列过去的单人版本相比，这款游戏存在明显的差异，但他认为多人游戏形式为游戏体验增添了新的深度。“你必须关心自己的城市和军队的发展，征服周边地区以获取资源，然后与其他玩家——或友或敌一起在世界地图上扩张。这款游戏显然有多个层次和步骤贯穿整个过程，而且还有不同的派系，这使得情况很容易被改变。”

The gameplay centered on the development and defense of a city occupied by the player's hero and their troops. Resources necessary for the city's upkeep, training of troops, and construction of new structures could be collected from mines in the region surrounding the city, but non-player troops would have to be cleared away first before any mining or new construction could take place. Alliances with other players in neighboring regions were important for protection, as well as for the collection of the "Tears of Asha" which were necessary for victory—once again harking back to a King's Bounty mechanic, which originally revolved around finding King Maximus's Scepter of Order. In one other curious throwback to the early days at New World Computing, the portraits for some of the in-game characters were jokingly based on the faces of developers connected to the Heroes franchise.

游戏玩法的核心在于，玩家用操控的英雄及其部队对所占领城市进行开发与防守。维持城市运转、部队训练以及建造新的建筑都需要资源，这些资源可以从城市周边地区的矿井中获取。但在进行任何开采或建设工程之前，必须先清除掉中立部队。与其他邻近区域的玩家结盟对于保护以及收集“亚莎之泪”（这是获胜所必需的资源）至关重要——这再次借鉴了《国王的赏金》中寻找马克西姆王之秩序权杖的机制。一些游戏内角色的肖像被戏谑地设计成了与《英雄无敌》系列相关开发人员相似的面部特征。这是对 NWC 公司早期一些趣闻的复古。

Cambounet explained that it took a long time to get the game to a playable state because of Ubisoft's approval process, and the game had an entirely new financial model compared to how games were traditionally sold. First publicly announced in November of 2007 (while the Tribes of the East expansion to Heroes V was being trotted out for eager fans), Heroes Kingdoms capitalized on the free-to-play social media gaming craze which dominated the early 2000s. It would officially launch in 2009.

坎鲍奈特解释说，由于育碧的审批流程，这款游戏花费了很长时间才达到可玩状态，而且它与传统游戏的销售模式完全不同。《英雄无敌：王国》于 2007 年 11 月首次公开亮相（当时《英雄无敌5》的《东方部落》资料片刚刚向热情的玩家们展现），充分利用了在 21 世纪初盛行的免费社交网络游戏热潮。它的正式上线是在 2009 年。

“I think we succeeded in bringing our vision to life,” Cambounet said. “But the game was probably too complex, hence too niche and hard to evolve and maintain, and we also waited too long before starting alpha testing. We were learning along the way how to produce a free-to-play game.”

“我认为我们成功地将我们的构想变成了现实。”坎鲍奈特说，“但这款游戏可能过于复杂，因此太过小众，难以持续发展和维护，而且我们在开始进行内测之前也等待了太久。我们属于是一路摸索着学会了如何制作一款免费游戏。”

Kingdoms would finally cease operations in September of 2014, a year during which many social media games simultaneously failed due to a change in Facebook policies that rendered it essentially impossible for the games to remain profitable.

《英雄无敌：王国》最终于 2014 年 9 月停止运营。在这一年里，许多社交媒体游戏同时遭遇失败，原因是脸书的政策发生了变化，使得这些游戏几乎无法保持盈利。

Behold the transmogrified faces of Fabrice Cambounet (left) and Julien Pirou (right) who for a while roamed the digital realms of Ashan in Heroes Kingdoms.

瞧瞧法布莱斯·坎鲍奈特（左图）和朱利安·皮乌奇形怪状的脸庞吧，他们曾短暂地活跃在《英雄无敌：王国》中虚拟的亚山世界中。