30周年回顾 第八章 血与泪

Chapter Eight

"Blood & Tears"

With news of the collapse of 3DO in 2003, however, Pirou despaired that two of his favorite gaming series were being rubbed out of existence. “I was super sad. I really felt like it would be the end of Might & Magic and of Heroes, but when I heard that Ubisoft had bought the IP, I thought for a moment they were being rescued and wouldn't die,” Pirou recalled. “Then Ubisoft announced they were rebooting the universe.” For Pirou, as well as for a number of other loyalists to the original games from New World, the narrative reset initiated by Erwan Le Breton and Richard Dansky for Heroes V wasn't an immediately popular decision. Pirou was unhappy that some of the sci-fi underpinnings of Might & Magic and the more lighthearted approach to the storytelling in Heroes were all being thrown overboard in favor of the new, darker high-fantasy setting. “I said to myself, if Ubisoft is not continuing the story of the old Heroes, I will.”

而在 2003 年，3DO 公司倒闭的消息传来时，皮乌深感绝望，因为他最喜爱的两个游戏系列即将不复存在。“我当时非常难过。我真的觉得《魔法门》和《英雄无敌》这两款游戏就要彻底消失了。”皮乌回忆道，“当我听说育碧已经买下了这些知识产权时，我一度以为它们会被拯救，不会消亡。可后来育碧宣布要重启这个宇宙。”对于皮乌以及许多其他对原版游戏忠心耿耿的 NWC 玩家来说，由艾万-勒布雷东和理查德·丹斯基为《英雄无敌5》所发起的叙事重置并非一个立即受到欢迎的决定。令皮乌感到不满的是，《魔法门》中的一些科幻元素以及《英雄无敌》较为轻松的叙事方式都被抛弃了，转而采用了全新的、更黑暗的高奇幻设定。“我对自己说，如果育碧不继续讲述旧版《英雄无敌》的故事，那我就自己来。”

By the time Heroes V released to market, Pirou was no stranger to the world of modding. He had experimented with making maps of his own using the editor shipped with Heroes II. Once he had Ubisoft’s new tools in hand, he set about creating his own vision for the series by fusing the storylines of Enroth with the visual polish of Heroes V. “Heroes V had very powerful map-making tools, and you could mod a lot just by editing the XML files, so I created this campaign called the ‘Legends of the Ancients.’” His first effort was well-received by fans, and to this day it can still be downloaded from the Celestial Heavens website. “I called it ‘playable fan fiction,’ ” Pirou resumed. “My sequel was probably not what Greg Fulton and the New World Computing people would have done, but it was a continuation of their storylines from my perspective.”

在《英雄无敌5》向市场发布的那一刻，皮乌对于模组制作的领域早已不陌生了。他曾尝试过使用《英雄无敌2》附带的编辑器制作了自己的地图。等到掌握了育碧的新工具，他就着手根据自己的想法为这个系列创作内容，将恩洛斯的故事线与《英雄无敌5》的视觉效果完美融合在一起。《英雄无敌5》拥有非常强大的地图制作工具，只需编辑 XML 文件就能进行大量修改，于是他创作了名为“先民传说”的战役。他的首次尝试受到了粉丝们的热烈欢迎，该战役至今仍可在 “Celestial Heavens” 网站上下载。皮乌接着说道：“我称之为‘可玩的粉丝小说’。我的续作可能与格雷格·富尔顿和 NWC 公司的人所设计的有所不同，但从我的角度来看，它延续了他们的故事情节。”

As Pirou continued to create maps and campaigns as a fan, his work drew the attention of Ubisoft, prompting producer Fabrice Cambounet to reach out to him for a special project. “They needed someone to create a map for the super collector edition of Heroes V. It was going to include the game and all the expansions, and they wanted something that adapted Dark Messiah as a Heroes map so that the strategy players could catch up with the larger story of the universe without needing to play Messiah." Cambounet thought Pirou's previous independent work made him an ideal candidate to tackle the map, but he had one caveat for the project. "Fabrice told me that it needed to be done in one week. I agreed, but I had a full-time day job, so I would work on the map at night when I got home. While I was working on it, I got to know Erwan Le Breton who was the creative director for the new Might & Magic titles, and he was really pleased with my interpretation of Dark Messiah for Heroes. 'You did a great job with this,' he told me. 'When we do Heroes VI, we might call you to work on it.' And I'm like 'Sure, why not, but I'll believe it when I see it.'"

当皮乌作为粉丝继续创作地图和战役时，他的作品引起了育碧公司的注意，这促使制作人法布莱斯-坎鲍奈特主动与他联系，商讨一项特殊项目。“他们需要有人为《英雄无敌5》的典藏版创作一张地图。该版本将包含游戏本身以及所有资料片的内容，他们希望能够把《黑暗弥赛亚》设计成一张《英雄无敌5》的地图。这样一来那些策略玩家就不需要去玩《黑暗弥赛亚》，也能把握整个魔法门宇宙的宏大故事了。”坎鲍奈特认为皮乌之前独立完成的作品，使他成为开发这张地图的理想人选，但他对这个项目有一个条件限制：“坎鲍奈特告诉我，这项工作必须在一周内完成。我同意了，但我有一份全职的工作，所以我会在下班回家后的晚上再做这张地图。在做这个的过程中，我认识了艾万-勒布雷东，他是新系列《魔法门》游戏的创意总监，他对我在《英雄无敌》中对《黑暗弥赛亚》的演绎非常满意。‘你做得很好，’他跟我说，‘我们制作《英雄无敌6》的时候，可能会请你参与其中。’而我则是说‘当然可以，为什么不呢，但我要亲眼看到才会相信。’”

骇入亚山 - Hacking Ashan

A modder for the early Ubisoft era of Heroes would likely have been frustrated by the limitations of the editor. Corporate concerns over misuse of the tool and potential legal liabilities for Ubisoft led to the publicly released toolset being sharply restricted in its capabilities. It was tough to try to generate anything more than a simple "remix" of the official content, but thanks to the ingenuity of level designer Julien Pirou, the community was gifted with a clever fix.

对于早期育碧《英雄无敌》系列游戏的模组开发者来说，他们可能会对地图编辑器的局限性感到沮丧。育碧公司对工具的不当使用和可能产生的法律风险存在担忧，因此公开发布的工具集在功能上受到了严格限制，想要创作出比官方内容更复杂的内容几乎是不可能的。但多亏了关卡设计师朱利安·皮乌的聪明才智，社区才得以获得了一个巧妙的解决方案。

While working on the Dark Messiah map for the Collector's Edition of Heroes V, future Ubisoft designer Julien Pirou ran into a very big problem while trying to add a new and very critical creature into his map. "All the entries for the creatures in Heroes V were tied to a specific XML entry," he said. "You couldn't technically add any new creatures to the game, but Dark Messiah has a very famous battle against the Undead Cyclops. I really needed him in there, but initially there wasn't a way to do it. As a graphic designer I knew that I could use the existing Cyclops entry but change the texture so that it's rotten and everything, but I needed a way to add it to the official list of units."

在为《英雄无敌5》的典藏版制作《黑暗弥赛亚》地图的过程中，未来担任育碧设计师的朱利安·皮乌在试图将一种非常重要的新生物加入到他的地图中时，遇到了一个非常大的难题。他说：“《英雄无敌5》中所有生物都与一个特定的XML条目相关联。从技术上讲，你完全无法为游戏添加任何新的生物，但《黑暗弥赛亚》有一场与亡灵独眼巨人的著名战斗。我真的需要它出现在那里，但起初并没有办法能做到这一点。作为一名图形设计师，我知道我可以使用现有的独眼巨人条目，只是将其纹理修改为腐烂的样子等等，但我需要一种方法将其添加到官方单位的列表中。”

After doing a bit of poking around in the files, he found a potential solution. "I found an unused entry for a Yeti—I guess at some point they thought about putting a Yeti in the game, but didn't get around to actually doing it—so they had this empty, unused entry there. So I dropped the Cyclops in its slot and it worked!"

在对文件进行了一番仔细查找之后，他找到了一个可能的解决方案。“我发现了一个名为雪猿的未使用条目——我猜他们曾经考虑过在游戏中加入雪猿，但最终没有付诸实施，所以那里有一个空着未被使用的条目。于是我把独眼放到了这个位置，结果就起效了！”

Pirou's clever workaround made him an instant hero in the modding and mapmaking community. "When it was released, everyone saw my Undead Cyclops and they were like, 'How did you do that?'" Then they reverse engineered what I'd done and added a way to expand this unique, unused entry to be able to add in as many creatures as you wanted, and from there they added a ton of content to the game in the following years." Even considering all his contributions to the Might & Magic and Heroes franchise in the following years, Pirou admitted his "hack" remains one of the high points of his career. "It's one of the things I'm most proud of."

皮乌巧妙的解决方案使他在模组制作和地图绘制领域迅速成为了英雄。“当它发布时，所有人都看到了我的亡灵独眼巨人，他们惊叹道：‘你是怎么做到的？！’然后他们对我的做法进行了逆向工程，并添加了一种方法来扩展这个独特的、未被利用的条目，从而能够根据自己的意愿添加任意数量的生物。此后几年里，他们还为游戏添加了大量内容。”即便算上接下来几年里皮乌对《魔法门》和《英雄无敌》系列所做的贡献，他自己也承认他的“骇入”仍是他职业生涯中的高光时刻之一。“这是我最引以为傲的一件事情。”

ABOVE: Adapting the first-person sword-and-sorcery action of Dark Messiah of Might and Magic served as an audition of sorts for Julien Pirou prior to his work on Heroes of Might and Magic VI.

上图：在为《魔法门之英雄无敌6》工作之前，朱利安·皮乌曾凭借改编《魔法门之黑暗弥赛亚》这部第一人称视角的剑与魔法风格动作冒险作品，获得了一次重要的展示机会。

Above: Pirou's legendary Undead Cyclops towers over a knight in its appearance in the Heroes V adaptation of Might & Magic: Dark Messiah. Pirou not only figured out how to sneak it into the database, but did the modeling and texturing on the beast himself. Released December 13, 2007.

上图：在《英雄无敌5》版的《魔法门之黑暗弥赛亚》中，皮乌那传说中的亡灵独眼巨人俯视着骑士。皮乌不仅成功将其纳入数据库，还亲手完成了这只生物的建模和纹理制作。该地图于 2007 年 12 月 13 日发布。

In what would turn out to be a two-year gap, as Pirou awaited Le Breton's call, Cambounet was at work once again on a sequel with Russian developer Nival. "We had started discussing the budget and features," Cambounet said, "but they were becoming very greedy. The initial budget was like ten times what we did for Heroes V, which was quite a bit. And in parallel I'd started working on Heroes Kingdoms." Not long after, Cambounet would relinquish the reins in order to pursue work full time on Kingdoms, allowing Le Breton to step in to oversee what was going on with Heroes VI and Nival. "They had some interesting proposals and wanted to change quite a lot with the game," Le Breton recalled, "but after a year or so of iteration, prototyping, and discussion, Ubisoft and Nival decided to stop working together. Nival moved on to another project that was like a World of Warcraft MMORPG, and Ubisoft went looking for another external developer to help us with the new project."

在这实际长达两年的空白期里，皮乌一直在等待勒布雷东的来电。而此时，坎鲍奈特又与俄罗斯开发商 Nival 合作，重新开始创作一部续集作品。“我们已经开始讨论预算和特色了。”坎鲍奈特说，“但他们变得越来越贪婪了。最初的预算是《英雄无敌5》的十倍之多，这实在太多了。与此同时，我开始着手《英雄无敌：王国》的开发工作。”不久之后，坎鲍奈特就交出了制作人权限，转而全身心投入到《王国》的开发中，让勒布雷东接手监督 Nival 对《英雄无敌6》的开发情况。“他们提出了一些有趣的想法，并且想要对游戏进行诸多改动，”勒布雷东回忆道，“但经过一年左右的反复修改、原型制作和讨论之后，育碧决定不再同 Nival 合作了。Nival 转向了另一个类似于《魔兽世界》的大型多人在线角色扮演游戏项目（《首个世界/繁荣世界》），而育碧则开始寻找另一家外部开发商来协助我们开展新项目。”

蠢步子部门（巨蟒剧团喜剧片名） - The Ministry of Silly Walks

For a certain segment of fans who had followed the Heroes franchise since its scrappy origins at New World Computing, there was a general misapprehension that Might & Magic's stewards at Ubisoft were "just a bunch of accountants dressed in suits." It was an idea that creative director Erwan Le Breton tried to dispel in his communications with the community. "When you work for a really big developer, it's easy for people to get the wrong idea. A lot of them would think, 'those guys are after the profit and they just want to milk us.' That was a big part of the reason why we wanted to open up to our community a bit more with Heroes V and Heroes VI, to let them be involved with us and understand that we loved the IP, and that we loved the job that we were doing. We were really just like the players."

对于那些自《英雄无敌》系列游戏刚由 NWC 公司推出时，就一直关注该系列的粉丝群体而言，有一部分人普遍存在这样的误解：在育碧公司负责《魔法门》系列的管理人员“不过是一群穿着西装的会计而已”。创意总监艾万-勒布雷东在与粉丝们的交流中试图消除这种误解。“当你为一家大型开发商工作时，人们很容易产生错误的想法。他们很多人会认为，‘那些人只关心利润，只想榨取我们的血汗钱’。这就是我们希望与《英雄无敌》五代和六代的粉丝们进一步建立联系的最主要原因——让他们参与进来，并让他们明白我们热爱这个 IP，也热爱我们正在做的事情的原因之一。我们真的就跟玩家一样。”

There are always dangers, of course, in lowering one's guard and letting outsiders into the process. "If you decide to let players vote on factions, like deciding if they want dark elves or orcs, there're going to be winners and losers. If fifty-one percent of the fans vote for the dark elves, there are going to be forty-nine percent of the fans who wanted orcs instead who are going to be unhappy and revolt against the decision. There was always a risk in unbolting that door."

当然，在放松警惕、让外界介入这一过程时总会存在风险。“如果你决定让玩家们对派系进行投票，比如决定他们是想要黑暗精灵还是兽人，那么就会产生赢家和输家。如果51%的粉丝投票支持黑暗精灵，那么另外 49% 希望是兽人的粉丝就会感到不满并反抗这一决定。敞开那扇门总是存在风险的。”

As part of his policy of transparent development for Heroes, Le Breton was frequently tasked with planning and hosting live events or creating special videos that would help further break down the wall between developers and fans. On one occasion, he decided to go the extra mile to share a joke with the community. "Ubisoft had this game called Rocksmith where you can learn to play the guitar. I was really excited about it because I'm a guitar player, and we had another guy working with us who was also a very good musician, so we had the idea that we'd do a special parody for April first. We created a metal band with a song about the Orcks to promote the new faction, and announced that the next Might & Magic game would be called Orcksmith: Lords of Metal. It was super funny."

作为《英雄无敌》项目透明化发展策略的一部分，勒布雷东经常需要负责策划和举办现场活动，或者制作特别视频，以进一步消除开发者与粉丝之间的隔阂。有一次，他决定额外做一件事，与社区分享一些笑料。“育碧出了一款名为《摇滚史密斯》的游戏可以学习弹吉他。我对此非常兴奋，因为我本身就是一名吉他手，而且还有另外一位同样非常出色的音乐家与我们一同工作，所以我们决定在 4 月 1 日搞一个特别的模仿秀。我们组建了一个金属乐队，创作了一首关于兽人的歌曲来宣传新的派系，并宣布下一款《魔法门》游戏将是《兽人史密斯：金属之王》。这真是太有趣了。”

ABOVE: The spoof poster created for Might & Magic Orcksmith: Lords of Metal featuring Kuryak's Killers, a fictional group composed from members of the Paris Might & Magic worldbuilding team.

上图：为《魔法门之兽人史密斯：金属之王》制作的恶搞海报，乐队名为库恩亚克（反抗法师奴役的兽人英雄）的杀手，这是一个由巴黎《魔法门》世界观构建团队成员组成的虚构团体。

Another event of which Le Breton has fond memories came after reviewing the troop animations from rival publisher, Blizzard. Warcraft III and Starcraft had become famous for their witty quips while their troops were left idle, and Le Breton wanted to bring that same kind of energy and fun into Heroes VI. Rather than limiting the experience to funny lines of dialogue, he assembled a team of both Ubisoft and Black Hole employees to visit with the team of animators who had been contracted to work on the project.

勒布雷东还有另一段令他难以忘怀的经历，那是在观看竞争对手暴雪公司制作的单位动画之后。《魔兽争霸3》和《星际争霸》因其部队在空闲时的俏皮台词而闻名，勒布雷东希望将这种活力和乐趣带入《英雄无敌6》中。他没有仅仅局限于那些搞笑的台词，而是组建了一个由育碧和黑洞公司员工组成的团队，与负责该项目动画工作的团队进行交流。

"We wanted spectacular action and cool animation with effects. Even if it's turn-based, it should feel like it's dynamic, right? At first we tried communicating what we wanted with the team with drawings, but we decided that the best thing we could do was just show the animators what we had in mind. We spent a whole day there acting out what we wanted, and they recorded us." It was during this visit that the team whipped up some very funny idle animations, and a video of their improv sessions were later shared out to the community. "Some of them were based on instruments. Like the Sanctuary faction with the nagas has this huge hybrid shark-slash-human warrior, and he's got a huge club with encrusted shells, but the animators turned them into jazz bass players. The vampire lord played his sword, whipped his hair, and threw up the rock horns. It was all fun and ridiculous, but also super valuable not only creatively, but because again, it ended up being a demonstration of who we were."

“我们想要的是震撼的动作和精良的动画效果，包括各种特效。即便游戏是回合制的，也应该给人一种动态感，对吧？起初，我们试图通过画图向团队传达我们的想法，但后来我们决定，我们最好的方法就是向动画师展示我们心中所想的内容。我们在那里花了整整一天的时间来演示我们想要的效果，然后他们把我们的表演录了下来。”正是在这次访问期间，团队创作了一些非常有趣的闲暇动画，并且后来把他们的即兴表演视频也分享给了整个社区。“其中一些是以乐器为基础的。比如瀛洲派系的娜迦族，他们有一批巨硕的混种鲨鱼人战士，他拿着一根巨大的、带有贝壳装饰的棍棒，但动画师们却把他变成了爵士贝斯手。吸血伯爵挥舞着他的剑，甩动着他的头发，还比出了摇滚手势。这一切既有趣又荒诞，但同时也极具价值，不仅在创意方面如此，而且因为它展示了我们的个性化。”

There were many goals on Le Breton and de Waubert's wishlist for Heroes VI, but their primary concerns revolved around modernizing the franchise to preserve its long-term prospects for Ubisoft. Sales of PC-only games were soft at the time—particularly in the US, where Heroes V had struggled to find shelf space in the formerly reliable gaming outlets like Software Etc., Babbages, and others. The market trends strongly suggested that gaming consoles were quickly becoming the only profitable center for gaming. Any projects that weren't streamlining themselves for one of the dominant platforms might ultimately be heading for extinction. A major consideration in allying with Black Hole Entertainment had been to leverage the Hungarian studio's experience to help ease Heroes' long-term transition into the console world, though the plan had been to experiment with simplifying the features of VI before committing to a complete conversion. The trick would be in balancing the changes they needed to make while retaining the essential elements that made the game a Heroes game and not just another generic strategy title.

在《英雄无敌6》的开发计划中，勒布雷东和德瓦伯特提出了许多目标，但他们的主要关注点在于对该游戏系列进行现代化改造，以确保其对育碧的长期发展具有积极影响。当时，仅针对电脑平台的游戏销量不佳——尤其是在美国，《英雄无敌5》那时就曾很勉强地要在那些曾经可靠的电子游戏销售点（如“software etc.”、“巴比奇”等）找到货架空间。市场趋势强烈表明，游戏机正迅速成为游戏领域唯一具有盈利潜力的核心产品，任何未能针对主机平台进行优化的项目最终都可能走向衰落。与黑洞娱乐公司合作主要考虑的一个因素就是，利用这家匈牙利工作室的经验，长远地帮助《英雄无敌》顺利过渡到游戏机领域，不过最初的计划是先尝试简化《英雄无敌6》的功能，然后再进行全面的转换。关键在于在进行必要的改动的同时，保留使这款游戏作为《英雄无敌》而非普通策略游戏所必需的元素。

"When considering any new features, we used to have this matrix at Ubisoft," Le Breton said. "We didn't invent it, but it came from a French marketing and statistics researcher named Sylvie Losa. The first part has to do with what your game must have. These are the elements that are absolutely essential, and if you don't include them your players will hate the product. If these elements are in the game, the players won't thank you for them because it doesn't even occur to them that you've done them a favor. Those are the things that make or break whether or not the game gets purchased. The next part is what's truly critical, the things that players will have strong opinions about, and their range of appreciation might run from very high, to positive, or to negative. And basically they will mostly judge the game on those elements. Those are the things where your talent and your production value will shine the most, and where players will be the most concerned with the quality of the work. Those are the things you're going to get your strongest responses from. The third aspect has to do with your differentiator... what makes the product different from what you've done before or what else is out there in the market. It might not even be something that players are expecting, but just something that you add on top of the core formula that doesn't really change it in a fundamental way, but it's something extra. The last category has to do with things that you might not really notice ordinarily, but if they're missing it could strike the player as weird. With a mobile game, it could be the music or the sounds, because usually you play them with your own music or without listening to the game. But if one day you check it, and there's no sound, it's suddenly weird to you. So it should be there, but it's not important. It's like the story in Super Mario. Without a story the game structure makes no sense, so you have to have it but you don't spend much money there because no one cares."

“在考虑新功能时，我们曾在育碧公司使用过这样一个矩阵图。”勒布雷东说，“这个矩阵图并非我们原创的，而是源自一位名叫西尔维·洛萨的法国市场营销和统计学研究人员。第一部分涉及你的游戏必须具备的内容。这些是绝对必不可少的元素，如果省略了这些内容，你的玩家将会讨厌这款游戏。可如果这些元素存在于游戏中，玩家是不会因此而感谢你的，因为他们根本不会想到你帮了他们什么忙——这些因素决定了游戏是否会被购买。接下来的部分才是至关重要的，是玩家会持有强烈看法的那些方面，他们的评价范围可能从非常高，到积极，再到消极不等。而基本上他们会主要根据这些元素来评判游戏。在这些部分，你的才华和制作水平将会发挥最大的作用，也是玩家最关心作品质量的方面——这些就是你最能获得强烈反响的地方。第三个部分涉及到你的差异化因素……它们令该产品不同于你之前的作品或市场上其他的产品。这些可能并非玩家所期待的东西，而只是你在核心模式之上添加的一些东西，这些东西并不会从根本上改变它，但却是额外的。最后一个类别涉及到那些通常你可能不会特别注意到的东西，但如果它们缺失了，可能会让玩家觉得很奇怪。对于一款手机游戏来说，可能是音乐或音效，因为通常情况下，你玩这些游戏时都是播放自己的音乐，或者根本不听游戏本身的音乐。但要是有一天你去查看，却发现没有声音，这对你来说就会显得很奇怪。所以它应该存在，但却并不重要。这就像《超级马里奥》里的故事一样。没有故事的话，游戏的结构就毫无意义，所以你必须要有故事，但你不会在这方面投入太多资金，因为没人会在意这些的。”

In analyzing the features of the previous Heroes games, Le Breton and de Waubert felt that they needed to refine the formula and get back to the franchise's must-have combination of strategy and role-playing. In some ways they felt that a lot of the fun of the gameplay had been diluted by all the relatively trivial resource management, which they felt distracted from the fantasy of playing the hero.

在对之前《英雄无敌》系列游戏的特征进行分析后，勒布雷东和德瓦伯特认为他们需要对游戏模式进行改进，并重新回归该系列游戏必备的策略与角色扮演结合方式。在某些方面，他们觉得游戏玩法中的许多乐趣因那些相对琐碎的资源管理而被削弱了，他们认为这些琐碎的管理分散了玩家对扮演英雄这一幻想的注意力。

"We were fed up with moving secondary heroes across the map to do boring things. The idea of Heroes is to have the primary heroes moving around on the map exploring and fighting and conquering. They're generals, after all, and they're supposed to be leading armies into battle. If they capture a town, it should be theirs, as it should exert an area of control around it. The role of the secondary heroes should then be to remain garrisoned in a town to handle everything connected to it." He flashed a smile. "What good is conquering a kingdom if you don't have minions to do all the dirty work?"

“我们已经厌倦了让次要英雄在地图上四处移动去做那些无聊的事情。《英雄无敌》的设定初衷是让主要英雄在地图上四处游走，去探索、战斗和征服。毕竟他们是将领，理应率领军队投入战斗。如果他们占领了一个城镇，那这个城镇就应该是他们的，而且应该在其周围形成一个控制区域。而次要英雄的作用就是留在城镇中，处理与该城镇相关的一切事务。”他露出微笑说道，“如果占领了一个王国却没有手下去完成所有脏活累活，那占领又有什么意义呢？”

The idea, Le Breton stressed, was to have secondary Heroes focused on logistics; the player need not have them wandering all over the map. "We wanted to create ways for resources to move faster because there was the caravan system in which the resources were going to your town, and an enemy—in multiplayer especially—could attack and steal resources. That was another layer that wasn't necessarily something that was useful in single player, but in multiplayer it had become a thing to attack the enemy's convoys. It felt like something that would be in line with the player fantasy of building an empire. And again, Romain, coming from the 4X world, wanted to add more of those kinds of elements into the game. So you'd still have your main couple of Heroes to explore, collect, conquer, and fight who had stories and stuff, but then you'd have secondary Heroes who were more wrapped up with things at home. We'd then allow the primary Heroes to quickly teleport between their holdings to deal with picking up units or dealing with other resources. It allowed for more expansion, bigger empires, and less time that your Hero was running around and wasting precious movement points."

勒布雷东强调说，这个想法是让次要英雄专注于后勤工作；玩家无需让这些英雄在地图上四处游荡。“我们希望找到能让资源流通速度加快的方法，因为游戏中曾有过篷车系统，资源将会流向你的城镇，而敌人（尤其是在多人模式下）可能会发动攻击并窃取这些资源。这又是一个在单人游戏中没什么用处的层面内容，但在多人游戏中，它却演变成了攻击敌方运输队的玩法，这感觉会符合玩家构建帝国的幻想。而且，倡导 4X 游戏的罗曼（知名游戏有《人类》、《无尽地牢》）也希望在游戏中加入更多此类元素。所以你仍然会有几个主要英雄供你探索、收集和征服，而次要英雄则更多地专注于整顿家园。然后我们会允许主要英雄在他们的领地之间快速传送，以便收编部队或处理其他资源。这使得游戏能够有更大的扩展空间、更大的帝国规模，并且让你的英雄能够节省更多时间，不再四处奔波浪费宝贵的移动点数。”

Black Hole developer Gábor Szabó was enthused about the new "zone of control" concept, and admitted it was one of his favorite gameplay accelerators to the Heroes formula. "Having Heroes tied down doing minor things was a big burden. To control an area, heroes had to keep wandering around and flagging and re-flagging all the mines and other buildings. By creating these control zones, it made it much harder for an enemy player to flip a resource like a mine because they would first have to defeat the town or the fort that it belonged to. The enemy could still flag a mine temporarily if they remained there with their hero, but then they would be pinned down. It prevented a lot of the cat-and-mouse game where you had to keep chasing the enemy away, so Heroes VI made this aspect of gameplay much more convenient."

《黑洞》游戏的开发者加博尔·萨博对这一新的“控制区域”概念十分赞赏，并承认这是他将《英雄无敌》模式玩法提升至新高度的最有力手段之一：“用一些琐碎的事情去束缚英雄们，这对我们来说是个巨大的负担。要控制一个区域，英雄们就得不停地四处走动、标记、重新标记所有的矿井和其他建筑。通过创建这些控制区域，使得敌方玩家要侵占像矿井这样的资源会变得困难得多，因为他们首先得击败该矿井所属的城镇或要塞。敌方玩家要是把英雄留在那里，也能暂时占领矿井，但这样一来他们就会变得束手束脚。它避免了那种你必须不断追赶敌人的‘猫捉老鼠’式的游戏模式，这样一来，《英雄无敌6》让游戏的这一方面变得更加便捷了。”

Julien Pirou explained that another shift made by Le Breton and how it impacted the opinions of the fanbase. "In the original game, you had the seven resources like crystal, sulfur, and so on. In Heroes VI, this was reduced to four. You had gold, you had wood, you had stone, and then we had the dragon blood crystals which were like the blue crystals in Blizzard's Starcraft, right? Those were your resources. From the design side it was interesting because if you restricted the resources, it would lead to even more competitive play. It made them more meaningful. Also, because the dragon blood crystals were tied into the Ashan mythos, they created this link between the mythology and the gameplay, plus it was a little more whimsical, more specifically Heroes of Might & Magic in a sense. That was a big, big shift. Limiting the varieties of different resources changes how you approach the maps quite a lot if everyone is competing for the same special resources. When you add that up with the 'zone of control' idea, it meant that players had to adopt more of a grand strategy for the maps, and I think that was very interesting, but it resulted in a very deep shift in the feel of the game. It took a shift in mindset to get into."

朱利安·皮乌解释了勒布雷东所做的另一项改动，以及这一改动对粉丝群体意见的影响。“在原版游戏中，你有诸如水晶、硫磺等七种资源。而在《英雄无敌6》中，资源数量减少到了四种。你有金币、有木材、有石头，然后还有龙血水晶，就像暴雪《星际争霸》中的蓝色水晶一样，对吧？这些都是你的资源。从设计角度来看，这很有趣，因为如果限制了资源种类，就会导致游戏更具竞争性，也会让它们更有意义。此外，由于龙血水晶与亚山的神话体系相关联，这就将神话体系与游戏玩法联系了起来，而且还更具奇幻色彩，从某种意义上说也更像《魔法门之英雄无敌》的风格。这是一个非常重大的改变。限制不同资源的种类会相当大地改变你在地图上的路径，因为每个人都在争夺相同的特殊资源。再加上“控制区域”这一概念，也就意味着玩家需要对地图采取更加宏观的战略，我认为这非常有趣，但它也导致了游戏整体感觉的显著变化。要适应这种变化，需要转变思维方式才行。”

Ubisoft was pushing hard to update other aspects of the visual appeal of the maps, and wanted to introduce many new features. "The most difficult part was the studio's ambition to turn Heroes into a AAA strategy game with intricate graphics, 3D worlds, and so on," Pirou continues. "But we didn't have a AAA budget. It was much smaller. That change made the mapmaking process so long because everything needed to look super good. In the previous versions of Heroes, even in Heroes V, the approach to the maps was very much still tile-based. You'd just paint your map with some stuff and put down some trees. But in Heroes VI the goal was that the world look like something you'd see in a third-person RPG with super-detailed models and so on. So much of our budget and so much effort was put into this 3D world, and that was very taxing on the production side." For Black Hole, Szabo admits that some of Ubisoft's requests for the maps really forced them to push the technical envelope. "It was challenging. They wanted the maps to be more dynamic and change in real time, so say maybe characters could drown in a lake or you could make a bridge out of a fallen tree. I remember we put some water lilies in that the heroes could step on and walk across the water using these pads."

育碧公司正在努力提升地图的视觉效果，并想要引入许多新功能。“最困难的部分在于工作室一心想要将《英雄无敌》打造成一款拥有复杂图形、全 3D 世界等内容的 3A 级策略游戏。”皮乌继续说道，“可我们没有 3A 级的预算，预算要少得多。这些改变使得地图的制作过程变得异常漫长，因为所有内容都需要呈现出极佳的视觉效果。在《英雄无敌》的前几代、甚至是五代之中，地图的制作方式仍然主要是基于格子的。你只是用一些材质绘制地图，并放置一些树木。但在《英雄无敌6》中，目标是让这个世界看起来就像你在第三人称角色扮演游戏里所看到的那样，有着极为精细的建模等等。我们的预算就这么多，还在构建 3D 世界上投入了巨大的精力，制作上的任务极为繁重。”萨博承认，对于“黑洞”来说，育碧对地图的一些要求确实迫使他们突破技术的极限。“这很有挑战性。他们希望地图更具动态性，能够实时变化，比如角色可能会掉进湖里，或者你可以用倒下的树木搭建一座桥梁。我记得我们还放置了一些睡莲叶子，让英雄们可以踩在上面并在水上行走。”

In the first decade of the 2000s, many game developers were scrambling to capitalize on the ubiquity of cheap, and increasingly fast internet-connected households. Blizzard and Sony Online were practically printing money with their massively multiplayer games, and proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that fans were ready, willing, and able to spend significant time living in their favorite fantasy universes. Persistent online connection was seen as a potential goldmine to savvy marketing departments as well as to game developers. By tracking actual player behaviors—as opposed to the things players claimed to be doing—game developers hoped to focus their designs on the activities that drew the most attention. The data would also help to identify the best features to monetize for an industry that was diving deeper into the dubious economy of microtransactions. Microsoft was already planning for its next console, the Xbox One, to be "always on," a decision that would be met with almost universal fan outrage when it was first announced in May of 2013. Just three years prior to that, however, Ubisoft was wrestling with how they should be taking advantage of the concept.

在21世纪的第一个十年里，许多游戏开发者都在竭力抓住廉价且日益高速的家庭联网得到普及这一机遇。暴雪和索尼在线凭借其大型多人在线游戏赚得盆满钵满，并且毫无疑问地证明了粉丝们能够、愿意并且乐意花费大量时间沉浸在他们最喜爱的幻想世界中。持续的在线连接被视为营销部门和游戏开发者潜在的财富宝库。通过追踪玩家的实际行为（而非玩家声称自己在做的事情），游戏开发者希望将设计重点放在最吸引人关注的活动上。这些数据还有助于逐渐深入到微交易这种不当经济模式中的游戏行业，确定能够实现盈利的最佳投入方向。微软已经计划让其下一代游戏机 Xbox One “始终保持在线”。这一决定在 2013 年 5 月首次公布时，几乎遭到了所有粉丝的强烈反对。然而，就在三年前，育碧公司也在思考如何利用这一理念。

"We wanted to have the game always connected, always online, even if the player is just playing a single-player game because that was the trend at the time," Le Breton explained. It was another feature they knew would be needed for their eventual jump to console, particularly if they were going to land on the Xbox One. "In the long run it didn't turn out to be the best idea, but the thinking was that we'd have more data about how our players were playing and it would help us with retention, and we could offer the players extra bonuses for being online. We also had the notion that we could give players badges based on how long they'd been supporting the brand. Long-time players would get to be VIP fans, and with the badges players would get new skins and customizations for heroes for seasonal events and lots of stuff like that."

勒布雷东解释道：“我们希望游戏始终保持联网状态，即使玩家只是在玩单人游戏也是如此，因为那是当时的趋势。”这是他们当时就知道需要具备的另一项功能，对于他们最终转向游戏机平台（尤其是如果要登陆 Xbox One 平台的话）来说更是如此。“从长远来看，这并不是一个最佳方案，但当时的想法是，我们能获得更多关于玩家游戏方式的数据，就有助于提高用户留存率，而且我们还能为在线玩家提供额外奖励。我们还曾设想，可以根据玩家支持品牌的时长为他们颁发徽章。长期玩家可以成为VIP粉丝，而凭借这些徽章，玩家还能获得英雄的新皮肤和个性化设置，以及各种其他内容。”

Part of the Ubisoft retention strategy was to offer something to players that they couldn't have had with non-connected computers. "We were trying to bake these dynasty features into it," Julien Pirou said. "You needed the game to be connected to the internet to access a bunch of features so your heroes could keep stuff across different games and unlock special weapons that would gain experience when you used them. Just all kinds of stuff, but you needed to be connected for that to work." Some of these specially-created online features rendered the game unplayable without an internet connection, but Pirou thought these felt artificial and out of character for Heroes. "It was still mostly a single-player or turn-based, hot-seat kind of game."

育碧的留存策略之一是为玩家提供一些非联网电脑无法实现的功能。“我们试图将这些王朝系统融入其中。”朱利安·皮乌说，“要使用其中的诸多功能，就必须保持游戏联网状态，这样你的英雄才能在不同游戏间保存物品，并解锁特殊武器，而且使用这些武器时还能获得武器经验值。总之有各种各样的功能，但要实现这些功能就必须保持联网状态。” 有些专门设计的在线功能使得游戏在没有网络连接的情况下无法正常进行，但皮乌认为这些感觉很不自然，也不符合《英雄无敌》游戏的风格。“它仍然主要是单人游戏或回合制热座模式的游戏。”

Another major consideration for the introduction of the "always on" features was that Ubisoft was attempting to curb piracy, and it had been a similar motivation that drove Microsoft's thinking about the DRM policies for the Xbox One. "These online features made the game very hard to pirate. It was actually successful commercially because it was a lot harder to steal, particularly if you compare it to what we had on Heroes V, because there was so much outrage from fans who felt the online features were intrusive—which, to be fair, was true. So, in Heroes VII we got rid of them, and the pirates came back, and were plagued by it."

引入“始终保持在线”功能的另一个重要考量因素是，育碧公司试图遏制盗版行为。这一动机与微软对于 Xbox One 的 DRM （数字版权管理）政策的思考如出一辙。“这些在线功能使得这款游戏极难被盗版。实际上，它在商业上取得了成功，因为盗版难度要大得多，尤其要考虑到《英雄无敌5》的那些措施。但因为粉丝们对此反应强烈，他们认为这些在线功能过于侵扰——说实话也确实如此。所以，在《英雄无敌7》中，我们取消了这些功能，盗版们又回来了，于是我们又陷入了困境。”

The online aspect of the game was also central to the multiplayer component, which was intended to be another evolutionary step on the game's path to the console. "It was supposed to be a stepping stone toward a more multiplayer focused Heroes VII," Szabó said. "It was kind of in between V and VII because it still had a lot of emphasis on the single player content as well as on the multiplayer. Of course, we balanced it principally for the multiplayer, so it was actually a much more balanced version of Heroes overall than previous versions had been." One specific aspect of the multiplayer particularly pleased Szabó. "We planned the simultaneous multiplayer steps so that players were able to control their heroes independently until they met each other. When they at least encountered another hero, the player order kicked in, so it was kind of a mixture of real time and turn based. It was a little different in that respect."

游戏的线上部分也是多人模式的核心部分，旨在成为游戏迈向主机平台进程中的又一进化步骤。“它本应成为迈向更加注重多人模式的《英雄无敌7》的垫脚石。”萨博说，“它就像介于《英雄无敌5》和《英雄无敌7》之间，因为它既有一定程度的单人模式内容，同时也强调了多人模式。当然，我们专门为了多人模式而进行了平衡调整，所以与之前的版本相比，这次的《英雄无敌6》实际上在平衡性方面要比之前的几代都要好得多。”萨博特别欣赏多人游戏的一个具体特色。“我们精心设计了同步多人游戏的阶段，使得玩家能够在相遇之前同时独立控制自己的英雄。当他们至少遇到另一名英雄时，玩家顺序机制才会启动，所以这有点像是即时制和回合制的结合。在这方面会稍微有所不同（实际上同步回合在《英雄无敌5》的多人模式就有）。”

Of all the goals that Le Breton and de Waubert set for Heroes VI, they felt the highest priority was for the series to get closer to its RPG roots—even closer in some ways than Jon Van Caneghem had attempted to do in Heroes II and Heroes III. “Romain and I had both been playing a lot of RPGs around the time we began production on Heroes VI,” Le Breton said, “and had been looking specifically at a lot of Bioware titles. We wanted to have the same kinds of classes and upgrades and skill trees, plus we'd also really admired the Paragon and Renegade kinds of ideas from Mass Effect.”

在勒布雷东和德瓦伯特为《英雄无敌6》设定的所有目标中，他们认为最重要的目标是让这个系列更贴近其角色扮演游戏的本源——在某些方面甚至比乔·万·坎内根在《英雄无敌2》和《英雄无敌3》中所尝试做到的还要接近。“在我们开始制作《英雄无敌6》的时候，我和罗曼都一直在玩很多角色扮演游戏。”勒布雷东说，“我们还特别关注很多生软公司的游戏。我们希望拥有同样的职业种类、升级系统和技能树，同时我们也非常欣赏《质量效应》中的‘楷模’和‘叛逆’等理念。”

The idea of introducing a system of consequences for player actions was not at all new to computer games in general but was clearly an innovation that hadn't been explored in the world of large-scale strategy titles before. “We didn't really want it to be good versus evil, but something a little more nuanced than that, because you're not playing an individual character in a party or running around alone in the world. You're a general. You're leading armies. We wanted to have something that connects with that broader view. And we decided there would be two ways that your hero can respond to conflict. We called it the Blood and Tears system.”

为玩家的行为设定相应后果这一理念在一般意义上的电脑游戏中并非新鲜事物，但在大型策略类游戏领域却显然是一个未曾被探索过的创新点。“我们其实并不希望它完全是善与恶的对立，而是希望呈现一种比这更复杂、更微妙的模式，因为玩家并非在团队中扮演单个角色，也不是独自在世界中四处活动。玩家是将军，要率领军队。我们希望设计出能与这种更宏观的视角相契合的东西。于是我们决定，你的英雄在应对冲突时会有两种不同的反应方式。我们将其命名为‘血与泪’系统。”

Pirou was particularly fond of Blood and Tears. “We tied a bunch of choices in Heroes, both on the story side and on the gameplay side too. Say, for example, your hero encountered a stack of neutral units on the map, and they're afraid of you and they want to flee. If you choose to pursue them because you want the XP, that was a Blood choice. If you let them go, that was a Tears choice. We tied a lot into this. If your knight was making a lot of Tears choices, then they'd become a Paladin eventually. If they made a lot of Blood choices, they would become a Vindicator or an Inquisitor—I can't remember which it was—but it had an advanced class aspect to it, which was something which started back with Heroes IV. We were revisiting that idea, but with a clearer explanation of why you get this class or that class because in Heroes IV, you would pick this skill or that skill and suddenly your class would change. With the system in VI, it was more organic. The cumulative effect of the decisions you make in the world push you toward Blood or Tears, and that's why your class changes, and you get certain skills based on that new class.”

皮乌特别喜欢血与泪这一理念：“在《英雄无敌6》中，我们在故事和游戏玩法方面都设置了众多的选择。比如说，假设你的英雄在地图上遇到了一群中立单位，它们害怕你并且想要逃跑。如果你因为想要获得经验值而选择去追击它们，那就是一个偏血的选择；如果你选择放它们走，那就是一个偏泪类的选择。我们在这上面做了很多的关联。如果你的骑士做出了很多偏泪的选择，那么他们最终会变成圣武士；如果他们做出了很多偏血的选择，他们就会变成复仇铁卫或圣裁官——我不记得是哪一个了（圣裁官是牧师的血系升级），但这个系统具有进阶职业的特点，这是从《英雄无敌4》开始有的设定。我们重新探讨了这个想法，但这次对成为这一职业的原因有了更清晰的解释，因为在《英雄无敌4》中，你选择这个技能或那个技能，突然间你的职业就会改变。而在《英雄无敌6》的系统中，这种变化更加自然。你在游戏世界中所做决策的累积效应会引导你偏向血或泪，这就是你的职业发生改变的原因，并且基于这个新的职业，你会获得特定的技能。”

The degree of impact that the system had on the game overall was significant, but Pirou noted that it might not have been realized as fully as he would have wished. “It got drowned a little bit in everything that was going on. I think we could have revisited that in Heroes VII in a lower-key sort of way with less eye candy, more meaningful choices, and more integration with the systems. It could have been very interesting. But at the time it was very strongly associated with the online aspects of Heroes VI, so when we got rid of the online part, it wasn't practical to recreate in Heroes VII. But I still think it was an interesting idea. As a level designer and later as a story writer, because I became a writer on the DLCs for Heroes VI, it was a nightmare. You had to have two storylines to handle the different paths. If you play an Inquisitor, your story is not the same as for the Paladin. Once you add a campaign on top of that, and the character carrying over from one map to the next, it was hugely ambitious, let's say, but still I think it was something players remember from Heroes VI, how the Blood and Tears choices they made impacted the story. Some people said it impacted the story too much, and some would tell you it didn't impact the story enough, but still they remembered it. So, I think there was something there that we could have iterated on and improved."

该系统对整个游戏产生的影响是相当显著的，但皮乌指出，这种影响可能并未达到他所期望的那样全面。“它在当时被各种事务所掩盖了。我认为在《英雄无敌7》中，我们本可以以一种更节制的方式去重新审视它，减少视觉元素，增加更有意义的选择，并加强与系统的整合。这原本可能会非常有趣。但当时它与《英雄无敌6》的在线部分紧密相关，所以当我们去掉在线部分时，在《英雄无敌7》中重现它就不具备可行性了。但作为关卡设计师以及后来的故事编写者，我仍然认为这个想法很有趣。因为我在《英雄无敌6》的DLC中担任了编剧一职，那简直是一场噩梦。你必须设计两条不同的故事线来应对不同的游戏路径。如果你扮演的是圣裁官，你的故事与圣武士的故事就不一样。再加上上面提到的战役模式，以及角色在不同关卡之间的继承，这在某种程度上可以说是极具雄心壮志的。不过，我认为玩家们仍然会记得在《英雄无敌6》中的那些选择，血与泪的选择对故事的影响。有些人说这种影响太大了，而有些人则会告诉你这种影响不够大，但不管怎样，他们还是记得这件事的。所以，我认为这其中有一些我们可以进一步改进和完善的元素。”

ABOVE: In Heroes VI, the player's Blood or Tears points are tracked independently. Whenever certain thresholds are crossed, the player is then given the opportunity to make particular choices about the development of their hero. In the above example, the player has accumulated enough Tears points to join the Order of Paladins.

上图：在《英雄无敌6》中，玩家的“血”或“泪”分值是分别进行统计的。每当达到特定的阈值时，玩家就会有机会对角色的成长做出特定的选择。在上图中，玩家已经积累了足够的“泪”分值，从而能够加入圣武士团。

In reviewing the Blood and Tears system and all of its associated complexity, Le Breton was a little rueful and sighed. He explained that out of everything they tried to introduce into Heroes VI, the system had been the largest, most complex, and most expensive element they'd tried to introduce. "When we got close to launching and shortly afterward, we were showing players the whole Blood and Tears system and gauging their reactions to it. It was so unusual and not at all what we had expected. It wasn't even a differentiator to them, like they didn't care about it at all. I'm guessing that it was just too far away from what they were used to, and it wasn't part of what they felt the core Heroes experience should be. They were like 'Oh, yeah, we see what you were doing,' but we all ended up feeling as though all the money and time and discussions that we invested in that feature were for nothing. Just a complete waste. It was very bad for us, and one of the key reasons that we ended up going vastly overbudget on Heroes VI. It would play a really big role in what happened with Heroes VII."

在回顾血与泪系统及其所有相关复杂性时，勒布雷东略感遗憾地叹了口气。他解释说，在他们为《英雄无敌6》尝试引入的所有内容中，这个系统是规模最大、最为复杂且成本最高的一个。“在临近发布之时以及之后不久，我们向玩家展示了整个血与泪系统，并观察他们对此的反应。它太不正常了，完全不符合我们的预期。对他们而言它甚至不是什么差异化元素，因为他们根本不关心它。我猜这主要是因为它与他们所习惯的东西相去甚远，而且也不是他们所认为《英雄无敌》核心体验应有的部分。他们就像说‘哦对，我们明白了你们在做什么’，但我们最终都感觉为这个功能投入的所有金钱、时间和讨论都白费了。完全是浪费。这对我们来说非常不利，也是《英雄无敌6》最终超支的主要原因之一。它将对《英雄无敌7》的发展带来极大的影响。”

As the development of Heroes VI stretched out, the long distance between the Paris and Budapest teams began to take a toll on the project. For the Hungarians, there was growing discontent that they weren't being given the resources they needed. "We had three years to develop the whole game," Gábor Szabo said. "The problem was that the story part was supposed to come from Ubisoft. We had to create the campaigns based on their story, but for two and a half of those years we had no story to work from. All we could do was create maps, and toss around ideas for the design, so it was difficult having our hands tied like that. By the time it was delivered to us, we didn't really have the time to implement things the way they should have been."

随着《英雄无敌6》的开发进程不断推进，巴黎和布达佩斯两个团队之间遥远的距离开始给项目带来了诸多困扰。对于匈牙利团队来说，他们越来越感到不满，因为没有得到他们所需的资源支持。“我们有三年的时间来完成整个游戏的开发工作。”加博尔·萨博说道，“问题在于故事部分本应由育碧提供。我们得根据他们的故事来创作战役内容，但在这两年半的时间里，我们根本没有任何故事可参考。我们所能做的只是绘制地图，讨论设计方面的想法，所以那种手脚受限的感觉真的很糟糕。等到故事交付给我们的时候，我们确实没有足够的时间按照应有的方式来实施这些内容了。”

Jeffrey Spock—who had been held over from Heroes V to write Heroes VI—remembers the collaborative process being very different than what he'd experienced on the previous game. "I never actually met with the people at Black Hole Studios. I think Ubisoft was handling all of the creative direction for the project. The other studio didn't have the same level of involvement—or at least didn't seem to have the same weight—that Nival had, and didn't have the writers and the creative team on their side. So it was very much Ubisoft imposing the vision and the design and the writing, and the Hungarians were doing their best to execute. I was doing more freelancing and other games inside and outside of Ubisoft, and you know, I'd been working on the Might & Magic and Heroes IPs for six or seven years by that point. And then I guess the management at Ubisoft wasn't happy with how things were going on in Heroes VI, so there was a lot of shuffling going on."

原本是从《英雄无敌5》转过来负责《英雄无敌6》的编剧杰弗里·斯波克，记得这次合作过程与他之前参与的那款《英雄无敌》有着很大的不同。“我实际上从未与黑洞工作室的人员见过面。我认为育碧公司负责的是整个项目的创意指导工作，可另一家工作室并没有像 Nival 那样深度参与其中，或者至少说没有像 Nival 同等的权重—— Nival 拥有编剧和创意团队的支持，而这另一家工作室却没有这些资源。所以基本上是育碧公司主导了这个愿景，主导了设计与编剧，而匈牙利人则尽全力去实施。我当时更多地从事自由职业、以及在育碧内外开发其他游戏，要知道，那时我已经为《魔法门》和《英雄无敌》系列 IP 工作了六七年了。然后，我想育碧的管理层对《英雄无敌6》的进展情况并不满意，所以就发生了很多人员调动的情况。”

The story-related issues between the studios would only grow more complicated as Spock jumped ship to join recently departed Romain de Waubert at the newly-founded Amplitude Studios. Writing duties would abruptly fall to Kurt McClung, who had never officially been a part of Ubisoft but had served as an independent contractor for the Heroes franchise since the formation of Le Breton's lore team.

随着斯波克离开旧东家，加入离职的罗曼·德瓦伯特刚刚成立的振幅工作室（现已脱离世嘉），剧情故事的问题只会变得更加复杂。写作工作突然由（漫画作家）库尔特·麦克伦承担，他此前从未正式成为育碧的一员。自勒布雷东的背景故事团队成立以来，他就一直作为独立承包商为《英雄无敌》系列提供服务。

Though the actual business between Ubisoft and Black Hole was being handled at a level above the development teams' heads, virtually everyone began to feel the effects of the rapidly degenerating relationship. Even as a lowly level designer, Pirou remembered the tension. "We had a crisis at the end of development. At my grade I didn't have all the information, but negotiations were going on, and it was easy to tell it was not going well. Black Hole had an agent that sort of became the front man in this negotiation, and from what I understand of the Ubisoft perspective, this guy was making things so, so much worse. And I'm sure from Black Hole's perspective, we were the bad guys. It was super sad because on the development side we'd been working with these people for three years, getting to know them and trying to make the best game we could. And I know Erwan was trying to mediate a bit and find a solution."

尽管育碧与黑洞公司之间的实际业务并不由开发团队高层直接掌控，但几乎所有人都开始感受到这段迅速恶化的关系所带来的影响。作为一个普通的关卡设计师，皮乌也记得当时的紧张气氛。“在开发结束时，我们遭遇了一场危机。以我的职位级别，我并不掌握所有信息，但谈判正在进行，很容易就能察觉情况并不乐观。黑洞公司有一个代理人，在这次谈判中充当了主要代表的角色，而据我所了解的育碧公司观点，这个人把事情搞得极其糟糕。而从黑洞公司的角度来看，我们则是坏人。这实在是太令人伤心了，因为在开发过程中，我们已经与这些人合作了三年，逐渐熟悉他们，并努力制作出最好的游戏。而且我知道艾万也在试图调解并寻找解决方案。”

"The way the project ended was terrible." The memory of it still troubled Erwan Le Breton as he discussed the last few months of development. "It was delayed several times. There were a lot of technical issues. There was a lot of bad blood between Black Hole Entertainment and Ubisoft, things not related to the game itself, but more about the relationship between the two studios as business partners not being... let's say respectful with one another. So it turned into a kind of development hell in the end."

“这个项目的结局非常糟糕。”当艾万·勒布雷东谈到开发的最后几个月时，这段经历仍令他感到困扰，“它多次延期。存在很多技术问题。黑洞娱乐公司和育碧之间存在很多矛盾，这些并非与游戏本身相关，而是更多地涉及这两家作为商业伙伴之间的关系，即彼此之间……比方说不够尊重对方。所以最终它变成了某种开发地狱。”

For the Hungarians, the collapse of the Ubisoft / Black Hole relationship was catastrophic. "We were really overworked during the last couple of months," Szabó said. "I think everyone at the company was determined to finish this game because most of us loved the series. We'd all played the previous versions, and we couldn't let it go. We just had to finish it. It would have been very unfortunate if we decided to just cut it off and start something else." In the end, however, all attempts to salvage the failing relationship between the two studios would fail and Black Hole Entertainment prepared to head into bankruptcy. Le Breton acknowledged that management issues arose on both sides. However, since Ubisoft controlled the budget, he felt that the responsibility weighed more heavily on their shoulders, even though the development team had no say in the matter.

对于匈牙利人来说，育碧与黑洞的关系破裂是灾难性的。“过去几个月我们工作得非常辛苦。”萨博说道，“我认为公司里的每个人都决心要完成这款游戏，因为我们大多数人都喜欢这个系列。我们都玩过之前的版本，而且我们不能放弃它，我们必须把它完成。如果我们决定就此放弃并开始新的项目，那将会是非常不幸的。”然而最终，双方努力挽救这一破裂关系的种种尝试都以失败告终，黑洞娱乐公司将会走向破产。勒布雷东承认双方都出现了管理问题。不过，由于育碧掌控着预算，他认为他们的责任更重，尽管开发团队对此没有发言权。

The version of Heroes VI that was initially released to the public was, by Le Breton's own estimation, unfinished and unpolished. Along with the troubles with Black Hole, early negative feedback from testers about its new skill tree system led Ubisoft to attempt an eleventh-hour fix to the problem. “We tried to handle it in the last month before we were due to ship, but we ended up with a mess. There wasn't any clear path for hero development. You could go anywhere and do everything and it was super overwhelming, leading to a very bad user experience. The player had total freedom, but it was not at all gated, so your hero would level up and you'd open up this spell book with tons of pages and you wouldn't know which one to pick. In the time we had left, we couldn't test all the options, so the balance suffered, and it lacked consistency." To further Le Breton's troubles, Heroes VI's producer, Romain de Waubert, had decided to found Amplitude Studios. “After those very exciting years of working on this super promising game, having it shipped in such a state was frustrating for me, for the fans, for a lot of people." As a result of these many burdens, and as a consequence of Black Hole's dissolution, online and post-release support were completely unavailable for the game at launch.

最初向公众发布的《英雄无敌6》按照勒布雷东自己的评估，其实尚未完成，更奢谈打磨。除了与黑洞公司相关的种种问题之外，前期测试人员对游戏新技能树系统的负面反馈也催促育碧要在最后一刻尝试解决这个问题。“在我们预定发布之前的一个月里，我们试图处理这个问题，但最终却陷入了一片混乱。英雄的发展没有明确的路径。你可以去任何地方，做任何事情，结果让人感到极度困惑，导致了非常糟糕的用户体验。玩家拥有完全的自由，但并没有任何引导，所以你的英雄会升级，然后你会打开那本有大量页面的魔法书，却不知道该选择哪一页。在我们剩下的时间里，我们无法测试所有的选项，因此平衡受到了影响，而且缺乏一致性。”让勒布雷东的麻烦雪上加霜的是，《英雄无敌6》的制作人罗曼·德瓦伯特决定离开育碧，创立振幅工作室。“在经历了这段非常令人兴奋的、致力于开发这款极具潜力的游戏的时期之后，以这样的状态将其发布出来，对我来说、对粉丝们、对很多人来说都是令人沮丧的。”由于这些重重负担，以及黑洞公司解散的影响，该游戏在发布时完全无法提供在线支持和发布后的更新。

The job of fixing the broken release would take months as Ubisoft sought a new development partner to at last put the project to bed. “We had to wait for six months or more before the first patch because the only developer who would help us was a small German studio called Limbic that had assisted Black Hole with the multiplayer aspect of the game. They were offering a technical solution, they had the code, and they knew how to fix it. But it still took them time to ramp up and be fluent enough in Heroes to be able to fix it."

修复这个糟糕发布版本的工作将需要数月时间，因为育碧要寻找新的开发合作伙伴，以最终完成这个项目。“由于唯一愿意帮助我们的开发团队是一家名为 “Limbic” 的德国小型工作室（他们在本作的多人游戏方面协助过黑洞），所以我们不得不等待了六个月或更长时间才发布第一个补丁。他们提供了技术解决方案，虽然他们拥有相关代码，并且清楚如何进行修复。但还是花了些时间才逐渐熟悉《英雄无敌》这款游戏，达到能够解决问题的熟练程度。”

As it happened, Ubisoft's new partnership with Limbic Entertainment would turn out to be very fruitful for both companies. Limbic was not only able to solve Heroes VI's broken online and multiplayer problems, but they were also able to add in features that Ubisoft hadn't been able to get into the game at the time of its launch. “They also facilitated our connection with another developer named Virtuos who assisted with the art," Le Breton explained, "and Virtuos then would go on to create Heroes VI's only official add-on, Shades of Darkness, which was for the Dungeon faction."

事实上，育碧与 Limbic 娱乐公司的新合作对双方而言都将带来丰硕的成果。Limbic 不仅成功解决了《英雄无敌6》在在线功能和多人游戏方面的故障问题，而且还添加了当时育碧未能在游戏发布时加入的游戏内容。“他们还帮助我们与另一家名为维塔士的开发商建立了联系，后者协助了美术工作。”勒布雷东解释道，“然后，维塔士接着为《英雄无敌6》创作了唯一的官方资料片《幽暗之影》，加入了地牢派系。”

With the help of both Limbic and Virtuos, Ubisoft was at last able to patch Heroes VI into a stable and enjoyable game that was a hit with fans. Despite the production's troubled last few months, with the combined sales of Heroes VI along with Shades of Darkness, The Complete Edition, and various bundles, the game ended up being a big commercial success for Le Breton and Ubisoft. "It became the best-selling edition of Heroes that Ubisoft had ever made," he said with pride. "It was unfortunately also one of the most expensive. We took a lot of risks, tried a lot of new things, and we made a lot of mistakes with it too, but I'm very proud of it."

在 Limbic 和维塔士的帮助下，育碧终于将《英雄无敌6》优化为一款稳定且有乐趣的游戏，深受玩家喜爱。尽管这款游戏在最后几个月的制作过程中遇到了一些问题，但凭借《英雄无敌6》本体加上《幽暗之影》、“完整版”及各种套装的总销量，这款游戏最终为勒布雷东和育碧带来了巨大的商业成功。“它成为了育碧有史以来最畅销的《英雄无敌》版本，”他骄傲地说道，“但不幸的是，它也是成本最高的版本之一。我们冒了一些风险，尝试了很多新事物，也犯了很多错误，但这一切我都深感自豪。”