30周年回顾 第九章 激情

Chapter Nine

"Passions"

When he started working for Ubisoft on Heroes VI, Julien Pirou was astounded that the company had no plans for a new Might & Magic role-playing game. The nearest the company had come was the financially disappointing game Dark Messiah of Might & Magic. “Messiah had started off as Might & Magic X, but it evolved into an action game,” Pirou explained. “Unfortunately, the company wasn't very keen to attempt another one because Dark Messiah had been big, expensive, and not well received. It had been unfavorably compared to Oblivion and the other Elder Scrolls games, which really wasn't fair. They were completely different stylistically, but because they were both first-person games, players expected the same experience.” In point of fact, Oblivion and Dark Messiah were completely different experiences; the former was an open-world RPG, while the latter was essentially a fantasy shooter that was more story-driven and linear with a focus on action.

当朱利安·皮乌开始为育碧开发《英雄无敌6》时，他惊讶地发现公司根本没有计划推出新的《魔法门》系列角色扮演游戏。公司最接近该系列作品的尝试还是那款在财务上表现不佳的《魔法门之黑暗弥赛亚》。“《黑暗弥赛亚》最初是作为《魔法门10》开发的，但后来演变成了一款动作游戏。”皮乌解释道，“不幸的是，公司不太愿意再尝试推出另一款系列游戏，因为《黑暗弥赛亚》规模宏大、成本高昂且反响不佳。它与《湮灭》及其他《上古卷轴》系列游戏相比表现欠佳，但这不太公平。它们风格完全不同，只因为都是第一人称游戏，玩家对体验有着相同的期待。” 实际上，《湮灭》和《黑暗弥赛亚》完全是两种不同的体验；前者是一款开放世界的角色扮演游戏，而后者本质上是一款更注重剧情驱动的线性奇幻射击游戏，侧重于动作元素。

Following the relative failure of Dark Messiah, Erwan Le Breton tried valiantly to cajole Ubisoft into trying again, but was met with steep resistance. "From the beginning I'd wanted Ubisoft to do a Skyrim-like game with Might & Magic because we were the masters of the AAA open-world game, right? We had the Assassin's Creed and Watch Dogs and Far Cry series. So, I was telling them that we should do our thing with Might & Magic," Le Breton said. He argued that the idea made perfect sense, but Ubisoft's upper management felt the IP's strength was limited to the turn-based strategy game, and Ubisoft wasn't known for churning out medieval fantasies. "They knew it was working for Bethesda and Blizzard, but I couldn't convince them that it was right for them."

在《黑暗弥赛亚》遭遇相对的失败之后，艾万-勒布雷东竭力劝说育碧公司再次尝试，但遭到了强烈的反对。“从一开始我就希望育碧能推出一款采用《魔法门》的风格，类似《上古卷轴》那样的游戏，因为我们是 3A 开放世界游戏的专家，不是吗？我们有《刺客信条》、《看门狗》和《孤岛惊魂》系列。所以我跟他们说，我们应该用《魔法门》来做我们擅长的。”勒布雷东说道。他认为这个想法非常合理，但育碧的高层认为该 IP 的优势仅限于回合制策略游戏，而且育碧并不以炮制中世纪奇幻作品见长。“他们知道这是贝塞斯达和暴雪的优势，但我无法说服他们这对我们也是一样。”

Le Breton repeatedly went to bat for the neglected Might & Magic role-playing brand. He reasoned that the company already had the assets from the Heroes games with which they could make any number of RPG-flavored titles. "We could have made an RTS or an action RPG like Diablo, so I asked them several times, 'Why don't we do it?' It was cheaper than developing an open world, and we had a ton of stuff we could reuse." In that vein, he convinced Ubisoft to let him partner with a new third-party development partner, Limbic, to create a simple real-time prototype using existing Heroes assets. "It looked great, but I couldn't get Ubisoft to move forward with it. They felt Heroes was the only viable brand in the Might & Magic series."

勒布雷东多次为备受冷落的《魔法门》系列角色扮演游戏品牌发声。他指出，公司已经拥有《英雄无敌》系列游戏的成品资源，凭借这些资源他们可以开发出众多角色扮演主题的游戏。“我们本可以制作一款即时战略游戏或者像《暗黑破坏神》那样的动作角色扮演游戏，所以我多次询问他们：‘为什么不这么做呢？’这比开发开放世界游戏要便宜得多，而且我们还有很多可以重复利用的内容。”基于这种思路，他说服了育碧让他去与新的第三方开发合作伙伴 Limbic 合作，利用《英雄无敌》的成品资源制作一个简单的即时制游戏原型。“效果看起来很棒，但我无法让育碧继续推进下去。他们认为《英雄无敌》是《魔法门》系列中唯一可推行的品牌。”

Above: Sorpigal-by-the-Sea would be the starting town in Might and Magic X: Legacy. The scenery was inspired by creative designer Julien Pirou's visit to the Cyclades islands in Greece.

上图：在《魔法门10：传承》中，海滨小镇索皮格将是游戏的起始地点。其场景灵感来源于创意设计师朱利安·皮乌对希腊基克拉泽斯群岛的探访。

Despite Le Breton's setbacks, Julien Pirou kept faith that one day the role-playing game could be resurrected. He's freely admitted to pestering his superiors into including more narrative "nods" back to the New World era, and steadily gained permission to reference, obscurely, the characters and events from both of the old franchises. What he never expected, however, was that the production disruptions that shook the team during the latter half of Heroes VI would reopen the door to Might & Magic.

尽管勒布雷东遭遇了种种挫折，但朱利安·皮乌仍坚信这款角色扮演游戏终有一天能够重获新生。他坦率承认自己曾不断向上级施压，要求增加更多与 NWC 时代相关的叙事“致敬”，并且逐渐获得了相关许可，能够含蓄地提及这两款老系列中的角色和事件。然而，他从未料到的是，在《英雄无敌6》后半段导致团队陷入混乱的生产问题，反而为《魔法门》的回归打开了大门。

A perfect storm of events led to a dramatic shift in the creative atmosphere at Ubisoft. The defection of several key Heroes personnel to Amplitude Studios—including producer Romain de Waubert and lead writer Jeffrey Spock—led to a number of hasty battlefield promotions for Le Breton, Kurt McClung and Julien Pirou. "Erwan, Julien, and I were all scrambling around doing level design all of a sudden," McClung recalled. "We had like no bosses. Erwan had to become the producer and the creative director, and he had this weird job where he was going from associate producer to producer to executive producer, just trying to get the power to make his game, right? And I was suddenly the lead writer without formally having the title because everything was going crazy."

一系列事件的共同作用导致了育碧公司创作氛围的显著转变。几位关键的《英雄无敌》团队成员（包括制作人罗曼·德瓦伯特和首席编剧杰弗里·斯波克）转投了振幅工作室，这使得勒布雷东、库尔特·麦克伦和朱利安·皮乌等人的职位加快晋升。“艾万、朱利安和我突然都开始忙于进行关卡设计了。”麦克伦回忆道，“我们当时根本没有任何上级主管。艾万不得不兼任制作人和创意总监，他面临着一种奇怪的工作状态，从助理制作人到制作人再到执行制作人，一直在努力争取掌控自己游戏的权力，是吧？而我则突然成为了首席编剧（虽然没有正式的头衔），因为一切都变得很疯狂。”

To assist McClung, Julien was given dominion over the story and lore of the Shades of Darkness expansion, a role for which Pirou was more than qualified. He was already considered the team's expert on the subject—not just what had been created for Ashan, but on all the lore that had ever been created for the Might & Magic and Heroes franchises. "Julien was able to be all in, all the time. He lived for it," McClung said. "By contrast, I had a baby, I had a wife, and I'd have to tell the people in charge, 'Guys, I can't just come to the office every day. You don't pay me enough. I can only work one job because I'm a freelancer. I'm gonna have to go out and find other stuff.' So, they gave Julien a full-time job in the studio, and it was really his chance to step up and become a leader."

为了协助麦克伦，朱利安被委以负责《幽暗之影》资料片的故事和背景设定的工作，这个角色正是皮乌所完全胜任的。他早已被视作团队在该领域的专家——不仅精通为亚山世界创作的内容，还熟知《魔法门》和《英雄无敌》系列的所有背景设定。“朱利安能够全身心投入，一直如此。他为此而生。”麦克伦说道，“相比之下，我有了孩子，还有妻子，我得向上级说明：‘伙计们，我不能每天都来办公室上班。你们给我的报酬不够。我只能做一份活，因为我是个自由职业者。我得出去寻找其他机会。’所以，他们给朱利安在工作室安排了一份全职工作，这正是他能够挺身而出、成为领导者的机会。”

Another important personnel change in Ubisoft's third-party management team was the appointment of Deborah Papiernik, who was more open to new ideas than her predecessor. "When Deborah took over, things began to change. She told us that we could pitch games that we wanted to make so long as they were IPs that Ubisoft already owned and they wouldn't cost too much."

在育碧的第三方管理团队中，还发生了一项重要的人事变动，即任命了德博拉·帕皮内尼克。与前任相比，她更乐于接受新想法。“德博拉接手后，情况开始发生变化。她告诉我们，只要是我们想要开发的游戏，只要它们是育碧已经拥有的知识产权，并且成本不会太高，就可以向她提出开发申请。”

Pirou was well aware that the company's previous experience with Dark Messiah had made them gun-shy when it came to the first-person RPG genre. He also knew it was unlikely that a big-budget, Skyrim-sized project would get past the company's accounting department, but he supposed with a little out-of-the-box thinking that it might be possible to sell Papiernik on a more modestly budgeted approach.

皮乌很清楚，公司之前在《黑暗弥赛亚》项目上的经历让他们对第一人称角色扮演游戏这一类型望而却步。他也明白，一个像《上古卷轴5：天际》那样规模的大型项目不太可能通过公司的财务部门审批，但他认为只要稍微跳出常规思维，或许就能说服帕皮内尼克接受一个预算相对较低的方案。

The inspiration for his pitch came from a recently released computer role-playing game called Legend of Grimrock. "It was a small, very well-done RPG based on the old Dungeon Master game from the 1980s. I thought it might be a great way to approach a new Might & Magic. We could create a compact, old-school, back-to-the-roots version of the game, and it could also be a good opportunity for Ubisoft to experiment with making games on smaller scales—which was totally opposite than what they were doing with games like the Assassin's Creed series."

他这次推销的灵感来源于一款近期发布的电脑角色扮演游戏《魔岩山传说》。“这是一款小型但制作精良的角色扮演游戏，基于 20 世纪 80 年代的《地下城领主》。我认为这或许是一个开发全新《魔法门》系列游戏的绝佳方式。我们可以打造一个紧凑、复古、回归根源的游戏版本，这也能为育碧提供一个尝试制作较小规模游戏的机会——这与他们制作像《刺客信条》系列这类游戏的方式完全相反。”

Papiernik liked the budget-friendly concept and greenlit what would become Might & Magic X: Legacy with Pirou leading the creative charge. Gary Paulini, a Ubisoft producer with the third-party development group, would be responsible for finding a new external team and keeping the game within the project's restrictive parameters. Paulini and Pirou turned to Limbic Entertainment, the scrappy little German studio who had already demonstrated their value when they'd helped to rescue Heroes VI following Black Hole's exit. The team seemed ideally suited for Pirou's concept for an "indie" Might & Magic X. Stephan Winter, the founder of Limbic, was electrified by the idea, and a deal was struck to get rolling on the RPG.

帕皮内尼克对这一经济实惠的创意颇为欣赏，并批准了后来成为《魔法门10：传承》的游戏项目，皮乌负责创意统筹工作。育碧公司的第三方开发制作人加里·保利尼将负责寻找新的外部开发团队，并确保游戏符合该项目的严格限制。保利尼和皮乌找到了 Limbic 娱乐公司，这是一家德国的小型工作室，他们在黑洞公司退出后曾帮助拯救了《英雄无敌6》。这个团队似乎非常适合皮乌提出的“独立制作”《魔法门10》的概念。Limbic 娱乐公司的创始人斯蒂芬·温特对这个想法十分兴奋，于是双方达成协议，开始开发这款角色扮演游戏。

As one cost-cutting measure, the Might & Magic team initially planned to reuse existing Heroes assets just as Le Breton had attempted to do with his failed earlier pitch. Pirou thought that using available material was a responsible choice. It seemed illogical to recreate everything from scratch. "The models we had were great looking, so redoing them felt like a waste." More than that, they were hoping that preserving the look of Heroes VI within Might & Magic X: Legacy would help players visually associate the role-playing game with the strategy game.

《魔法门》团队最初计划像勒布雷东之前被驳回的提案那样，重新利用现有的《英雄无敌》角色素材，作为一项削减成本的措施。皮乌认为使用现有的素材是一个负责任的选择，重新从头开始创作似乎有些不合逻辑。“我们现有的模型看起来就很棒，所以重新制作感觉是一种浪费。”此外，他们还希望在《魔法门10：传承》中保留《英雄无敌6》的风格，有助于玩家在视觉上将该角色扮演游戏与策略游戏联系起来。

On paper, the recycling plan made a great deal of sense, but the execution was much more challenging than they had expected. "It wasn't simple at all. Converting the models and animations for use in Legacy took quite a bit of effort, but midway through our production we ended up with some unexpected help. Another project that Kurt was involved with was a game called Might & Magic Raiders which was being developed by Ubisoft Chengdu in China. Their project ended up being canceled, so the team from Chengdu reached out to us and said, 'Hey, we have like three months still on our contract. Our animators don't have anything to do, and we love Might & Magic. We would be happy to help you with your project if we can.' So, all of a sudden, we had a few extra 3D artists and animators that could help us with converting models. We also got some of the music that had been created for Might & Magic Raiders."

从理论上讲，这项复用计划很有意义，但实际执行起来却比他们预想的要困难得多。“结果一点都不简单。将这些模型和动画转换为可用于《传承》的版本需要耗费大量精力，但在我们的制作过程中，我们意外地得到了一些帮助。库尔特参与的另一个项目是名为《魔法门：突袭者》的游戏，该游戏由中国的育碧成都工作室开发。他们的项目最终被取消了，于是成都的团队联系我们并说：“嘿，我们的合同还有大约三个月才到期。我们的动画师们没什么要做的，而且我们很喜欢《魔法门》。如果可以的话，我们很乐意为你们的项目提供帮助。”于是，突然间，我们有了几位额外的 3D 美术和动画师，他们可以帮我们完成模型的转换工作。我们还得到了为《魔法门：突袭者》创作的一些音乐。”

Kurt McClung—now the lead writer of the entire Might & Magic and Heroes franchises—would edit and supervise all the narrative elements of the new game, but Pirou would do most of the writing by himself. "Kurt and I had a process for X that was pretty unusual," Pirou recalled. "We used a tool with Limbic called Articy Draft. I'd be in Paris creating the quests in Articy and then Limbic could just import those directly into the game on their end, so whatever I wrote was just going straight in. It felt a little less collaborative than what we had done on Heroes where we'd be passing Word and Excel documents back and forth between us before sending those off to a development team to be integrated. It was a very different flow."

库尔特·麦克伦——如今是《魔法门》和《英雄无敌》系列游戏的总编剧——将负责监督新游戏的所有叙事元素，但仍是由皮乌来独自完成大部分的创作工作。皮乌回忆道：“库尔特和我为《魔法门10》这款游戏制定了一套非常独特的创作流程。我们使用一款名为 ‘Articy Draft’ 的工具，我在巴黎用它来创作任务，然后 Limbic 这边可以直接将这些内容导入游戏，这样我所写的任何内容都能直接进入游戏。这与我们在《英雄无敌》项目中的协作方式有所不同，那时我们会先相互传递 Word 和 Excel 文件，然后再将它们交给开发团队进行整合。这种流程完全不同。”

Before they started writing, McClung and Pirou paused to consider how the narrative of the Might & Magic role-playing game should differ from that of the Heroes strategy game. Moreover, while they couldn't use the stories from Enroth, they wanted at least to tap into the essential tone of Jon Van Caneghem's original creation. "We went back to the original Might & Magic and really thought about the player's party," McClung said. "You had four characters, you were in a party, but you didn't know each person's name. You felt as though you were part of this group, and it was the party that was most important. It's not about a hero; it's not about Bob or Joe or whomever. There wasn't a solitary leader. The way things were written originally, it was always written from the party's perspective. ‘The party discovers this. The party does that.’ So that's how we decided to approach the storytelling in Might & Magic X. Whatever happens, it's the group that's important. It's kind of like the family in Oregon Trail. You've got these four characters, your family, but you never know who's going to survive. I trace everything back to Oregon Trail."

在开始创作之前，麦克伦和皮乌先停下来思考《魔法门》角色扮演游戏与《英雄无敌》策略游戏的叙事方式有何不同。此外，尽管他们不能使用恩洛斯的故事，但他们至少希望能借鉴乔·万·坎内根原创作品的基调。“我们回溯了最初的《魔法门》，认真思考了玩家的小队构成。”麦克伦说道，“你有四个角色，组成一个小队，但你并不知道每个人的名字。你感觉自己是这个团体的一部分，而这整个小队才是最重要的。写的不是某个英雄，也不是鲍勃或乔或其他任何人。没有专门的领导者，原本的叙述方式始终是从这个小队的视角出发的。‘小队发现了这一点。小队做了这件事。’这就是我们决定在《魔法门10》中讲述故事的方式。无论发生什么，重要的是这个小队。这有点像《俄勒冈之旅》中的家庭。你有这四个角色，你的家人，但你永远不知道谁会活下来。我们所有这一切都能追溯到《俄勒冈之旅》中去。”

Pirou noted that the inspiration for Legacy's story grew fairly organically from the events in Heroes of VI, and would be set just a few years thereafter in the same universe as Ashan. "There was this huge conspiracy of angels who were trying to restart an ancient war and had been manipulating the human kingdom to achieve that. From my perspective that was huge. If I'm a human being, at the end of that I'd be pretty pissed at those angels. So that was the jumping-off point for Might & Magic X. In the world there's a huge debate about whether church and state should be separated, and that conflict is tearing the kingdom apart. For me it was just a logical continuation of this big conspiracy, this huge revelation." A key element of the new story would come from a casual detail that McClung had included in VI. "I don't know if it was in his descriptions or in the tool tips or something else, but he made this offhand comment somewhere about a faceless master of assassins fighting in the ancient war. There wasn't really any context to it, but it sounded cool, and the light went on and I thought, I've found my villain. So, the master of assassins became a bad guy in my game."

皮乌指出，《传承》故事的灵感很大程度上源自《英雄无敌6》中的情节，并且将发生在同样的亚山宇宙之后的几年。“当时存在着一个庞大的天使阴谋组织，他们试图重启一场古老的战争，并一直在操纵人类王国以实现这一目标。从我的角度来看，这是一件大事。如果我是人类，到最后我会对那些天使非常愤怒。所以这就是《魔法门10》的开端。在这个世界里，存在着关于教会与国家是否应该分离的激烈争论，而这场冲突正在撕裂这个王国。对我来说，这只是一个庞大的阴谋在逻辑上的延续，也是重大的揭秘。”新故事的关键元素源自麦克伦在《英雄无敌6》中不经意间加入的一个细节。“我不知道这是在他的描述中、还是工具提示里，或者是别的什么地方，但他确实随口提到了一个无名的刺客大师在古代战争中战斗的事。当时并没有什么背景信息，但听起来很酷，于是我就灵机一动，我觉得我已经找到了我的反派角色。于是，那个刺客大师在我游戏中就变成了一个坏人。”

The location for the new adventure was chosen in part because it was essentially unexplored territory, allowing Pirou to have significant narrative freedom. "In the previous Heroes games, there was always this peninsula on the map of Ashan—which is pretty much Europe—but where Spain would be. It was mentioned a couple of times in the stories, but it had never been explored in gameplay. So, I felt like, 'Okay, that's where Might & Magic X will take place, on the fringe of the Holy Empire in this big blank part of the map that everyone has been looking at for a long time.' I seized that territory and started to play with it. The only thing that had really been previously established was that there was this huge city, which looked a bit like Istanbul. I decided that I'd let the players explore there. It allowed me to use something that was already there, but I was able to some extra layers to the story."

选择这个新冒险的地点，部分是因为那里基本上是尚未使用的区域，这为皮乌提供了极大的叙事自由。“在之前的《英雄无敌》系列游戏中，亚山地图上总有一个半岛——那其实差不多就是欧洲现在西班牙的位置。在故事中它被提及了几次，但在游戏玩法中却从未被探索过。所以我就想：‘好吧，这就是《魔法门10》发生的地方，位于神圣帝国的边缘，在这张大家都长久关注的地图边缘的空白地带。’我占用了那个区域并开始对其进行研究。之前唯一确定的是有座巨大的城市，看起来有点像伊斯坦布尔。我决定让玩家去探索那里。这让我能够利用那些已经存在的东西，但我也会为故事增添一些额外的层次。”

ABOVE: Julien Pirou (CENTER-RIGHT) met Might & Magic creator Jon Van Caneghem (CENTER-LEFT) while demonstrating Might & Magic X: Legacy at Gamescom.

上图：朱利安·皮乌（中右）在科隆游戏展上展示《魔法门10：传承》时，遇到了《魔法门》游戏的创作者乔·万·坎内根（中左）。

In addition to filling in a few blanks in the world of Ashan, Pirou also had the freedom to redress some of the issues he had with the setting. “I'd always been a bit bothered by the Ashan reboot initially having no connection at all to the previous worlds of the franchise,” Pirou said. “It made me sad. I always felt like you could create something new, but just have it located somewhere we hadn't been before and still keep it attached to the established mythology. I had been pestering Erwan to make references to the old games, specifically to the Ancients. He told me he wasn't comfortable making those kinds of nods himself, but if anyone was knowledgeable enough about the old Enroth lore to do it, it would be me. When I finally got hold of Might & Magic, he gave me permission to do it, but I couldn't put in any definitive ties, nothing explicit. He warned me above all else, 'Don't replace my dragon gods with robots.'

除了在亚山世界中填补一些空白之外，皮乌还能够自由地对一些与设定相关的问题进行调整。“一开始，重启的亚山世界与该系列之前的各个世界毫无关联，这一直让我感到有些困扰。”皮乌说，“这让我有些难过。我一直觉得我们可以创造全新的东西，但只是将其置于他们未曾涉足的某个地方，并且仍然将其与已有的神话体系关联起来。我一直缠着艾万，让他做出与那些旧游戏的关联，特别是提及那些先民。他告诉我他本人不太愿意做出这样的致敬，但如果说有人对旧版的恩洛斯背景足够了解，能够做到这一点的话，那肯定就是我了。当我最终开始制作《魔法门》时，他给了我这么做的权限，但我不能建立任何明确的联系、或任何明确的表述。他第一句话就是警告我：‘千万不要用机器人来取代我的龙神。’”

“In the original Enroth lore, there's a mention of the Kreegan demons that came from beyond the void, and it's mentioned quite a bit that the Ancients created Enroth there. In the lore of the new universe, Ashan also has a void, that's where the cosmic egg came from. I thought, What if Ashan wasn't created by the Ancients? What if it exists in the same cosmos as Enroth, but it's on the other side of the same void? So one of the things we introduced in X was this quest where you have to escort an astronomer to a place where you can watch the stars. If you talk to the guy and really explore his dialogue, he says, 'Yeah, I've seen some strange things. There's a flat world out there.' If you explore his house and look closely on the wall behind him you see a bunch of drawings, and one of them is actually the world map of Terra from Might & Magic III. It's like he saw this planet in the distance. I put lots of little nods to the old games like that in there. Which, of course, were taken very literally by some fans who said 'Aha! Ashan is part of the original universe after all! They lied to us!"

“在原本的恩洛斯传说中，提到了来自虚空之外的克里根恶魔，并且多次提到了创造恩洛斯的先民。在新宇宙的背景中，亚山也有一个虚空，那里就是宇宙之卵的起源地。我想，如果亚山不是由先民们创造的呢？如果它与恩洛斯处于同一个宇宙，只是位于同一个虚空的另一侧呢？所以，在《魔法门10》中我们引入了这样一个任务，你必须护送一位天文学家前往一个适合观测星象的地点。如果你与这个人交谈，并深入探究他的对话，他会说：“是的，我见过一些奇怪的事情。那一边有个平坦的世界。”如果你探索他的房子并仔细观察他身后的墙上，你会看到一排画作，其中有一幅实际上是《魔法门3》中的幻岛世界地图。就好像他远远地看到了那个星球一般。我融入了许多类似的、对老游戏的巧妙致敬，当然，一些粉丝会非常认真地看待这些，他们会兴奋地说：“啊哈！亚山终究还是属于原作宇宙的一部分啊！他们骗过了我们！”

At the outset of production, the Might & Magic X team had high hopes that they would be able to include an editor along with the game—a first for the role-playing franchise—but there was a problem with the development platform that made it impractical for inclusion. "We were making the game in Unity, which was convenient for the team, but would-be modders would have been required to own the professional version of Unity just to do simple things like adding quests and creating their own dungeons. We didn't have the budget or the time to build a tool that could circumvent the problem," Pirou said. "So that ended up being a bit of a broken promise to the community and a big disappointment to us as well."

在游戏开发之初，《魔法门10》团队满怀期待，希望能将编辑器一同纳入游戏中——这在角色扮演游戏系列中尚属首次，但开发平台存在一个问题，使得这一功能难以实现。“我们使用的是 Unity 开发工具，这对团队来说很方便，但想要进行修改的玩家需要拥有 Unity 的专业版，才能完成诸如添加任务和创建地下城之类的简单操作。而我们既没有预算也没有时间去开发一个能够解决这个问题的工具。”皮乌说道，“所以这最终对社区来说是一个不小的失信之举，对我们自己来说也是一次巨大的失望。”

Though fans would be prevented from building their own maps for Legacy, they would still be given an unprecedented amount of input on the project's design. "We set up this website for community exchanges, and part of it was dedicated to design ideas about the dungeons. Fans could come up with ideas, and then everyone could vote on them, and I'd then write the story based on those designs. One of the best was called Fortress of Crows, and honestly, I think it's the best dungeon in the game. It was also the last one that we built, so we had a lot of experience by then. It's a very memorable dungeon, a bit scary with a creepy sort of abandoned city in the sand and stuff, and it works really well. And I think it's a best-case example of what can happen when you've got a good collaborative experience with the fans."

虽然粉丝们将无法绘制自己的《传承》游戏地图，但他们仍能获得参与该项目设计的大量机会。“我们设立这个网站是为了促进社区交流，其中有一块专门用于探讨地下城的设计理念。粉丝们可以提出自己的想法，然后大家可以进行投票，之后我会根据这些设计来撰写故事。其中最出色的一个叫做《乌鸦堡垒》，说实话，我认为这是游戏中最棒的地下城了。这也是我们最后建造的一个，所以那时我们已经有了很多经验。这是一个非常令人难忘的地下城，在沙中埋着一座阴森恐怖的废弃城市之类的，效果非常好。而且我认为这是一个很好的例子，说明了当我们与粉丝之间有着良好的合作时，会发生什么样的结果。”

In the end Pirou's passion project would be released to the public in two stages: a partial beta release in August of 2013, and then a full release on January 23, 2014. Though fans and critics alike gave it generally good reviews, the game was unable to attain the same level of profitability enjoyed by its Heroes siblings, even given its greatly reduced budget. Nevertheless, Pirou remained proud of what they accomplished. "While it's true that it's not a big game, most of our players still feel that it was a proper Might & Magic RPG. They see that it was created by people who respect the franchise and did their best to make it a real entry in that legacy... pun entirely intended. I still get messages on social media from people who say things like ‘Oh, thank you for Might & Magic X. It brings back so many great memories, I really enjoyed it.’” Pirou said one of his greatest satisfactions came with a review published in The CRPG Book edited by Felipe Pepe. “I was proud that a whole page was dedicated to our game. The review said that while the game had a few flaws, it was easy to see that it had been done with a lot of love for the series. If I ever have a mantle above a fireplace, I'm going to hang that review right there.”

最终，皮乌的这一激情之作分两个阶段向公众发布：2013 年 8 月进行了部分测试版发布，随后在 2014 年 1 月 23 日进行了完整版发布。尽管粉丝和评论家们对其评价总体不错，但这款游戏却未能达到其《英雄无敌》系列作品那样的盈利水平，即便考虑到其预算大幅削减也是如此。然而，皮乌仍然为他们所取得的成就感到自豪。“诚然，这并非一款大型游戏，但我们的大多数玩家仍然认为它是一款合格的《魔法门》角色扮演游戏。他们看到它是由尊重该系列，并尽最大努力使其成为该系列‘传承’的人创作的……双关语是有意为之。我仍然会在社交媒体上收到一些人的留言，他们说‘哦，感谢你的《魔法门10》。它让我回忆起了许多美好的时光，我真的很喜欢它。’”皮乌说，他最大的满足感来自菲利佩·佩佩在《CRPG通鉴》中的一篇评论。“我为能有一整页的篇幅来介绍我们的游戏而感到自豪。那篇评论说，尽管这款游戏存在一些缺陷，但很明显能看出它是倾注了对这个系列的大量热爱才完成的。如果我以后能在壁炉上方挂上一件挂饰的话，我会把这篇评论挂上去的。”

Xavier Penin got his first taste of Heroes glory during the development of Heroes VI when he was asked to assist with a few of the shorter missions. Like so many of his teammates, he had been a longtime fan and coveted the opportunity to work on the franchise. “When Ubisoft bought the rights, I was so jealous of a friend of mine who was on the project. He worked just a few meters away from me. My close proximity let me be a spectator as they built up the world of Ashan, however, and I had a front row seat for the creation of the new version of Heroes of Might & Magic.”

泽维尔-佩宁在开发《英雄无敌6》期间首次领略到了这款游戏的辉煌之处，当时他被要求协助完成一些较短的任务。和许多队友一样，他一直是该系列的忠实粉丝，并渴望有机会参与其中。“当育碧获得版权后，我非常羡慕一位参与该项目的朋友。他就在离我几米远的地方工作。由于我们距离很近，我得以旁观他们构建亚山的世界，而且我还能近距离见证《英雄无敌》新版本的诞生。”

Penin's familiarity with the IP—along with his seven years of experience supervising third-party development teams—put him in an excellent position when he began lobbying to lead the newly proposed Heroes VII. He was already familiar with the Heroes team, and understood how best to deal with long-distance design partnerships. “At Ubisoft we were in a position of control, and we were the ones paying for everything, but if you want a team to have investment in what they're doing, not just act as slaves doing whatever you want and not giving a shit, you have to be honest with them. You have to be involved, and they have to trust that you want the same things.”

佩宁对这一 IP 的熟悉程度，加上他过去七年负责监督第三方开发团队的经验，使他在争取上级新提议的《英雄无敌7》项目时处于极有利的地位。他早已熟悉《英雄无敌》团队，并清楚如何处理远程的设计合作事宜。“在育碧，我们处于掌控的位置，也承担了所有费用，但如果你希望一个团队能够对他们的工作有所投入，而不是仅仅像奴隶一样听从你的指挥、毫无怨言地去做任何事情，那么你就必须对他们坦诚相待。你必须参与其中，而且他们必须相信你跟他们有同样的追求。”

This policy of honesty meant that Penin would have to share some difficult truths with Limbic Entertainment, who had already been tapped to handle the development. Ubisoft still supported the franchise, but their faith that it could be developed into a mass market tentpole was rapidly fading. “Heroes VI had been profitable, but it ran hugely over budget. Some of Erwan Le Breton's well-meaning attempts to “streamline” the core gameplay seemed to have alienated large swaths of both longtime fans and new players looking for a more complex experience.

这一诚实的方针意味着佩宁必须向获得授权负责这款游戏开发工作的 Limbic 娱乐公司坦承一些难以启齿的事实：育碧仍然支持这个系列，但他们对于将其开发成面向大众市场之主打作品的信心正在迅速消退。《英雄无敌6》是盈利的，但超支严重。艾万-勒布雷东的一些旨在“简化”核心玩法的善意尝试似乎反而疏远了大量长期粉丝和寻求更复杂体验的新玩家。

“The mandate from above was to keep the game small and on a super strict budget,” Le Breton said. For Ubisoft's third outing with the game, Ashan's mastermind would be less involved with the day-to-day operations, but would act as the creative director of the overall IP. “The bottom line was 'Just make it good.' There was a lot of trauma from VI, and people were worried that if we got overambitious with it again, it would double the budget, and we couldn't be sure that we'd sell enough to keep that profitable.”

“上级下达的指令是将游戏规模控制得小一些，并严格控制预算。”勒布雷东说。对于这款游戏的第三次开发，这位亚山世界的策划者将不再参与日常运营工作，但会担任整个 IP 的创意总监。“底线就是‘把游戏做好’。《英雄无敌6》项目带来了很多挫折，人们担心如果我们再次过于雄心勃勃，预算就会翻倍，而且我们也不能确定能否卖出足够数量的游戏来保证盈利。”

Might & Magic X's producer Gary Paulini would be called in on the Ubisoft side of the equation to help make sure that the mandate was being followed. “He's a tall, very funny guy,” Penin said, explaining why he was an important part of the Heroes VII team. “And he's blunt. He'll tell you everything you don't want to hear, but he can't lie. He doesn't hold his tongue. If he thinks you're doing shit, he's gonna tell you. Some people can't stand that, but when you realize it's all for the best, it's interesting." Julien Pirou backed up Penin's assessment, and said that Paulini had a lot of good, practical advice, particularly when they began to develop the user interface for the game. “He would always say, 'Don't be shy. Make it big.' He said this because with so many PC games on the market, you tend to have these little boxes with tiny text. And now, maybe because I'm older and my sight isn't what it used to be, I realize, No, we have cool art. We have cool characters. We have cool 3D. Let's show them off. Don't make everything small. Don't be shy. Make it big. I still use that advice to this day."

《魔法门10》的制作人加里-保林尼也会被请到育碧这边来，协助确保规定得到执行。“他身材高大，而且非常幽默。”佩宁说明着他成为《英雄无敌7》团队重要成员的原因，“他直言不讳。他会告诉你那些你不想听到的事情，但他不会说谎，也不会闭口不言。如果他认为你在做错事，他会告诉你。有些人受不了这一点，但当你意识到这一切都是为了最好的结果时，就会觉得有趣了。”朱利安·皮乌也支持佩宁的评价，并表示保林尼有很多好的、实用的建议，尤其是在他们开始为游戏开发用户界面时：“他总是说：‘别那么保守，把它做大。’他这么说是因为市面上的电脑游戏种类繁多，通常会有一些小盒子，上面的文字很小。而现在，也许是因为我年纪大了，视力也不如从前了，我意识到：对，我们有很棒的美术设计，我们有酷炫的角色，我们有出色的 3D 效果，让我们把这些展示出来吧。别把所有东西都做得那么小。‘别那么保守，把它做大。’我至今仍会遵循那条建议。”

With an eye on the budget and wanting to take advantage of the big, beautiful 3D models they already had, the team hoped to steal a page out of the playbooks of both Might & Magic X and Might & Magic Heroes Online and reuse assets from Heroes VI, but another mandate from Ubisoft meant that Limbic would have to start over from scratch. “After we were done with Might & Magic X: Legacy, Ubisoft began signaling that moving forward all their future projects would be built using the Unreal Engine," Pirou explains. “As it was, we weren't going to be able to use the same engine as Heroes VI anyway because that had been built using Black Hole's proprietary tech, so we wouldn't have access to that. Limbic had a lot of experience with Unity, but we'd run into problems with that trying to build the community editor for Legacy, and it was absolutely mandatory that Heroes have an editor. That isn't to say that Unreal didn't come with its own technical challenges."

该团队考虑到预算问题，并且希望充分利用他们已有的精美 3D 模型，就想借鉴《魔法门10》和《魔法门英雄无敌在线》的策略，重新利用《英雄无敌6》中的资源，但育碧的另一项指令要求 Limbic 必须从头开始重新制作。“在完成了《魔法门10：传承》之后，育碧开始发出信号，表示他们未来的所有项目都将采用这种虚幻引擎。”皮乌解释道，“实际上，我们也无法使用《英雄无敌6》的引擎，因为它是基于黑洞公司的专有技术开发的，所以我们无权使用。Limbic 在使用 Unity 工具方面有着丰富的经验，但在尝试为社区构建《传承》编辑器时遇到了不少问题，而且《英雄无敌》绝对要有地图编辑器。这并不是说虚幻引擎本身就没有技术难题。”

For Le Breton, the shift to Unreal represented more than a technical alteration, and in execution felt a bit like a walk-back to the series' origins. “The art style of Heroes VII is more like a modernized Heroes III or IV rather than V or VI. It's less colorful, and the proportions are more realistic. Part of that was a conscious choice driven by the fans saying to us, 'Go back, go back, go back!' But it was also influenced by the change to Unreal and how the lighting worked in the new engine. It was really hard to achieve a super stylized look with it at the time. With time and effort, we might have been able to tame it, but it was tremendously expensive and with our efforts to keep costs down, it wasn't really achievable in the timeframe we were going to have."

对于勒布雷东而言，向虚幻引擎的转变不仅仅是一次技术上的改变，其执行过程在某种程度上感觉像是回到了系列作品的本源。“《英雄无敌7》的美术风格更像是《英雄无敌3》或《英雄无敌4》的现代化版本，而不像《英雄无敌6》。它的色彩没那么鲜艳，比例也更加贴近现实。这其中有一部分是出于粉丝们的强烈要求，他们对我们说：‘回去吧，回去吧，回去吧！’但这也受到了向虚幻引擎转变、以及新引擎中光照效果的影响。当时要实现那种极度夸张的风格确实非常困难。随着时间的推移和努力的付出，或许我们能够加以控制，但这样做成本极高，而我们又要努力控制成本，所以在我们预期的时间范围内是无法实现的。”

When Xavier Penin took the reins of VII, fans were still arguing loudly over the changes made to Heroes VI, leaving him with the problem of how to best address their concerns. "They felt we'd opened up too much to mainstream audiences and it'd become less of their thing. We really wanted to listen to them, and maybe wind the game back to the fundamentals. We brought back the larger number of resources, and we reintroduced things like the war machines that had been removed. We wanted desperately to win back the love of the old fans while also modernizing the whole experience." But the push to revisit the golden age of the franchise wasn't just coming from fans. It was also coming from within the development team.

当泽维尔-佩宁接手《英雄无敌7》时，粉丝们仍在激烈争论《英雄无敌6》所做出的改动，这让他面临着如何稳妥解决他们担忧的问题。“他们觉得我们已经向主流受众让步得太多，游戏变得不再那么受他们欢迎了。我们非常希望能倾听他们的意见，或许应该让游戏回归根本了。我们改回了更多的资源种类，并重新引入了之前被移除的诸如战争机器之类的元素。我们迫切希望重新赢得老粉丝们的喜爱，同时也要对整个体验进行现代化改造。“但重新回归该系列黄金时代的这一要求，并非仅仅来自粉丝们。开发团队内部也有这样的想法。”

Not long after Limbic's founder announced at Gamescom that Heroes VII was being developed, Ramiro Cibrian found himself being interviewed for a job at Limbic Entertainment. While discussing his CV, he was asked about his impressive depth of knowledge about the series. Cibrian recalled that he began to babble. "I started talking about possible builds, how you can mix abilities, what my favorite faction was, what my favorite artifacts were, what I would do if I could do this or that, and they were just blown away, like, 'Oh my God! We've found the king of all Heroes nerds!" Ultimately, Limbic wanted to know what would be Ramiro's first goals for the franchise. "I told them we should take everything back to the roots. When Ubisoft bought the license, they seemed to be really enthusiastic about revitalizing it and evolving it, but then they changed everything that made it Heroes in the first place," Ramiro recalled. "They got rid of Enroth and created Ashan. They decided to change the rules for how everything worked, so in the end they were really only using the name. The IP wasn't the thing they'd bought anymore."

在 Limbic 娱乐公司的创始人在科隆游戏展上宣布正在开发《英雄无敌7》之后不久，拉米罗·西比安就接到了该公司的一份面试邀请。在谈论自己的简历时，有人问他对于该系列游戏的深厚背景有何见解。西比安回忆说，他开始滔滔不绝起来：“我开始谈论可能的搭配、如何组合技能、我最喜欢的角色阵营、我最喜欢的宝物、要是能这样或那样我将会怎样，然后他们就惊叹不已，就好像说‘老天哪！我们找到《英雄无敌》的宅粉之王了！’”最后，Limbic 想要知道拉米罗对这一系列的的首要目标是什么。“我告诉他们，我们应该回归最初的设定。当育碧获得这个授权时，他们似乎对重新振兴并发展它非常热情，但后来他们却改变了最初它之所以是《英雄无敌》系列的那些元素。”拉米罗回忆道，“他们摒弃了恩洛斯，创造了亚山。他们决定改变一切机制与规则，结果他们只是借用了这个IP的名义而已，它已经不是他们买来那个了。”

Cibrian's response to the interview was possibly more ardent than the responses given by other prospective employees, but it was by no means unique. Several others inside Limbic held similar opinions that what Heroes needed was a soft reboot, and a return to the kind of gameplay enjoyed in Heroes III. "Limbic wanted to rediscover that original magic, that innocence it had while it was still at New World Computing," said Kurt McClung about working with the German team. "Those games weren't pretentious. They leveraged the imagination of the players really well."

西比安对此次面试的回答或许比其他潜在员工的回答更为激情，但这绝非独一无二的情况。Limbic 内部的其他一些人也持有类似的观点，即《英雄无敌》需要进行一次温和的重启，并回归到《英雄无敌3》那种令人享受的游戏玩法。“Limbic想要重新找回最初的那种魔力，那种它在 NWC 公司时所拥有的纯真。”库尔特·麦克伦在谈到与这支德国团队的合作时说，“那些游戏并不高深复杂。它们很好地激发了玩家的想象力。”

In his own way, McClung was orchestrating a retro-inspired rebellion from within the narrative department of Ubisoft, though not against the world of Ashan, which he had no small part in creating himself. Instead, he wanted to go back and revisit some of the storytelling methods that had been used in Heroes IV. "We were trying to get back to what it felt like IV was trying to accomplish. So many people have said negative things about it over the years, but I was like its only champion—aside from Julien who loved everything to do with Heroes—but I'd felt that the franchise had kind of missed the boat after 3DO went under. The whole industry had lost something. New World had been on to something, but they'd been cut short midstream."

麦克伦以自己的方式，在育碧的叙事部门内部策划了一场复古的反叛行动，不过这次并非针对亚山世界，因为这个世界在很大程度上是他自己参与创造的。他只是想要回归过去，重温《英雄无敌4》中所采用的一些叙事手法。“我们试图回归到《英雄无敌4》想要达成的那种感觉。多年来，很多人对其评价不佳，但我是其唯一的拥护者——还有朱利安，他喜欢与《英雄无敌》有关的一切。但我感觉这个系列在 3DO 临近倒闭时似乎偏离了正轨。整个产业好像失去了某些东西。 NWC 曾经想做点什么，但他们中途就被迫终止了。”

The appeal to McClung of the earlier games lay in all the different kinds of voices that he perceived in the telling of IV's campaigns. “I don't know if that was true or not, but it felt like there were different writers writing the different campaigns. There was a kind of collectiveness around it. Each faction not only had its own story and characters, but its own way of telling the stories. There was an Arabian Nights style that was really big in both III and IV. The elven stories were so different from the barbarian stories, and the barbarians were just told differently. The necromancer story was told almost like a vampire novel, you know, like something from Shelley or Le Fanu. Whoever wrote IV felt like they were young and experimenting, clearly trying to bring different literary genres into the game. It could have been the start of something really different."

早期游戏对麦克伦的吸引力在于他在《英雄无敌4》的战役故事中所感受到的各种不同的声音。“我不知道这是否属实，但感觉就像是有不同的作者在撰写不同的战役内容。这其中有一种集体创作的氛围。每个派系不仅有自己的故事和角色，而且还有各自讲述故事的方式。在《英雄无敌》三代和四代中，那种阿拉伯民间故事的风格确实非常盛行。精灵的故事与野蛮人的故事截然不同，而野蛮人又是以不同的方式被讲述的。亡灵巫师的故事几乎就像是一部吸血鬼小说，你知道的，就像雪莱或勒·法努的作品那样。写《英雄无敌4》的人感觉年轻且充满探索精神，显然试图将不同的文学体裁融入到游戏中。这可能就是某种真正与众不同的开端。”

To embrace this diversity of storytelling styles for VII, McClung had the writers assisting him lean into the exploration of different ideas and different genres. He encouraged them to think not as if everything was one continuous story, but rather as a multitude of different stories being told within a larger picture. “I wanted them to approach it like myths or histories or fairy tales where the symbolism becomes more interesting. I'm a huge fan of fairy tales.”

为了在《英雄无敌7》中展现这种多样的叙事风格，麦克伦让编剧们协助他深入探索各种不同的理念和不同的文风。他鼓励他们不要把一切都视为一个连贯的故事，而应将其视为在一个更大框架内讲述的众多不同的故事。他说：“我希望他们能像看待神话、历史或童话故事那样去看待它，因为其中的象征意义会变得更加有趣。我非常喜欢童话故事。”

Along with his duties as Ubisoft's lead designer for the project, Xavier Penin was assisting McClung with the writing duties on one of the campaigns when he introduced a plotline that was precisely in line with McClung's genre-busting ideology. “I wanted to tell this love story with the Haven faction,” Penin said. “We had a lot of discussions about how to make the whole thing coherent with the world of Ashan itself.”

作为育碧在该项目的首席设计师，泽维尔-佩宁在履行职责的同时，还协助麦克伦完成了其中一个战役的编写工作。在此过程中，他引入了一个与麦克伦打破常规的创作理念完全契合的故事情节。“我想以圣堂派系来讲述这个爱情故事。”佩宁说，“我们曾就如何让整个故事与亚山世界本身保持连贯性进行了大量讨论。”

McClung embraced Penin's story as a representation of their broader storytelling goals for Heroes. “It felt a bit more like Heroes IV, something that was pushing the envelope of what kind of story you could tell in a game. If you think about the companion romance stuff that you see in games like Baldur's Gate III, we were doing this a lot earlier.” McClung had written love stories himself within the context of Heroes VI. “Heroes IV had given me the idea that we could do that sort of thing. You could have two heroes on the same field of battle, and one could heal the other and resurrect them. All of a sudden it was like, ‘Wait a second. These heroes share a tragic destiny.’ I could imagine that these two characters were in love, but they're fighting, and one of them dies. ‘Oh, my God!’”

麦克伦将佩宁的故事视为他们为《英雄无敌》所设定的更广泛叙事目标的体现。“这感觉就有点像《英雄无敌4》，是一种突破游戏中所讲故事框架的尝试。想想《博德之门3》那样的游戏中那种同伴之间的浪漫情节，我们早就在这方面有所尝试了。”麦克伦自己也曾在《英雄无敌6》时期创作爱情故事。“《英雄无敌4》让我有了这样的想法，我们也可以这么做。可以在战场同一边有两位英雄，其中一位可以治愈另一位并使部队复活。突然间，就好像‘等等，这两位英雄有着悲惨的命运。’我能想象这两个角色之间存在着爱情，但他们却在战斗中相互厮杀，最终其中一人死去。‘哦，天哪！’”

McClung's favorite love story of his own had actually taken place in Heroes VI, but presenting it during an onscreen cinematic proved to be a technical challenge and a budgetary obstacle. “I had this angel and this devil, and I wanted the devil to kiss the angel guy. The problem was, the producer was telling me, “You can't just have one kiss. It's a lot of work for it just to happen once, so it has to happen at least twice in the game. It has to be a feature, otherwise we can't do it.' So, I went back, rewrote things, then told them, 'Okay, now there are three kisses in the game.' The producer went in, made it a feature, and it ended up in the game. Unfortunately, you can't really see anything because it's just these two heads kind of bobbing together, but it worked. We got romance into a wargame."

麦克伦自己最喜欢的一段爱情故事确实在《英雄无敌6》中写过，但在屏幕上以动画形式呈现这一情节却遭遇了技术难题和预算限制。他说：“我设定了一个天使和一个魔鬼的角色，我想让魔鬼去亲吻那个天使角色。但问题在于，制片人告诉我：‘你不能只让他们亲一下。要让这个吻发生一次需要做太多工作，所以它必须在游戏中至少出现两次。这必须成为一个特色，否则我们就做不了。’于是，我回去重写了相关内容，然后告诉他们：‘好了，现在游戏中有三个吻的情节了。’制片人听了之后，将其作为特色加入了动画中，并最终被纳入了游戏。可惜的是，你根本看不清什么，因为只是那两个头颅一起上下摆动而已，但总算实现了。我们把浪漫元素融入到了战争游戏中。”

Seven years after his underaged admission into Ubisoft's VIP program nearly got Fabrice Cambounet in very hot water with his bosses, "Oak" Ozolit was astonished to land a job at Limbic Entertainment to work on the Heroes franchise. Once again, he was surrounded by people much older and more experienced than himself, but he was considered one of the most promising hires ever to walk in the German developer's doors. His interview had lasted for four hours, which was considered highly unusual at the company. His path from teenaged game localizer to gameplay programmer had been anything but direct, and featured a several year detour through biochemical studies before he at last found his way to a degree in computer systems and engineering. As soon as he graduated, he reached out to the developers of Heroes VII.

在法布莱斯·坎鲍奈特将年仅十几岁的他加入了育碧的贵宾团队，差点和上司闹得不可开交的七年后，“奥克”·奥佐利特意外地在 Limbic 娱乐公司得到了一份工作，参与《英雄无敌》系列的开发。这一次，他周围也都是比自己年长且经验丰富的同事，但他却被视为这家德国开发商历史上最具潜力的员工之一。他的面试持续了四个小时，这在该公司来说是极为罕见的。他从一个十几岁的游戏本地化人员到游戏玩法程序员的转变之路绝非一帆风顺，其间还中断了长达数年的生物化学研究，最终才获得了计算机系统工程的学位。一毕业，他就联系了《英雄无敌7》的开发者。

"Before I'd started at Limbic, because of the VIP experience, I'd caught a glimpse of what game development was like behind the veil, but only in tidbits. I didn't have many details. It was weird when I finally got inside because I didn't initially know how to take all that information I'd learned over the years and condense it into something useful," Ozolit said. "For my first two or three weeks, I was very confused. Totally disoriented."

“在加入 Limbic 之前，由于那次贵宾体验，我得以一窥游戏开发的幕后情形，但只是零星地了解了一些情况。当时我所掌握的细节并不多。当我最终真正置身其中时，感觉很奇怪，因为我起初并不知道要如何我这些年的所学浓缩成有用的内容。”奥佐利特说道，“在最初的两三周里，我完全摸不着头脑，完全不知所措。”

Where other new hires might have retreated from the overwhelming environment, Ozolit took it as an opportunity to learn everything there was about making games. "I was super obnoxious. To begin with, I was the youngest person in the studio, like a two-year-old running around in the offices. It was so hilarious. I took all that youthful energy and I bugged everyone. I bugged the designers about how they did things. I bugged the project leads about budgets and how they were made—like what even is a budget? I talked to the CEO and asked him what running a company was like. I bugged the QA guys. I bugged the level designers. I bugged everyone I possibly could."

其他新员工可能会因这种令人应接不暇的环境而选择退缩，但奥佐利特却将其视为一个机遇，去学习有关制作游戏的一切知识。“我当时简直是个十足的捣蛋鬼。首先，我是工作室里最年轻的员工，就像一个两岁的孩子在办公室里到处乱跑，那真是太搞笑了。我把那股青春的活力发挥到了极致，不停地烦扰每个人。我询问设计师们他们制作的方法，向项目负责人询问预算以及预算的制定方式，甚至问他什么是预算。我还找首席执行官聊了聊，询问他经营一家公司是什么样的体验。我还去烦扰了质保人员、关卡设计师，以及我所能想到的每一个人。”

Ozolit's initial assignment had him focused on anything connected to the underlying rules, pathfinding, and abilities, but as his skills, drive, and curiosity continued to grow, he soon established a reputation as the "fix-it" guy on the team. "If you needed something fixed, then I could do it quick, and I could mostly do it cleanly," he said. "My pride and joy on the project came from being trusted with something really, really big."

奥佐利特最初的职责是专注于与底层规则、路径规划以及技能相关的所有事务。但随着他的能力、动力和好奇心不断增长，他很快就在团队中树立起了“解决问题能手”的形象。“如果你需要解决什么，那找我就能迅速完成，并且大多数情况下都能做得干净利落。”他说，“我在这个项目中的自豪感与乐趣，就来自能够被委以极其重大的任务。”

From the earliest work on Heroes VII, the project had been dogged with a problem that persistently annoyed lead designer Xavier Penin. "We had a lot of discussions about the AI. In games like this, it can sometimes feel like the computer is playing in a way that's a little too efficient, or that it's cheating because it knows every possible move by heart and it optimizes everything." Penin's remarks echoed the concerns that had led Jon Van Caneghem to the development of "Fun AI" for Heroes II with Phil Steinmeyer. "We wanted to have an AI that was challenging to play against without feeling like it was a computer. One of the leads at Limbic was very confident about a specific way to program this AI, and we waited a long time for it to get there.

从《英雄无敌7》最早的开发阶段起，该项目就一直面临着一个令首席设计师泽维尔-佩宁颇为困扰的问题。“我们曾就AI的相关问题进行了多次讨论。在这类游戏中，有时会让人感觉电脑对手的操作方式显得过于高效，或者说是在作弊，因为它完全了解所有可能的行动方式，并且能够进行优化。”佩宁的这番话与乔·万·坎内根与菲尔·斯坦梅耶一起为《英雄无敌2》开发“趣味人工智能”时所面临的担忧如出一辙。“我们希望创造出一种 AI，它在与玩家对战时具有一定的挑战性，但又不会让人觉得它是电脑在操作。Limbic 团队中的一位高层对于这种AI的编程方式非常有自信，我们为此等待了很久。”

"You'd have your little horse moving around, and you might see that three moves away there's a treasure that can give you a level-up or something very interesting. Any human would sacrifice three moves to get that. But for a long time, the AI wasn't making this kind of decision because it had calculated something that was maybe a bit more optimized in the long run, but if you were a player and you saw that, you would wonder, 'What's this asshole doing? Why isn't he going after the treasure?' But in the end, after a lot of waiting, we were disappointed that we weren't getting to that point."

“你骑着你的小马四处移动，然后你可能会发现，在三步之外的地方有一处宝藏，它能让你升级或者有些有趣的效果。任何人类都会愿意牺牲这三步来获取它。但很长一段时间里，AI 都不会做出这样的决策，因为它经过计算后认为不这样做在长远来看可能更优化，但如果你是玩家，看到这个情况时，你会疑惑：‘这个混蛋在干什么？他为什么不去争夺那个宝藏呢？’但最终，经过长时间的等待，我们却失望地发现我们一直无法实现这一步。”

As it would turn out, the AI's developmental delay wasn't a simple matter of technical limitation or a lack of creative inspiration. "The product owner at the time, Francois, came over to my desk and asked me to sit down with him for a while," Oak Ozolit recalled. "I remember thinking, Uh oh, what's this about? Did I fuck up? How hard did I fuck up? I was having all these anxious thoughts. And then when we sat down at his place, we had this long discussion about the situation. The person who was responsible for the AI had pretty much just up and quit the company. It was complicated by the fact that this person had also been one of the co-founders of Limbic and was an extremely talented programmer. He'd been with the company since the beginning, but he just got to the point where he felt he couldn't do it anymore. He was burned out, so at that point they just handed the AI entirely over to me."

结果发现，AI 的开发延迟并非仅仅是技术限制或缺乏创意灵感的问题。“当时的产品负责人弗朗索瓦来到我的办公桌前，让我和他坐下来谈一会儿。”奥克·奥佐利特回忆道，“我记得当时心想，哎呀，这是怎么回事？我搞砸了吗？到底搞砸得有多严重？我满脑子都是焦虑的想法。然后当我们在他那里坐下后，就当前情况进行了长时间的讨论。负责 AI 的那个人几乎就在刚才主动离开了公司，情况的复杂性在于，这个人同时也是 Limbic 的联合创始人，而且是一位极其出色的程序员。他从一开始就一直在这家公司工作，但他到了这时就觉得他再也无法继续下去了。他精疲力竭了，所以当时他们干脆把整个 AI 系统都交给了我来负责。”

The task was daunting. The system that had been unceremoniously dumped onto Ozolit's plate held a lot of potential, but he admittedly had to do quite a bit of retro-engineering to complete what the former programmer had started. In the process, Oak pored over existing white papers about artificial behaviors. "The idea had been to go for an agent-based AI," he said. "Each piece of the world, every town, every hero, every army would think for themselves, which had never been done before for this kind of game. In the past there had always been this kind of overseer AI that would work from an overview of all the different moving pieces. Instead, we'd set things up so that every piece on the map acts as an autonomous agent. It took a lot of work, and a lot of learning, and a lot of trial and error on my part, but I managed to make it work in a way that didn't suck really terribly, and that made me very happy."

这项任务相当艰巨。当时交给奥佐利特去完成的 AI 系统蕴含着巨大的潜力，但他不得不进行大量的逆向工程才能完成前任程序员所开始的工作。在此过程中，奥克仔细研读了公司有关 AI 行为的白皮书。“当初的想法是采用基于代理的人工智能。”他说，“世界的每一个部分、每一个城镇、每一个英雄、每一支部队都会自主思考，这在这类游戏中以前从未有人这样做过。过去用的都是一种监管型AI，它会从所有不同行动元素的综合视角出发进行运作。而这一次，我们要设置成地图上的每一个元素都作为一个自主代理来运作。这需要大量的工作、大量的学习以及大量的尝试和错误，但我最终成功地做到了，而且做得还算不错，没有太糟糕的地方，这让我非常开心。”

As the team progressed, Ubisoft reached out to the Heroes community in hopes of replicating the collaborative fan experience that had proved so popular during the development of Might & Magic X. Users were provided with an opportunity to vote on what things should or should not be included in the new game, but the results were not what anyone had wanted.

随着团队的不断推进，育碧与《英雄无敌》社区取得了联系，希望能重现在《魔法门10》开发过程中那种深受玩家喜爱的协作式互动体验。用户们获得了参与投票的机会，决定哪些内容应该包含在新游戏中，哪些不应该包含。但结果却并非任何人所期望的那样。

“Ubisoft made some really strange decisions to involve the community," Kurt McClung recalled. "They were supposed to help develop it. It wasn't user-generated content, but user-driven development. Ubisoft would have these votes where they'd ask, 'Do you want elves or do you want dwarves? Do you want this kind of thing or that?' There were just all these weird things they were trying, and they pissed off half of the fans because if some of them voted for an elf and didn't get it, those fans would be upset. If others voted for the dwarves and didn't get that, they'd get upset."

“育碧曾做出一些颇为奇怪的决定，试图让玩家社区参与进来。”库尔特·麦克伦回忆道，“他们本应帮助开发这款游戏，做出的却并非倡导用户创作内容，而是由用户来主导开发过程。育碧会举行这样的投票活动，他们询问：‘你想要精灵还是矮人？你想要这种设定还是那种设定？’他们尝试了各种各样的奇怪做法，结果惹恼了一半的粉丝，因为如果某些人投票选择了精灵却没能得到这个派系，那些粉丝就会感到不满。而如果其他人投票选择了矮人却没能得到这个派系，他们也会感到不满。”

"They didn't like the kobolds either," Julien Pirou added with a smile, "but I'm responsible for those being in the game anyway. They're basically like groundhog men, and I've always loved them, but when we showed them to the community, they were like 'This is too silly. They have no place to be in Heroes.' I kept them because they're like something out of a fairy tale, and closer in tone to the original games that we were trying to get back to."

“他们也不喜欢那些豺狼人。”朱利安·皮乌笑着补充道，“但不管怎样，我还是做主把这些生物纳入了游戏之中。他们基本就像是住在地洞里的人类，我一直都喜欢他们，但当我们把这些角色展示给玩家群体时，他们却说‘这太荒唐了。在《英雄无敌》游戏中他们毫无立足之地。’我之所以保留了他们，是因为他们就像是童话故事里的角色，而且在风格上更贴近我们想要回归的原版游戏。”

Penin was generally dissatisfied with attempts to cater the design process to fans, and wondered if they'd made a grave mistake by involving the community, but Pirou believed the problem lay in how the interaction had been handled. “In hindsight, we took a few wrong lessons from Might & Magic X when we tried to apply them to Heroes VII. We'd had such a good relationship creating materials with fans during X that we assumed we could do the same with Heroes. The problem was, in Might & Magic we were sharing with fans something that was going to be in the game anyway, but allowing them to have some say in how it was implemented. In Heroes though, we were only giving them a choice of something we were going to take away from them."

佩宁总体上对试图让设计过程迎合粉丝的做法感到不满，并怀疑他们让社区参与进来是否犯了一个严重的错误，但皮乌认为问题在于互动的处理方式：“事后看来，我们在尝试将《魔法门10》中的某些经验应用到《英雄无敌7》时，犯了一些错误。在《魔法门10》中，我们与粉丝合作制作素材时建立了良好的关系，所以我们以为在《英雄无敌》中也能这样做。问题在于，在《魔法门10》中，我们是与粉丝分享游戏里必然会出现的内容，但同时又让他们对如何实现这些内容有一定的发言权。但在《英雄无敌7》中，我们却是只给了他们一个选择，并且实际上是选择我们要剥夺他们的东西。”

Unwelcome comments weren't the only feedback the team was getting from the community. A few fans were not-so-helpfully trying to set the people behind the scenes straight about their jobs. "There was this one guy who historically had been a translator of the games in German," Penin recalled. "At some point he contacted Limbic directly and offered to come and visit them, to tell them how to make the game. It was particularly upsetting, and I remember we talked to the boss about it at length, and were told to welcome this guy and talk to him. It was surreal. Apparently, the guy came in and just 'offered his services' to become the lead designer and asked for even more money than the boss was receiving. He was delusional, and probably the most fanatic fan ever."

团队从社区那里得到的反馈可不仅仅是那些负面的评论。还有一些粉丝不太友好地试图帮幕后人员纠正他们的工作。“有这么一个人，过去一直负责将游戏翻译成德语。”佩宁回忆道，“后来他直接联系了 Limbic 公司，并主动提出要前来参观他们，告诉他们如何制作这款游戏。这实在是令人难以接受，我记得我们和老板详细讨论了这件事，然后被告知要欢迎这个人并与他交流。这简直太不可思议了。显然，这个人一过来就只是‘主动提出要提供服务’，要成为游戏的首席设计师，并且要求的薪酬比老板还要高。他简直是精神错乱了，而且可能是有史以来最狂热的粉丝了。”

While the team endured a rising tide of negativity from fans about the still-unreleased game, there were a few people at the company who were actively ringing alarm bells about problems they were observing. Level designer Ramiro Cibrian felt the line of communication between Limbic and Ubisoft had become increasingly strained, and that the upper management of Limbic was quietly placing blame on Ubisoft for their difficulties. "They'd be telling us 'Ubisoft is saying that we have to do this,' but at the same time I knew some things weren't being handled properly on our end of things." As the hard release date of September was charging toward them, "power days" were being implemented that required the team members to put in two more hours per day. Everyone felt the pressure of the project's originally agreed-upon budget and deadline. “We were having to run and rush and hack and slap things together that were not ideal.”

尽管团队一直承受着粉丝们对尚未发布的游戏不断涌现的负面评价，但公司内部仍有少数人对所观察到的问题发出了警告。关卡设计师拉米罗·西比安认为，Limbic 与育碧之间的沟通渠道已变得愈发紧张，而且 Limbic 的高层管理人员正在悄悄地将责任归咎于育碧，以解释他们所面临的困难。“他们会告诉我们‘育碧说我们必须这么做’，但与此同时，我知道我们这边有些事情处理得并不恰当。”随着 9 月这个硬性发布日期逐渐临近，“关键日子”制度开始实施，要求团队成员每天额外工作两小时。每个人都感受到了项目早已确定的预算和截止日期的压力。“我们不得不匆忙行事、拼命赶工，还强行将一些并不完美的方案拼凑在一起。”

From the Ubisoft side, Erwan Le Breton was watching with mounting distress as corners were being cut. Regrettable decisions were made, driven not by the best interests of the product but by attempts to adhere to the restrictive budget and schedule. Cutscenes and narration that were crucial to the plot were being cut because they couldn't be completed within the constraints. Graphical problems were being overlooked. “I was pleading with the top management to give Limbic more time and money. At times I was even working against the team at Limbic because they wanted to show that they could stay within the budget. They would be telling me, ‘This was the mandate. We will do it right,’ which was fine, but then when I was countering and warning them that the game wouldn't be any good with the restrictions that they were imposing on themselves, they just kept coming back with, ‘No, just look at what happened with all of the overspending on Heroes VI. We won't overspend.' And I'd have to tell them they wouldn't reach the quality expectations, and it would go round and round and it was always the same debate. They were scared of doing it wrong, they wanted to do it right, but they were sticking to the original plan because they feared what might happen if they didn't.”

在育碧这一边，艾万-勒布雷东目睹着一些环节被削减，心中充满了深深的忧虑。一些令人遗憾的决策被做出，并非出于对产品本身的最佳考量，而是出于努力遵循严格的预算和时间表的考虑。对剧情至关重要的过场动画和旁白被砍掉了，因为它们无法在这些限制条件下完成。图形问题也被忽视了。“我一直在恳求高层管理人员给 Limbic 更多的时间和资金。有时我甚至会与 Limbic 的团队对立，因为他们想要证明自己能够遵守预算。他们会跟我说：‘这是任务要求。我们会做好这件事的。’这没问题，但后来当我反驳并警告他们，说在他们给自己设定的限制下游戏质量会很差时，他们总是会回应说：‘不，看看《英雄无敌6》过度支出的情况吧。我们不会过度支出的。’然后我就得告诉他们，他们无法达到质量预期，而这种争论总是如此循环往复，始终如一。他们害怕做错了，他们想要做得完美无缺，但他们还是坚持按照原计划行事，因为他们害怕如果不这样做，会发生什么后果。”

Even with the twin specters of a hastily-approaching deadline and diminishing resources looming above them, the production team at Limbic worked feverishly to get as much content finished and into the game as they could before their time expired. Despite falling seriously sick from exhaustion, Ramiro Cibrian lashed together an achievement system, with most of their names based on cleverly disguised song and movie titles. Oak Ozolit would encounter a mysterious bug that was zeroing out the game's frame rate, only to discover that the culprit was an underground cave built by a naive level designer who had used ultra-high-resolution assets lifted from an Assassin's Creed game. “There were over six million polygons condensed into this teeny tiny area in the underground," Oak howls with laughter, “The wireframe was displaying it as an entirely solid block of color！”

即便面临着紧迫的截止日期即将到来以及资源日益减少这两个严峻的挑战，Limbic 公司的制作团队仍全力以赴，力求在规定时间内尽可能多地完成并整合游戏内容。尽管因过度劳累而病倒，拉米罗·西比安还是整合出了一个成就系统，它们所使用的大多数名称都是巧妙地用了一些歌曲和电影的标题。奥克·奥佐利特则遭遇了一个神秘的故障，会导致游戏的帧率归零，后来他才发现罪魁祸首是一个天真无邪的关卡设计师，他使用了从《刺客信条》游戏中获取的超高分辨率素材来建造了一个地下洞穴。“有超过六百万的多边形被压缩到了这块小小的地下区域里。”奥克激动地大笑道，“但显示的线框只是一整块实心的色块！”

In the weeks before ship day, the feedback from VIP fans filled Le Breton's inbox with a steady stream of disappointments and calls for intervention. “It looked bad. Even Heroes fans who hadn't said much about the game in the past came forward and said 'Hey, it looked better before, right?' They were comparing it to Heroes VI and saying 'Yeah, it doesn't look as nice." All this was coming in just days before launch, but by that point there was nothing I could do to fix it, and nothing I could do to stop it.”

在交货日之前的那两周里，来自贵宾粉丝的反馈让勒布雷东的收件箱里充斥着一连串的失望和要求干预的呼声。“情况看起来很糟糕。就连那些过去很少对这款游戏发表评论的《英雄无敌》粉丝也站出来表示‘嘿，之前看起来要好得多，对吧？’他们将它与《英雄无敌6》作比较，并说‘是啊，看起来没那么好看了。’这一切都是在游戏发布前几天才出现的，但那时我已经无法采取任何措施来解决这个问题，也无法阻止它了。”

Launch day arrived on September 29, 2015. After months of frenzied production, the game at last arrived on store shelves only to be met by a slew of last-minute bugs and service disruptions. “The day before we released Heroes VII, Ubisoft updated their Uplay plugin, but they hadn't informed us about this beforehand,” Cibrian recalled. “It was a necessary component for our game to work, but because of the change, our app couldn't find it, and it couldn't function. We were instantly review bombed.”

2015 年 9 月 29 日，发售日终于到来。经过数月的紧张制作，这款游戏终于在商店上架了，然而却遭遇了一系列最后时刻出现的漏洞和服务中断。“就在我们发布《英雄无敌7》的前一天，育碧更新了他们的 Uplay 插件，但他们事先并未告知我们这一情况。”西比安回忆道，“这是让我们的游戏正常运行所必需的一个组件。由于这一改动，我们的应用程序无法找到它，也就无法正常运行。我们随即就遭到了负面评价的猛烈抨击。”

Xavier Penin remembers being with the team at Limbic on the night of the launch, along with six or seven people from Ubisoft. “We were having a barbecue, and everything seemed to be working fine. We started drinking a little, but then suddenly our producer Gary Paulini came in and said, ‘We have a problem.’ And the problem was that apparently a version had leaked to China, and we had thousands of Chinese players playing the game—which hadn't been localized to them yet—and they were complaining about that. And we had these emergency communications with them to tell fans there that they weren't playing the official version, and that the Chinese version wasn't ready yet. So, we were promising them that they'd have it soon, but not to, you know, give it a thumbs down online because there wasn't any localization for it yet.” And we were like, ‘Oh my God! Why is this happening to us?’”

泽维尔-佩宁记得在游戏发布当晚，他与 Limbic 团队的成员们在一起，还有来自育碧的六七个工作人员：“我们当时正在举行烧烤活动，一切似乎都进展顺利。我们喝了些酒，但突然我们的制作人加里-保林尼走了进来，说：‘我们遇到了问题。’问题在于，显然有一个版本已经泄露到了中国，而我们有成千上万的中国玩家在玩这款游戏——这款游戏都还没有针对他们进行本地化处理，他们对此提出了抱怨。于是我们与他们进行了紧急沟通，告诉粉丝们他们并没有在玩官方版本，而且中国版本还没有准备好。所以，我们得向他们承诺很快他们就会得到，请他们不要——你知道的，不要在网上直接给出否定的评价，因为目前还没有进行本地化处理。”我们当时心想：‘天哪！这种事怎么会发生在我们身上呢？’”

Le Breton was rueful about the ending of the last Might & Magic Heroes with which he was actively involved. It's clear he wishes that VII could have been given a higher budget, or that he could have convinced Limbic to back away from their promised ship date. “It's hard because the team at Limbic were very talented and very dedicated, but the terms of their development deal had them straightjacketed. They reached the limit of their budget and then they had to ship the game when it was close to being finished, but not quite. It wasn't polished. After it shipped and it had problems, Limbic did their best to patch it and they added stuff—there was an expansion—but the sales were still very disappointing. They had expected it would do as well as Heroes VI, perhaps even better because they had such strong enthusiasm from the community, but that enthusiasm had turned out to be a double-edged sword. A month beforehand the fans had been telling them not to ship, that it wasn't ready, so they ended up feeling like their concerns were ignored. Of course, the fans had no idea what was happening internally, but they were right. So instead of having strong community support, they got a strong community backlash.”

勒布雷东对于自己参与制作的最后一部《魔法门英雄无敌》之结局感到遗憾。很明显，他希望《英雄无敌7》能有更高的预算，或者他能说服 Limbic 公司推迟原定的发售日期。“这很难，因为 Limbic 团队非常有才华且非常敬业，但他们的开发协议条款限制了他们的行动。他们达到了预算上限，然后在游戏接近完成但尚未经过打磨的情况下就发布了。游戏还没有经过完善处理，发布之后出现了问题，Limbic 公司尽力进行了修复，并添加了一些内容——有了一个资料片（《烈火试炼》，是的连宣传图都没有），但销量仍然非常令人失望。他们原本预期它会和《英雄无敌6》一样好，或许甚至更好，因为这款游戏得到了玩家群体的热情支持，但这种热情最终却成了双刃剑。一个月前，粉丝们一直劝他们不要发布，称游戏尚未完善，结果感觉自己所担忧的问题被忽视了。当然，粉丝们并不知道内部到底发生了什么，但他们是对的。因此，我们没有得到强大的社区支持，反而遭到了强烈的社区抵制。””

The fans were not alone in feeling let down by Heroes VII. Not long after the game's release, a number of Limbic Entertainment workers took their leave from the German developer of Heroes VII. “In less than a year after the expansion was released, more than half of the team quit the company,” Ramiro Cibrian said. “Oak and I included. In total it was something like twenty or so people who walked because we'd all been burnt out by the process.”

粉丝们并非是唯一对《英雄无敌7》感到失望的人。在该游戏发布不久后，一些 Limbic 娱乐公司的员工便离开了这家《英雄无敌7》的德国开发商。“在资料片发布后不到一年的时间里，超过一半的团队成员离开了公司。”拉米罗·西比安说，“包括我和奥克在内。总共大约有二十来人因为这个过程让我们感到精疲力竭而离职了。”

For Erwan Le Breton's part, however, he had no regrets about the time he spent crafting the world of Ashan. “I'm still close to the Might & Magic and Heroes team from Ubisoft. It's been fifteen people over the years, and we're still like old friends. I still see almost all of them when I have the chance. I've worked on other projects with other people and other brands, but the Might & Magic team all shared the same love for strategy games, RPGs, tabletop games, and fantasy worlds. We are all part of that community itself. We shared those same values, even though we were on the other side and making games. It's an important part of my life, not just because I spent so many years on it, but because I was with the right people.”

然而，对于艾万-勒布雷东来说，他对自己为亚山世界所花费的时间并不感到后悔。“我仍然和育碧的《魔法门》和《英雄无敌》团队保持着密切联系。多年来，团队成员共有十五人之多，我们仍然像老朋友一样相处。只要有机会，我几乎都会见到他们所有人。我曾与其他人和不同的品牌合作过其他项目，但《魔法门》团队所有人都有着对策略游戏、角色扮演游戏、桌面游戏和幻想世界的共同热爱。我们都是这个社区的一部分。我们有着相同的价值观，尽管我们是在制作游戏的那一端。这对我来说是一段重要的人生经历，不仅因为我在其中投入了这么多年的时间，还因为我是和正确的人在一起。”