Ubisoft's Chris Early talks about making the next game in the legendary Might and Magic franchise and why this is one web-browser MMO you can't miss.

Real-Time Gameplay

Early: The whole game is oriented around you being able to come in, spend a bit of time and then have events happen in real time later on.

ZAM: Why did you decide to go with a real time model as opposed to the older, turn-based game model from Heroes of Might and Magic?

Early: We went with a real-time model because we wanted to allow people to engage as they felt they wanted to. I can come in when I'm busy and take a turn in ten minutes and it will have an ongoing effect for quite a period of time. I can also come in for an hour and really get into micromanaging my hero and my cities and my resources to really produce an optimal result.

The real time nature of it is important from a competitive standpoint in that we really want to bring forth that this is an alive and a living world. I don't want to have somebody miss out because they missed a turn, so they miss a whole bunch of play.

I can plan my gameplay around my real life as well. For example, if I know that I'm going to be really pretty busy this weekend, I'll kick off a couple of projects or buildings that take, maybe, several days to build. So I'm not being penalized at all for, if it were only turn-based, missing a turn.

By the way, because we're coordinating across thousands of players, whether it be real-time straight or turn-based, like a play-by-mail game used to be, where you'd have one turn a day or something like that, you still have to keep people synchronized. Because you happen to have more time than I, you shouldn't be able to take ten turns for my one turn, and then ten turns later come and whack on me with your really built up army, when I've only had one turn to build up mine.

ZAM: As a second part to that question, how long do things take to build?

Early: In general the lower the level of the building or the troop, the shorter period of time it takes to build. And conversely the more complex the troop or the building, the longer it takes to build. Towards the end game there are some buildings that take ten or fifteen days of real time to build. They also take a tremendous amount of resources, but they're some of the buildings that allow you to collect the Tears [which need to be collected to win the game], so they really do have a big effect on the endgame.

Combat

Early: The combat mechanic is a relatively straightforward rock-paper-scissors concept. Melee has an advantage of cavalry, cavalry has an advantage over archery, archery has an advantage over melee.  It's not that each one wins, it's just that there's an amplification of the basic attack strength. So in planning a battle, you're doing a lot of allocating of the troops and maximizing your effectiveness.

ZAM: Why did you decide to move away from the hexagon grid map that was used for combat in most Heroes of Might and Magic games and instead use this model of matching up units?

Early: When you think about the traditional Might and Magic combat method, it's very much round based where you allocate your troops, you move, they take a round, the other side moves and takes a round. Remember that mechanism?

To do that in a real-time world where you're playing with thousands of other people, the asynchronous nature of people's play makes it very difficult to have that take place. It either makes combat take days, because if I make my first move, now I have to wait for you to make your move, or you have to do some kind of always fighting against the AI.

What we've done is we've extrapolated some of that to give you some feeling of being able to do that by being able to reorder your troops and cast magic, but we don't have the full back and forth. It was a compromise to allow real-time nature of the game to go on but also make it so you and I don't have to sit down at our screens at the same time, wherever we may happen to be in the world, to play a particular battle.