Some more details about the game:
- It's made by Unfrozen, who have only released one game in their life but it's highly acclaimed Iratus Lord of the Dead.
Iratus: Lord of the Dead is a turn-based tactical roguelike RPG set in a dark fantasy universe. Lead an army of undead to help an angry necromancer in his quest to reach the surface world and bring death to the mortal realms!
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- Unfrozen define themselves as an international team of veteran video game developers united by their passion for challenging turn-based games.
Unfrozen
www.unfrozen.studio
- The art style is a mix of HoMM 3 and HoMM 5.
- They want to make the map as clear/visible as possible, and they focused on making the interactable elements stand out as much as possible and be easy to see, and clearly distinguish what is interactable and what is not. Make the interactable stand out, like a pop-up.
- The new town design is fabulous. They based it on the HoMM 5 design but without overloading the scenarios. When you build a new building in the town it is built very visually.
- They have focused on the very distinctive design of the units of each faction, so that there are no filler units. They have also focused a lot on a very good artistic design of the units.
- In terms of gameplay they have added a enhanced online, noticing that many people play HoMM 3 online in the Horn of the Abyss lobby. There are many tournaments there and they want to capitalize on that aspect. There will be several ladders and an arena mode like Hearthstone, ranking systems, etc. What does change is that in terms of gameplay a battle can last more than 8 hours, but that would be very slow for a ranking system, so that is another issue that they have worked on for that type of ranked games, because otherwise you would need a save system and more things.
- The game will include a map editor that will exceed the capabilities of the HoMM 3 editor.
- They have not revealed anything about the campaign, but the lore of the series will continue.
- The spell system and the spell book have been completely remade. There will be new magic schools that will not be the same as the typical elemental spell schools of the series.
- There will be no magic such as problematic spells such as "Mass Slow" and they will add a new system in which you will increase the level of your spells in the spell book.
- Each unit type of each faction will have at least one ability they can use, but it won't be like in HoMM 3, they will have to be charged progressively, you can't use them immediately. You have to use any other action and then that unit gains energy and then you can use that energy for something like getting a special effect from your unit, and those unit effects go from your archers doing double damage, your gravediggers being able to summon skeletons..., so abilities of all kinds, like summons, damage, and all sorts of abilities.
- The hero leveling will also have changes since perks will be added every certain amount of levels, and you will be able to choose a perk that will fit your hero or your play style. There they seem to take inspiration from the Heroes 5.5 mod (a mod of HoMM 5). Heroes 5.5 takes hero development to another level, and you can build like a super strong hero, but the issue is to balance that, so you can't create an overpowered hero.
- Regarding music, the most notable games in the series are Heroes 2, 3 and 4, and to a lesser extent 5. It is a series well known for its wonderful and legendary music created by Paul Romero. It is not known if Romero will be the composer of the game again, but I imagine that at least the legendary melodies of the game will be used as inspiration.
