Devlog #3: On Lore and Subjectivity
Franchises require a very special approach to lore when you’re not the original creator. As a fan, you want to add something to the world you love that is faithful to its spirit, but meaningful enough so that it doesn’t feel like gushing fanfiction. This becomes even harder if a franchise is old (like Might and Magic) and has a complicated history (like Might and Magic).
Heroes of Might and Magic as a series is a spin-off of the Might and Magic franchise and partially shares a world (MM6-MM8) with it — up until HoMM3, that is. Then an eschatological event happens, and HoMM4 takes place in a new world, as do the following games. Some inhabitants of the original Enroth escape to Axeoth from HoMM4, but HoMM5 is, in terms of grand cosmology, a kind of pure fantasy soft reboot of the setting in the world of Ashan.
It is, of course, irrelevant to us as HoMM:OE is a return to Enroth. But the soft reboot happened for a reason. And that reason was, the HoMM community is very… split on the franchise’s origins.
Are Demons Space Aliens?
This is because the Might and Magic universe isn’t fantasy — it’s space techno fantasy about powerful high-tech races and ancient creatures terraforming a world that only looks medieval. The Might and Magic series explores this in full detail, but the Heroes of Might and Magic sub-franchise conceals this aspect. Of course, it’s not like the original creators considered HoMM to be separate from MM lore-wise — quite the contrary. But the fact remains, in all of the Heroes games the sci-fi aspect was never ever made explicit. You wouldn’t know that the devil Kreegans from Inferno are actually a race of spacefaring aliens (a few hints in the campaigns notwithstanding), unless you search external sources, like the Might and Magic games or Internet sites, for this information. So a lot of players fell in love with Heroes without knowing about its roots.
Naturally, this split the community. Some people enjoy the techno fantasy aspect. Others treat it as a sort of easter egg! But there are also people who heavily dislike the “techno” part — they rebelled against the original (unreleased) Forge faction in HoMM3, which was meant to represent this more technological aspect. A significant portion of the Heroes of Might and Magic fans view it as pure fantasy. Which is one of the reasons the series moved to more traditional worlds in later installments.
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