Might & Magic Heroes VII has been poorly received with Trial by Fire in particular doing poorly. Ubisoft has taken the logical step of dropping Limbic Entertainment as a developer via a public announcement. This follows a patch and hotfix for the game which turned out to be the last patches for the game ever.

Dear Heroes,

Over the past year, we've had the pleasure of releasing the latest game in the legendary Might & Magic series, with Heroes VII and its add-on "Trial by Fire".

We truly hope you enjoyed this new adventure through the rise of the Griffin Empire and we would like once again to thank you for your support. Shadow Councilors, your devotion will be remembered, working with you was an inspiring and memorable experience for all of us.

After 4 years of a close collaboration, our partnership with Limbic Entertainment is coming to an end and as such no further updates will be provided for the title. The forums will remain open to allow you to continue the conversation about the game and keep sharing your best creations.

We would like to thank all the teams involved in this project, particularly our friends at Limbic Entertainment and wish them the best in their future endeavors.

On behalf of the Heroes team, we hope you continue to treasure this series as much as we do and we are looking forward to seeing you again in Ashan!

Thank you,
The Might & Magic team

Ubisoft has given us a look at fortress heroes, another aspect of the upcoming Trials By Fire expansion pack.

After profiling the Fortress warfare units earlier this month, Ubisoft and Limbic have now treated us to a set of profiles for the Fortress heroes that we'll be able to utilize in their upcoming Might & Magic Heroes VII: Trials by Fire expansion pack.  The profiles come complete with statistics, portraits, and a set of concept artwork, with a little something about a Dwarven fellow named Bart Brimstone to follow:

Affinity: Magic

Class: Runelord

Specialization: Viking (All Defenders, Kobold Scouts, Rune Priest, and their respective upgrades in the hero's army gain the "Sea Warfare" creature ability.)

Biography: Born in a clan of artisans and engineers, Bart Brimstone was fascinated by water and believed there was great power to be harnessed in the marriage of fire and its opposite element. His research was regarded as heresy by the other Dwarves, which eventually led to Brimstone’s exile. To further his knowledge of water in all its forms, he eventually joined a crew of Sea Elves in their travels, and ended up falling in love with the ocean and its endless possibilities. He became a pirate to fund his experiments, and created the Fiery Heart, Ashan’s first (and only) steam-powered warship.

Might and Magic Heroes VII isn't far off now. Ubisoft has profiled the units that will be introduced for fortress warfare.

With the release of Ubisoft and Limbic's Might & Magic Heroes VII: Trial by Fire expansion pack less than a month away, the team has put together a set of profiles for a few of the warfare units available to the new Fortress faction. The Runestone, Fire Cannon, and Dwarven Ballista are all on tap, with accompanying artwork:

Crossbows and siege engines are dwarven specialties, and are vastly preferred to less complicated devices like bows, slings and the like. Dwarven ballista crews are deadly accurate, and can reload and fire fast enough to break up almost any enemy advance.

The Lost Tales of Axeoth: Unity DLC for Might & Magic Heroes VII is available now (actually already a few weeks). Unity is a free campaign based on a script made for HOMM IV.

The next free DLC is named Every Dog Has His Day.

In addition patch 1.7 has been released.

Thanks Eye.

Might and Magic Heroes VII's patch 1.7 will arrive early in February.

The latest update to the official Might & Magic Heroes VII blog brings word of the team's plans to release a version 1.7 patch in early February, which will include the promised first campaign of The Lost Tales of Axeoth "Unity", a removal of the level cap imposed on heroes within skirmish maps, more multiplayer connectivity fixes, and more. Some of what to expect:

Hello Heroes,

Today the Might & Magic team is glad to announce to you the upcoming availability of Patch 1.7, to be released in early-February.

In addition to the first Campaign of the Lost Tales of Axeoth, this update will also provide several fixes for the game and especially related to the multiplayer experience with the introduction of automatic port forwarding and various out of sync fixes.

Let’s have a quick look of what is coming next with this new patch! More elements and details to be shared with full release patch log.

1. THE LOST TALES OF AXEOTH: UNITY

More info to come!

2. LEVEL-CAP REMOVAL

Many of you have been asking for it since the announcement of the game, we are pleased to announce that the level cap in all skirmish map (not available on Campaigns or Scenario maps) will be removed with Patch 1.7.

New maximum level for Heroes is now set to 999!

3. MAIN MENU REORGANISATION

With the additional elements populating the main menu, we decided to offer a new disposition to improve visibility and readability of this one. All single and multiplayer modes are now separated and the option button is back on main layout.

4. ONLINE CONNECTIVITY IMPROVEMENTS

The team is continually working on out of sync issues and this patch will provide a new batch of fixes for those ones (more details to come with full patch note).

Moreover, 1.7 will introduce STORM (already mentioned on https://mmh7.ubi.com/en/blog/post/view/patch-1-6-announcement), allowing better connectivity between players but also a NAT indicator to make sure your network is properly setup for online experience (port forwarding, router security policy etc.).

More information.

Patch 1.4 is out:

Hello Heroes,

Today we are pleased to announce you the immediate availability of the patch 1.4 for Might & Magic Heroes VII. Downloading this new update should be automatic on both Uplay and Steam.

This patch provides this time again a great number of fixes for the game but we also were able to go further with additional game and performance improvements.

We highly recommend you to check our previous post from the team for more information and before/after benchmarks!  Here!

Patch 1.4 top lines:

• Improved memory management and loading times
• Adventure map saturation rework
• Tutorial videos now available and Haven campaign now introduced as beginner campaign the first time you launch the game
• Option to enable/disable the height fog
• Multiplayer fixes
• Editor fixes
• Various game bug fixing and improvements

Stay tuned for more information regarding future patches!

Best,
The M&M Team.

Girls Gamers UK has reviewed Might & Magic Heroes VII:

Take a hero to the land of Ashan in Ubisoft’s ongoing fantasy turn-based strategy series.
 
The Might & Magic Heroes series has been around for a fair while now, and developers Limbic Entertainment take us to the land of Ashan for this seventh title in the series.

´Might & Magic Heroes VII is, as were all of the games before it, a game with two distinct sides. On the one hand, you have the whole exploration and management side, and on the other hand are the strategic combat encounters.

 
The player takes their hero and is given a large map to roam around. Each turn, the player is able to move a certain distance along the various paths. These paths and the open areas are littered with little icons representing different things of interest, such as resources, treasures and enemies.

 
Collecting the resources will give the player the opportunity to improve their city. This all takes place within a city management set of screens, and the player is able to add all manner of new buildings to their city for various purposes, be they to recruit new or replacement troop types, increase their income or the city defence, or even to hire new heroes who come with their own small army.

[...]

Unfortunately, little has changed from the previous Might & Magic Heroes outings, and things are starting to feel a little stale now. It is okay to say “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, but games still have to evolve, and Might & Magic Heroes VII hasn’t. The UI is nice and intuitive, but there seems to be a lack of polish and quite a few bugs that sour the experience. To top this off, there is very little guidance for newcomers to the game and Might & Magic Heroes is not the most straight forward game to grasp without prior knowledge.

For fans of the series, myself included, Might & Magic Heroes VII offers a substantial amount of content and will entertain for many hours, despite the lack of evolution or change. For those new to the series, this turn-based strategy title may well prove too much of an uphill battle.

Score: 7/10

Eye spotted these two reviews for Might & Magic: Heroes VII.

God is a Geek, 7

As good as Might and Magic Heroes VII is, it’s not a perfect game by any stretch of the imagination. Nostalgic and fanatically protective fans have stifled any innovation that could have come from it, and Limbic Entertainment’s decision to service the fans so absolutely means that they’re unable to change what they do. New players coming into this franchise for the first time are going to struggle. It’s uninviting for anyone unfamiliar with the series; however, if you’re willing to stick through it there is a genuinely good game underneath.

wccftech, 5.4

Might & Magic Heroes, or Heroes of Might and Magic, is one of the longest running franchises in PC gaming history. Spanning seven main games in the series, with seven spin-offs for both PC and consoles, in the past twenty years, it should be a celebrated franchise that has the care it deserves. From the deterioration in the previous two entries, particularly Might & Magic Heroes VII, I don’t see a particularly bright future ahead.

And at GameBanshee there is this news about the patch:

Two new patches have been recently released for Might & Magic Heroes VII, patch v1.2, which fixes a variety of issues with the title, and patch v1.2.1, which is mostly a hotfix for a memory issue. Unfortunately the changelog isn't very clear on the exact details of the issues fixed, but hopefully those of you who were experiencing bugs (especially of the gamebreaking variety) should have a smoother experience thanks to these updates:

Fixed Campaign & Scenario Maps walkthrough blockers

Improved AI speed and decision making process

Improved global compatibility and performances of the game

Fixed Load, Save & Autosave corruptions in various circumstances

Fixed Skills and Abilities effects and values

Many bug and glitch fixes

Improved multiplayer experience and stability

Improved Map editor feature and fixes

Improved Localization in various languages

Watcher henriquejr spotted this review for Might & Magic Heroes VII on IGN:

Might & Magic Heroes 7 Review

It’s not hard to draw parallels between Might and Magic Heroes 7’s protagonist, Ivan Griffin, and its developer, Limbic Entertainment. Much like Griffin, the studio has inherited a domain and wants to play it safe by not discarding traditions or ruining the most well-regarded features. The result is a strange roleplaying-strategy experience that's at once nostalgically enjoyable and somehow unfulfilling. As promised, the spirit of the glory days of the Heroes of Might and Magic series reveals itself here, but it lacks both personality and polish even as the strategic elements provide decent challenges.

To its credit, MMH7 generally gets the broad strokes right. True to the series, this is a turn-based game about sending heroes out to explore a world shrouded in a fog of war, where they find resources, allies, and foes hidden throughout. Finding one of the latter means jumping into strategic battles that superficially resemble Holochess from Star Wars, and where your named heroes dish out damage and protect their minions for the sidelines. That's all here, and there's virtually nothing here that hasn't been seen before aside from a welcome addition in the ability to deal additional damage to enemies by flanking them with multiple soldiers. Caravans also make a comeback in MMH7 (after a disappointing absence in MMH6), allowing the hire and placement of new units in town without the need for them to travel with the hero, keeping the pace of exploration steadily entertaining.

[...]

The Verdict

There's very little that's new about Might and Magic Heroes 7, and that's a good thing when it comes to its classic-style tactical roleplaying exploration and combat and menus that make managing resources easy to understand and let heroes explore at a rewarding pace without frequent backtracking. It manages to scratch a very old PC gaming itch, at least between the awful cutscenes and performance problems.

Score: 6.4/10
Okay - M&M Heroes 7 is a loyal but buggy sequel that manages to scratch a very old PC gaming itch.

Good:

• Classic M&M gameplay
• Intuitive 2D town maps
• Good game modes

Bad:

• Camera bugs
• Weird, stiff cutscenes

Might & Magic Heroes VII has been released on Tuesday. The first user reviews are a mixed bag:

Metacritic

Steam

Morrandir spotted this announcement for Might & Magic: Heroes VII:

Pre-loading now available!

We are pleased to announce you that Might & Magic Heroes VII preload is now available on Uplay & all supported PC platforms! Thanks to the preload, you will be able to anticipate your download of the game and be fully prepared to play the game on Tuesday!

The M&M Team

A new trailer from Ubisoft UK has popped up for Might & Magic VII Heroes.

Ubisoft is interviewing Terry Ray, who worked on M&M: Heroes IV and he also wrote two campaigns, that were never released at the time, but will be released as expansion to Might & Magic: Heroes VII, later this year and early next year.

• Can you tell us about yourself?

I’ve been a writer slightly longer than I’ve been a gamer. I wrote my first story around age nine and I’ve played video games ever since Pong. I flipped Asteroids in the arcade, but I sucked at more games than I was ever good at. Still had fun though. Been a father less than both but it has influenced my life in much greater ways.

My father was in the Army, so I had the great pleasure of living in Europe during my high school years. I consider that time in Europe some of the most important years in my development. It gave me a global outlook, not one that was centric to my nationality, and an open mind. I wish everyone had the chance to do that.

Today, I have recommitted myself to telling stories. I am, at my core, a writer. You can’t deny something like that. I learned that the hard way. So, who am I? Writer, father, gamer, trickster, humorist, amateur philosopher, and lover of grilled salmon.

Also Couch spotted this video in which Jon Van Caneghem, the creator of the M&M: Heroes games,  is interviewed.