I think I have the Linux version of this game in my attic.
Steam and GOG had big sales through the end of December that had me looking at some old games like this. I thought about getting some Microprose games to spare me the trouble of copying them from 5.25" and 3.5" floppies (if they're even readable anymore), but I figured it was just as well to leave the graphics and gameplay to my rose-colored memory.
It did get me thinking about what it takes to bring classic games to a modern audience. Grim Fandango and Age of Empires have gotten updates, primarily to the assets. The negative reviews tend to focus on old-fashioned gameplay, or bugs that still haven't been fixed after umpteen years.
A project like this reminds me of the ScummVM engines, which basically provide a new platform for old assets. It's harder to get excited about this, because it's just one game.
Just to be clear, this post kinda implied to me that HoMM 3 doesn't run on modern machines. It does, and there is a patch that provides higher resolutions and some other features.
This is still cool though, but it's not required to play the game on a modern PC.
I think content-esque updates tend to be the the sweet spot on resources/ROI for games such as Age of Empires II expansions.
I can imagine codebases for older games are likely written in an older dialect of C++ (and probably in a very C style at the time, to boot) and likely haven’t had any ongoing maintenance or technical debt addressed. Most of the income from the product came from one win32 binary (plus perhaps an update) that shipped on CD years ago. The engineering/QA cost of writing or maintaining new features is going to be high, so I can imagine a publisher is going to look at the returns of an expansion to an old game and see that a conservative release is the most economic bet to make.
Steam and GOG had big sales through the end of December that had me looking at some old games like this. I thought about getting some Microprose games to spare me the trouble of copying them from 5.25" and 3.5" floppies (if they're even readable anymore), but I figured it was just as well to leave the graphics and gameplay to my rose-colored memory.
It did get me thinking about what it takes to bring classic games to a modern audience. Grim Fandango and Age of Empires have gotten updates, primarily to the assets. The negative reviews tend to focus on old-fashioned gameplay, or bugs that still haven't been fixed after umpteen years.
A project like this reminds me of the ScummVM engines, which basically provide a new platform for old assets. It's harder to get excited about this, because it's just one game.