The Might and Magic games have always been generous. Might and Magic games, in other words, weren’t so much stories to be experienced as places to be explored.Ĭhet Bolingbroke - better known as The CRPG Addict - names “generous” as his defining adjective for Might and Magic. Jon Van Caneghem, the series’s guiding light, was himself a lifelong compulsive gamer, and he stuffed his creations full of the things that he himself enjoyed: quests to fulfill, dungeons to explore, loot to collect, and an absurd variety of monsters to fight, all couched inside a non-linear, open-ended philosophy of gameplay that eschewed the sort of (overly?) elaborate set-piece plots that had begun to mark many of his series’s peers by the dawn of the 1990s. What Might and Magic consistently did have going for it, however, was the quality of being fun. Meanwhile their level of commercial success, although certainly considerable at times, never became so enormous as to make them sit up and demand our attention.

These games were never obviously, forthrightly innovative, being content to rework the same high-fantasy territory over and over again. The long-running Might and Magic CRPG series is an easy thing for a project like this one to overlook. Most of all, I wanted players to feel free to experiment with all of the “tools” I put in the game, so that they could enjoy playing any way they wanted to.

I wanted party-based tactical combat, tons of magic items to find, and an ever-increasing feeling of power as you leveled your characters. I wanted more of an open-world feel, with quests, puzzles, and an emphasis on exploration and discovery. But I wanted to make my own vision for a CRPG. Wizardry and Ultima were great inspirations for me.

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