1. First of all, could you introduce yourself and explain us what is your job on HOMM 5?

Erwan

My name is Erwan Le Breton, Might & Magic Content Director at Ubisoft.

My quest is to build the new world of Might & Magic that will be the setting of all the current and future M&M games produced and/or published by Ubisoft.

And my favorite colour is red (for those with an unhealthy obsession for the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow.)

Outside of Ubisoft, I’m a published writer, author of a dozen pen & paper RPGs, children’s novels, and comic books for various French publishers.

Richard

I’m Richard Dansky, Might & Magic World Designer at Ubisoft

I’ve worked on numerous games for Ubisoft, including Far Cry, Ghost Recon: Island Thunder, and Cold Fear, and before that I contributed to roughly 130 role-playing books for White Wolf. I’ve published four novels, including the fantasy series The Trilogy of the Second Age, and various other bits of fiction.

Outside of work, I enjoy building large wooden badgers, and running about with silly knees-bent advancing behaviors.

2. Why did Ubisoft decide to revamp the M&M universe?

There are several reasons for this.

1. The world used as a background for the Might & Magic games has often changed from one title to the next (Varn, Cron, Terra, Xeen and then Axeoth with Enroth, Erathia, Jadame, Cheh'dian, etc.)
As a result, the consistency between all the M&M games was not very strong and the overall background was vague, if not flat-out confusing at times. We want to have a single, deep world that’s consistent across the board and has layers of story and content that players can just dive into.

2. There was just so much information in the world that it was difficult for new players to really embrace everything that was there. The mass of backstory and continuity was almost intimidating, and we wanted to create a world that new players could enjoy as well.

3. As much as we enjoyed the original M&M worlds, they had a certain science-fiction undertone, while we really wanted to focus on the fantasy aspects–the “might” and “magic”, as it were. Those games were also “lighter” in tone than what we had in mind for the new generation of M&M games.

Again, we really loved what was done in the past, so it simply made sense to respect that and build our world from the ground up, focusing on capturing the core essence of what drew us all back to Axeoth over and over, rather than try to modify things that people really loved and enjoyed.

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