The thread on HOMM IV is good. Main points :

- the game is copy protected in that CD has to be drive to play (or once a day,
or something).
- combat is slow and that music playback causes slow downs. Overall
slowness causes games to be 1/3 to 1/2 longer than HOMM III games.
- AI is dumber than a door nail - to the point that single player games aren't
worth the time to play.

-General thought is that a patch will come to fix the slowness and crashing,
but will not fix the AI (Windoz version suffers from the same dumb AI). As a
stand alone game, probably not worth the money. As a player v player game,
worth the money now if you have to, and most probably when the bug fix
patch comes out.

IMHO, this is all too bad. Personally, I won't be getting this game until the
patch is out and speed issues are resolved. Even then, unless single player
games are worth the time, I'll wait until HOMM V. I just hope there will be a
Mac port of V since sales of IV are bound to be very low.

-Allan


Oh, some good news:


"I would like to state that your posts are not going ignored, and that we at
Contraband Entertainment are looking into the issues. I cannot say much at
this time, however some of the issues that have been discovered since
release have been resolved, and others are being investigated. We want to
make sure any patch we release resolves as much as possible rather than
inundating you with micro-patches and awkward upgrade paths.

We aren't shipping a product and dropping support for it; Contraband always
supports the products it can. However, not all issues come up during testing,
because thousands of computers can have far more quirks and bring out the
odd issues that a couple dozen testing systems can't. Please be patient, and
contact 3DO's customer service with your issues, rather than emailing us at
Contraband directly. 3DO has a large support staff able to collect and collate
all the reports for easier digesting by us. "

- Chris Jacobson [this is the guy that did the Mac port]