Heroes of Might and Magic Online

» see heroeswo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

There is a version of this grave where i tell you i played it, and it is not available to me. i could not have played it. That is the actual story here and it is worth putting in the first paragraph rather than saving. Heroes of Might and Magic Online shipped an English client in 2010 and then checked where your connection came from, and if the answer was not Asia it closed the door. TQ Digital's license from Ubisoft covered one continent and the servers enforced it at the network layer.

Underneath the wall was something genuinely odd. TQ Digital in China took Heroes III, a 1999 turn based strategy game that ran on a single machine, and rebuilt it as a free to play persistent world. NetDragon Websoft published. It had been announced for late 2005 and arrived on 30 may 2008, three years behind, which in the Chinese market of that period was long enough to be a different era on release.

The setting was Erathia, out of Heroes III, which by 2008 was legally awkward. Ubisoft had bought the franchise out of 3DO's collapse and was busy building a separate continuity of its own. So this game sat in the old world with no real storyline attached to it, non canonical by design, a licensed thing running in a universe its licensor had already moved on from.

~ the record ~

~ three maps in one client ~

The structure is the part that deserves remembering. There was an MMORPG overworld running in real time where you moved your character around and met other players. Drop into a scenario and it became a Heroes style strategy map, where movement cost points and the day ended when you ran out. Start a fight from there and it opened a 3D tactical grid with turn order, which is Heroes III combat rendered in a way Heroes III never was.

Eight factions carrying fifty six unit types between them, plus four separate magic systems. that is a large amount of Heroes III preserved inside something built to be logged into rather than installed and owned. It is also three different games' worth of pacing bolted together, and reports from the time suggest the seams showed.

~ the wall ~

The English beta ran from 7 may to 9 june 2010 and the live version opened on the 11th. Nothing about that client was localized for Asia specifically, the text and the interface were simply in English. What stopped a player in Ankara or Warsaw was a check against whatever address their ISP had handed them that morning.

Territorial licensing is ordinary in publishing and it lands very strangely on a game. A book printed under an Asia-only license still sits on a shelf if you carry it home. a server that refuses your IP is not a distribution limit, it is a wall built into the product itself, and there was no legitimate way through it from where i live.

~ how it ended ~

On 31 march 2014 it went offline and that was that. Nearly six years is not a short run for a licensed MMO in that market, and by 2014 the license itself was moving anyway. Ubisoft's own Blue Byte was building Might and Magic Heroes Online, a browser game that launched in september that year and ran until december 2020.

heroeswo.com does not resolve. Nothing was preserved, because nothing about it was ever a file you held. The strange middle chapter where Heroes III became a persistent world for a Chinese audience only exists now in screenshots and in a handful of wiki pages written by people who got past the door.

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