You can tell the new Heroes of Might and Magic game is meant to be a throwback to when the series was good because they're not insisting we call it Might and Magic: Heroes this time

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Beloved turn-based strategy series Heroes of Might and Magic suffered a renaming six games in, with the last two entries known officially as Might and Magic: Heroes 6 and 7 just to mess with the order of your library. Publishers Ubisoft have relented though, and gone back to the HoMM naming convention for the next in the series, the recently announced prequel Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era.

It's being developed by Unfrozen, the studio behind Iratus: Lord of the Dead. That game demonstrated their ability to recreate Darkest Dungeon with a twist, so the studio seems like a decent choice for recreating HoMM 3, which is what Olden Era is most reminiscent of at first glance.

One thing that's different about Olden Era is the launch strategy. It'll be coming out in early access to give time for community feedback (of which I'm sure there will be plenty), and balancing. While it promises to have a singleplayer story campaign set on Enroth's continent of Jadame before the events of the first game in the series, the focus is on multiplayer, with a classic multihero mode as well as a 1-hero mode for shorter games. If you want an even shorter match there will be a mode called arena that's a bit like drafting in Magic: The Gathering, only instead of choosing cards from boosters you're choosing a hero, units, upgrades, and artifacts from a random selection.

Olden Era will have six playable factions with more to be added as DLC, and a map editor. Local multiplayer hasn't been mentioned yet, but I hope it's included because hot-seat games were my way into the series way back when. The release date is currently set for the second quarter of 2025, and you can wishlist it on Steam.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.