Might and MagicŪ IX

About IX

A great army is marching toward the chaotic land of Chedian. It is up to a party of adventurers, skilled in the lores of Might and Magic, to unite the land and end this destruction once and for all.

BM

Overview:

For the first time the Worlds of Might and Magic are in a completely 3D environment. Using Monolith's Lithtech technology, and specificall the version used for No One Lives Forever, some may complain that the game is outdated, and in fact it is around two years old (which is quite a long time in the gaming community). Many have complained about this, but the truth is you can still get the same enjoyment out of the game. Of course now that the monsters are fully animated 3D objects you won't find hordes and hordes of them, but to make up for that they are a bit tougher.

MM IX may have a sleak new appearance, but all the elements of the previous games are still there. Most of the quests are along the same lines as in the previous games, the skill system works much in the same way, you need to go to a training hall to train, the inventory works much the same as it did before. It may look a little different, but if you enjoyed MM VI-VIII chances are you'll like this one too. I've heard a lot of complaints about this game and most of them aren't valid. Some people are upset about the new engine simply because they don't have experience with typical First-Person shooter control interfaces so they say all this stuff about the game that isn't true. The fact is, this game is very similar to all previous MM titles, it just looks a little different.

Good things about the new game (to name only a few):

Beefs with the game:

As you can see this is a great MM game, while it may not meet up with the industries current standards, it certainly maintains the standard that has been present in all the MM games.

I mentioned above my gripe with the inventory system, and I would like to comment on that just a bit. I loved the paper-doll type dress up system from VI-VIII, and seeing that leave was the biggest dissapointment in the whole game for me. I suppose that can be attributed to the overall laziness of the programmers and artists. This game would have quite been a bit better (though not significantly better) if the old inventory system had been used.

Ultimately I like the game, and if you give it a chance you probably will too.

If you like Might and Magic you'll probably also like Morrowind from Bethesda Softworks.

General Strategy

At this time I won't write any specific strategies, but heres a tip: There is a quest in which you can summon a dragon. Once the dragon is summoned you'll find it in a cave in Lindisfarne. Also in that cave is two chests which contain rare items. Here's the tip: Go into the cave, cast elemental protection, run to the two chests and get the item inside (ignore the dragon), and run out. You'll take a significant amount of damage, but it's worth it. After you've made it out, rest, then go back in and you'll find two more rare items in that chest. You can do this over and over, and get good stuff, and if you don't want the stuff you can sell it.

Extensive Strategy

You should be able to find helpful guides here:
http://www.gamefaqs.com/
Please report broken links

Tweak Guide

I would lastly like to make mention of a few things you can tweak in the game. To tweak the game you need to open the file autoexec.cfg found in the Might and Magic IX directory. To open this file use any text-only editor (notepad will work great). In this file you find a series of lines looking something like this:

"ValueName" "Value"

Where ValueName is some value, and Value is the number or text applied to that value. By changing the Value portion of some of these lines you can improve the performance of the game.

The biggest effect you can have on the game is to change value of BitDepth from 16 to 32. To do this find the line that looks like this:

"BitDepth" "16"

And change it to this:

"BitDepth" "32"

You'll notice a significant improvement in the texture quality. Also make sure the value screendepth is set to 32 as well.

There are other things you can tweak but I don't recommend changing any of them.