Ubisoft is remaking Heroes of Might and Magic 3. Not remastering, not “reimagining” with a roguelite mode bolted on. Rebuilding the 1999 turn-based strategy game for PC and consoles, and by the accounts coming out of Gamescom 2026, doing it with the restraint of a conservator cleaning a painting rather than a director putting their stamp on it.

Rock Paper Shotgun’s writeup is the more interesting of the two, because the writer opens by admitting they aren’t a fan of the original and still calls the recreation faithful. That’s a useful data point. Praise from a devotee tells you the nostalgia machinery is working. Praise from someone outside the church tells you the craft is actually there.

Faithful is a harder brief than it sounds

There’s a tendency to treat the faithful remake as the lazy option, the safe box-tick between real projects. It isn’t. Heroes 3 is a game people have been playing continuously for twenty-seven years, largely through community mods and the HD fan patches that kept it running on modern machines. That audience has memorized the numbers. They know the movement costs, the creature stacks, the exact feel of a week’s worth of turns. Deviate on the math and you’ve made a different game wearing the same hat.

The reported quality-of-life improvements are where the risk lives, and where I’d want the most scrutiny before launch. QoL is never neutral in a strategy game. Faster turn resolution changes how long a multiplayer session runs. Better information display changes how much of the skill was memorization. None of that is disqualifying, but it’s the seam where a faithful remake starts quietly becoming a slightly easier one.

The console question

Bringing Heroes 3 to consoles is the genuinely new thing here, and both previews note it without much interrogation. A 1999 PC strategy game built around precise mouse work on a dense hex battlefield and an adventure map crowded with clickable objects. Controller support for that is a real design problem, not a port checkbox. Turn-based helps. It doesn’t solve cursor traversal across a map that assumes you can flick to any point instantly.

Worth noting the company doing this. Ubisoft shipped an Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag remake this year, and IGN frames Heroes 3 as the lower-profile sibling project. It is. It’s also the one with a clearer reason to exist, since Black Flag remains perfectly playable while Heroes 3 has spent decades being held together by volunteers.

Two games, one franchise, different jobs

Hooded Horse and Ubisoft are also backing Unfrozen’s Heroes of Might & Magic: Olden Era, the first new entry in over a decade. Running both at once is the smart configuration: Olden Era carries the burden of proving the series has a future, which frees the remake to just be accurate.

The thing I want answered at launch is what happens to the mods. Heroes 3’s afterlife was built on Horn of the Abyss and its cousins. A remake that can’t host them is a prettier version of a game most of its players stopped running years ago.