Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era is leveraging player feedback to deliver the strategy RPG I've longed for since 2005

With a great IP comes great responsibility, and such is the case for Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era developer Unfrozen. Being chosen by co-publisher Ubisoft to inherit the iconic strategy franchise is no small thing. It's the first new Heroes instalment in over a decade, and following a hugely successful Steam Next Fest demo, Olden Era's Early Access release is now confirmed for April 30, 2026.

Impressed as most fans were, the passionate playerbase still had some thoughts to share with Unfrozen. Community developer Bart Podress-Leszek's job is to feed that information back to the dev team, he tells me, and one of the most noticeable changes I see when sitting down to play the latest version is the result of this process.

Grove armada

I frown immediately when I see an unfamiliar name listed among other factions in our pre-hands-on briefing. I've racked up almost 100 hours in the demo since my first big breakthrough, and it turns out that the woodland and fae-themed contingent once known as Sylvan has been renamed Grove. But why?

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"We had a lot of feedback from the community when we first revealed the Grove faction," explains Podress-Leszek. Fans weren't happy with how dissimilar Olden Era's "wild forest of various fae creatures and elemental beings" felt to the Sylvan faction of Heroes 5, where wood elves, pixies, and unicorns are staple fantasy units. So, Unfrozen changed the name to Grove to better "match expectations."

That's my most burning question cleared up, straight off the bat. But later, as I click around my chosen map to start my turn in PvE mode, my eyes lock onto the curious empty space on the left-hand side of the screen. The toolbar, where I'd usually find my active heroes in the demo version, has been relocated to the right-hand edge of the screen and has a brand new look entirely.

"One of the earliest [pieces of] feedback that the team received was about the user interface," he says. Players shared how they found it "a little bit too clean, a little bit too modern," and "would like to see something a little bit more reminiscent of what we are going back to – because the game is called Olden Era." Unfrozen wasn't put off by even the harshest criticisms. Instead, it got to work on meaningful changes for its Early Access launch.

"We went back to the drawing board. We started ideas. We started looking at the previous interfaces, checking what would work," says Podress-Leszek. There were multiple considerations to take on board – "we have much bigger screens these days, for example," meaning Unfrozen had to think outside the box while working to a harsh deadline.

"We previewed it to the community, and we communicated clearly that this is the initial stage, that there will be more changes in Early Access. And this is, essentially, the result of that feedback that we got over those years, from [the Twitch announcement in] 2024 to [the demo launch in] August, up 'til now."

Tempering player feedback with the developer's own vision is a tricky thing. As a huge Heroes fan himself, Podress-Leszek has learned how to cut through the noise and distil useful feedback into manageable, actionable parts. "A lot of that boils down to me and the other community managers just being on the hunt for information," he says. "There are certain places where we say, 'we understand you guys, but we cannot do everything exactly as you ask us,' and we communicate that in a manner that is decisive but not insulting."

Unfair's fair

Another change I bear in mind while playing the latest Olden Era build is the difficulty level. I find myself progressing quite rapidly through this PvE session, finding far more "normal" or "easy" fights dotted across the map than I recall in the demo, even after its November update. A free demo getting patched is a rarity in itself, but rarer still is the depth to which Unfrozen goes to ensure that, as CEO Denis Fedorov told me in an interview, "Heroes is for everyone."

Despite the difficulty balance being tweaked in the demo, the jury's still out on whether Unfrozen has it quite right just yet. "Interestingly enough, we still get various responses all the way from 'this is too difficult' to 'this is so easy', so certain adjustments were still made compared to the demo." For this, Unfrozen leaned on some valuable expertise: its working relationship with original Heroes of Might and Magic creator, Jon Van Caneghem, who had some advice.

"Back when he was working on the Heroes games, and when they were designing the AI as a team, they used this term called Fun AI, where the AI is meant to be smart, but not too smart," says Podress-Leszek of Caneghem's teachings. "Sometimes [the AI] will do something reckless just to keep you engaged, even though it knows it will not win. It will be defeated, but it still does it, just to keep you on your toes." This all boils down to how "attrition is the core of the game," he continues. "If you want to keep progressing, you need to start to be able to lose things, just so that there's this sort of pattern that you have to keep doing."

Outside of quickplay Arena mode or the competitive PvE strategy modes, Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era builds that core cycle of attrition in its main campaign, too. Here, I find myself playing through a narrativized series of task-based missions, taking me through the basics of the game right and enriching the decades of lore underpinning Olden Era as the franchise's first prequel.

Since the demo is PvE only at the moment, the campaign is a fresh experience for me. I'm surprised by how tutorialized it feels at first, taking me through the gameplay basics slowly, inquisitively, as I enjoy some fully-voiced dialogue and moments of choice. It seems like a great way to ease a new player into the Heroes experience, and I suggest that maybe it's intended as the first stop for brand new players.

"The initial mission or two, they are meant to be sort of easier on the mind," says Podress-Leszek of the difficulty balancing system in campaign mode versus PvE. "They have this clean structure with those neatly hidden secrets that you have to find. But as you go through a campaign, it gets more and more challenging. Not to the level of 'I cannot progress past this', but just enough to keep you thinking."

Podress-Leszek notes that, in his interactions with fans in the Olden Era discord, there's a variety of directions new players take in their first approach to the game. "People that are new to the series, that have not touched it before, tend to flock to the simple Hero mode because they only have one hero to think of," he says of the more simple maps offered in OIden Era's classic PvE mode. "For those that want to try the game out, I saw a lot of people like playing Arena, so they can have some sort of semblance of what the game is."

As for which factions Podress-Leszek recommends to newbies who are coming to Olden Era as would-be Heroes fans, he keeps it simple. "I would recommend Temple or Dungeon. They're kind of made with accessibility in mind. They are not too complex, fun, strong factions," he explains.You also get dragon units in Dungeon, I can't help but point out, because every time I don't choose Dungeon and come up against the majestic beasts in combat, I immediately regret it.

But again, this is just my personal experience. "The way Heroes games work is that they pull you in by this desire to explore them, so you need to be inquisitive. You need to be curious when playing them. So that's my go-to tip," says Podress-Leszek. "Be curious, explore, and allow yourself to be immersed in it."

Heroes is one of the best strategy game series in turn-based history, and there are plenty more besides...