Heroes: Olden Era — they finally did it

Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era came out last week, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

Not because I’ve been playing it for 10 hours straight — I have two children and a finite number of hours in any given day. But whatever hours I’ve managed to scrape together, most of them have ended up on the Steam Deck: working through Arena mode against AI opponents, poking at Single Hero mode, slowly building up an understanding of a game I’ve been wanting to exist for 24 years.

This is the dream, actually.

Where it started

I played Heroes III as a kid. Not properly — I never touched multiplayer, never learned what half the spells did, never built a coherent strategy from map start to castle assault. I just loaded up campaigns, picked the factions with the coolest-looking units, and vibed. I lost a lot. I saved-and-loaded constantly. I’d sometimes spend 40 minutes methodically conquering a section of map and then walk my entire army into a fight I had no business picking, lose everything, and reload.

I did this happily, for hours, across most of childhood. It never occurred to me that this was a suboptimal way to play. Those were good hours.

That’s Heroes III. The vibe, specifically, and the pull. The hand-painted fantasy map spread out like a board game. The music that still lives rent-free in my head. The satisfying rhythm of picking up resources, moving armies, building a town, watching numbers go up. None of it required you to be good. You could be completely mediocre — strategically incoherent, tactically confused — and still find the whole thing deeply, embarrassingly compelling.

I loved it. The series continued after that, but none of the newer entries ever quite reached me the same way.

40-something hours on a free demo

When Olden Era announced a free demo, I downloaded it within about 10 minutes of seeing the news. And then I played it for — I’m going to say 40 to 50 hours. I’m not going to be more specific than that because the exact number probably says something unflattering about my impulse control. I bought the Early Access the day it launched. Obviously.

A meaningful portion of those hours was spent figuring things out. Arena matches where I assembled what seemed like a solid army and then slowly realised, mid-combat, that my logic was slightly off. Single Hero mode sessions where I discovered that “picking the hero with the coolest name” is not a complete strategy. The systems clicked gradually, piece by piece.

The demo didn’t sell me on being good at the game. It sold me on wanting to keep playing it despite not being good at the game. Which is, I’d argue, a higher bar.

Adult gaming on the couch

Most of my hours with the Early Access so far have happened on the Steam Deck, late evenings or the odd half-hour when everyone else was occupied. For me, at least, it’s turned out to be a near-perfect pairing.

Turn-based strategy is practically designed for handheld play. Nothing moves when you’re not looking at it. You can put it down mid-battle, mid-turn, mid-reconsidering-every-decision-you’ve-ever-made, and the game will be exactly where you left it. No checkpoint missed, no session ruined. Just you, your increasingly questionable army composition, and an enemy hero who seems to know something you don’t.

Arena mode has been my main entry point, and I think it’s genuinely brilliant for someone in my position. Skip the map. Skip the economy and the week-by-week army building and the resource management. Jump straight into a hero, pick your troops, pick some spells and artifacts, and fight. It’s the concentrated version — less map management, more pure combat, and a genuinely good way to understand the mechanics before committing to a full campaign.

Single Hero mode is even better suited to me, spiritually. One hero, no army stacking, figure it out. I have not yet figured it out. But I keep loading back in, which is the point.

What I’d really like, eventually, is a proper campaign run — the full map, the economy, the long slow satisfaction of building something over many sessions. I keep telling myself the Steam Deck’s sleep mode makes this genuinely possible: pause mid-battle, come back tomorrow, carry on exactly where you left it. This is technically true. I just haven’t fully let myself believe that a long game, interrupted and resumed across several evenings, can be as satisfying as one unbroken sitting. That might be the next thing to test.

What the game actually gets right

The atmosphere is there. That’s not a small thing — plenty of games have tried to recapture what Heroes III felt like. Most of them got close in some ways and missed it in others. Olden Era doesn’t miss it. The art has that painterly quality, the maps have that handcrafted density, and the soundtrack is exactly right — partly because Paul Anthony Romero, the composer who wrote the Heroes III music, came back to do it again. That’s not a throwaway detail. Hearing the main theme for the first time is one of those experiences where you immediately remember why you cared about this franchise in the first place.

The quality-of-life improvements over Heroes III are well-chosen too. Your hero’s movement no longer depends on the slowest creature in your army — previously, accidentally hiring one sluggish troop could quietly cripple your whole turn economy. Resource pickup no longer costs movement either. There’s also a new crafting material called Alchemical Dust that makes collecting resources feel like an actual decision rather than a mindless reflex — things you gather now go somewhere specific, and you find yourself actually caring which.

The combat has more going on than it first appears. There’s a Focus Points system — charges that build up as you deal and take damage, then get spent on faction-specific abilities: summons, revives, disabling effects, things that can turn a fight. The question in any engagement isn’t just can I win, it’s do I spend a charge now or hold it for something bigger later. As someone who’s played almost exclusively Arena, this is the thing that makes each match feel like a distinct problem rather than a stat comparison. Every unit also has two upgrade paths — freely switchable at no cost — which means the decisions start before the battle does.

And the “just one more turn” thing is fully intact. In fact it’s arguably more dangerous when you’re still learning, because you always believe the next turn is the one where it all clicks and you finally turn things around. It almost never is. You play anyway.

The part that actually deserves saying out loud

Here’s what keeps sticking with me: this game launched without a single microtransaction. No battle pass. No premium currency. No season roadmap with a free track and a suspiciously expensive paid track. No live-service layer bolted onto a strategy game because someone in a boardroom decided that’s just what games are now.

The developers were transparent throughout the entire demo period — actively collecting feedback, responding to it, shipping changes based on what players actually said — and the Early Access launch continues in the same spirit. The lead designer described the philosophy as wanting to revive the classics, make something more involving, bring something new. That’s it. No engagement loop engineering, no FOMO mechanics, no metrics-driven extraction. Just: make a good game.

It sounds so obvious that it’s become radical.

In 2026, this approach — build the thing, listen to players, don’t treat the audience as a resource to be harvested — feels almost strange to encounter. These people genuinely care whether Olden Era is good. The community feedback forums are full of developer responses. Things get fixed. Things get changed. The relationship between studio and player feels like it used to feel, back before “live service” became the answer to every question nobody asked.

I’m grateful for it. The fact that the game is good is one thing. The fact that it’s good in this specific way, without a single dark pattern in sight, is worth saying separately and clearly.

24 years later

Heroes III came out in 1999. I was a kid. I was bad at strategy games but deeply fond of them. I wandered around fantasy maps not knowing what I was doing and had an absolutely excellent time.

24 years of various franchise misfires followed. Entries that didn’t quite land, or that tried to change too much, or just never caught the feeling. Long enough that some part of me quietly gave up expecting it to come back properly.

Olden Era brings it back.

The best part — the thing that’s harder to put into words — is that this game gives back a specific feeling I’d quietly assumed was gone. Not the game itself exactly, but the absorption around it. Being completely inside something. Not tracking time. Finding something endlessly interesting without needing it to be grand or meaningful. I hadn’t expected to find that again. It’s a surprisingly good feeling to be wrong about something.

I’ve been grinding through the mechanics the patient way — learning which unit combinations actually hold up, what the spells do, how to build something that doesn’t collapse in the first few rounds. It feels more like rediscovery than grinding.

PvP is the obvious next step, and I keep telling myself I’ll get there. The honest answer is that losing to the AI feels instructive; losing to a real person who clearly knows what they’re doing is a different kind of experience. The slightly reassuring thing is that the game just launched. Nobody’s had years to perfect their builds. It’s genuinely one of the better windows to start without feeling hopelessly behind. I am absolutely using this as an excuse to keep learning a bit longer.

The Steam Deck is on the nightstand. There’s a run waiting.

I’m having an absolutely excellent time.