Very late in the game you get a series of spells which allow you to bypass walls and teleport around the map, and there are some areas where you need them in order to navigate, but for the most part, when you’ve finally gotten them, you’ve probably charted most of the area anyway and they end up becoming ways of speeding up travel and creating shortcuts.Ĥ has no such walls. The challenge lies largely in growing strong enough to fight the enemies in each area and in actually winding your way from Point A to Point B. In Might and Magic, you’re ultimately able to step on every single square–every area in the game is a 16X16 square–but it takes a long time to be able to do so. These are the literal walls of the game–they’re represented as mountains and trees too dense to move through. But what I want to draw your attention to the pencil lines all over the place in the 1 map. There’s some obvious aesthetic differences–there was something like nine months in between playing the two games, and so I’ve gotten a bit more relaxed and loose with mapping 4 also contains an automap, and so while mapping out 1 is essential in order to complete it, hand-mapping 4 was more for the enjoyment, and so I felt freer to use bolder colors and go for look more than practicality. Here’s the area surrounding the first town in Might and Magic Book 1:Īnd here’s an equivalent section in Might and Magic 4: We’re going to need a couple of shots of some Might and Magic maps to understand.

There’s a term–I learned it from The CRPG Addict–called lawnmowing.

Anvil of dawn maps