Might and Magic V

Might and Magic: Darkside of Xeen
Also known as: Might and Magic V Developer: New World Computing Publisher: New World Computing Platform: DOS Released in US: 1993 This game has revisional differences. This game has a prototype article

This page is rather stubbly and could use some expansion. Are you a bad enough dude to rescue this article?

Might and Magic: Darkside of Xeen is the fifth game of the Might and Magic series. A masked man with an infectious laugh has taken over the Darkside of the Xylonite Experimental Expansion Nacelle, locking that world's leaders within their own homes and turning their monstrous "friends" against them! Luckily, a random herbalist finds their distress beacon and, naturally, pawns it off to the first group of six people she sees.

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Prototype Info

Unused and Misplaced Music Some music didn't make the cut. And some simply found a new home.

World of Xeen

Much like Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles, Clouds and Darkside were designed to tell one expansive story. If installing Darkside of Xeen on a computer that already has Clouds of Xeen installed, an option to combine the two into a one game – World of Xeen – will be given. This allows players to jump back-and-forth between the two worlds and complete a few additional quests. This also brought about a few minor changes to various things.

To do: There's probably more than just an audio difference.

Clouds of Xeen	World of Xeen

The blacksmith's FM-synthesis hammer sound (heard when using AdLib or Sound Blaster sound cards) significantly differs between revisions of the game, with the World of Xeen version being far less abrasive and much longer.

Unused Graphics

The hole in the Sci-Fi wall is actually used, but there's no way to see it during normal gameplay. If a saved game's map coordinates are edited so that the player is stuck within an enclosed wall (in any area), the game allows the player to kick holes through as many walls as it takes until a normal pathway is reached.

(Source: Dark Linkaël)

Revision Differences

Xeen CD

Released in 1994, the CD-ROM version of World of Xeen was presented as the whole Xeen package all-in-one.

• The individual games could no longer be installed individually.
• The title screen was changed to show a spinning CD.

Diskette version	CD-ROM version

• All NPCs were given digitized speech in Redbook CD Audio format. To accommodate this, a new smaller NPC portrait/name dialogue was added, as well as new options to turn on text boxes (off by default) and turn off speech (on by default). Each game's NPC speech is stored as a giant, single CD audio track specific to that game (disc 1 is Clouds, disc 2 is Darkside); as such, the CD-ROM version introduces disk-swapping each time you speak to an NPC who can transfer you to between games.
• The CD-ROM version adds support for the Roland TAP-10 for digital music playback.
• Save games from the floppy version are compatible with the CD-ROM version without doing more than copying them into place and changing the extension (from .SAV to .WOX); however, floppy version saves won't activate the NPC speech even if Speech is set to "On" (if Text is "Off", NPC dialogue is completely missing). The INSTALL program will offer to convert saves, but doing so resets a number of event flags (such as doors and portcullises) and respawns every monster in the game.

To do: Figure out the details of the save format changes and what the 'converter' resets.

MacOS Version

When the combined game was ported to MacOS Classic by Presage Software, Inc in 1995, the game was further updated with a number of changes.

This page or section needs more images. There's a whole lotta words here, but not enough pictures. Please fix this. Specifically: Rips of the replaced portrait graphics would be amazing!

• The game's resolution was increased from 320 x 200 pixels to 512 x 320 pixels.
  • Depending on the system resolution, a simple "World of Xeen" may surround the playfield.
• Most of the game's graphics were redrawn to compensate for the bigger resolution, though the cutscenes were untouched.
• Several character portraits were replaced while the rest of them gained additional details.
• A number of sound effects that previously used FM Synthesis or MIDI, such as doors or walking through water, were replaced with digital samples.
• Compared to the MS-DOS version, there are several animation errors or changed music cues, especially in the cutscenes.
  • Oddly, the intended music for the Darkside intro (heard in all other versions) is replaced by "End Game" (entirely omitted from all other versions).
  • The "Guild" and "Bank" music play in their intended locations (they are swapped in all other versions).
• All music is played back in AIFF format, having been recorded from an unidentified playback of the original MIDI files.