Posts from how did Heroes of Might and Magic III½ come about? Auto-translated

Who is the creator? 3DO or Russian fans?
And why isn't this great, almost standalone game on AG.ru?????
(By the way, it's not available in stores either...)

Hmm... write to Horn, he'll tell you everything... they make TE out of vogs, they probably know everything.:) here's his ICQ: 286-955-870

Who is the creator? Is it 3DO or fans from Russia?
And why isn't this great, almost separate game on AG.ru?????
(by the way, it's not in stores either...)

The creators are a whole team of enthusiasts and fans of the game. WOG-Team.
The game isn't in stores because it's not an official expansion and it wasn't intended to generate commercial profit... It's distributed for free by downloading it from the internet. ;)
The project is entirely fan-made.
Basically, that's it...

WoG Team
(in alphabetical order)

ERM Idea:
Slava Salnikov

Programmers:
Alexander Karpeko
Alexander Trifonov
Slava Salnikov

Lead Artists:
Alexey Pichulin
Alexey Vasiliev (Darkloke)
Bruno
Dieter Averbeck
Mathias Launhardt
Petr Alekseev (Arstahd)

Artists:
Alexander Karpeko
Artem Gagarin
Bianor
Jerry Kowalczyk (Treupp)
Jonas Gustafsson
Konstantin Nochev (Dutch)
Mandi (Kitten Angel)
Sergey Vakhrameev
Slava Salnikov
Victoria Kalinina (Candy)

ERM programming and/or
level designers:
Alexander Karpeko
Alexander Trifonov
Alexandra Balahura
Alexey Pichulin
Alexis Koz
Anders Jonsson
Andrey Adutkevich (Perfecto)
Bruno
COX
Dieter Averbeck
Dmitry Lelikov
Donald X.Vaccarino
Jack Stebaev (AsPiN)
Marc Lasch
Petr Alekseev (Arstahd)
Petyo Georgiev (Petronius)
Qurqirish Dragon
Rich Reed (Space8999)
Robert Bergerfjall (Overlord)
Sir Four
Slava Salnikov
Steven Lynch
Thomas Franz (samot)
Timothy Pulver
Tobyn

WoG & ERM documentation:
Alexey Pichulin
Bruno
Darkloke
George Toganel (Pushtiu')
Jack Stebaev (AsPiN)
Kamil Belau (Acid Dragon)
Marcus the Red
Yura Metelyov (Ennin)
Slava Salnikov
Timothy Pulver

Leading ERM testers:
Donald X.Vaccarino
Gangrail
Jonas Gustafsson
Roland Rollig (Rasputin)
Stefan Pavlov (Ste)
Steve Hanna (ByteBandit)
Timothy Pulver

Webmaster:
Alexey Pichulin

Web artists:
Alexey Pichulin
Dmitry Lelikov

Special thanks:
Alex 2k
Alexander the Artist
Alexander Bass
Alexey Kryuchkov (GreyMage)
Andrew Svietlichnyy
Andrew Yang
Angelspit
Dan Lind
Glover
Paul Lipka (Lipa)
Psycomonkee
Sergey Gorbanyov
Simon Mooncalf
Slaim Master
Theo van Bekkum
Xerobull

Regarding the history of its creation, I'll provide the link to the interview with ZVS again. As for the team composition (which, as I understand, is taken from the Credits 3.58f), it has changed significantly since then. Many new people have joined, but even more of those listed have left the project (they have new interests or life "caught up" with them). Currently, there is not very active work being done on the scripts, but without Slava's return, 3.59 will not appear; at best, another update pack for the previous version will be released. Whether Slava will return is something even he doesn't know yet... :smile32:

Sorry, can the World of Xeen be considered a license? I simply bought a disc with a World of Xeen license, and during the game, there is nothing new, and it doesn't differ from Heroes 3, but in map creation, everything new is present. :confused:

Arseny, no! A licensed Wog is a free Wog with a size of 41 megabytes.
http://hmm3.fclan.ru/main.php?t=0.3623780440902741

Actually, the official add-on was still under the 3DO umbrella, Life vs. Death, WOG 3.5, and I remember that WOG itself was initially released with the generous permission of 3DO. There were disks, not with cobbled-together patches, but I specifically had disks for HoMM 3 1/2 "Life vs. Death" and HoMM 3 1/2 In the Wake of Gods. Whether it was official or not, I can't say for sure, but these games were on the installer, not as a patch on top of the original. I'm more interested in who created the patches after the WOG 3.5 versions.

There is an article on this topic in the latest issue of the Vestnik magazine: http://www.woggrad.ru/vestnik/

Snip, you have pirated copies. World of Xeen is distributed freely as a 41MB executable file.

well, pirated versions – no, I said I wasn't aware of it. I just saw some information about the very first WOG, and yes, the WOG team developed it, but without 3DO, they couldn't really do anything, because they didn't have the rights. By the way, as an archive/updater up to version 3.53 or 2, I'm not sure which, I saw WOG, but I never saw the original 3.5 on any updaters. And never mind that they were pirated versions; at least in the "Life vs. Death" campaign, there were excellent additions that were different from WOG, something in the style of "The Shadow of Death."