The developers behind Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era are treating its upcoming 2026 Early Access release more like a full game than an unfinished taster because the team "don't want to waste" their chance at a good first impression, especially with a series that's been chugging on and off for 30 years. Speaking to the PC Gamer magazine, senior dev Katya Prikhodko said the company is "treating this Early Access as a full release, because we know it is important for us to have this shot, and we don't want to waste it." Unfrozen apparently "want to be as prepared as possible, even with the small team that we have." CEO Denis Fedorov called it a "pretty great responsibility" to make the first Heroes of Might and Magic game in so many years "because the playerbase is quite huge, and the expectations from fans are quite high, but we have a vision, and we definitely hope that the project will be successful and satisfy expectations." After games like Hades, players expect more from Steam early access games than they did even 5 years ago, Dead Cells creators say: "But that's fair, because, in a way, they are buying the game" Playing Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era has turned me into a Dungeon devotee, and I can't help but feel like I'm already seeing a strategy classic in the making Palworld dev pushes back on Early Access criticisms, points to examples like Baldur's Gate 3 and Satisfactory: "Games only get better when the players are involved" "There is a long road ahead, so don't expect that everything works like a charm in Early Access in terms of balancing, because it's always been back and forth," Fedorov continued. "You cannot satisfy everyone." Elsewhere, the exec mentioned how the team are taking inspiration and extracting "the best things" from every era of Heroes, even though, "personally, I'm a fan of Heroes 2 and 3 mostly." I've been playing Heroes of Might and Magic since I was 6, and after putting 10 hours into Olden Era's huge Steam demo, the strategy series has never felt better