Heroes of Might and Magic II: Desecrated Lands is a freeware map pack developed by Dark Entertainment and various authors, and distributed by East Valley Software, released in late 1997 with some editions of Heroes of Might and Magic II: The Succession Wars for Microsoft Windows. Included in the form of a bonus CD, it was provided as an extra feature at no extra cost.
Content
None of the 113 maps included in the pack were created by New World Computing; fifty, marked as "ORIGINAL", were developed by Dark Entertainment, while the remainder, marked as either "Classic" (single-scenarios) or "Sets" (psuedo-campaigns), were purely user-created. These are included along with readmes attributing their creation either to their original authors or, where the mapmaker's identity is uncertain, "unknown authors from the internet."
Additionally, the pack includes two user-developed programs - a Heroes II savegame money patcher attributed to Obstler, and a savegame editor by phantasm.
Reception
As an unofficial release distributed to substantially fewer users than usual, the map pack is considered extremely rare and is not widely-known; however, Richard Goodwin, Acorn Arcade's reviewer for the original Heroes II, regarded it as "a very valuable resource [which] adds to the game immensely."[1]
References