Heroes 6 - Discussion

You're wrong, they definitely gave up. The units could have been made in a more or less classic style, perhaps taking some elements from the fifth game and some from the third. Just make them prettier and add more features. There's no need to over-fantasize. And everyone would be happy. But when they turned the Orcs into Papuans and the Necromancers into some kind of Aztecs, it's unclear why they went in that direction.
P.S. At least the shamans look like Orcs, which is more familiar.

On the new engine, everything looks better anyway, and the units clearly have no fewer abilities than in previous games in the series. By the way, in the fifth game, when creating factions, the developers were also inspired by various cultures: the Orcs are like steppe nomads, the mages are in the style of the Middle East, and so on. The sixth game is the same, only other cultures were taken as a basis; the Orcs, in my opinion, have an original and fresh design, due to the territory in which they live in Ashan. It's all logical. The Necromancers, by the way, are in the Egyptian style, not the Aztec style. This kind of "cultural" division makes the difference between factions more noticeable, so that they are not just a set of creatures.

To the fact that everything is too extravagant. And I personally got used to the fact that Heroes was a more serious game.

We haven't seen the game yet, but based on the screenshots, it looks much more serious than the fifth game, where many models look like illustrations from children's fairy tales.