The fifth Heroes game made me pay attention to demons back in the day, not least because of the designs and unit lineup in general, since I had fallen in love with nightmares back in the fourth game (cool fiery horses, whee!), and succubi seemed very stylish and striking to me (girl power, yay!). Suffice it to say, succubi made up a significant portion of my fan art for the fifth game, and to this day I find their design quite decent for all its indecency.
Nevertheless, I can't call the demon faction's design in the fifth game an excellent 10/10 perfect. That honorable title has long been firmly occupied by my beloved, divinely beautiful Legions of the Damned from the second Disciples, endlessly delightful in their terrifying monstrous horror. The second Disciples is generally an insanely stylish and atmospheric game, but there's a small problem — its graphics were hopelessly outdated even at the time of release in 2002, with all that entails, so fully enjoying the chthonic hellish spawn of the Legions is a bit tricky. No, of course, the Legions in the godforsaken third Disciples are also monstrous, horrifying, and disgusting, but in a bad way, lol. I suppose my dream of seeing the entire Legion faction from the second game in cool, roughly modern graphics will remain just a dream, which is a shame. Although, perhaps humanity simply isn't ready for it yet.
I also want to recall another extreme — the demons from the King's Bounty remake by 1C and Katauri, which are The Legend and its ilk, 2008 and onwards. This is also an incredibly stylish game, but whereas Disciples is steeped in the spirit of gothic dark fantasy, King's Bounty is a bright, kind fairy tale. And if the Disciples Legions would make Lovecraft himself feel ashamed by their degree of chthonic, indescribable otherness, then the demons from King's Bounty are as classic as they come. Imps look like they crawled out of "Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka", cerberi are cute doggies, succubi seem to have stepped out of a freeze-frame of some hentai, and the image of archdemons/devils/I don't remember what the faction's strongest units were called, but you get it — is only slightly less classic than the devils from the third Heroes.
And so, the Inferno of the fifth game categorically doesn't measure up to either of these two benchmarks. To be fair, comparing them to the Disciples Legions isn't entirely correct, since the fifth game doesn't even come close to attempting dark fantasy, but I can't talk about demons without mentioning the divine Disciples, sorry. But even against the backdrop of King's Bounty, they look... not cartoonish enough. Imps are more ugly than funny, and cerberi and nightmares resemble monsters more than doggies or horsies. And that's not necessarily bad; I could even count that as a plus for the fifth game. But the main problem is color.
The classic demon colors are black and red. Want to design a demon? Slap black and red on it, you can't go wrong. Black and red are vital if you're making a demon faction; demons without black and red just wouldn't be understood. But the question isn't how necessary black and red are. The question is different — are just these two colors enough for demons?
Look at the Disciples Legions. The city screen and native terrain are painted exclusively in these two colors, but the units themselves are very colorful. We have brown advisors and devils, orange molochs, purple archdevils, almost-pink three-headed demons and beasts, and doppelgangers and the capital guard are even blue.
Look at the King's Bounty demons. Alongside red and black, there's a lot of yellow and purple in the designs, and succubi even have human skin color. There's also a lot of play with shades, all colors being very pure and bright.
And what do we see in the color scheme of Inferno in the fifth game? Yep. Black. Red. Black-and-red. A little bit of play with shades of black and red. Wow, gray! That's like black, but lighter. For variety — fire, which, hurray, is yellow! And that's pretty much it.
But maybe it's just the game's style? Yeah, right.
Mages — all the colors of the rainbow and half the colors unknown to science. Blue and brown dominate a bit, but overall the lineup is quite multicolored; I won't even list them.
Dungeon — purple, blue, red, brown, green, pink, black, yellow, gray... Plus the skin color of the elves themselves, especially the female elves, lol.
Humans — gray, brown, blue, yellow, red, white. A bit of orange.
Undead — black, green, brown, a little light blue and pink. Actually, they also suffer a bit from a poor palette, but it's nowhere near as bad.
Elves — blue, green, blue-green, brown, white, yellow, orange, a bit of pink and red.
Dwarves — red, orange, gray, brown, white, green, and light blue. Oh, and one of the grades of their
fire dragon leans into purple.
Orcs — brown, orange, gray, red, a drop of green. Also a very poor color scheme, but maybe it's because lore-wise the orcs are connected to demons?
As we can see, most other factions are quite colorful, and yet somehow manage to maintain their identity and style; many factions have the un-upgraded and both upgraded lineups clearly separated by color scheme, yet they don't look like a bucket of paint of the right color was just dumped on them. Which can't be said for Inferno.
Absolutely all demon units are painted with an even coat of the same paint. It's a muted red-pink for un-upgraded units, bright scarlet with a fiery glow for the upgraded, and smoky-charred gray with black for the alternative upgrade. There are practically no color accents, except for the glow on the upgraded version and red eyes on the alternative upgrade, no interspersed elements highlighted in other colors, not even plain white/beige horns and hooves, or even black ones for the un-upgraded or first upgrade; at best, we get gradient stretches or some very closely matched colors that barely differ in shade. So diverse, just a joy for the eyes from such a rich and vibrant palette. Yes, there's a little play with shades, but against the backdrop of the rich color schemes of other factions, it looks frankly dreary. To top it off, black itself is achromatic, a placeholder color, a background color, like white and gray; achromatic colors desperately need additional spectral colors to liven them up, because in the real world, achromatic colors don't exist thanks to something called reflection, simply put — reflected color. I'll tell you as an artist!!11, I never use black for drawing shadows; I usually take blue-violet, less often red-brown, sometimes other appropriate colors. Similarly, I never paint light with white. And I actually like the color black and actively use it in everyday life and character design. I'm leading up to the fact that black can't really be counted as a full color, and red and yellow are categorically insufficient for a rich color scheme. If it were just one character, everything would be fine, but we're talking about an entire faction — three lineups of seven units each, 21 creatures. If they're all painted in two and a half colors, the eye will just get tired of the monotony. The poor color palette is my main complaint about the demons; they're just boring to look at. The city screen itself, by the way, suffers from the same problem.
Just for the record — I also reproach that Betrezen-cursed parody of the Legions from the third Disciples for the same dreariness of color scheme, only there everything is much, much worse because the unit models are also made according to everyone's favorite principle of ctrl-c, ctrl-v.
But as for the unit models themselves in the fifth game's Inferno, everything is very good. Each creature has its own recognizable silhouette, its own style, very well-balanced exaggerated cartoonish features, excellent work on portraits — you've got the appealingly ugly imps with big tongues and tiny eyes, the cute languid faces of succubi, the archetypical goat-like devil, and nightmares with cerberi looking like evil parodies of doggies and horsies. I especially like the pit lords with their almost dragon-like faces. The balance between cute expressive cartoonishness and chthonic demonic otherness is very well struck; the units generally look stylish and fit harmoniously into the game, but some have something appealingly wrong and frightening about them. The twisted wings raise questions, of course, but who cares if it looks cool; anatomy? Not acquainted with that lady. The succubi's hooves are also outrageously non-anatomical, but what is anatomy to us if it's precisely the succubi who are the sponsor of hundreds of thousands of billions of satyr-like creatures with enormous hooves that I crammed into my then-setting to the brim. I really like the certain monstrous-reptilian quality of the cerberi and nightmares; it effectively breaks their seemingly mammalian appearance, working well for the otherness and wrongness of demonic spawn. The only thing I'd want to criticize the nightmares for is the horn on the nose; it looks very unbalanced, the horsie must have a hard time in life with such a club. And the pubic glow on the upgraded succubi raises questions. It's certainly an interesting choice, looks good, and fits the overall image, but is it necessary to place such a bright accent precisely on that part of the body in a game that's about something else entirely? I wouldn't have questions if it were some RPG where the player meets such units face-to-face and, if the developer/modder wishes, could even flirt with them, but here we just have a generic rank-and-file soldier from a turn-based strategy, whose seductive appearance is a nice bonus in the first hours of getting to know the game and is a bit pleasing afterward. Most of the time, the player sees only a reduced model on the battlefield or a portrait in their army, and their thoughts revolve not around "Ah, I'd romance her," but "Okay, how best to blast with them to take out as many enemy units as possible..." I don't know, maybe I'm not a romantic. For my part, I can say that back in the day I drooled quite a bit admiring the elven wardancers (the ones running around without pants in just loincloths), and for fifteen-year-old me, there were no hotter men (except maybe Luke Skywalker, but that's Luke Skywalker). Then I played, saw that they die like flies from a single hit, and all my love for them faded, the tomatoes withered, pain, disappointment, I even started making less fan art of them. Succubi are a bit better, since they're shooters, but still.
The dry result — models 9/10, not perfect, but very decent; textures 2/10, thanks for using three buckets of paint, you could have just poured one over all three upgrades.
Рон54
