The Fallen

Hey that's right! Come to think about it spikey buildings ARE more practical!

Good work guys! I especially like the evil picnic tables, even the Fallen like to eat outside Mmmm sandwiches!

Strongest, OK, ruthless... well, that can be good. Evil?  Um, no thanks Mr. Fallen, I don't wanna play

Huh, I had imagined thim in a very different way.   This makes me very excitied.    

That building looks quite primitive, are all of them like that?  or is that specific to a particular empire

I think there is a general lack of sophisticated and noble evil/dark/bad races in games.  I tend to play good/light sides, but I also tend to jump at the (very rare) chance to play the bad guys if they're not wart-faced, snot-nosed, sniveling snide snakes living in decrepit hovels.

That said, I do like the quality of what I see in the screenshot posted of The Fallen, so I have no specific critique for that.  I guess I was hoping that the bad guys in this game might not be so obviously evil and generally low-rent.

They are not low rent, just more practical. It seems to have an Orky feeling tough.

I don't know about that.   I would have to argue.   In fact, I had an argument with somebody else a while ago about how the evil guys were always cooler than the good guys.

I think its a mark of the times.   Now its the late 00's, but back in the 90s evil dudes were playable all the time and they wern't all wart-covered or snide snakes.  Things like the soviets on C&C, drow and half the characters in baulder's gate, shadow the hedgehog (we was pretty evil until the Sonic teamed managed to mess his archetype up in every game since adventure 2), non-strogi vampire counts in warhammer.  Heroes of Might and Magic's infernal characters were generally pretty sophisticated, and so are most mad-scientist archetypes.  I wouldn't consider kerrigan from starcraft to lack sophistication or nobility.  She is wart-faced, or something similar to it anyway, but she's really intelligent and still shows humility at times.  Sephiroth is very pretty and playable in FF: Crisis Core.  The plant chick is evil (I strongly suspect) in Demigod, and she doesn't appear to lack nobility.

Using warcraft as an example, since they have so many villians, Illidan is a noble villian.  He has horns in Warcraft 3, but he didn't always have them.   He holds love in his heart, and doesn't actually want to fight his fellow elves.  (if they broke continuity in WoW: BC, I don't care and don't bother telling me.  It was a good story until the WoW writers got their hands on it).    He just wanted power.  Originally he thought his power would please his love when he first started to turn into the demon during the war-o-the-ancients, but of course she didn't like it and she was already sleeping with another dude with horns (his brother to boot).   When they had to destroy the Magic well, the thought he was doing good by saving some of it to start another well of magic in their new home.  It is like the Lex Luther effect, he does things very bad but things that in the end his old friends will realize it is a good thing and forgive him.   

I bring him up because I suspect most strategy game fans have played Warcraft 3.  it is about as mainstream as it gets.  And there you have it, a noble sophisticated and playable villian.  That also being said, most* of the examples I give are actually rather old, and that is probebly because of the economy and such.   Movies have similar trends.  Right now good guys are bright and shiny, bad guys are evil and twisted.   Go back about 8 years and everybody had a black-boarder to some extent.

Yep, looks like Warcraft / WOW Ork architecture. Can we have some variety? Maybe some fallen with posh buildings please. (A la Dark Elves or something?)

You guys do realize that ork with a 'k' is the Warhammer 40,000 way of spelling orc and not the real fantasy way right? Although, so many people get it wrong these days (a side effect from DoW I suppose) that I'm not sure why I even bring it up anymore.

Keep strong. You're not alone.

I don't know what the 'real fantasy way' is, but Tolkien would probably have told you it's spelled "Orch" - since that's how his Sindarin-speaking Elves would have spelled it. I'm ok with ork, orc, or orch though.  A wart-faced, twisted, sub-moronic hairy baboon by any other name still smells bad.

I agree there are examples of 'evil' characters that have some silver linings.  The key example you raised was relating to Warcraft - which I'd agree with - and will add that the WoW Blood Elves were a stroke of genius.  In one update, Blizzard created a playable race that everyone wanted to play - raising up the Horde population quite a bit and bring a bit more balance to the PvP side of the game (not to mention opening up the Horde experience to a lot of players that were otherwise stuck in the Night Elf rut).  The Blood Elves looked physically appealing, had swanky looking digs, architecture to please any fantasy RPG buff (sort of), etc.  And they were evil - but not like "I'm here to plunder your village and take yer wiminz."  I just think that spikey looking wood structures suitable for Vlad the Impaler (and his hobby) aren't what I prefer to see.  And that the pic in the top post is closer to that bad guy cliche than I'd want it to be.

[Added: And to be clear, my critique is one about aesthetics.  As far as quality, I think objectively speaking the top post pic looks great.   It's the aesthetic flavor of what I see about The Fallen that I think might be at risk of being cliched.]

The render definitely brings warcraft 3 very strongly to my mind, but I think it's because of the red roof and the white bone/tusk/whatever.

Actually, I think if the corners were blunted and not bone-colored and maybe the roof a maroon or something (still red-ish, but not so close to the red from warcraft 3) then I wouldn't feel "warcraft 3 orc" so strongly.

As Aesir Rising said, the quality looks great. Maybe if we had the Men aesthetics to compare it against side-by-side we'd get a better feeling for the overall direction though, so I will await that render before judging the aesthetics further

http://i190.photobucket.com/albums/z151/elomi23/Motivational%20Posters/Orks.jpg

How's this going to work with the building builder? We've already gotten confirmation that we will be able to create or at least edit buildings to an extent, and be able to create a civilization aesthetic of our own choosing. I hope that is the case and I'm not just misunderstanding... Because frankly I would get tired of playing the Fallen if all their buildings look so barbaric and crude. I definitely like to mix up run-of-the-mill crude evil with some good ol' sophisticated evil.

That said the quality of the art is great. If we'll actually be able to zoom in and see buildings and stuff in such high quality in the game if we have good enough computers I'll pee myself.

Ok, so here's another The Fallen structure to compare with the one in the top post.

I like this better - and probably because it has the feature changes you mention:

Some other The Fallen structure

Who says the humans won't be evil, or some good Fallen.

That said, I just hope the Fallen have horns.  I kinda imagined them like Urusei Yatsura-style Oni.

Just remember, all these buildings are totally customizeable by players. Think GalCiv II ships.

<3

Hi,

Question for Brad then. ... ?

Can we have different materials (e.g. flesh / crystal) for the customisable buildings etc?

Then I'm a very happy person right now; so long as the buildings blocks aren't severely limited by race choice, anyways.

Yay

It is good to see Frogboy singing high praises about me and my people.

Thought about modding the art and/or models outside the game using stuff like Blender and gimp but I wasn't aware you're planning an in-game GC2 shipyard type functionality for the buildings.  That's very interesting.

That's very nice to know.

I know you don't like the comparison (since you probably had the idea before it) but Elemental sounds like it has as much customization as Spore, but with an actual game behind it.

Wait a minute! 

The ships had parts that had direct changes of final result.  For example: you could put a laser cannon on the back and now the ship's fire/power was increased.  You could place an armor plate on its wings and now it was able to stand more in combat.     Are you saying that the buildings are going to be like THAT?    How's that going to work?   Can buildings be directly attacked where adding armored plates might be a thing needed?   Are you going to add class rooms and book-halls to buildings to make them boost research?  Are you going to add nurseries and kitchens to the same building to make it also boost population growth?

I mean, if you litterally have to build your first "Library" by adding bookshelves, then wow.

(I was going to put this in last night but the forum exploded)

Personally, I would like to see the beast those tusks came from!

Yeah that forum explosion made me very sad

And I have to say, I kind of hope the building editor is mostly or completely cosmetic. I think I'd be a little overwhelmed by having to design all my buildings with both form and function in mind.