When it comes to the poxwalkers we see a variety of them with their appearances. But Shooters, Gunners, Snipers, Shotgunners, Flamers, Bulwarks, Crusher etc all look the exact same. Give us a handful of other looks to them. Go nuts, i wanna see a gang of Reapers that all look different in their own way. I wanna see a posse of Maulers that look like a 40k version of the Knights of Ren of something to that effect. I know we don’t care about the heretics but at least we can get some quality of life updates that make the game look better yea?
2 Likes
Sounds good, but actually I think many of us are programmed on the silhouettes and enemy colours. Having a wide variety might make for a more interesting line up, but it’d make the game harder across all levels.
Thats not me saying it’s not a bad idea, but it’d add some visual complexity to a game that does already have a lot of things thrown at you.
5 Likes
the traitor army has a standardized uniform from being an army, you know
3 Likes
actually if you bother to generate multiple of any enemy in the meat grinder or even pay attention in game you’d see that there are elements of each model that are randomized. like tatoos, scars, sections of flesh missing and even the growths sticking out of dreg ragers and the like. reapers have a skull implant they can wear, ragers have a leather head harness thing and a couple different weapon options, mauler might have a skull attached to his helmet like a man-bun, crusher might have the hoses from his mask still attached and tox flamers can wear a mask. what you are asking for them is to break from the very well done visual fidelity of identifying exactly what you’re dealing with. which I guess if they’d like to deliver in a totally different map setting for an actually different visual experience maybe, but in general gameplay I think they achieve this well.
the problem for me is that for a lot of the scab units, it just affects the runes they might have on their armor. they should have a bit more helmet variety. and a couple units need another headgear option - the 2 bombers. one of the dreg bombers should have his mutated face exposed, and a scab bomber needs a headset to reflect how tactical his comms are.
6 Likes
yeah who’d have thought the forces of chaos would be so orderly
They do, we do. But we get to change out appearance to whatever cosmetics we want. Why can’t they? I doubt anyone would care if a Crusher had some red on their armor. Or Maulers had spikes all around their body. Or Gunners had a different MK machine gun or what have you. Plus some of them can have body changes, not just uniforms.
Correct. Silhouettes in particular are critical for quickly identifying things. This is the underlying mechanism behind the usefulness of camouflage - Disrupting the silhouette causes the observer to take longer to identify the thing, leaving more time for the thing to act.
Because they’re NPCs that exist purely as challenges for us to overcome. Consistent visual design is an important component of that in this sort of game.
3 Likes
Nice of them to fall in line.
I agree the enemies could use some more random distinctions between them, but they do already have some, and it’s just hard to notice. The trouble is that if two ragers were too distinct from each other, they would lose the important trait mentioned here before that they’re easy to read and tell apart from each other. It’s difficult to thread the line between making every heavy gunner look different from each other in order to be interesting and making sure the player can always instantly identify a heavy gunner at a glance at a distance.
Maybe they could try playing around with colors vs silhouettes. They did something like this in Vermintide with Stormvermin having varying shades of red armor, but all their silhouettes are still the same, so you can easily tell them apart from clanrats. But then again, nurgle cultists aren’t known for their creativity.
Looking at some concept art for various other nurgly things from various Warhammer sources, I think they could get some use out of brightly colored ornaments. Things like horns and buboes and trinkets, maybe even little fly wings or tentacles poking out of their skin. If they’re small but colorful, and arranged in a variety of locations on an elite, they could add distinction without blurring the silhouette and without overpowering the base color palette, so long as the ornaments aren’t the same colors that are used to identify anyone, like the scab bomber’s big glowy red bandoliers or the mauler’s little orange eye slit. Could potentially have the extra bits be the same color as the identifying colors already present, like putting more little glowy red things on a scab bomber would probably be fine.
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed 7 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.