The god portraits could be better, I agree. Appart from weird anatomy (Zeus having two sets of ribs on top of one another, Prometheus having four fingers, etc) they are mostly mythologically accurate, as far as I can tell. Tho the godesses, for the most part, seem to be rather average looking. In mythology, they were mentioned as superhumanly beautiful. Tho that is a minor complaint.
Sobek replacing Hathor is a positive change, as far as I’m concerned. No idea what’s gonna happen with him in the legacy portrait pack. Will he just get the Hathor portrait, with his name and codex entry remaining unchanged?
The Gaia change to this fem-groot looking design got criticized a lot, and before the beta, I did defend it, assuming it was part of a greater rework of Atlantean gods, making them look more monstrous, matching Kronos, and giving them a distinct look that sets them appart from the Greek gods, despite being directly connected.
The fact that Gaia is the only one that was meaningfully changed makes me feel like that wasn’t the intention behind the redesign, and I honestly don’t like the implication that it may be politically motivated.
Graphical bugs like textures not loading, and audio bugs like lines of dialogue being cut off during campaign cutscenes are a thing too. I do have mixed feelings about the voice acting. On one hand, it seems like the chraracters are now intended to talk with a greek accent, which I can get behind. (but in the case of Arkantos, I’d prefer a different kind of accent, for reasons I’ll get to shortly) On the other hand, the line delivery seemed like the actors were simply reading their text off a script, and not really acting.
The campaign being exactly the same as in the original, I can get the appeal of. But given that the Atlanteans exist, it makes it confusing as to why there are no Atlanteans in Atlantis.
Of course, the reason behind it is that the Atlanteans in the original were added later in an expansion, and when the campaign of the main game was made, they didn’t know about an Atlantean faction yet, and when they did make the Atlantean faction, they had to make them distinct from other existing factions to sell copies.
This created a plot hole we were willing to excuse and overlook, even rationalize, 20 years ago, because we understood the situation that was going on outside the game.
That same situation, however, doesn’t apply here. Here, the devs need to redo the story knowing the Atlanteans will be there from the start. The only real reason they have is to not have Arkantos speak Atlantean instead of Greek, and to not have Atlantean Buildings and military units in Atlantis, is nostalgia for the original games, where all of that was simply Greek stuff.
This comes at the cost of lore consistency. Atlanteans are their own, distinct faction available for skirmish and multiplayer from the very beginning, but don’t exist in the main campaign, aren’t even hinted at. And new players, who didn’t play the original, will not find out why until they finish the Arkantos storyline, which in itself is 32 missions.
This is something that may be very confusing, which is why I suggest a (campaign only) hybrid faction that blends together Greek elements (specifically Poseidon as a major god, an well as Gameplay elements) with Atlantean elements (specifically architecture style, clothes and armor human units wear, and the language they speak)
This could be a simple reskin of Poseidon assets, or it could be a more complex hybrid of both cultures.
This would include Arkantos speaking more Atlantean than Greek.
The idea behind it is that the first two missions, maybe three, we would play as the hybrid faction, training arcuses rather than toxotes, and utilizing fire syphons rather than petropoli.
For the siege of Troy, we shift to greek, then Egyptian, etc. In the dream mission, the enemy where we need to destroy the wonder is also the Hybrid faction.
Then in the end, we play as Greeks again, but Atlantis is either the hybrid faction again, or proper Atlanteans. (Gargarensis can stay Greek. I’m mostly referring to the civillians, in the last sentence.)
That would be my suggestion.
I like the fact that the new Ulfsark/Berserk is consistent with which gatherer is turned into one now. So they don’t make a ### ###### anymore. A dwarf sized version would also be nice. I wouldn’t mind if it could only be made by turning dwarves into Berserks, and Berserks trained at the TC or Longhouse would still be either male or female. Dwarves seemed slightly too tall, but maybe that’s just me. Ragnarök heroes had a dwarf version in the original. Can we get that back too? (And have the hero the villagers turn into match the type of villager they were. I didn’t try the Ragnarök power in the beta, so I don’t know if it does translate, but I hope it does. In the original, what type of gatherer it was didn’t influence what kind of Ragnarök hero it turned into. It was simply random.)
For the Golden Gift campaign in the Extended Edition, the dwarf sized Ragnarök heroes were used as starting units. So if you want to redo that campaign, you’ll need them anyway.
So far, I approve of the changes to the Egyptians. Only complaint I have is that the red particle effect for Set monument effects looks weird.
) , Chimera, Nemean Lion, Minotaurus, Centaur and so on. then it will be not only great but amazing and totally wortht the price. - at least in my opinion!