Nothing too hard on criticism or desire for change. Just general observation rant.
A lot of heroes, especially older ones, have visual designs that fails to present them as characters. To tell their story and who they are through a visual medium.
They look less like characters of their own, and more like units that are ment to look good when there is a whole bunch of them.
And that is probably due to the fact how in DOTA 1, heroes were visually just army units with changed abilities and added lore. In Valve and Icefrog's attemp to keep those heroes' designs close to the original resulted in the same problems when it comes to visual story telling with the original designs. Those designs have the benefit of being iconic, because this is what the original player base grew up with, and nothing else.The monster heroes seems to suffer the most from this.
Venomancer, Weaved, Viper, Morphling and many other look less like characters and more like regular mops you can find in an RPG's mid level area. Their designs does nothing to do with their story, or who they are as characters.
DOTA has slightly improved on this with new heroes releases, but I think it has birthed another problem. Art style consistency. Marci, Primal Beast, and Snap Fire don't look like characters that belong in the same art style. They remind me of Smash Bross characters from different franchises, but that game has….well, characters from different franchises. Speaking of Marcy, her design also seems to suffer. She is just very bland and doesn't really have anything interesting visually going on. That is due to the fact that she is from a show in which more complex design will result in more work for the animators, and doesn't need her story as presented immediately as video game characters do, because we will know her throughout the run of the show. Put that in a video game? Yeah, it lacks.
I doubt this will get changed, because people have grown accustomed to those designs and have become iconic, but it will be nice if for future releases of characters we get more design consistency, and characters to be more interesting visually.
But the most likely scenario I see is for DOTA to sell designs that look like upgrades over all as Arcanas.
Some notes to leave because I know some of you guys will bring this up:
- No, just because I have something negative to say about the visuals doesn't mean I dislike the game.
Which leads me to
"If it isn't such a big problem, why bring it up?" something doesn't need to be gamebreaking in order to be talked about. Otherwise we will never talk about anything.
No, characters having good voice over and lore doesn't make up for weak design
"Man, what even is with you? Just play the game" This isn't about gameplay, ok? Like, the game has visuals, audio, lore, other stuff that people might wanna disgust. You can just skip this post you know.
"Would you prefer to be just waifu bait like league?" No, but that doesn't mean those are the only 2 options
"Morphling doesn't need change, for Morphling is perfect in everyway" Correct
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/yp1ao2/on_dota_2s_heroes_visual_design/
