New hospitales were sculpted makes sense to sculpt new magisters to go with them for the fireteam, would make more sense the next thing to release to be Santiago since they too link with Magisters than the other knights and work on the MO when their update window comes again.
And they do do that; it's just that (for various reasons) they mostly time those updates around major book or product releases instead of doing them a little bit at a time. My personal opinion is that HSN3 was of lower quality than the core N3 book; I think the sheer number of units and rules overwhelmed them and they lost focus a bit compared to the first round of edition updates. That being said, I don't think waiting another 6 months to release the book would have necessarily been better for the game. PanO isn't the only army that needs some love, and Sepulchers aren't the only units that have obvious issues. They know about them, but I don't think their rules and balance team has enough manpower for the size the game has grown to.
I just hope that when they'll approach MO again they'll do so with open minds and really put their heart in it.
you cant justify it as a matter of update windows when the update windows are pretty whimsical in of themselves. For example the Japanese have a larger percentage of their range updated than mo and now it is almost entirely update due to uprising. I understand the fluff justification, indeed i appreciate it. But things have been re-sculpted and updated without fluff justification before. I only speak for MO and pano in general because that's the horse I have in this race. But how can you justify uprising to the MRRF and shasvaasti players, who's entire ranges are old as sin. It also isnt addressed that the way its being justified ,is the opposite of how the starter not being re-sculpted was justified. @toadchild I get that, Im saying that in some cases it is problematic. Binding yourself to book release dates to profile updates often leaves errors uncorrected for years. Im not trying to tell em how run their company, im sure we all low CB here to varying degrees, it just feels lame when others get brand new exciting units and not only do we not get new units our old ones arent even reworked. (like bolt paramedic, and alright kamau rework in comparison to the kriza's gamechanger). Again I am not accusing CB of hating pano or anything, just that nobody loves pano the way they do their own factions. Which in turn means our releases dont get as much care. -side note i wish defersen came with a helmet option :(
Yeah, I'm definitely not saying that I think they do things ideally all the time. I'm just trying to understand and describe what I do see.
JSA "It is already here, it works as we want it, the concept art is mostly done, needs new sculpts, here done!" Shasvastii "it needs new art direction and overhaul of the same extend Morads got, it plays bad and needs a gameplay fix, the later is done so it needs a lot of work in the art direction department. will start working on them after gencon to avoid disruptions." MRFF "It does not play as we want and needs to be updated, can't start working on that till we nail the gameplay." As for MO I do not think they got an overhaul and work, they got patched up to be playable with N3 and that's about it their releases so far are models desperately needed because players use them.
What... the Japanese got worked on because it was already mostly worked on? That doesnt make any sense if instead of working on the concept art for the japanese they worked on the one for MRRF they'd alse be in the state of mostly done. Yeah designing an alien race is hard. I dont begrudge that statement but its beena hell of a lot of time , with plethora of brand new imaginative units for a lot of factions with , two of the most outdated factions in the game getting nothing. If anything those justifications are more insulting to the players, a we will get tp you when we feel like it after we are done working on armies we actually like.
Practical realities, you cannot leave everything behind because you have a writers/ artist block and things that are almost finished and need a bit of work to get updated are easier and faster to finish than things you do not know how they will evolve.
Again not a practical reality when we see the level of rework and design the Japanese got. Japanese only were in a situation were only a little work remained. Because they were being worked on this entire time. Which again repeats the issue, that means MRRF was not being worked on this entire time, when somebody like the JSA actually came out really strong out the gate in n3 and did get worked on.
You have to understand that designers and artists don't work like machines. Motivation has a lot more impact there. We players ofthen assume thing X could have been substituted for thing Y in the release cycle. It couldn't. I've personally experienced a designer nailing a year's worth of mechanical drafts on the first try, pretty much earning his pay in the matter of a month. But I've also seen the same designer dragging the the 3rd redraft of a single concept over the span of several months because he couldn't get something to work the way he wanted to. With mechanics it's not quite as important, you can always go with "borrowing assets" or partially reusing your own designs to get something functional. Infinity minis don't quite work that way. There is always a lot to do, so you can't have designers getting stuck on stuff they don't have inspiration/motivation to do. I'd assume they have some say in the matter what they want to work on next, which probably impacts release schedules by up to a year in correlation to rules and playtesting. For this year they planned NA2 as well as 5 new Sectorial Armies (including JSA) which has been confirmed by Bostria to be a massive strain on their ressources. When they started planning the year there needed to be 5 Sectorials far enough ahead in their development and design cycle to make that schedule work. An educated guess would now be to assume they simply went with what was up to their quality standard and available instead of carefully elaborating the perfect order for a release plan. Following that logic the current plan is the only one that would have been possible with the same level of output (except for minor changes like swapping A,B,C,D,E with the next in line, but not B with D). Those things are pretty likely to occur, but don't take my word for it.
Trust me i understand , i work closely with a game company. But i seriously understand the frustration of mrrf , kazak and shaasvasti players. Specially since they got hit with a blizzard soon (tm) and 6 years down the line nothing to show for it.
Speaking on work that was done on JSA, do you mean uprising or more of it earlier in N3 era? Not sure since I wasn't around. I just wanted to say (or rather repeat) that JSA seems to keep its main design philosophy and most of the recent work was on sculpting side of things. On the other hand, it seems that devs want MRRF and Shas to become something very different than what they are right now. It's not a surprise if they decided to choose their priorities based on whether they even knew what they wanted from certain armies, picking those that didn't have to be redesigned from the ground.
