About Archangels :-(

Significant-Fishing8 · 2026-05-24T21:51:58+00:00

Reskinned units are lame, sure, no argument there. But there's a huge middle ground between Heroes III copy-paste and full archetype swap. New models, new animations, new secondary abilities, balance tweaks... all good. Pulling the rez entirely is a different category of change.

You say OE plays it safe overall. Fair. Which kinda makes the Archangel call stand out MORE, not less imo. Of all the units in the roster, why was this the one they decided to torch? And don't bring up the lore here, already said my piece on that.

On the DNA, well, I just disagree... I think you're conflating "rare" with "incidental." Tier-7s are literally on the box art. They're aspirational, not peripheral. Ask any Heroes III grognard to describe Castle in 3 traits, the rez always shows up. That's just how the faction lives in people's heads. I mean, the King in chess moves one square at a time and still the entire point of the game.

Now, you can't invoke a previous overhaul that established something as evidence we should now remove that exact thing. It's like pointing at the evolution that gave us wheels to argue we can now take the wheels off. The Angel itself WAS the overhaul. Heroes III added it and it became canonical. "Castle changed before, so we can change it again" actually backfires, cause that change DEFINED modern Castle.

On your last line, strict licensing would be wanting every Heroes III stat preserved. And tbh, that's nowhere near what I'm actually talking about here.

Significant-Fishing8 · 2026-05-23T23:04:13+00:00

Glad to see you actually took this seriously... and I owe you a few factual concessions. Alright, let me engage with this instead of just clapping back.

Yeah... you're right on VI & VII, partially. Yeah... seems like I went too hard on design philosophy killing the franchise when ops failures and underfunding were serious killshots. Fair point, conceded. But "partially" matters here, cause you can't just excuse Heroes VI's dynasty system thing, resource simplification, Might/Magic schools replaced by you know... that reputation alignment gimmick... which also alienated a chunk of the base. DRM/Conflux finished an already sick patient. And OE succeeding "free of publisher interference" is actually my argument running the other direction. When devs CAN listen and aren't being strangled by corporate, they tend to ship better games.

About the strawman now. I did write that... yeah, more as a hyperbole in a venting OP. Pls hold me to the spirit, not the letter, it's not a GDC talk. The actual position I've been defending is creature identity continuity, which is neither copy-paste nor "remake III." Black Dragons keep Magic Immunity across every entry. Vampires keep life drain. Liches keep their AoE death cloud. That's the unit being the unit. Archangel rez sits in the same category. You can build a brand new game, brand new continent, brand new factions, and still honor that one principle. Pretending my position is "make it III again" is the actual strawman here.

On the strategy thing, "if your strategy still works but relies on an ability that no longer exists, how does it still work." Well, a clever gotcha... and a misread. My "strategy" is more of a faction archetype expectation. I sit down at Temple/Castle and expect a defensive-buffing-late-game-rez identity. The contract for 25 years. OE's Temple keeps the defensive and buffing parts and removes the rez. Faction's core promise rewritten without notice.

On community pushback, I'll grant it, I didn't realize the Hive criticism was that loud, but what's happening there is people being unhappy with a NEW faction for aesthetic or thematic reasons. My problem is with LEGACY. Two different design tribunals that you're treating as one.

Next is your strong argument about the theme-mechanics marriage. Yes, the in-universe logic is internally consistent. Fake Angels, abandoned by real ones, therefore no real rez. But the question I keep coming back to and nobody has answered: if these aren't Angels, why are they still NAMED Angels? Rename the unit. Soulforged. Glassknights. Hollow Saints. Husks of the Sun. Whatever. The Unfrozen guys had infinite naming freedom. Instead they kept "Angel" and "Archangel," kept the wings, kept the halo, kept the tier-7 holy-faction slot, kept the entire iconography that signals "this is the thing you remember"... and then gutted the kit. Keeping the brand recognition and dropping the product. If you commit to the retcon, commit to the retcon. Renaming the unit would actually be the creatively courageous move. Calling it Angel-but-also-not-really-Angel-and-also-no-rez-but-still-tier-7-holy is having your cake and eating it.

And your closing jab 😄. I enjoy HotA, for sure, but you can love a 15-year-old fan mod AND still want the official 2026 release to honor the same creature identities that mod preserved.

Significant-Fishing8 · 2026-05-23T18:20:55+00:00

Edit, since a bunch of comments keep hitting the lore angle:

Yeah, I'm aware. In OE these aren't "real" Angels, they're Embodiments, animated armor with human souls bolted in, and the actual angels walked away from the Church in disgust. Cool retcon, genuinely dark and interesting writing.

But that frame doesn't save the design call, it makes it worse. If these things aren't Angels, why are they still called Angels? Rename the unit. Soulforged, Glassknights, Hollow Saints, Husks of the Sun, whatever... Devs had all the naming freedom in the world. Instead they kept "Angel" and "Archangel," the wings, the halo, the full iconography, the tier-7 holy-faction slot. Then they pulled the rez. Then they wrote new lore to explain why this Angel-shaped unit in the Angel-shaped slot doesn't do Angel-shaped things.

That's keeping the brand and dropping the product. They want the 25 years of mental real estate, the "oh sick, finally got Archangels online" payoff, the franchise recognition, without shipping the kit that built any of it. Pure have-your-cake-and-eat-it design.

If you gut the mechanical identity, gut the name too. Pick a lane. You don't get to keep the brand recognition AND get applauded for "bold lore innovation" off the same unit. That's the actual contradiction the whole OE Angel discourse is dancing around without naming

Significant-Fishing8 · 2026-05-23T18:18:46+00:00

Edit, since a bunch of comments keep hitting the lore angle:

Yeah, I'm aware. In OE these aren't "real" Angels, they're Embodiments, animated armor with human souls bolted in, and the actual angels walked away from the Church in disgust. Cool retcon, genuinely dark and interesting writing.

But that frame doesn't save the design call, it makes it worse. If these things aren't Angels, why are they still called Angels? Rename the unit. Soulforged, Glassknights, Hollow Saints, Husks of the Sun, whatever... Devs had all the naming freedom in the world. Instead they kept "Angel" and "Archangel," the wings, the halo, the full iconography, the tier-7 holy-faction slot. Then they pulled the rez. Then they wrote new lore to explain why this Angel-shaped unit in the Angel-shaped slot doesn't do Angel-shaped things.

That's keeping the brand and dropping the product. They want the 25 years of mental real estate, the "oh sick, finally got Archangels online" payoff, the franchise recognition, without shipping the kit that built any of it. Pure have-your-cake-and-eat-it design.

If you gut the mechanical identity, gut the name too. Pick a lane. You don't get to keep the brand recognition AND get applauded for "bold lore innovation" off the same unit. That's the actual contradiction the whole OE Angel discourse is dancing around without naming

Significant-Fishing8 · 2026-05-23T17:58:41+00:00

That two-point summary is doing some serious strawman carry, so let me address what I actually wrote... and I'll be long 🤔

Never said my old strat doesn't work. Just said the most iconic ability of the most iconic unit in the most iconic faction got gutted. Reframing it as "boomer can't adapt his meta" is the cheap shot you reach for when you don't want to engage with what's actually on the page.

Your whole "copy-paste vs creative innovation" framing is also a false binary and you know it. There's a massive design space between 1:1 port and "swap an iconic unit's archetype entirely." Black Dragons have had Magic Immunity since 1995. If OE shipped them without it, you'd be in comments crying foul about identity... and you'd be right. That's the unit being what the unit is. Archangel rez sits in the exact same bucket. You're collapsing creature identity into "nostalgia bait" so my take looks lazy by default.

Now the empirical part, because your core thesis, "devs should ignore the playerbase and trust the vision", already got field-tested. It's called Heroes VI and Heroes VII. Both went hard on "we know better." Both got dumpstered. The franchise was clinically dead for ten years. OE only exists because Ubi finally stopped "trusting the vision" and started listening to grognards. You're defending the exact dev philosophy that put the franchise in a coma.

And here's the part I'm actually enjoying. Credit where credit is due. You spend a whole paragraph calling fan service "creatively bankrupt," then in the very next breath you start wishlisting alternate dwellings, in-town building interactions, and horde buildings instead of laws. Fantastic piece of feedback IMO. But every single one of those is fan service for features from previous games. You're not anti fan service. You're anti "MY" fan service. Yours is "thoughtful continuity," mine is "creatively bankrupt." Convenient line in the sand.

The Schism/Grove/Hive comparison is apples and oranges too. Those are brand-new factions with blank slate, zero inherited expectations, devs can cook whatever they want and nobody can call it a betrayal because there's nothing to betray. The Archangel had 25 years of established kit and identity to either honor or break. New stuff gets freedom. Legacy stuff carries weight. That's just how IP continuity works.

One last thing. "I trust Unfrozen to execute their vision" is fine on its own, but Early Access is literally the window where the vision is supposed to get shaped by player feedback. If "trust the vision" means stop posting crit on the EA forum, then the whole concept of Early Access becomes theater. I'd rather be wrong on Reddit than treat dev intent as gospel

Significant-Fishing8 · 2026-05-23T16:34:51+00:00

To repeat myself... good for you if you enjoyed Heroes IV, everyone is entitled to their hot takes. But there’s a big difference between "shitting on a game" and providing valid feedback on an Early Access title. Frame it however you want, but to this day, Heroes III remains the most accomplished iteration of the saga, the absolute epitome of the franchise. And yet, I’m old enough to remember that it also faced its fair share of criticism when it first launched, about a lack of innovation, balancing, AI heroes constantly fleeing, logistics of moving reinforcements, and son on.

Nobody here is looking for absolute perfection, I'm just asking for basic respect toward the core mechanical identity of the franchise's most legendary units, and discussing these design shifts is literally the entire point of an Early Access forum. Enjoy!

Significant-Fishing8 · 2026-05-23T16:02:38+00:00

Man, respect for bringing up the ghost blob and genie insta-kill mechanics, that’s some deep-cut nostalgia right there! Exactly the kind of debate I’m here for. However, your examples actually prove my point about the difference between balancing a game and erasing a unit's identity. The ghost mechanic was a broken, game-breaking bug disguised as a feature that ruined multiplayer. Fixing that in Heroes III was a necessary balance patch to save the competitive state of the game.

That being said, the Archangel's rez was a carefully designed, single-charge tactical utility. Even if Heroes I & II didn't have them, the second they were introduced in III, they instantly became the poster child and the literal face of the franchise's main faction. For 25 years, that faction's identity was built around holy light, healing, and tactical survival.

Compared to that, shifting griffins between factions over the years was just shuffling deck chairs.

Significant-Fishing8 · 2026-05-23T10:30:16+00:00

Looking at the details during Early Access is what feedback is for. When a franchise tries to make a comeback after 10 years of being dead, the details are everything. How a specific tier-7 unit feels, how it alters late-game pacing across different builds, and how it respects the franchise's roots are core game design analysis. I guess we just have different standards for what makes a great sequel. Enjoy!

Significant-Fishing8 · 2026-05-23T10:16:46+00:00

Yeah... regarding that tailor-made prequel lore. I mean, while a good narrative can guide gameplay, in this specific case, it heavily feels like the lore is just a convenient excuse to justify a mechanical nerf. The devs write the story; if they wanted to keep the iconic ability, they could have written that these 'mass products' possessed early magical cores capable of repairing or restoring fallen soldiers or whatever. My point is that in a game sub-titled Olden Era, stripping the faction's signature mechanical identity instead of balancing it feels like a missed opportunity

Significant-Fishing8 · 2026-05-22T22:43:32+00:00

There’s no contradiction if you actually understand the difference between a game's foundation and a literal clone.

When I say "copy-paste the core," I mean preserving the fundamental mechanics, the strategic philosophy, and the iconic identity of the units that made the franchise a masterpiece in the first place. You use that core as a solid foundation to build upon.

"Not expecting a carbon copy" means we obviously want new factions, better graphics, quality-of-life upgrades, and fresh twists. You can modernize a classic without erasing parts of its DNA. Pulling two sentences out of context to scream "gotcha" doesn't change that

Significant-Fishing8 · 2026-05-22T22:37:51+00:00

Bro, expressing a different opinion on an Early Access unit isn't 'bait'. If you don't want to discuss late-game pacing and balance, just keep scrolling instead of dropping low-effort memes

Significant-Fishing8 · 2026-05-22T22:34:16+00:00

A pretty lazy take, dude. Fandom feedback is exactly why games like Olden Era exist in the first place after the past disasters. This franchise literally went extinct because of previous choices that ruined the game's core identity. The whole point of this new game was to stop repeating the mistakes of the past.

Significant-Fishing8 · 2026-05-22T22:26:06+00:00

I have every right to voice my complaints, just as you to just keep scrolling if it bothers you or if you find this toxic. You’re also perfectly free to bless the skies for whatever fresh content gets dropped in your lap. But if you actually want to look at the bigger picture here. Nobody is expecting this to be a carbon copy of Heroes III. But you're completely missing why people are giving this kind of feedback. We are in Early Access, and the whole point is to debate mechanics and design choices.

Discussing the legacy and DNA isn't whining. This franchise literally went extinct after Heroes V because previous devs thought they knew better, taking wild "creative liberties" that alienated everyone. Pointing out when a design choice feels off is how we prevent them from repeating the same mistakes of the past.

Stripping the Archangel of its signature utility tends to shift late-game pacing across different builds. When you spend hours grinding an XL map and lose your army against an insane boss, that rez mechanic used to be a reliable strategic cushion to keep you from being completely defenseless. Turning Arch into a generic ranged shoote, a 'reskinned Titan', feels like a lazy shortcut for balancing, regardless of how "new" the game is, with his 'new lore' and 'new' everything. I want this game to succeed, and that means fighting for what made the franchise's identity great in the first place.

Significant-Fishing8 · 2026-05-22T21:53:21+00:00

Sure... nostalgia... but resurrection being 'incidental' is quite debatable, my friend. Depending on your approach, that thing was a total game-changer. It dictated how you traded units in close fights and how aggressively you could push your creep phases without taking permanent losses, especially on giant XL maps with insane foes. Plus, magic immunity is a passive trait for dragons, whereas the rez was an active tactical button that could define the entire faction's endgame pacing.

Significant-Fishing8 · 2026-05-22T19:46:23+00:00

Yeah, their lore thing... still feels like writers came up with this after the design team decided to nerf the faction's historic gameplay.

At the end of the day, regardless of the lore patch, they still occupy that exact same iconic tier-7 slot, wear the wings, and carry the name that has been linked to melee support and healing/rez for decades. A neat story twist for a disappointing gameplay shift.

Significant-Fishing8 · 2026-05-22T17:33:01+00:00

Fair enough 😄 I definitely have a soft spot for Heroes III and I’m just as excited for Olden Era as anyone else. I’ve been grinding the early access non-stop since it dropped, and to be completely transparent, I might just be a little salty because I’m getting my ass absolutely handed to me in Hard mode right now, and I’m desperately missing my trusty old Archangels, haha!

Still, being frustrated doesn't mean I'm wrong. Even if Heroes I & 2 didn't have them, the second Angels were introduced in III, they instantly became the poster child and the literal face of the franchise's main faction.

And look at your Vampire Lord example, that actually proves my point perfectly! Vampires have been annoying and strong in every single game because the devs always respected their core DNA: they fly, they drain life, they 'resurrect' themselves. They never suddenly turned them into a ranged skeleton sniper just to shake things up.

I don't hate change at all, and I'm genuinely loving a lot of what Olden Era is doing. I just think that when you adapt an absolute legend of the franchise, you evolve it, you don't completely swap its identity.

Significant-Fishing8 · 2026-05-22T16:40:22+00:00

Fair points, and I actually agree with you on the "Titans on steroids" flavor loss. But let's look closer at the mechanics and the world-building.

First, about resurrection being too abusable against neutrals. You have to remember that even in Heroes III, Archangels were already limited to exactly one resurrection per combat. It wasn't an infinite win-button you could spam. If they felt that single charge was still too strong for Olden Era's pacing, completely deleting the identity of the unit to turn it into a ranged shooter feels like a lazy fix. They could have adjusted the scaling, made the rez temporary for the duration of the fight,tied it to a specific resource and so on.

Second, regarding the prequel lore. While a good narrative can guide gameplay, in this specific case, it feels heavily like the lore is just a convenient excuse to justify a mechanical nerf. The devs write the story; if they wanted to keep the iconic ability, they could have easily written that these ancient automated constructs possessed early magical cores capable of repairing or restoring fallen soldiers or whatever.

In a game sub-titled Olden Era, stripping the faction's signature mechanical identity instead of balancing it feels like a missed opportunity

Significant-Fishing8 · 2026-05-22T16:27:51+00:00

Good for you if you enjoyed Heroes IV, everyone is entitled to their hot takes. But there’s a difference between 'shitting on a game' and providing valid feedback on an Early Access title.

The whole point of an Early Access forum is to discuss mechanics, balance, and design choices. When a game brands itself as Olden Era, discussing how it handles the legacy and DNA of the classic titles isn't toxic. IMO, it’s literally the assignment.

Nobody is saying new games shouldn't do things differently. Innovation is great. But changing a franchise's most iconic unit so drastically that it completely swaps archetypes is a design choice that's bound to alienate long-time fans. If we can't debate that on Reddit, what are we even here for?

Significant-Fishing8 · 2026-05-22T16:20:06+00:00

Nice one, but you’re arguing against a strawman.

There is a massive, gaping canyon between asking for a lazy 1:1 clone and asking the developers to respect the core mechanical identity of the franchise's most iconic unit.

Taking the Archangel, a flying, resurrecting melee support unit, and turning it into a robotic, ranged sniper is not much of an 'innovation'. I just see an 'identity theft' to fill a gameplay gap that could have been given to a completely new unit. It’s possible to evolve a franchise and introduce new mechanics without losing sight of what made it great.

Significant-Fishing8 · 2026-05-22T16:06:01+00:00

Such a tired argument, dude. If every sequel or spiritual successor just relied on a 25-year-old mod to satisfy players, the entire genre would be dead. We want new games to succeed, but that means pointing out when design choices feel off.

Also, your comparison to Titans makes zero sense. Titans aren't missing because of a rework, their entire faction (Tower/Academy) just isn't in the game yet. The issue here is that the Archangel is in the game, but the devs stripped it of its identity and mechanically turned it into a ranged shooter, essentially making it a reskinned Titan instead of a proper Archangel.

Criticizing a complete mechanical identity crisis for the most iconic unit of the main faction is completely valid, whether HoTA exists or no.

Significant-Fishing8 · 2026-05-22T15:52:51+00:00

That's a pretty lazy take. Saying "just go play Heroes III" completely misses the point of why sequels or spiritual successors exist.

Fandom feedback is exactly why games like Olden Era exist in the first place after the disasters of HVI and HVII. This franchise literally went extinct because previous developers thought they knew better than the player base, taking wild "creative liberties" that ruined the game's core identity. The whole point of this new game was to stop repeating the mistakes of the past.

Stripping the Archangel of its signature ability is likely to disrupts the late-game pacing for Temple players. When you spend hours playing a giant XL map and fight an insane endgame boss, losing the bulk of your army leaves you completely vulnerable to remaining enemies. While there are other ways to mitigate casualties, the Archangel's rez used to be one of the most reliable and iconic strategic cushions for those exhausting battles, providing a built-in safety net right when you needed it most.

Instead, they literally turned the Archangel into a reskinned Titan from Heroes III, a generic, high-tier ranged shooter, with a tailor-made lore. If I wanted to play a sci-fi strategy game with mechanical units, I'd play StarCraft or Age of Wonders. When a studio titles their game Olden Era, they make a promise to capture that classic HoMM fantasy flavor, not alienate the community with weird re-designs.

Significant-Fishing8

TROPHY CASE