I think all of the aesthetics are worse.
Gotta agree with that. I said "many of" just in case there was something I missed that's actually an aesthetic improvement. But through and through, these products show a lack of attention to detail, and a failure to understand all the elements beyond just gameplay that made Heroscape great.
The sad thing is, I have the same overall feeling about Renegadescape that I do about Disney Wars, Paramount+ Trek, Indiana Jones and the Insufferable Intended Replacement.... So often now, when somebody new gets control of something that has been a cherished classic, they can't seem to look past their own self-interest long enough to understand how they're actually ruining that thing. The exceptions, like Cobra Kai or Godzilla Minus One, are few and far between. Actual
craftsmanship is in short supply.
I guess this must work, to some degree, in the marketplace because the opposite customer perspective still persists. "Bad ______ is better than NO ______, my dudes!!!" I suspect that attitude is part of the reason why we keep being asked to pay more and more money for increasingly inferior stuff. The crap sandwiches will keep coming until we stop buying them and demand better with our wallets.
The irony is, it doesn't always have to cost a lot more money to get things right. It does however require putting the right people in place and actually listening to your customers. It should cost no more money to test-fit your tiles before going into production instead of after, or to ask the player community to help you,
for free, evaluate the consequences of your unit recosting scheme, or to write an actually good name for an alien space-bear instead of "Irene." As has already been said, these and a dozen other issues are all unforced errors.
Regardless of whatever excuses we come up with to soothe ourselves, we can't call any this "competent."
So we all fall back to "at least the gameplay looks good." Well, during the many years of no new product, this community has learned how to provide itself with new units without buying official product from anyone. That's not gonna be good for Renegade when a big chunk of the player base just proxies the new units because they don't need the new terrain and/or are fed up with the multiple kinds of poor quality, and when they end up having to do their own painting anyway because the "premium" paint jobs look cheap and sloppy. It's not hard to predict where this all leads.
And after everything this community has been through, that just plain
SUCKS.
