Article sur les héros de Defiance et les choix de design par Corvus Belli à J-7 de la GENCON
DEFIANCE ICONS. A look upon Defiance’s heroes design.
Have you found this article while searching for more information about Infinity Defiance? Then you’ve come to the right place.
Infinity Defiance is a dungeon crawler board game with high quality metal miniatures that are compatible with Infinity. A new cooperative game by Corvus Belli that will debut on Kickstarter in Fall 2019.
A group of heroes have been commissioned by the human nations to stop an imminent offensive by the Combined Army. Embarked on the Defiance, the heroes of the Human Sphere must fight against an alien invader in a suicide mission with the sole objective of saving humanity.
With this synopsis, and lots of excitement, the development team and the art team took on the challenge of designing the protagonists of this story.
At Corvus Belli, we’ve been designing characters from the very beginning - treating each miniature with love, as each one of them is a protagonist in this story. All of them, being soldiers, have to represent the values and game statistics of their respective factions, armies, and units. In the end, it makes this kind of work convoluted for the sake of a greater good - that the armies become the true protagonists of the story, as Infinity is a wargame.
Nevertheless, Defiance allowed us to switch the perspective and focus on each character as a unique protagonists and symbolize their respective nations whose endgame is to save humanity. The experience we’ve gained designing the motley crew of Aristeia!’s characters has been undoubtedly formidable, and has allowed us to tackle the design of these characters in record time.
Without further ado, I will present them to you:
Cadin “Firstrike” Donn. Representing Ariadna, we chose one of the alien species that makes them stand out from the rest of the nations. A Wulver - a feral lycanthrope armed with sharp blades. He’s a specialist whose bite is worse than his bark, and in this case it is not entirely a clever play on an old idiom. In Development, Jesús, Marcos and myself thought up a set of abilities that allowed him to take advantage of any melee weapon he can wield in his adventures, while also having enough mobility to get to every fight first. Carlos Torres and Fausto Gutiérrez gave him brutal muscles and fierce features that will haunt the dreams of young Shasvastii for decades.
Jazmín “Jazz” Caticovas. Representing the Nomads, she deals in the controversial infowar “business”. With this in mind, we decided that her body would be partially cybernetic and implanted with hardware - also a controversial issue in Human Sphere, where image is everything and only Nomad radicals would dare step out of the norm. Jazz forced the Development team to create a whole catalog of software to satisfy her needs, turning her into a really fun support character to play with. To round things off, Carlos and Raúl Tavares made sure the details weren’t just on her cyber arm and working on her facial expressions, gave her that blank stare of someone whose eyes see more than just one reality.
Uma Sørensen. The one representing PanOceania couldn’t have gone any other way. The most advanced nation in terms of weapons development had to be a long range weapons expert. Fans would have never forgiven us otherwise. That’s why we worked on giving her a set of abilities and armament that made her a true pain in the ass for her adversaries - either due to the overwhelming firepower of her arsenal of light weaponry, or her capacity to hide and use the element of surprise. Carlos and Raúl chose for a restrained pose, that typically seen in people who know they’re winning, but don’t want to fully spend their resources unless absolutely necessary.
Qiang Gão. One could say he’s the leader of this far-from-home family. Yu Jing’s representative dons a set of powerful heavy armor, a true banner of this great nation’s military technology. Therefore, we built the whole character up from the core ideas of strength, protection of his people, and leadership - but where they’re going, true protection comes also from heavy weaponry, and no one beats Qiang in that arena. Carlos and Javi Ureña achieved in coming up with an unwavering piece that is the epitome of the resistant and immovable, so make sure you place him on the right base - because once he’s there, you’ll never be able to separate them.
We haven’t mentioned why we assigned each one their own color, because as any fan of infinity knows, it’s evident that they match the main colors of the factions they represent. I’ve also left this for the end so I can do a bit of shameless product placement and remind you of that a cool new set of paints from Vallejo has just been released, with which you can paint your miniatures. For now, only the ones for PanOceania and Nomads are available - but rest assured that the rest will be available in short order.
I say farewell while thinking… Ariadna Green, Yu Jing Orange, PanOceania Blue, Nomad Red - doesn’t it remind some of you of the famous Spanish game of Parchís? Should we include a reward in the Kickstarter that comes with and extra board on which to play said game with the less geeky part of the family? Do not hesitate to send us your opinions on that.
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