One disappointing aspect of TOTE is they make your campaign hero "good" no matter what race he represents.

Orcs are savage pillaging bullies and, if not evil, should never be portrayed as a good, noble, or even sympathtic race. The whole TOTE storyline of orcs as repressed and seeking only a fair shake in life struck me as merely invented to get the player to feel he is on the "right side" while cycling through levels of blood rage. And when they start shouting "for the children" as a rallying cry in the cutscenes I wanted to throw up. No self-respecting orc behaves that way.

And a good necro? No way. Alliances of convenience, sure, but not actually serving a good cause. So far as I can tell after TOTE, necros are just Ashans bestest recylcers.

I guess the devs think people have some problem playing a campaign map or two as an evil character, but you do it repeatedly in the HOMM3 expansions (Sandro, Xeron) and it's just fun. I prefer to play good races and want them to win in the end, but I also enjoyed the occasional map in which I played the other side. The campaigns would have rung more true if the typically bad (or, in the case of the orcs, savage, greedy and selfish) races did not serve some noble purpose.

I know I am overselling this a bit, but you get the point.

At least the demons are still purely evil (except when infiltrated by dark elves).

They say evil is just a point of view. For example elves look evil to me: all that tree hugging while things with feelings and self consciousness are suffering…

Well, that's usually how the story goes - you have one very evil faction, which puts the world to its knees just to show how evil actually is and then is beaten by the valour and the selflessness of the dedicated good guys, who are few, but exceptionally brave.
In the meantime, just to show how REALLY evil the evil ones are, some more or less neutral or slightly evil factions find their inner goodness, planted there by the wise nature or the just god(s) and waiting to be awakened by some apocalyptical event. Of course the evil ones can't do this, becouse they're truly evil and what's more important - they have to be beaten in the end (and who you're gonna beat if there are no evil guys around, eh?).
Thus every truly evil leader has to start his campaign, bearing in mind that he'll ultimately fail (there are no evidences of the opposite at least). Even if there's only one good guy left in the entire world, the evil commander of gazillions brutes knows that his doom is at hand. The moral of the story is that if you're REALLY evil, you should stay in your terrible infernal kingdom, play Dungeon Keeper 2 and leave the world to the good guys, who'll inevitably start to kill each other if there are no evils around to battle and when they're done - voila, the world is all yours!

Depends on what you mean by "evil". I don't consider Dungeon to be evil. Very Nietzschean/Randian, yes, but not evil; I don't equate selflesness with good, being a Randian (after all, altruism hardly precludes being utterly evil.) Likewise, Haven seems to be rather sinister with its puritanic attitude, the type of faction that demands altruistic behaviour from its members and purges the "heretics". A bunch of nutcases. In a way I agree with FB on the Sylvan too, they seem like psychos. Inferno is the only genuinely evil faction though, with Necropolis being amoral.

BTW, evil does often win - post-apocalyptic worlds are usually one example of this. I agree with the OP in that HoMM genuinely lacked much of an evil side to it, which is a bit of a disappointment.

I know there are shades of gray (except inferno), and none of the "good" races are a bunch of angels (7th tier excepted), but I did not recognize the orcs or necros in TOTE. The other races behaved according to type.

Yeah, at least Markal was somewhat villainous. Arantir was boring.

Orcs good ? They burn farms and cities ! What the hell is good with that ? Sure they might do some good.. but that is just from their point of view that the demons must be killed.. but you don't exactly see them being nice to the peasants do you ?
And Arantir ? He ain't good.. just the circumstances that force him to be, especially when demons are as large a threat as they are at the moment i would imagine.

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Originally posted by Imperial_Dane:
Orcs good ? They burn farms and cities ! What the hell is good with that ? Sure they might do some good.. but that is just from their point of view that the demons must be killed.. but you don't exactly see them being nice to the peasants do you ?
And Arantir ? He ain't good.. just the circumstances that force him to be, especially when demons are as large a threat as they are at the moment i would imagine.

Orcs: Well, everybody conquers and kills in the process. I'm talking about motivations, and the devs went out of their way to make the orcs noble and righteous as opposed to just greedy and savage. I've seen plenty of cutscenes of peasants toiling in the fields in HOMM games, but never using orcs or anybody else as slaves (fields plowed by centaurs, right). TOTE did not just introduce a new race, but changed the conceit of the existing world. The whole orc story became one of 1980s Latin American liberation theology rather than the historic Mongolian hordes they obviously represent.

Necros: While Arantir doesn't adopt the orc "for the children" rallying cry, he does come off as a lot less self-interested than, say, Markal or any other necro. I like my undead heroes like Sandro, just looking for the best way to scare up the most fresh bodies. Yes, Arantir is motivated by the common threat of demons, but he does not appear self-interested in any of his cutscenes or goals. I have never heard of necromancy portrayed as recycling outside of TOTE.

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Originally posted by Moragauth:

BTW, evil does often win - post-apocalyptic worlds are usually one example of this.

Hm, the only significant post-apocalyptical game world I think of right now is Fallout and in both the first and the second part the ultimate goal is to defeat the evil guys - The Master and The Enclave respectively. But that's not the point. In the fantasy games the evil is bound to lose - save maybe in the Disciples world - no matter how much suffering it causes and how many casualties it inflicts, in the end it's ultimately destroyed or banished. There's nothing wrong with that if it happens from time to time, but when it's virtually everywhere, it mightily sucks.
I generally agree that the case with the Orcs and the undead is too weird. The Orcs are bloody half-demons for Kha-Beleth's sake! And their "human" part is supposed to be neutral in the conceptual context of the humans in Ashan, not good. With simple mathematics, the orcs should be "less evil" than the demons, but certainly well under the "true neutral" zone of the scale - something like "mediocre evil" in other words. The undead on the other hand are bloody slaves - and since their masters aren't using them for farming or fishing, what's their purpose? War! Now I know that the "humane war" has its supporters, but I don't think this is the case with all these curses, flesh-destroying spells and such goodies.

@Greg: Sure, but the orcs kinda went beyond what is normal and burned down farms and cities. The only other ones to do that were the fanatical, demon lead griffon soldiers. And sure they were oppressed and all that, but perhaps not just to show them off as good guys, more as a bunch of oppressed *******s, i mean they've got slave traders in the cities, and they have no problems with sacrificing creatures, sure they aren't demonic evil, but they aren't good either. They're sort of savage neutral.

And i still don't recall the necropolis guys doing good things..

quote:

Originally posted by Imperial_Dane:
@Greg: Sure, but the orcs kinda went beyond what is normal and burned down farms and cities. The only other ones to do that were the fanatical, demon lead griffon soldiers. And sure they were oppressed and all that, but perhaps not just to show them off as good guys, more as a bunch of oppressed *******s, i mean they've got slave traders in the cities, and they have no problems with sacrificing creatures, sure they aren't demonic evil, but they aren't good either. They're sort of savage neutral.

And i still don't recall the necropolis guys doing good things..

Okay hopefully this is the last I'll post on this, because it's getting belabored. Dane, you are right that the orc race has slave markets and can get $ by burning down peasant huts and cities. That's my point, they are freaking orcs built for pillaging and wonton destruction, but the CUTSCENES and campaign setup makes them the poor oppressed noble fellows just trying to get a fair shake, and rightfully freeing the slaves and taking back what is theirs. You know what race would fit better into that storyline? Any race, enslaved by . . . orcs!

(Okay, maybe not demons and undead, but you get the point.)

On necro goodness, I can't go back and quote all of Arantir's dreary sermonizing about restoring Asha's balance, blah blah, during his missions, but I just remember him time after time sounding like some plucky young knight out to save the Griffin Empire. It's more of a tonal thing.

Well I guess Arantir was simply serving Asha, much like Ylaya was serving her higher powers. Neither seemed to be typical representatives of their faction.

Xenofex, I was just giving a potential illustration of a place where evil prevailed. Disciples is one such example. Fantasy certainly does not preclude it, although most fantasy worlds usually involve evil being vanquished, usually by dullards. I suppose most gamers like happy endings though. I for one would like to play a genuinely evil character, or at least one whose concept of goodness does not involve running around like a headless chicken, sacrificing oneself for whatever stupid cause comes up (probably why I liked the campaigns/scenarios with Agbeth, Markal and Eruina most.)

I think, for the Orcs you ignore the story of how they came into being: an experiment of the Wizards in a time of deepest despair created from Humans and Demons with the sole purpose to fight the Demons.
This would have worked if they had been Golems, but they ain't.
It is pretty clear that they would have been treated rather poorly AFTER they had fulfilled their purpose and beaten the demons, especially by the bigoted humans, but by their creators as well.

Now, don't forget further, that this has happened in the PAST. At some time the Orcs were fed-up with being treated like slaves and monsters and build the dream to find their own place to live in freedom, something very understandable. And they made it.

Now, in the present, they live in the Steppes, away from the other races. They simple live their life, probably plundering here a little and pillaging there a little (but I don't think we haven't seen the fullness of Ashan yet).

In any case, since they were BRED to fight the Demons, fighting the Demons seems to be the only cause that can bring them back to fight for something else as themselves, since it is in their genes, so-to-speak.

I don't think, that this is "wrong" in any way. The Orcs will do what they were bred to do - but luckily enough not only will they fight the demons, they have opportunity enough to pillage and burn in the course of it.

For me the Orcs are neither good nor evil, they just are what they were made to be and live with it. I have seen a lot of worse explanations and backgrounds than that.

Agree with JJ. And where from came that concept of Orcs being evil. Yes, they are savage brutes; êtres that incorporate the abstract of what we call Might and Force, yet it doesn't imply to evilness.

Even in WC III, Orcs ain't just plain wretched beasts, though, they initially were thought to be much like Orcs in HV. Even in the series of Orcs and/vs Humans (WC I;II) - there wasn't such disparity in black&white. Naturally we support human beings - and if I were an Orc?

As someone put it right - it's only a perspective of view.

The orcs are distinguishably "evil" in at least half of the fantasy games. Right now I can point Age of Wonders and Spell Force, but there are certainly others.
The HoMM V Orcs are weird case, becouse they have no problems when it comes to capturing and trading slaves, razing this and that, living for the "Blood Rage" killing frenzy, but at the same time being the serial pretenders for the "save the world from the bad evil monstaz" job. They hate the Demons - good, let them fight the Sovereign's armies just becouse of this - but it appears that they actually care for more than their arch-enemy's destruction. That's kinda strange behaviour for beings, which are actually half-demons themselves.
In the end we have, once again, one simply evil faction and the whole world united against it. Stay tuned for the next episode of "Hell opens its gates - we must ally and close them before it's too late!", blah-blah...

Not so. Let's recapitulate:
We have one evil that's more or less endaring all other factions: the demons want to destroy all life or something.
In the course of the story we have more, though:
Markal (on a personal revenge mission)
The inner Haven struggle: Biara's fanatics are DECIDEDLY evil, and they are humans.
The inner Dwarven struggle: we have an evil Dwarven character as well (Rolf)-
The inner Dungeon struggle (there is a faction with strong demon ties).

The only interest of the Orcs in this is to fight the Demons (and their allies). On the other hand the Wizards take action to reconcile with the Orcs.

So what we actually have is NOT a united front, everything against one evil, but more or less a spreading evil that infects others or invites others to take the opportunity to profit from the situation.

The bottom line for me is, that the story ain't just THAT simple.

Markal was pretty evil and ruthless too.

Whatever side I'm on is obviously the "good" side. We do things for "good" reasons, and achieve "good" ends.

Go Necromancers!

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Markal (on a personal revenge mission)

Isn't he dead already ? Besides It was a pure grab for power coupled with revenge against those opposed him back in the olden days.

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The inner Haven struggle: Biara's fanatics are DECIDEDLY evil, and they are humans.

Not all of them, as far as i can see most of them seem to be purely fanatical without ever realising that they are serving a demon, i mean just look at Alaric.

and the rest i agree with you on¨, except the orcs.

They aren't just out to beat the demons, indeed for some time there only interest is vengeance and causing as much havoc on the Griffin Empire as possible, burning farms and cities whenever possible, without discrimination.

But yeah, the story isn't a simple one..