I received my new Space Marines and Codex and cannot help, but share some thoughts before diving in to building stuff again. Amazing work from Games Workshop and brilliant bitz for Legion.
Therein lies the biggest mistake Games Workshop has ever done - the incorrect Architecture for the most central imagery in the game - the plastic Space Marine. When Jes Released the current road map with his 98 classics, the world was quick to embrace the models as pinnacle of GW capabilities and largely blind that what Dainton, Kopinski and Boyd soon started was not at all captured in miniature form. A few years later the hobby reacted and the first corrective actions started appearing. Then in 2006 or so came a second wave built on the Terminator kits, but GW has not had the heart to reset.
Today, looking at my Alpha Legionnaires, next to an excuse built from the box, I’m left worndering how fucking fantastic things could have been. Utterly fantastic.
But lets put that aside. The new kits are some of the best GW has ever produced, marvelous advancement in sharpness and mold quality, range of options and iconography and fantastic source material for everyone working with Space Marines - be it insanity like “Art-scaling” or just building from the box.
The Sternguard kit is loaded with gorgeous options, the Centurions have a really surprising level of detail and selection and the single frame characters continue the strenght of that line, but offer quite a bit of more flexibility to kit bash than some of the Fantasy counterparts. I rate this release very highly. Almost up there with the Dark Eldar and Ork onslaughts of recent years.
The Codex on a quick glance is a land mark piece, much like the 6th edition rule book. There isn’t much new Art, but a great collection of the classics remastered to this new digital age with color and some amazing new one offs for each of the main chapters. The background is very rich and laid out like a great foundation to create your own chapters and storylines and the miniature section is long and comprehensive.
I have to wonder how the Codex Chaos Space Marines can be so bad in light of all the other sixth edition books (Eldar, Tau, Necrons all brilliant) is beyond my understanding. Massively more so now the loyal Chapters have their land mark tome. If I would be in charge, I would immediately admit to this internally and reshuffle the que to create something equally spctacular for the Renegades. Because these two books truly define everythign else.
All this new space marine goodness has really made me wonder if there is anyway I could do a small force of marines that were just built as is. Sadly no. But I still enjoy and thoroughly appreciate the new releases and it will be a joy to see so much richness to people's armies.
I might allow a small detour to my Legion work now that I have the army together. Something really nice to enjoy the gorgeous
new plastic sets. Working on it already.
I completely agree with you on the Chaos Space Marine Codex. I think that GW really dropped the ball with them and have an opportunity to rectify the situation with a revision of the book or supplements featuring individual Chaos Legions. They really should consider updating the Chaos Space Marine plastic kits as well. I thought that they would release new marines similar to the sculpts in the Dark Vengeance box set or at least have the marines available to purchase separately. That is one of the biggest marketing errors and disappointments for me of 6th Edition.
ReplyDeleteThe Dark Vengeance Chosen were what got me back into the game after many years of not touching warhammer, but watching people like Migsula make great miniatures. The DV chosen tapped into the same creative stream that they had been drawing from for several years beforehand. Its really too bad a multi-part kit featuring sculpts like them hasn't been released.
DeleteMigsula, I think the multipart Space Marine Kit was great for when it was released. The space marines released then were in Scale with the metal Imperial Guard of the time. The plastic Catachan box set and later the plastic Cadian box set were what threw everything out of sync.
I agree with you about the scale of the guardsmen RhesusforBreakfast. The funny thing is that the Forge World Guard kits are much closer to the scale that they should be when compared to the plastic marine kits. I use the FW Veteran Cadians with shotguns and the Renegade Cultists combined with the DV plastic cultists for guard and other human troops.
DeleteRhesus - when it came out, it was already out of scale with Dark Eldar, Eldar and a lot of human models. Not subjectively speaking, but fact of the matter to every bit of size reference GW has produced for Space Marine height, size and equipment. :)
DeleteWell, eldar are supposed to be tall. but, I get your point, GW has never really been sticklers for scale.
DeleteYour position on the plastic marine kit is ultimately an issue with heroic scale. As I understand it, heroic scale is unapologetically an artistic rendition, an adaptation from one medium to another, of a particular image. For one, it's about readability at a distance - that needn't be far at all - which is an issue because of the miniature's tiny stature. Why do people have a problem with this? Heroic scale makes a lot of sense from both a design and production standpoint. GW have never made scale models.
ReplyDeleteMy problem with the scale of the miniatures is that an unaugmented human guardsman shouldn't be the same approximate height as a fully armored space marine. You can call the "scale" heroic or whatever you want but a space marine should still be discernibly larger than a Human or an Eldar, especially when they are all designed and sculpted by the same company.
DeleteExactly what Ephrael said. I should go back to my post and build the argument from that. It is not a about matter of taste - it's a fact as much as there are facts in a game with Demons and Grav guns.
DeletePhiq, I don't think there is any logical production, design or other standpoint that guided GW's decision. It was Jes's choice and at the time he was the sole authority on things like this.
My critique is tempered with love and care for the hobby and the models and utmost respect to what Jes has done for the hobby. What I see around the internet and in my own work is a proof of concept that the current scale missed a massive opportunity and the core of the imagery.
I'm thinking that for both the models to approximate the sense of scale in the artwork and for the rules to be anything like the fluff, the Space Marines need to be shifted up on level; counting Space Marines as Terminators and Terminators as Centurions.
DeleteI understand the motivation for holding this kind of view; you care about the imagery of the 40k fiction and how it is portrayed in miniature form. I have no problem with this view, I hold it myself, and I think true/art scale marine conversions are great. But this “failure/missed opportunity by GW” issue is completely about taste.
DeleteGW make toy soldiers. They are tiny men and vehicles and monsters designed to fulfill a number of roles all at once: for playing tabletop games, for the pleasure of developing craft skills, for representing fantastical fictional universes, and many other reasons besides. This means they have to be particular sizes, they have to be relatively durable, they have to be designed but not over-designed so that the hobbyist can inject his/her personality into them and encourage creativity, they have reflect the fictional universe to which they refer which is always part of the appeal, and they have to be easily identifiable on the tabletop at all times so as facilitate the smooth play of a game and the player’s immersion.
What we have come to call heroic scale seems to be a product of these considerations, and GW have been consistently capable at achieving excellent results, all the while coming to various compromises with each product. As Ephrael hinted at in his response, heroic scale isn’t really a “scale” as such, and he’s right. Everything is considered on it’s own terms, but also in light of everything else. GW do have a design mind-set, a feeling even, not a set of measurements, from which comes their recognizable style.
Take a look at almost any range. Notice how the legs are too short? (Exceptions, somewhat, being the Eldar, who sport longer legs for obvious effect.) Heads and hands too large? Weapons are too big, and their barrels awfully thick. (28mm lasguns do not look out of place on 54mm INQ models.) It’s not just the marines, it’s everything. What about the vehicles and monsters? A Rhino couldn’t fit ten marines, and neither could a Land Raider. That High Elf hero on his griffon could not even hope to fly. Deffkoptas: what? Revisit, for eg, the Necromunda range, or virtually anything from the 90s, 80s and back; it’s even more pronounced. Nothing is stringently to scale. It’s almost as if GW don’t want it that way…
But it all still makes sense. Despite similarities in height, no one mixes up a guard model with a marine model. No one even mistakes an Eldar for a Dark Eldar. Its GW’s good design and every range they produce sports a thoroughly considered, clear design language, and each shares shapes only when it makes absolute sense (Eldar and Dark Eldar, for eg). A lot of lesser manufacturers do not do this.
What about money and resources? GW are limited in that capacity. People forget that they are only a big company when considered in light of the tiny industry in which they operate. Can you imagine a ten man tactical squad in true/art scale? That’s twice the amount of plastic and twice the price for hobbyists to pay, perhaps more. Then they’d have to redesign - not simply upscale - the entire range to fit, vehicles and flyers included. Grey Knights and Chaos marines too. Every single model. What a colossal undertaking that would be. And what a huge effect this would have on all the other products on GW’s release schedule.
In the entire history of GW, as far as I know, Inquisitor’s Artemis of the Deathwatch is the only released marine model scaled differently. Perhaps we’ll see something similar in the future, but I cannot see a whole 40k range(s), completely re-jigged. Considering the way GW likes to make miniatures and the realities of production… keep converting!
Matter of taste are matters of good taste or bad taste.
DeleteEver incremental GW plastic release has gone towards fixing scale issues, be they Chaos Warriors, Dark Eldar, Tau (check out the new commander or broadsides in particular) any Fantasy horse model, every spear... Every single release points to a direction where opening the gap between a human and a space marine is the right thing to do.
...but Space Marines are locked to decision made 15 years ago.
Money and resources are not raw material related. The cost is in tooling, labour, logistics, marketing, but minimal fraction in plastic. GW strategy is to find every possible way to add value and make us pay more for our miniatures and a massive re-design of the space marine range starting with the next edition would help ship product unlike anything else they can do.
As for fixing scale issues: I don't think that has been the case because not all so-called "scale" issues have been addressed. GW seem to have tackled some, but not others... which to me sounds like GW style. Proportions shift, but the big hands, heads and weapons, short legs, etc, are still there. Plus, almost each new iteration is a completely new design, made possible by new perspectives and new technology, not simply size corrections. Each new kit sees GW showing us new ways of expressing the imagery of their worlds. Look at the evolution of Chaos daemons over their 20+ year history.
DeletePoint taken on the reality of costs. But we're still looking at a pretty considerable (horrifying?) price increase.
Just good or bad taste? There's a spectrum, I think, and many factors affect. It seems to me you can't "believe" in the current space marine models. I don't think this is bad taste. But I can't blame a toy soldier for being a toy soldier.
The problem as I see it is that GW are too invested in the number of kits they have in the current scale to change anything right now. True scaling is an artistic desire to make the models (which lets face it, are some of the best GW makes anyway) fit the art by some of the best artists in their genre, who don't have the same constraints as the model designers.
ReplyDeleteI wish the models would change, but I don't see that happening any time soon.
Stunning work as always Migs, making us all jealous.
yes, Too much vested in that architecture now... Having said that, in a few years time, what else would help move more product or elevate the imagery to new level than totally redoing the Space Marine, and then gradually updating every single kit based on it?
ReplyDelete