So will 'The Hobbit' bring life into GWs range?

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[Quests-of-legend]

Well here's "Radagast" the brown wizard





I've always like their LOTR range, so hoping for some more good stuff, not sure about the plastic above, hard to tell from the pictures.

[Billiam Babble]

This month's White Dwarf is featuring The Hobbit strategy game, although I bought it hoping to see if there are figures I can scavenge for other games. Nice paint work in there btw.

It's really strange reading a GW publication which takes hobbits seriously.  In Deathblow the Hobbit/Halfling character's special equipment is sticky buns or pies. Oh, the hilarity.  

The tallish dwarves could double up for all sorts of other characters in fantasy, like stout hill folk, brigands. Radaghast looks great - whoever he is (in the book I mean).  I'm not quite used to the bulbous goblins yet.  I think I'd paint the trolls and goblins different shades - they're all a bit too flesh coloured for my liking.  I feel the range so far, including the scenery, is ripe for pilfer, especially if your other figures are still close to the 25mm size.

I'm sure the goblin caves in the book weren't so "mine"-like, but then I've always felt odd about mines - makes me think of shire horses and canal boats ... I have a sort of prejudice for anything resembling local history....

[Billiam Babble]

[Billiam Babble]

from http://jaows.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/white-dwarf-december-2012.html

[MortiS-the-Lost]

Wishful thinking there Mr Lumberjack…

Yea it may well bring in some new customers - but it'll be more of GW's target audience, people with no sense of value for money and no conception of what makes good miniatures - they'll just be milling in another wave under a slightly different demographic. Most existing Tolkien fans aren’t going to leap at GW's new line of The Hobbit miniatures, the core market for GW's hobbit game will be the kids who never head of it before the films and will be paying to watch in 3D

As for will it be more RPG like?
Of course not - GW don't do RPGS any more, RPG's don't sell armies! It'll be a skirmish game at it's smallest!
Of course if you'd read the book you might be wondering how a pure wargame of The Hobbit is going to work, since there isn't that much fighting (a lot of running, but not so much fighting) until the Battle of 5 Armies and the rest of the fights are better suited to an RPG environment - and of course you are right … for the book.
However, the book was about 250 pages (and then add a few more pages for The Quest of Erebor) and we know the story is going to get a lot of padding to stretch it out to 3 films of around 2 hours each - and I'd say it's safe to assume a fair amount of that padding will involve extending the fighting sequences and maybe even adding in a battle or 2 that never happened

But the overall factor in this, is that GW are too busy making easy money out of the people stupid enough to pay their prices, for them even to stop and consider making a good game or good miniatures for the people who'd appreciate them.  

[Marchomer]

Did you see the prices of the new range?
That's incredible!
£45 to buy 4 miniatures?!?!? 4 miniatures already sold by GW (Gandalf, Sruman, Galadriel, Elrond), they only are in a different pose! And in Italy the price is €60!

[MortiS-the-Lost]

 and this single small goblin on foot miniature is £10!

[seanpatrick]

Odd - I thought the Goblins would be the same as Moria orcs>  In LOTR aren't they different tribes of the same species?

[MortiS-the-Lost]

seanpatrick wrote

Odd - I thought the Goblins would be the same as Moria orcs>  In LOTR aren't they different tribes of the same species?

Kind of, each tribe of Goblins/Orcs and so on are a slightly different breed

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[MortiS-the-Lost]

Lumberjack wrote

Prices alone have destroyed the chance of this becoming popular

That's not true - the people who determine what GW products are popular are idiots who'll spend a lot of money for very little product

[seanpatrick]

It's a shame they are so badly priced cos I genuinely like the LOTR miniature range.  There are a couple of dud models but their most of their core stuff is brilliant.  I think I'd only buy them if I had a wad of extra cash though.

[Captain Hobokus]

With every new addition - regardless of past and/or present and/or future prints - companies that have made money off of a particular franchise can and will try to "bring life" into their range/s.
Prices years ago were still bad for GW - and my eyebrows went an inch or so higher when I saw how high they'd gone up since I was in the hobby (not that much, but I've sorta inherited my grandpa's trait of being extremely tight when it comes to money). They'll always be a niche within a niche market that fork over hundreds of dollars on the new products.

I like to think of what happens when a new army/codex book comes out. An example is when the blood angles got an official codex for the latest edition; every man, his dog, and his friends were playing blood angels for a while. I had a BA army before it was even considered to be cool! Hobbies eventually come down to fads.
But I will say this...watching the Hobbit has made me want to play MERP in the time period of the Hobbit...

I probably have more to say about it, but its quite late for me sooooo...

Although Mortis...RPG's don't sell armies? I'm sure there must be a small amount of people who went from Dark Heresy or Deathwatch to 40K due to the fact that they've bought a few models here or there for their gaming (then again...they probably already were into 40K to the relevant rpg; so my point is pretty flimsy)...and most who DO spend money to buy these products straight from a store do so to satisfy children - and you know what happens when a child isn't satisfied...