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Edge of Eternity. Is it worth a go?

I wrote in a previous blog that recently I’d been playing Edge of Eternity a lot. Still haven’t cleared the last boss but after nearly 40 hours of gameplay, I figured I knew enough to write this. Edge of Eternity is currently available on Xbox Game Pass and is also available on Steam. My play through was on the Xbox, which seems to be a very recent port to console. EOE is a turn based JRPG which was originally a Kickstarter for PC and if I’m honest, the design shows it with menus, text and camera position reflecting a PC based design. I’ll be honest and say that I gave up on much of the in depth crafting very early on as I got tired of having to go right up to the TV screen in order to read it. On the other side though the game is extremely pretty with some lovely vistas, and acceptable if slightly rough cutscenes.

Gameplay is focused on exploration in combat with the odd puzzle thrown in. Some of the puzzles are extremely difficult but only a few are mandatory. For me not enough is made of the puzzles and that is a shame as they make for an interesting change of pace and the ones present are well designed. Combat is basic in principle but complex to master. A grid system controls position and range whilst terrain can block attacks, do damage or cause buffs. This is a great piece of design. And the bonuses for blindside attacks make combat rewarding if occasionally repetitive experience. Enemies are vulnerable to certain damage types in a manner familiar to any RPG gamer. But the game doesn’t have the usual plethora of buff and debuff spells; there are a few but most of the combats and tactics are damage focused.

The story is strange. It starts off as a tale about a fairly tropey sword wielder in black , whose friends are massacred before he himself is nearly sacrificed in some religious ceremony which is intended to release some great power to vanquish an alien invader. That’s just the tutorial. After this, we eventually join up with his sister Selene and the two sets off in order to save their mother who’s contracted some form of virus called corrosion. Along they are way they recruit Ysoris, Fallon Thea and Myra though she doesn’t stick around too long. Along the way, the story becomes a rather convoluted save the world/religious schism narrative which is never fully explained. It’s ambitious, but also a little too big and after 40 hours, I still wasn’t really sure what was going on. Tales of Arise does this kind of story far better in my view, even though that RPG does end rather abruptly.

The EOE character design is not bad. Deryen is rather tropic but the others have reasonable depth and the designers have at least resisted giving into fanservice temptation. There is reference to outfits within the game menus. But these seem to be locked off currently in the Xbox port. Weapons do change the visuals, but that’s about the only change that takes place irrespective of what armour or equipment you have on. It’s very hard to ignore the Final Fantasy influence in the design. But on the whole, it’s well thought out. And there’s certainly none of the gratuitous butt shots that Tales of Arise became somewhat famous for.

The biggest problem by a country mile is how this game runs. It is unbelievably buggy. I lost count of the number of crashes I’d had, even when just walking in the open world. Load screens are slow and post loads often see you floating in nothingness until the visual assets finish loading. Some never do load and you have an NPC in lurid purple polygons rather than pants and on the whole it really breaks the immersion. Hopefully some of these bugs will be patched in later updates. But the combination of this, the absence of a proper working mini map, and the display text size issue, stop me recommending this game to anyone who wasn’t a serious JRPG player. This is a potentially brilliant game. But as it stands, it’s just that potential. For a freebie It’s definitely worth a look. And if you like JRPGs you’ll get a fair bit from it. But if you were after a far better example of the JRPG genre, then I would say Tales of Arise remains the king on the market at the moment.

Rating: 6/10

Fairy Tail the game. Is it worth a go?

I am a fan of the Fairy Tail manga and anime and was excited when the news of this game dropped, but was that was stopped in its tracks when the xbox version was dumped. Still, a while later and I now have a switch so when I saw this game in a branch of CEX I had to pick it up and give it a go.

What’s it all about

The game is essentially a gameplay version of the Grand Magic Games, Tarteros and Avatar arcs from the series. You play as a variety of characters from the show in what is a combat orientated JRPG in an anime style. At the same time as the story you can level up your characters and the guild where you operate from with side quests and character stories.

The good

The game looks great with its anime style and design lifted straight from the anime. Combat is easy to master and the animations and cut scenes look great. It is clear that the designers took a good hard luck at the anime and lifted the attacks and matching animations before putting them in the game. So if you want to play as your favourite character and use the attacks then there is a good chance that you will be able to. There’s a decent split between pre and post endgame content and the difficulty curve scales nicely. The visuals in some places are great though there are some jarring gaps where I would have expected a full cut scene but got none.

The design of the game has you play as multiple characters via side and main quests so you can get an experience of using all the characters as well as your main team and again this is pretty much seamless. This game on the whole runs well save for some odd clipping bugs with alternate item sets i.e. Wendy’s hair clips through the wings on her alternate costume and Erza’s hand hovers over her hip when not in her default armour skin. Tiny things but they are noticeable given how cutscene heavy the game is.

The bad

The story is a problem here. This game is aimed at fans of the series but such people will know the plot and as a result they don’t need to watch the cut scenes. They are well done but the anime and manga give you more and with higher quality and better emotional impact. None fans who pick up the game would get the gist of what is in many ways a visual novel but would perhaps struggle to see what is going on. There is scope for a Fairy Tail RPG in my opinion; but it would need to have you create a character and live in the world rather than just playing a character in a story which people know.

The combat quickly became dull and grindy save for the excellent animations. It is turn based but you don’t have a sequence bar, though you can see who goes next if you use the right key, and the fact that the game essentially pauses whilst you make an attack choice ruins the flow of fights. Given that fighting is all that this game really offers then a slicker combat menu would have made more sense. Atelier Ryza is a stablemate of this game and has a better combat system for me and that system would have made the fights more engrossing than they are.

The side quests also lack depth. Essentially it is go and collect an item for an upgrade or kill x monsters/enemies in a location. After a while you become so strong that even enemies ten or fifteen levels above you go down easily, if not quickly due to massive health levels or defence buffs. After about 24 hours in I was the number two guild with all characters unlocked and my main team at max level. All that was left was to get to level 99 and to be honest I just lost interest in running the same beat up monsters thread I’d done a hundred times already.

The really?

Fans of the series will know that there is a large fan service element in the anime particularly and my god the game takes this to eleven. Within the first few chapters we have had a beach scene and swim suit scene with plenty of camera angle focus on the more ample cast members. Lucy even has a ‘seductive pose’ skill which is an animated cutscene at the start of a battle which is essentially a ‘come to bed’ look. The cut scenes in combat also tie into the fan service element with plenty of ass and chest shots. It meets the target audience I suppose but for me it quickly became cringe.

Also, I have to say the price of this game is daft. I know switch games hold their value but the DLC price is insane. To get the season pass and the game at full price (i.e. not on a steam sale for PC) then you will be looking at £100 give or take. Given that most of the items are cosmetics, including yet more swim suits, then the circa £50 price tag is just nuts. This is not a £100 game in any way shape or form and even if you are a die hard fan you would be mad to pay the full rate.

Conclusion

As a distraction game this is good fun and if you are a fan of the series then being able to use your favourite characters attack is initially very satisfying due to the excellent cut scenes/animatics. After a fairly short time though it becomes repetitive and the end game content is not different enough to keep you interested. The design making you play multiple characters and a visual novel style pretty much removes the replayability option.

All in all a bit of fun but nothing groundbreaking.

Rating: 6/10

Atelier Ryza – Ever darkness and the secret hideout. Is it worth a go?

As I have said before I am not a good gamer. I do not have the commitment to spending ages maxing out a tech tree or learning all the deep and intricate mechanics of a game. Likewise hours of grinding just to level up seldom appeal to me; but I do enjoy a good RPG/JRPG; especially when it has a crafting mechanic. Probably the best in terms of scale is Skyrim but I just find that entire game a little to dark, grim and realistic to be enjoyable. To be honest I find that many games on the Xbox are a bit too serious for my tastes and as a result I bought a Switch at the turn of the year. The first game I have played in anger on in it is this. Altelier Ryza – Ever darkness and the secret hideout.

Gameplay

The gameplay is, on the surface, fairly basic. You move around a somewhat open world setting until you encounter monsters. At that point it moves into the battle screen which will be similar to anyone who has played Final Fantasy XIII. There is however a fair degree of depth to the gameplay. In the open world you are mainly focused on gathering resources and doing the usual range of side quests; but the resource gathering is there for a reason. More on this later. The combat though initially seeming simple is actually quite layered. You fight in a party of three which you can choose (though initially the characters you can use are fixed) and they have skills and talents which put them in the role of attacker, defender or supporter. A basic attack triggers action points and you use these points to use skills. At the same time you have a number of ‘core charges’ and these can be used to trigger items. If you have a core charge sufficient for the item then you can use it without loosing it. Alternatively you can sacrifice an item to recharge. Combat runs on a timer on the left of the screen and you get to go when it is your turn. You can though jump the queue by using up some of your action points.

This works well in practice as it does add an element of strategy as you balance your AP (action points) and CC. The combat system has more though. When you reach a certain number of action points you can raise your tactics level. This resets the points to zero but boosts your attack power. Each level needs a multiple number of action points (10,20, 30 etc) up to a maximum of 50 at level five. In battle your companions will give instructions and if you follow them e.g heal them, do magic damage then they will use a special skill of their own. Likewise if you use the queue jump when the enemy is charging their own attack then your companion will use an even stronger special attack which can essentially stun the enemy. In the late game you also unlock an ultimate attack when you are at tactics five.

So a fairly layered combat mechanic but I will be honest, the combats get repetitive quite quickly and once you clear level 40 you will be often one shotting enemies. By that stage I was avoiding combat encounters as they had stopped being fulfilling. Even the optional bosses you can take on had become a bit one dimensional; mainly due to the fact that you do not do any blocking, positioning etc. You just use your own attacks and skills and if you time it so you stun the enemy then you will always win. Layered but limited is how I would describe combat.

Crafting though is another matter. This game revolves around its crafting mechanic. Every material you find will have a use in a crafting recipe and every thing you need in the game you can craft. In deed certain items can only be created by crafting and these are needed for the story. Materials are all different qualities, add traits and come in different quantities to each other. Use a higher value gathering tool and you will get more or better materials. Higher level areas and enemies drop higher level items and these in turn let you make higher level items when synthesising. You are given some recipes as you progress but mainly you learn more by following the synthesis tree (called loop) for each item. You do this manually though you can automate the creation of an item you already know if you have the materials. Completing each items tree to a full level also increase the additional traits you can give e.g. increased critical chance and its resulting level and quality. All this goes towards raising your alchemist level which lets you make more and better items etc.

It sounds complicated but I actually found it really relaxing to just gather, farm and craft. It can become repetitive especially post end-game when you are really doing it for the sake of completeness. Coupled with the combat system issues this is probably not a game you would replay from scratch but it is one you may go back to just to run around in a nice world.

Design

The design, colour palette and general layout of the game are lovely. The controls make sense and quickly felt natural. Each area of the world has its own distinct feel, enemies and look; but still sharing a common them with the other areas of the map. Quick travel makes exploration easy and other areas unlock as you learn new tools and your level increase. The characters look good and unusually for a JRPG there is little fan service; though clearly the designers of Ryza were fond of jiggle physics. Fortunately aside from the odd moment of wondering how she does not knock herself out when moving it does not detract from the game. Some of the movement and cut scene animation is a bit stilted but that seems to be more down to limitations on the console rather than the designers doing a bad job. Generally this game looks good, runs well and is, as I said before, quite relaxing in places.

story

Its a JRPG so it is the standard power of friendship, self discovery and save the world fare. There is nothing particularly groundbreaking here but to be honest I was not expecting there to be. The pacing is however unusually slow and you get the impression that the story is more of a vehicle for the crafting mechanic than the other way around. To be honest you could skip the story cutscenes and not really loose a great deal.

Conclusion

Overall this is in many ways a JRPG lite. There are no convoluted tech or skill tress outside of the crafting mechanic and you can easily complete the game without maxing that out. Combat is layered and smooth but does become repetitive and looses some of the appeal by the post end game areas. At around 30 hours to complete (main game, explore all areas and optional bosses) it is also a surprisingly short game for a JRPG. Despite its many limitations though this is a good game; I enjoyed it. I would probably not invest in the ridiculously expensive season pass for the DLC given that there is a sequel out but that is due to the economics rather than the game. As a relaxing experience with enough edge to keep you interested (think animal crossing with swords) this one is hard to beat but it will not appeal to all.

rating 7/10

Sword Art Online – Hollow Realisation. Is it worth a go?

Controversial bit first. I like Sword Art Online. Yes, I know it has massive limitations in how it is written and some of the tropes the author uses are not great but on the whole I like the light novels and the anime. Ok, controversy over and I will say from the off that this is not a good game adaptation/tie in.

Gameplay

The game is set in an open world divided into areas with some dungeons added on as you get further through. Played in a third person perspective the design is fine and it runs smoothly save for the ridiculous number of loading screens which take some lime to finish. This maybe due to assets in each zone but it breaks the gameplay up a lot (as does the 2d cutscenes which dominate the early game time). On the whole though things look good. The problems come when you actually start playing the game and progress a bit. Firstly the camera control is awful in that it does not seem to lock onto the enemy you are attacking (and pretty much all you do in the game is attack enemies). As a result aiming your skills is often a case of luck rather than judgment and you can end up launching a ten move combo at thin air. Frustrating.

Secondly is the control mapping itself. I have played this on PC and switch and both have issues. On PC the default bindings are awful and for me rendered the game unplayable (I don’t have time to remap everything). The switch is better but every button does two or three things depending on the combination used and it just feels clunky. Combat lets you use four possible attacks depending on combination but I usually found myself sticking a strong attack on the easiest option and running with it. This game feels like it was designed as a PC MMO and then they decided to port it to console. With better key maps the range of skills would work well on a PC setting with the ability to customise a skill tray. On console though it is just a mess.

Finally is the game premise itself. Basically you can watch the plot cut scenes but you will still end up doing the same thing. Killing monsters. That’s it. The skill tree covers weapons skills only and whilst you can build friendship with other characters this is all driven by the combat engine. This is a waste given that the whole premise of the original SAO was that it was a virtual world and we know that several of the key characters had other skills such as crafting, cooking, beast taming.

Really?

So the gameplay is limited and after a few hours of killing different monsters I decided to explore the friendship system. Oh dear. In combat you can praise your teammates for certain characteristics they demonstrate and build affection with them. Get it high enough and you can then reach the ‘hand holding’ stage and then eventually the ‘princess carry’ stage which triggers a bedroom cutscene. No I am not making this up. You basically get a romance cut scene with characters who are all canonically under eighteen replete with the character you are romancing in nightwear. Nothing too risque in the design but that is beside the point. Ignoring the garbage design around the friendship system the idea that you would stick something like this in is little more than fan service of the worst kind and it’s a shame as the main outfit designs are actually really good.

Conclusion

This is a bad game in terms of implementation and there’s no way I can dress that up. It feels like a compromise on every front and were it not a game gifted to me I would be trading it in. I do think there is scope for a proper RPG in the SAO world using a skyrim type approach with you being able to do lots of different things. This game though just feels like a soulless bit of marketing with a smattering of fan service thrown in to appease the likely target audience.

rating 3/10

Thoughts on the GW price rises

Recent events have forced me to put down all hobby but I have been able to keep an eye on social media and see the latest updates. The one which caught my eye was the new Ash Wastes box at £180 from GW direct. It didn’t catch my eye because of the contents; impressive looking as they are, necromunda is not my thing but the price caught my eye. £180.00 is a lot of money. I understand that it is a saving over the individual purchasing but £180 is a huge sum on what it a essentially a non-essential. I mean for me that is around two and half months of utilities or my entire energy and food budget for a month. I appreciate that times are hard but I do feel that at the moment GW’s price increase is moving the range beyond what I can really justify spending when I only really paint rather than play.

I also understand that costs are rising for GW so there is a dilemma for them. Reduce the profit margin and annoy stakeholders or hike the prices and cause issues for those buyers of ‘plastic crack’ who have to have the latest thing no matter what (there are plenty on social media spaces looking to sell things to cover the cost of new minis).

Ultimately, for me, 40k is a hobby and if I cannot afford it then I won’t buy it. Equally there is nothing coming down the new release pipe which is tempting me either so for the moment it is quite an easy situation. That being said I do wonder why GW does not issue a formal release schedule. Take the incoming heresy box set which is coming this year. It will be expensive so why not say to people that it will be released no earlier than x date. That gives people time to save, budget and plan ahead. This also opens the product up to those who don’t have £150+ lying around spare as if they know when they can see if there is a way to make it work. I do this all the time with collectible statues from anime and it means that I can buy ones I would never be able to afford.

I genuinely don’t see why GW do not do this and instead do a reveal and then say nothing until a few weeks before release. Yes it may drive FOMO a bit but given how GW likes to highlight how aware it is of social issues then surely it should consider looking at the socio-economic crisis as well and surely a simple release window is not going to hurt the FOMO that much?

Why I don’t play Elden Ring

I admit it. I don’t play Elden Ring and furthermore I don’t intend to. Right now if you are reading this you are probably hyperventilating in horror. After all it’s the greatest game ever made, a work of art and nothing will ever come close. Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t but for me the game is not in any way, shape or form, fun. I have not actually played it but I have played Dark Souls before and at no point was it enjoyable; the mechanics of the games of learning by repeated deaths is not what I game for. I game for escapism and for me the Souls types games do not offer that.

It’s a very simple motivation but one which a lot struggle to grasp. For me I want a game to be fun and this brings me round to the game I have been playing in my spare time the last month. The xbox port of Edge of Eternity.

It’s an indie JRPG which I believe was made originally for the PC as a kickstarter but I came across it on game pass. It’s buggy, slow to load and crashes like you wouldn’t believe. The menu items are so hard to read unless you have an absolutely massive TV and the difficulty jump for the final boss is insane. Tutorials are rare and half the bosses you fight in the hope that you will get some sort of cue on what you need to do.

And I’ve loved it.

Don’t get me wrong I don’t think I’ve ever saved a game as often as I have with this one and I’ve still not cracked the final boss; but I’ve loved it. It’s pretty, has a surprisingly well developed story and the combat has some nice original touches. But more importantly it does not feel like I am working. It feels fun. By no means is it a good game and I will do a full review on it when I crack the boss but the point I am making here is that so long as you are enjoying the game then you do you.

Return of the Squat

Funky model and certainly a surprise (that it was not actually an April Fool’s gag) but I do wonder how GW are going to fit the League of Votann into the lore. After all they were written out in a pretty terminal style a very long time again and the lore has moved on a long way since then. Aside from the nostalgia value I struggle to see where they fit. After all there are several elite Imperial armies (custodes, grey knights, astartes), armies which fit the high technology side and even armies which buck the grimdark aesthetic. I just struggle to see what niche they occupy; not that it will matter. They could be stuck out on their own and the sales will be through the roof; I suspect making the sisters of battle box seem like small change.

So with my self proclaimed writer hat on what would I do with them? Well from the start I would address the elephant in the room; how did some squats survive being a tyranid snack and where have they been for the past god knows how long without anyone noticing them. For me the easiest way is to have them as a surviving clan who came across a dyson sphere and ended up being trapped inside until something accidentally released them. Why a dyson sphere? Well in an old necron codex there used to be mention of a C’tan called the outsider being locked in one. And the tyranids seemed to be avoiding it. So sticking squats in one gives an instant link to the necrons (and rather selfishly a chance to bring the Outsider back into necron lore), ties them in with the Tyranids and the high technology and xenos element puts them at odds with ad-mech, inquisition and church. A nice neat package which ties in with some old lore and keeps things simple. Stick in some blackstone in said sphere and you can even fit it in with the current narrative around the Pariah nexus.

I guess we’ll just have to see what happens but if any of the above turns out to be right then you heard it here first!

Broken by the King

My first blog post in a while in relation to the hobby. Number of reasons for this but the main one was a simple one. I’d grown to absolutely hate painting and being part of it. After nearly two decades (not always painting admittedly) of being in the hobby I was done. The cause? The cause is below:

Yep. The Silent King broke me.

This model was one I’d own since it was released and I had deliberately used it as in incentive to work on skilling up. Finally I reached a point just after Christmas 2021 where I felt ready to give it a go. So, filled with hope, optimism and a degree of confidence I started the kit.

And it broke me.

Previously when people had asked me what was the worst kit I had ever worked on the answer was easy. Worst was a B17 flying fortress kit I had as a kit followed by the original necron monolith (seriously GW how did you make a four sided pyramid with so many panel gaps?). The key phrase there is ‘was’. Right from the start this was a pig of a kit. Even built in sub-assemblies it was a nightmare; tiny points of contact, misaligned parts and fundamentally unbalanced. Then the painting became and after three days of edge highlighting one sub-assembly I was nearly ready to cry. After three weeks I was ready for throwing the damn thing at the wall but finally it was done.

And I hated it.

Nothing looked how I wanted it to and all I could see was every imperfection. As you can tell the base was a rush job and maybe one day I will come back to it. Never before have I been intimidated by a model kit but this was the most expensive I have ever worked on and I wanted it to look good. I knew it was never going to be like the box art but I did want it to look good.

Fortunately after a break of a few months I managed to get over it and am hoping to be more active and maybe even get a few games in this year.

Indifference, ineptitude, introspection and intellectual property – a Cursed City novella

Disclaimer – I have no idea what is actually going on and these are just my views and opinions.

So, here we are again. another new week starting and another crisis involving the hobby. Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the past week you will have seen the noise which this time relates to the boxset Cursed City. Now say this point but this was not a release that I was particularly interested in. When it first came out I was moderately interested by the theme (vampires and Van Helsing have always been a bit of an interest) but it was all going to depend on the price point; and at the first reveal it did not do much to stir the creative juices. As a result I chose to give this one a miss.

Predictably on release date the box set sold out the moments; and third-party stockists had been confirming all week via social media that they had very limited stock (an increasingly common practice from GW) and were going to do what they could to limit scalping. Social media became the usual pit of rage, some people happy that they got the set and those bitter that they have not; but by this afternoon it began to die down and that I thought was the end of that.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

The first boxes but I saw well painted looked fantastic but there were rumblings about poor miniature build quality. Actually, rather poor could be substituted for shocking; and at least a third of the people I follow on social media have reported that spears in particular have snapped and broken before they were even removed from the sprue. Generally there is concern about the sturdiness of the kits. Nothing particularly new there so when I saw the Twitter outrage relating to Cursed City at the beginning of the week I assumed that this was just related to the build quality and only gave it a cursory glance. It was not until I saw that there was much more to this that I took a closer look and predictably saw that GW had made yet another faux pas.

So in the run-up to the release GW social media teams have been saying that Cursed City was going to be a permanent part of the range like Blackstone Fortress; therefore you might not get it on day one but you will be able to pick it up in the future. Indeed this had been in the back of my mind when I thought that I would give it a miss at this point. if later I was interested I would pick it up. At some point though it seems that message changed. Indeed the post referencing it being a permanent part of the range has been deleted and now the line being taken is that that is the end and that this was a limited run release, no more support, goodbye Cursed City. What has followed since has been an Omerta law of Silence from GW whilst the community has exploded in absolute outrage and and the entire release has become something of a scalpers paradise. Indeed at the time of writing I can see sets on eBay from about 25% over RRP to over 100% of RRP. GW predictably have said nothing.

There are no shortage of conspiracy theories flying around the internet as to the reasons for this. Some entertaining (GW owners are secret scalpers driving the price up on eBay), some ludicrous (GW just do this deliberately to piss off fans) and some which are rather more rational. These include IP infringement, quality issues or a change in direction after the production run had been ordered.

Speaking personally I tend to lean towards the changing direction theory. Given how stringent GW is over IP protection I would find it slightly surprising if it turns out that they missed something that would have them infringing some intellectual property. It’s not impossible but I do think that would be a rick of catastrophic proportions. A quality issue is possible. If a third of sets have defects and need to be replaced that very quickly is going to become a cost problem for GW but it does not explain removing an entire range. It would simply be a question of a recast with a re-release at a later date (with maybe some compensation thrown in).

That leaves an executive change of direction. Increasingly GW seems to be struggling to actually support the vast number of ranges that it has in the market. For my part I’m inclined to say that they should actually hold new releases for now and build up stock of the ones that they’re actually trying to get out and have already previewed. A number of other games manufacturers have done this though admittedly they are smaller in scale. Fans understand there are supply chain difficulties and would probably accept a freeze. GW management though does not seem to be particularly mature in the manner that one would expect from a FTSE 250 company. GW is no longer a group of fans building plastic middle models out of small facilities and is in fact a global company; as a result it keeps teasing and releasing more and more in a manner which seems reckless at best. It would therefore not surprise me if a rationalisation of the range was taking place.

There is an argument that games in a box like Cursed City are something of a dead end for GW at present. As entertaining as they may be (I do have Blackstone fortress but haven’t yet played it so cannot be sure on the playability); there is only a limited amount of expansion and additional sales that can be driven from such products. Unlike the main range where you can sell a small starter to whet people’s interests and then suck them into buying more and more units, expensive units or a different army altogether for a comparatively small price; games in a box does not really allow this. it does however draw a lot of resources in commercial terms. It takes a lot of time and energy to market and whilst it delivers a short-term profit; once the initial hype’s gone there are questions in my mind at least about profit durability.

it hasn’t happened with Blackstone Fortress but that came along at a time before Covid when funds were not as tight. In this new world, manufacturing chains are tighter than they’ve been since the second world war. More and more companies are looking at lean production methods in a way that they have never done in the past. GW has a huge number of armies that it supports so it would not be at all a shock to see an accounting department make a decision that killed off City. Especially if they took the view that as good as it may be in the short-term, is in fact not long term financially viable. I.e. It’s not going to be able to deliver as a sustained return on investment year-on-year. There is a reason that space marines get the focus that they do and that is because year on year they are consistently GW’s best-selling range.

This does not explain the shocking level or rather lack of communication from GW. Sitting silently hoping this will go away in the way that they have done with previous mistakes is now starting to look more and more like indifference to the fan base. Given the power of social media in this day and age such a thing is very much risky business.

In truth it is unlikely that we will ever actually learn the full story behind this, and for most the social media venting is just pissing in the wind. Indeed within 2-weeks it is likely that the vast majority of the noise will probably have died down but increasingly it does drive questions about the executive direction of GW. Given that last year made the somewhat provocative statements about being there for everyone is increasingly looking like it is like fact not there for anyone when GW decides to change its mind or message. It will be interesting to see whether over the next week any comments come out from GW; though I confess I would be surprised if anything more than a statement of minor apology is made.

As for Cursed City? Well it seems that it is now gone and all those energies and resources spent in marketing wasted. It will understandably become a bone of contention for hobbyists over the next year (particularly against those that have bought them and then never actually built them or try to scalp them). Undoubtedly though. Come the next reveal of an army set or new game there will be the FOMO train in full swing and people will forget the cock up.

Perhaps it is this that is the biggest issue here. GW has mastered marketing releases on a fear of missing out. If hobbyists want this to change then perhaps they need to change and not buy into this crazy obsession that seems to have sprung up around small plastic miniatures.

Of course all of the above being said there is no excuse for some of the abuse that has been thrown at the social media team for GW in the last week or so. If you are disappointed about the set then emailing customer services expressing the doubts, indeed voting with your wallet, is perhaps a better way to go then shouting at people who have no control over the message (I accept that they are employed by the same company). Other than that though this seems very little any of us can do but enjoy the doubtlessly huge piles of plastic miniatures that we all have sitting in our backlogs; and on that basis I tend to go and clear some of mine now.

Living in a scalper’s paradise

So here we are again. Another GW limited release weekend and once again a vast hoard of genuine hobbyists out in the cold or faced with the prospect of dealing with scalpers. I am of course talking about the ‘Piety and Pain’ box and the Ravenor Returned limited edition book. In the interest of full disclosure I wasn’t interested in any of these as I have a hardback version of Ravenor Returned and have never been interested in either the Sisters of Battle or the Dark Eldar. I did however take a quick look on ebay after seeing the outrage, rancor in the online groups and also in the chat in the afternoon reveal.

As an aside I have to question the wisdom of doing a reveal on the day of a hyped release. Felt that Adam and Eddie got hung out to dry there (and I think they saw from the chat that people were not happy based on how they moved on) despite the best efforts of the excellent moderators.

Anyway back to ebay. By the evening Ravenor was being listed for £100.00 whilst the box set (or bits of it) were going way over book. Once again the scalpers had won and yet again GW seem unable or unwilling to learn from this. Every release is the same going back as far as I can remember.

Part of me gets the GW view. Forcing fear of missing out drives sales and ensures you don’t end up sitting on a load of boxes in the depot; yet some boxes are dead certain bankers. Indomitus, sisters, dark eldar were all going to be popular. The price and new edition made Indomitus a ridiculously good value whilst sisters and dark eldar are old ranges with a vocal following in sore need of an upgrade. Making these such a limited commodity just makes no sense when you could make them limited run (like indomitus became) and still make a huge profit and beat the scalpers in the process.

So the question is why do GW seem unwilling to learn? Well so long as people keep buying into the hype there will be no incentive for them to change. They have a monopoly on the game and such things seldom favor the consumer; and until something forces them to change their practices then we’ll continue to live in a scalper’s paradise.