After too-long a hiatus from posts, I’d planned to kick off with a bang talking about the NOVA Open 2024 Reveals! In this post I go through the reveals and explain why this wasn’t quite the bang I’d hoped.
As we’ve come to expect from US based previews, the timings of this show were awful for anyone other than our cousins over the sea with another 2am show here in the UK – I’ve expressed my frustration at this in the past so won’t do the same again, suffice to say I wish Games Workshop would review the timings so that their UK hobbyists are slightly better catered for.
Before the reveals I reminded myself of the plethora of reveals we received last year from the Age of Darkness v2 box set through to a new Underworlds season. This year the preview would cover Warhammer 40,000, Age of Sigmar, Horus Heresy and The Old World with roadmaps for each.
Age Of Sigmar
Unsurprisingly with the 4th edition of Age of Sigmar coming this year and Skaven/Chaos winning the world wide campaign (so getting new models released first), we got a fairly sizable Stormcast reveal with new miniatures and Battletome. The new gryph style mounts which looks great and a pretty big scenery piece that looks like it could double up as a gazebo for a brass band in a park.
I really do like the direction they’re taking Stormcast, the updated miniatures are great, though we need to see this treatment on other factions. We’ve had nine years of Age of Sigmar now, Stormcast haven’t been received as a fantasy version of Space Marines, so to see them constantly getting iterated upon when where are so many other amazing factions that haven’t been is a huge shame.
Blood Bowl
OK, I’m not going to lie, I’ve been waiting for this release since they re-released Blood Bowl back in 2016 – the Chaos Dwarf team. There’s a heavy nostalgia reason for this as the metal Hobgoblins were the first miniatures I managed to paint to what I felt was a good standard and probably was the start of me moving towards wanting to improve as a painter. The new miniatures look great, not so vastly different from the originals but certainly updated and much more heavily armoured. Really looking forward to getting some of these in my hands! You’ve the a pair of Bull Centaurs being released in resin too.
Roadmaps
I’m not on my own when I say this, but what Games Workshop have put up as roadmaps for their main game systems miss the mark on what people were expecting. That might sound very unfair, but we’ve had really good roadmaps in the past, so there’s a (justifiable) expectation that roadmaps will going to tick certain boxes.
All four roadmaps consisted of “we’ve released these things this year, there’s a few more bits to come and next year there’s even more”, where the even more is generally a vague handwave with a couple of main focuses.
Having now had the opportunity to listen to the preview up on the Warhammer Community website, I do have to add that the interviews they had with the various members of staff made the roadmaps make a lot more sense. We had a good breakdown of how the releases this year are feeding into future releases and some discussion on things like seeing Mechanicum and Solar Auxilia releases will continue, seeing more plastic releases added. However a roadmap shouldn’t require you to listen or watch that interview. You don’t even need what’s happened up until now unless you’re using the same template and have it as a tick box to prove that it’s all working.
Summary
And that, dear reader, is that. One updated miniature range, one new team and roadmaps that are lacking the map element (and debatably no road either).
Broadly speaking the preview was OK. There wasn’t a massive amount of new miniature content, so we’ve not seen a huge buzz on social media because the boiled down version doesn’t have a lot to buzz about – that’s not necessarily bad, but more unexpected.
I should talk about the preview itself, which saw Adam Troke back on our screens. I’ve a lot of time for Adam, his enthusiasm for the hobby comes across whenever he’s presenting. It appears that Games Workshop is trying different formats to see what is popular and what isn’t, and this one was a series of pre-recorded interviews with various members of the studio teams talking about a particular game system, with Adam joining these all together in one continuous presentation and doing little summary sections on the game systems not covered. I think that worked really well. The preview started with Adam saying that there wasn’t going to be a focus on new miniatures and more talking about the state of the various came systems. The interviews were really solid, I’ve felt like recently like these pre-recorded interviews lacked a little bit of soul and felt like a serious of questions on prompt cards, this latest round of interviews didn’t have that feeling and was much more like the conversation you might have had at one of the old Open Day events.
I didn’t dislike this format, but it is a big step away from most people’s concept of what a preview ought to contain. We did get some previews (two) and certainly the interviews talked about upcoming things such as more plastic Mechanicum and Solar Auxilia, but with the best will in the world the definition of a preview is:
an opportunity to see something such as a film or a collection of works of art before it is shown to the public
With the exception of the Stormcast and Chaos Dwarf Blood Bowl team, the interviews really only confirmed things that we already knew and talked about things that had already come out. I don’t have an issue with this, but it shouldn’t have been packaged up as a preview for multiple game systems. Likewise, the roadmaps needed a lot more detail on, as they stand they’re broadly going “more stuff” rather than a defined map for the next few months let alone year.
Interestingly I have heard that attendees of Nova were played longer interviews with the Kill Team one running around the 8 minute mark. Personally I love this idea and it’s something I’ve said in the past. It allows people who can’t attend to be involved in upcoming releases, but also if you are there you get some special treatment.
Based on last year, I suspect we may have two more previews to come this year, with Spiel Essen early October and Warhammer Day mid-October – though that may be a little bit close together! That said we have seen multiple previews only weeks apart in the past so who knows.
