War is ugly. WAR is not.

About four years out of date this, but if you’re ever after inspirational warhammer stuff, don’t bother looking for pictures of miniatures. Look to Warhammer Online - Age of Reckoning.

Take a look at WAR and you have a totally immersive experience. It’s a world rich with detail and atmosphere. The landscapes are themed (a city, the chaos wastes, etc) and everything within them reflect that, from the lighting to the architecture to the shrubbery. You can see magic happening, not in some abstract way but in front of your eyes like fireworks. The colouring is beautiful and naturalistic, and the character and monster design rich with character.

Now take a look at a typical tabletop game. Unless you’re looking in the pages of White Dwarf or you’re playing a demo game set up at a convention, every single game of warhammer is played by two different players; two different modellers and painters, each with their own skill level and making their own (often terrible) artistic choices. It doesn’t matter how fantastic one guy’s army looks - he could find himself playing a half-painted tzeentch army (the worst offenders for lurid, garish colour-schemes) or one that isn't painted at all.

Atmospheric

Not so atmospheric

Consider a gamer's typical table and collection of scenery. Not only is it usually ugly and badly made, but there’s never any unifying theme to it: a chaos temple will quite happily sit yards away from a pretty half-timbered farm house. “How’s the crop, Hans?” “Not great, dear, the turnips have sprouted tentacles and are demanding blood for their gods.”

The reason WAR gets it right is because it is art directed. There’s a team of designers and an artistic director of some sort making sure everything fits with the overall look and feel of the game. Everything is unified and designed together as a whole project.

I bet anything that those designers and concept artists didn’t have their heads cluttered by decades of Games Workshop studio decisions. Ask most gamers what colour a Tzeentch army should be and you’ll either hear “bright blue/pink/yellow/red” or (worse) “ALL the colours!” Because that’s the way GW has portrayed their models over the years. Even the GW studio army looks all wrong - they get hairy, smelly, thick-set, Conan-style Uber-vikings called Chaos Warriors and then they tell you in the background info that Tzeentch is all about magic and strategy and cunning and deceit. Right, so that doesn’t really fit with the iron-clad uber-norse image does it, so how do they get round that? By giving them a blue paint job. Urgh.

Awesome

Not quite as awesome

And what’s Tzeentch’s symbol? The bird. But since his colours are blue and yellow we get all sorts of weird and wonderful parrots on show. Ugly ugly ugly. WAR took the background info and redesigned from scratch. A bird you say? Well, let’s make that a crow. Creepy. Chaos culty. Cool. See GW? THAT’s how it’s done. The colours are muted. And evil. With crazy magic glowy bits. They make just about every tabletop Tzeentch army ever created look like baubles on a christmas tree.

You could say that about every game of tabletop warhammer ever played too - it just never looks as good as WAR. For a start there are dice, rulebooks, tape measures, tubes of Pringles and general clutter, and that’s before we even begin to critique the scenery, battlefield or miniatures.

Now after that massive rant, I shall just turn everything I’ve just said on its head. I don’t play WAR. Never have done. Don’t play computer games, in fact. That’s because for me you can’t beat the real, tangible experience of moving toy soldiers around in their own real-life miniature model world.

What I’m lamenting here is the lack of art direction by the average gamer. No where on the internet can I see fantasy gamers who have taken the same global approach to getting the look and feel of the game right as WAR have taken. Where are the beautifully themed tables and armies? Where are the subtle and beautiful colour palettes extending through tabletop to miniatures? Where are the ambitious landscapes and atmospheric settings?

I should add here that the single biggest thing GW have done to address the problem of ugly-ass gaming is the introduction of plastic scenery. The pieces they have released have transformed the average game and go a huge way in doing exactly what I’m talking about here. You still get a mansion house precariously built next to a temple of chaos, but individually they look great and combined they do more to portray the look and feel of the warhammer universe than any painted army could do alone.

So well done to GW for making it easier for us (thankfully there are far fewer neat, little, half-timbered town houses littering the Old Worlde these days), but where are all the modellers and gamers who are going to take it all to the same level as WAR?


Special note: Pictures used without permission. Apologies to the owners of the second and fourth pictures!