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Some super exciting updates emerged today from the mothership: GW’s birthday celebrations where some prototypes of a potential GW Blood Bowl rerelease were showcased for the first time, the above slideshow coming courtesy of a repost from the Sepulchre of Heroes blog, who broke the original story. NAF Member and all-round lead junkie Jon “Axiom” Boyce reports!
I was at the GW birthday event today and spoke to Andy Hoare who will be heading up the new Specialist Design Studio.
Along with the usual ForgeWorld and 40k heavy focus, there was some good news for Blood Bowl. Hot on the heels of the announcement of the relaunch and renamed Specialist Games, it seems that Blood Bowl will be the first release. Andy won’t take up the reins of the new studio officially until mid January, so he was manning the ForgeWorld stall. He had brought along a pair of prototype multipart models (a human and an orc), and a folder of concept sketches by Mark Bedford.
The new box is “probably” less than 12 months away from release, likely to be towards the end of 2016. The rules haven’t yet seen any development, but won’t stray too far from previous editions (although probably not the direct ports of the Competition Rules, Community Edition or linked to Cyanide). The contents will include plastic humans and orcs, both digitally sculpted. There may be 4-6 other teams released in resin.
Andy was adamant that the Blood Bowl background and setting won’t be revised, and that the strong sense of humour will be retained in the rulebook and models.
As an added bonus, Aly Morrison was on the other side of the studio area with his original illustrations from Blood Bowl first edition. Aly spoke very fondly of the development process of first edition, and was delighted to show off the illustrations. He’s looking forward to seeing how the game evolves with the new Specialist Games team
Blood Bowl! This is amazing news!!!!
Huh… This was not something I expected to see when I cam to renew my membership…
Awesome! I remember reading about the Specialist Design Studio being brought back, but didn’t expect an estimated release date so soon! I’ll be making the purchase as soon as its available!
I’m sorry guys but I can’t get excited at all about GW jumping back into the game again.
This is an organization that only a few years back threatened their customers and those their websites with cease and desist letters, breach of trademark/copyright etc but then also destroyed all of the remaining stock including moulds and current stock. This demonstrates in my mind only how short-sighted they are as an organization with their focus then going back to WH and WH40K. An organization that is willing to take its customers to court over fan websites is not a customer-friendly company by any stretch of the imagination, they should have been doing exactly the opposite and helping to promote, thats what any smart company does. When your customers love your product, encourage them to promote it, support them, help develop it further, not threaten with legal action.
And now they’re coming back to the game and expecting their customers to throw more money at them? Why would I do that? Before I was quite happy to buy all teams, have them professionally painted and loved showing them of and playing with them. These days I don’t have the dollars to burn like I could before, my dollar has to go further and be more smartly spent, can I trust GW to not screw over the community again? Time will tell but personally based upon experience I’m not holding my breath.
The other factor which GW may not have considered is these days a lot of us can afford 3D Printers. I now have the ability to design and print my own unique team without throwing money at GW, times have changed and moved on, has GW changed their ways? We’ll see won’t we?
Davin G. aka KiwiBigD
Your 3D print will not look anywhere as good as these preview sculpts. The cost for print is up there as well.
I wasn’t aware that they did that, but it doesn’t surprise me I guess. They seem to have that elitist attitude. The quality of their miniature sculpts is top notch though and thats what i’m most excited for. As far as rules, i’m sure they will butcher them. Hopefully they wont though and it will get more players interested in the game again.