Sorry for the interruption in the regular weekly updates last week. I was working on Lokaris and just didn’t have anything interesting to show off so I figured it best to wait. Between Daylight Savings, work being exhausting and exasperating, and multiple things breaking in my condo this week, its been a pretty miserable week. The last couple of years have been tough here in the States anyway. It just feels like everything is bleak at times. Thank goodness for escapes like our hobby!
As far as Lokaris goes, I’m slowly building him up and painting sections that might be hard to access before adding more pieces onto the model. With this in mind, I focused on the left side of the model which didn’t have its accessories added to his belt yet. Mr. Lokaris has some interesting accessories including some tusks. As always, I did some photo referencing and of course, what kind of tusks do you see on the internet mostly, elephants and walruses. Walrus have very “clean” tusks so not very interesting. Instead, I went for elephants which have a mix of patterns on them. He also has a very interesting skull which looks like a demon’s skull, attached to a handle with a metal chain. At first, I thought, I should paint it bone, but the more I looked at it the more it looked like a Warhammer Nunchuck to me so that’s how I approached it. It looks pretty cool in the end, I think.
The front of him is really starting to come together now which is rewarding to see. I’m looking forward to seeing what else I can accomplish on this guy. I’m really taking my time and trying to do my very best work as I want this to be my best large scale miniature yet and something I feel good about taking to MMSI in the future as well.
Working on this miniature made me realize it would be nice to have one more painting handle for smaller miniatures, just in case I want to have two projects on the go. I don’t really want to take Lokaris on and off the base if I don’t have to, so I thought why not pick up another Citadel paint handle? I hadn’t realized that GW redesigned it quite a bit since I bought mine years ago. Here’s a look at them side-by-side in a fairly unimpressive picture.
While I can appreciate the sleekness of the new one on the left, my thoughts based on just initially holding is that it feels kind of weird and like there isn’t a great place to hang on to it. I look forward to actually trying it out at some point in the nearish future and seeing if it grows on me. Otherwise, I may be riding the old one out for as long as I can or maybe trying a different brand of paint handle in the future. We shall see.
Modiphius finally started teasing some of the changes coming to Fallout Wasteland Warfare: Second Edition and it was a lot more substantial than I was expecting. I’ve been a big fan of Fallout ever since I first tried it a few years ago and while I wrote that it needs a new edition a while back, I’m surprised by many of the details they’ve shared. I watched the video a week ago so my memory might be a little hazy now but hopefully I’ll get most of the details right. It is still early and there’s a lot that we don’t know yet too so my opinions might change over time. Finally, I want to preface my thoughts by saying, that I know people are working hard on this game and I want to see Fallout be successful for Modiphius because I really enjoy it, but (you knew there had to be a but), I’m not very enthused with the changes they’re making which I shall explain.
So perhaps the first place to start is that First Edition of Fallout took a Swiss Army knife approach to wargaming. It tried to do everything. There are scenarios, campaigns, modes to simulate having your own settlement, modes to simulate exploring a vault or the wasteland, and a Battle Mode (which is your standard 1 vs. 1 tournament style game). It was a lot and maybe even too much for new players to easily comprehend. Since Fallout Factions has been released and it is now the go-to 1 vs. 1 game now, Second Edition is nearly completely focused on solo and co-op gameplay. That makes sense to me and I completely understand this small modification.
What I wasn’t ready for is that Second Edition is going to be a campaign based game and there are no plans to make individual scenarios for the new edition. There are TONS of scenarios in First Edition, almost more than a person can hope to play in a decade of hobbying. Its awesome and something I love about the game. The only other game that I know of that is even comparable is Middle Earth Strategy Battle Game and I think the number and variety of scenarios are a real strength of that game as well. So it is surprising to me that they are not going to keep making new scenarios in the new edition. The campaign is going to be based on a hex-map system which will resemble the video games, I’m guessing. You spend a lot of time traveling around the Fallout world in the video games so I understand why they might think this is a good direction. Until I know more, its hard to fully judge this idea, but I do know that I would have preferred at least some new one-off scenarios. By not doing this, they immediately got me thinking about sticking with First Edition.
One concern I have about the new campaign system is that it is focused on creating random scenarios for you. There is something like this in First Edition, which I haven’t gotten to try yet, but hope to one day. Creating a system to do all this work for the players and for the designers makes a lot of sense, but at the same time, I have my doubts that it will be as good as hand-crafted scenarios are. Maybe AI has permeated my thinking too much but it feels a bit like that. If they create a system that can do all this work for them, Modiphius can create the new edition of Wasteland Warfare and leave it alone for the most part while they focus on Fallout Factions predominantly. I think Factions probably sells more models (even if you can use them all in both games) because more people want to play a 1 vs. 1 game than a solo-focused wargame as well so this move doesn’t seem like it is a good sign for the long-term future of Wasteland Warfare to me, but then again, I am a glass half-empty kind of person and I might be totally wrong in this regard.
In my opinion, campaigns in board gaming and wargaming sound great. You get to link games together and make each scenario mean more. The campaign tells a bigger and more ambitious story which is also cool. However, campaigns are not that easy to actually finish. I find that I think I want to play a campaign but more often than not, a single one-off game is much more realistic and something I can actually achieve. To make the crux of the game, campaign-based may not be the best decision for the long-term health of the game. The main reason why I haven’t attempted a Fallout campaign yet is that I don’t quite have the miniature and terrain collection to pull it off effectively. It takes a lot of miniatures and terrain to make for varied and interesting gameplay experiences.
Speaking a bit from my own experience, when I was much newer in the hobby, I was gung-ho on MESBG and I wanted to try and paint and get enough terrain for a campaign or two. I only worked on MESBG back then (as opposed to juggling too many projects now) and unfortunately, I never got close to playing any campaigns. It takes a lot of time and work to even get close to playing. I will admit that MESBG is tougher because you need a wider variety of terrain and often a higher miniature count but even in Fallout, its not going to be easy for new players. My concern is that this new system sounds good on paper but a lot of players are not going to be able to follow through on the hobby work and the time commitment to play campaigns and will end up losing interest and moving onto other wargames or hobbies.
The developers seem to be thinking of this because they’re changing the Second Edition board size from 3×3 to 2×2 which is again a bold choice. I find this hard to comprehend because Fallout features a lot of weapons that can shoot from one end of a 2×2 board to the other. That is going to require a fair bit of terrain to make for a strategically sound battlefield, I’m guessing. 2×2 also would make larger terrain projects not work so well. Something like Astro Mart (pictured below), which is known as Super Duper Mart in Fallout, is too big to work at this new board size. A big house would take up most of the board as well. So I’m curious to see how this will work out. The rationale provided seems to be to make the game easier for new players and I can certainly see where this helps them in a campaign-based system but I’m not sure its the best direction for the game as a whole. It certainly will limit creativity when it comes to creating terrain for the game, if nothing else.
There is a slew of other changes coming to the game as well which I won’t go into much detail about. They’re getting rid of some of the dice and the range rulers, both of which I like quite well. Apparently a lot of the rules are changing for the Second Edition which is a little surprising because First Edition has a pretty solid rules set overall. It has its flaws to be sure, but its very thematic which makes it fun to play. All of the cards are gone in Second Edition as well. Of all the moves they’re making, this one is all but essential. The cards were pretty unsustainable and Modiphius had more and more trouble even making them. So I knew this was going to happen and I’m not disappointed by it.
But by and large, Second Edition seems to be removing most of the things I liked about First Edition and I’m not sure it is going to be as new player friendly as they think it is going to be. I hope that I’m wrong but for now, I’m not really planning on investing in Second Edition and they’re going to have to convince me that its truly better than First Edition to make the switch. Before this week, I was fully expecting to get into the new edition and was even thinking that maybe one day I won’t need to keep all of the cards in my hobby closet. Its funny how quickly things change sometimes! Instead, I’m thinking about trying to pick up as many of the rules and card supplements that I can grab before they go out of print. I’ve enjoyed playing First Edition and perhaps, that will be where I stay for the next few years. Modiphius can still convince me to switch to Second Edition in the future but for now, I like what I’ve played more than the sound of the new edition which is not something that brings me any joy to say.
Kuribo's Painting 