Gripping Beast new plastic Dark Age Archers

[Duncan McDane]

Simple designs like this shouldn't be done in plastic at all, they could have been designed in the late 80's/early nineties as single metal castings and sold en masse at about 1/1.5 pounds each. I think not many people will be happy with these, not the plastic converters, not the mass-battle wargames ( why have to glue models like this together at all? ), not the display painters...
Having said that, I like some of the "primitive" heads, especially Big Ears, he has a great illiterate peseanty look about him, like, "I have to be here but I'd rather watch my sheep grow fat"  .

[Maxromek]

What gets me is how old they look. I mean, they are so similar to the old Perry one-piece plastic GW Bretonnian archers I had to double-check they weren't converted from them! It looks like something from 30-odd years ago - not awful, just very basic, with a very basic style of sculpting, posing and casting. Unless you're buying a lot for quick, cheap unit building, I don't see the appeal.

THIS! Yeah this is how I felt about them as well! I remember I got a starter paint set with those Bretonnian Archers when I was 8! 16 years ago And yeah, those Bretonnians look much better.

I think that the potential of plastics was and is intended to be cheap and cheerful, the Perrys have spoiled us. A low number of poses, less time spent on 'sculpting' and few additional options, optimises the profit margin too.

But nowadays everyone does it. Look at the new 40K and AoS, Malifaux and others, all of these are plastics and look stunning. Plastics now look better than metals ever did. What more, with plastics you can sacrifice some detail to get customizability, something you cannae do with metals.

Personally, I used to hate metals when I was young and playing WFB and LotR. They were clunky, constantly fell apart (try getting a pin vice in early 00's Poland...) and were a general pain in the arse. But since starting with historicals, I fell in love with metals. Currently on the market, for Dark Ages/High Medieval there isn't a plastic set that looks nearly as good as the vast number of metal options you have. And it's not even that much more expensive - compare a starter GB plastic set for SAGA with a metal one. If you get BTD figures when they are on sale you can brake a bank. The point is, there is a balance, some sort of equilibrium between price, detail and customizabilty. The plastics traditionally didn't have much detail, the metals where more expensive and less customizable. But now we get plastics that are just cheap and quite frankly, it's an issue.

I don't hate these new archers that much, I think they still look better than other DA historical plastic archers. But it's just such a shame they aren't any better - because they easily could.

[Emir of Askaristan]

Actually I don't mind them. A litttle bit staid perhaps. The paint job is ok, but possibly not the greatest for showing them off either. The do remind me, not of GW, but of Essex 25mm's.

But wait, these are the three ups, some detail now obvious and a little glaring will be lost or very much reduced in 28.

There are better plastic sculpts out there to be sure and I wasn't a fan of the 3up late romans but they're alright too.

Not horrible and not stunning, just, y'know, kinda average. Perfect for their intended use as army building units or perhaps a spruce or twos worth, they'll sell well enough I'm sure.

[Cubs]

I know the 'drawing' pose is a classic for archers, and rightly so. But is it wrong for me to yearn for other less dramatic poses? The old Perry metal archers had guys just stood about, one swigging from a bottle, etc.. and added such great variety.

[Codsticker]

For some reason what bugs me more than that is the very uniform wrinkling of the fabric. There seems to be a trend in plastic kits (I'm looking at you GB and Fireforge) these days to sculpt everybody in taffeta.

[Arlequín]

Simple designs like this shouldn't be done in plastic at all...

I don't know, the Grandaddy of plastic figure ranges, Spencer Smith, used to come in bags of identical poses and if I was being uncharitable I would suggest these were somewhat of a homage to that aesthetic. I've had nightmares involving better looking fellows than these guys.

I'm with those guys who like the sheer variety plastic can offer; essentially no two figures need to be alike. You can't do that in metal without it being a real pain as regards the adhesive blues.

Seriously in what has become a 'Golden Age' of figures I'm starting to see options beginning to actually narrow. If I didn't know these were GB already you would have a hard time convincing me that they were.

[Whitwort Stormbringer]

Well I'll buck the trend and say I'm just fine with them, although whether or not I get any will depend on the price. Since the only Dark Ages gaming I do is SAGA, and I'm sorely lacking in the Levies department, the mention of 12-man sets definitely caught my eye! We'll see about the price.

It's true that there are some affordable Dark Ages metal archers out there, and I've had my eye on them, but I'm just not that keen on a lot of Black Tree's sculpting (very hit or miss, the archers are more of a miss, for me) and I can't get a good look at the Old Glory figures - a perennial issue that has prevented me from ordering from them.

[Littlearmies]

Well I ordered a set from eBay and received them this morning. Four sprues of bases (4x 8cm x 4cm stands on each sprue) and 10 sprues of three figures each. I'd photo them but there seems little point. You simply get the three bodies and three heads (the 'Urko' look alike isn't quite so apelike in person). The chap reaching for another arrow has a separate hand holding the bow. So literally the only variation you can put in is to mix the heads between the three figures and change the angle of the bow in the loading guys hand.

In short the free Perry Agincourt bowman sprue given away free at Salute a couple of years ago has more modelling potential than these. These clearly need the other GB (or other) plastic bits to give them any variation at all.

Sent you a PM Captain Blood... 

[Captain Blood]

God that is piss-poor isn't it? Really pathetic.
Is this what the wonderful new world of plastic figures has already come to? Three lots of 10 x identical figures in a box for nearly 20 quid? Shocking.

Replied to your PM before I saw this, Malcolm. So thanks for the very kind offer, but I don't think I'll bother 

[Maxromek]

Oh WOW...

I asked on their fanpage on FB about customisation and they did say it's mostly just heads, but I didn't think I wanted to believe that.

AND it's only 30 of them, where the Vikings/Saxons come with vastly greater customisability and 44 miniatures... Even the  Late Romans/Arabs/DA Warriors come at least with 10 figures more...

What a pathetic set...

[westwaller]

I blame Captain Blood     - The manufacturers of plastic kits see his wonderful conversions and say, look we don't need to make decent plastic kits anymore, as people can just buy our other products and make better figures...

Seriously though, there increasingly seems to be plastics coming on to the market that are 'okay' but limited in their poses, unless you buy another of that manufacturers kits- aside from Gripping beasts output, Warlords WW2 kits would be an example, although Warlords output has arguably improved in quality while Gripping Beasts appears to have gone the other way. I've recently been putting some of their Vikings together, and have had a lot of fun but I got a sprue of their Saxons and apart from some nice heads, they seemed a step down from the Vikings. The same applies to the Dark Age warriors too IMHO.

It seems the original plastic space marines kit had more options than some of the latest plastics...!

[westwaller]

I think that Gripping Beast, Fireforge and Warlord calculate that you will just buy more of their stuff, which I guess is how they operate, but to be honest, I think in as many cases it actually directs consumers away from their products towards the sprue sellers on ebay, so in some way they lose that brand/company loyalty by shortchanging us.

[Captain Blood]

You know if they were charging a tenner a box, I could just about understand it: 'Let's make a box with minimal variety for people that just don't care about the aesthetics - they just want to sling a bunch of figures on the table cheaply and without having to glue them together'.

But it's not. It's pretty much the same price as a Perry box, most of which contain (literally) 50 times the amount of components and possibilities... Ditto for Victrix.

Very poor show.

I remember when Gripping Beast were the great new hope. Beautiful metal miniatures. And early onto the plastic bandwagon with a couple of pretty good sets.
Well they have not so much lowered the bar as dropped it to the ground. Their current metal miniatures are nowhere near as good as their original ranges, and their career in the plastics market has been one continual dash to the bottom. What a pity...  

[Corso]

I find it quite difficult to understand when nowadays a company produces limited-pose plastic miniatures because one of the concepts of plastics is easy customisation for conversions and having variety. In my opinion Perry are the best, followed by Victrix and Warlords have recently started doing it on their ww2 kits.

In my opinion, companies should copy good practices by the above mentioned in order to maximise sales. They cannot expect modellers to buy stuff like the archers in question. I wouldn't.

[delbruck]

Apparently Gripping Beast assumes they will sell no matter what the opinion of people of this forum. There initial release of Hirdmen and Thegns was quite good. They have gone steadily downhill ever since. There third release of unarmored dark age warriors could have been brilliant if they had put a little more effort and money into it. These unarmored warriors could have offered an almost unlimited range of possibilities for even  unskilled modelers like myself. The Arab/Turkish cavalry boxes suffer from lack of horse variety. Two almost identical poses don't cut it anymore At first I was excited by the Late Roman release, but compared to the Victrix Early Imperial Legionaires the GB box appears to be extremely incomplete. And with the release of the dark age archers GB has sunk to a new low. Clearly GB has  chosen a different path than Perry and Victrix. Our only hope is that the quality of Perry and Victrix will be matched by high sales.