TheTuninator

Wasn't Coast completely developed off of the old White Dwarf army list? My impression was that GW retained extremely tight control over the design of all new factions.

Looking at the TW roster, HE have at least 4 overtly magical units, being Sisters of Avelorn, Dragon Princes, the various phoenixes, and the various dragons. Might be I'm forgetting one or two as well, but it's definitely more than two.

I think the "low fantasy" concerns are a bit off, personally. Bretonnia is arguably the most "low fantasy"/"grounded" faction in WHFB and even they have elite units who are demigods with divine superpowers. Every single faction in WHFB is "high fantasy", even Bretonnia and the Empire. I totally get people wanting lots of utterly normal rank & file troops, believe me (Bretonnia is my favorite faction, after all ) but over-the-top Rare troops are pretty normal for even the human factions in WHFB.

IMO the goal isn't to sell a tabletop version of TWWH to TWWH gamers, it's to pull TWWH gamers into the GW hobby and convert them into long-term GW fans. Making a game that operates in a completely different way from the rest of the GW hobby ecosystem just doesn't make sense here. An additional problem with 10mm-12mm is that it puts GW in direct competition with 3D printers; sculpting and printing detailed 10mm-12mm at scale for affordable prices is very feasible & harder for GW to contest on copyright grounds given the greater degree of abstraction. Somebody like Forest Dragon, for example, is able to quickly create entire model ranges with very limited resources at a similar or equal quality to what GW could do in 10mm, which would not be the case in 28mm heroic, where GW's institutional advantages over independent 3D printing competition are far stronger.

I personally would be shocked if it's anything but 28mm heroic. I base this off two things, the first being that GW is a models company first and foremost, and the second being that the game will likely be targeted primarily not at WHFB players, but people who have come into the hobby more recently & TWWH players. As GW is a models company, they have a lot of people who collect the models but don't play the game, and smaller scales like ~15mm hold a lot less appeal to this demographic due to the reduced detail. As far as the second issue, getting people to rebuy models is not a concern which warrants a scale shift because GW already knows that the old WHFB fanbase can't be relied on to sustain a major product line - else we'd still have WHFB today! They won't be primarily targeting people with existing WHFB armies, but rather newer players/people who never played WHFB (which will be a substantial % of the playerbase given churn/the outsize popularity of 40k) and trying to on-ramp TWWH players as well. Rebuying is not a concern for these people. While they will still want to attract WHFB grogs as well, this is where factions like Kislev and others (maybe Norsca?) come in, enticing WHFB grogs with a brand-new model line without requiring any kind of dramatic scale shift. And all that aside, of course, the history of GW shows that people are often quite willing to rebuy a nicer version of what they already had! I'd certainly scramble to throw more money at GW for new Bretonnians if given the chance.

Do we even think that TOW is going to follow the HH model? This still feels like speculation based off that we know FW staff are working on TOW to me. Logically, you would think TOW would be oriented to attract TWWH & Vermintide players, which would suggest at least all the core troops at a minimum would need to be in plastic.

I am pretty confident that the target for TOW is probably the end of 2022 (although this may have slipped because of COVID). This lines up roughly with the estimate they gave in November 2019, and they need to get TOW out during the peak of TWWH3's release cycle in order to maximize the number of people they can draw into the hobby through brand synergy, and TWWH will have been out for about a year at that point, leaving several years' worth of peak hype for GW to ride.

Yeah, I was thinking along the same lines! They could pretty readily push Bretonnia into a lot more overt iconography of the Grail and the Lady if they wanted to differentiate the range from medieval historicals, especially if the Bretonnian range were to revolve around Repanse. Make the Battle Pilgrims/Grail Reliquae look closer to the default and you'd have something a lot harder to replicate (plus it sounds pretty cool!) Since we're getting Kislev, I have hopes that they could hardly then pass over Bretonnia, but only time will tell. To be honest, even though I played Bretonnia in 7th & 8th I'd not heard of her until TWWH! However, she seems like a fantastic subject for a later campaign book in Old World, & a great opportunity for GW to create more overlap with TWWH. I think the Daughters of Khaine would fit into WHFB pretty neatly as part of the Dark Elves, but I don't think we'll be seeing any New World factions, at least not for a very long time.

I'm quite excited as well! I only played WHFB for a couple years during 7th and 8th (Bretonnians, DEand Dwarves here), but TWWH got me back into the setting in a big way. The potential choice of factions is pretty interesting. Aside from the obvious Empire and Kislev, who else do you guys think is going to make it? I personally expect it to launch with a few different Empire factions, Kislev, and O&G. As a former Bretonnian player, I hadn't realized that the War of Three Emperors lands right before Repanse in the timeline, so that gives me more hope (which I hadn't had initially) that we might see Bretonnia finally get an update after all! It does still seem a little doubtful, if only because GW these days is pretty keen on making their model ranges harder to imitate & Bretonnia is the epitome of imitable, but perhaps they'll figure out a way around that.