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The box is nice. It is one of those folio types and the art on it is quite good. It weighs a fair amount even when empty. Mine has a scuff on one of the corners.

Open the box and the first thing you see is the art book, filled with character and landscape/architectural concepts from the game. I bought this set mainly for the concept art book, and it doesn't disappoint. Quite a hefty hardbound book that's full of very nice art and the occasional explanatory paragraph. It puts me in mind of the best bits from “The art of Warhammer online”, which I bought in the BL £1 sale a while back, but it’s three times the size and the art is of generally better quality (ie uniformly excellent throughout). It covers all of the races and archetypes present in the game upon release with various outfits for each character type and pages of monsters, structures, weapons, and armour (The Knights of the Blazing Sun have inexplicably missed the “u” from the word “Honour” etched into their swords). Some of the concepts vary slightly from the things we are used to in the current WH world, for example my favourite section, Monsters, has some rather odd looking quadruped Dragon Ogres and the Chaos spawn are reminiscent of the Scylla character that GW made a while back. I don’t think this is a bad thing, just different. The book could possibly do with having some sort of glossary or index, but apart from this it’s all good.

Next up is the hardbound comic book. It’s been a good few years since I’ve read a comic so I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from this. There’s a few stories, I only read the first one but I got the impression that they’re all linked in some way. The art is variable, quite good on the first and last stories but a bit bland in the middle. The dialogue in the one that I read was dull and hackneyed and quite inappropriate in parts (I think at one point one of the Chaos warriors says “fair enough” or something) and the story itself was a bit tedious and unimaginative. Flicking back to the first page I saw that all the stories are written by Graham McNeil, which adequately explains the pre-college quality of the text. Needless to say I won’t bother reading any of the other stories.

Next is the mouse mat. Not much to say about this, the art on it is good but it’s just a flimsy sheaf of plastic. I won’t be following the “peel away” instruction on the covering film, the mouse mat can stay in the box.

Finally nestling at the bottom of the box is the WAR edition Orc boss. The sculpting is good and there isn’t much excess material or mold lines on mine. This is quite a hefty piece and comes in a few parts, namely the main body of the orc, the axe (with hand), and a few spikes. Unfortunately the little snotling perched on his shoulder is part of the main body and not a separate piece as I had hoped, as I would have liked to have this on a separate base (mainly because I think the orc will look better without it), now I will have to go to the effort of removing it and damaging it in the process.

I really think they did a nice job in comparison to other CE MMO I have bought (SWG, WoW) The comic really helped my wife with some of the story line since she doesn't play WHFB and the art book feels like it has much more substance than the WoW art book (it even has the 4 classes that where removed at launch still in it). I think the model is very well sculpted, I too would have liked to see the goblin separated but I still think its a striking model without it.

I've always spelled Honor, as, well, Honor. In fact, Firefox is giving me a misspelling warning for Honour. It's probably like a Grey vs Gray thing.

Aduro wrote:I've always spelled Honor, as, well, Honor. In fact, Firefox is giving me a misspelling warning for Honour. It's probably like a Grey vs Gray thing.

Aye, its American English rather then Proper English or Engrish.

Cyporiean wrote:

Aduro wrote:I've always spelled Honor, as, well, Honor. In fact, Firefox is giving me a misspelling warning for Honour. It's probably like a Grey vs Gray thing.

Aye, its American English rather then Proper English or Engrish.

The Knights of the Blazing Sun would spell it the English-English way, I am almost certain. In fact they would go further than that and revert to Olde English. Ye honour, or something.

Aduro wrote:I've always spelled Honor, as, well, Honor. In fact, Firefox is giving me a misspelling warning for Honour. It's probably like a Grey vs Gray thing.

It's like hourse and armour and colour. /shrug