Games Workshop has revealed a new range of pre-painted terrain for Warhammer 40,000 after leaked images appeared on Reddit on Wednesday - and it looks wild. Grey plastic and brown MDF terrain has been the bane of battlefields forever, and these new kits promise to make it easy (if not necessarily cheap) for fans to create tables that look fantastic.
The level of detail here is outstanding: black and yellow striped power cables, screen readouts, the glow around lamps, all (apparently) pre-painted right out of the box. It's better rendered than any commercially available pre-painted scenery I've seen before.
I don't think these are marketing bullshots, either - the paintjob has a higher resolution than similar kits, which is impressive, but also the kind of upgrade you expect to see in manufacturing processes as the technology matures. Whether every model comes off the production line this this well finished is quite another matter.
Unsurprisingly, each new scenery piece corresponds to one of the silhouettes on the battlefield maps from the new Chapter Approved mission deck coming with Warhammer 40k 11th edition. I wouldn't be surprised for GW to release a new set of terrain alongside each new Chapter Approved pack, just like the Kill Zones for seasons of Kill Team.
The actual choice of scenery items is interesting. Large and small corner ruins are completely expected, and then after that we've got a real focus on electricity, with generators, elevated power conduits, and electrified barricades. It's more varied than the gothic ruins and promethium pipes that have dominated Warhammer 40k terrain for some time, if a little bit more abstract as well.
I can think of three methods for commercially manufacturing pre-painted terrain, but given the sheer volume of products GW sells, only one of them seems likely. Hand painting the kits on a production line, or applying an all-over decal via hydro-dipping, would both be too labor intensive and expensive to be practical at scale.
That leaves Prismacast, a technology pioneered by Archon studios. This sends plastic sprues through a colossal color printer which sprays them with UV-reactive pigments that are immediately cured under UV light.
The finish is extremely durable, and the paint scheme is a reproduction of high-quality master paint jobs by pro-painters captured using photogrammetry, a technique that turns multiple 2D images into a 3D model. The one weakness of Prismacast is that the pigment nozzles spray straight down at the sprues, so it struggles to get around the sides.
It's highly unlikely that GW is collaborating with Archon Studio, since they're direct competitors - even more so with the launch of the Starcraft Tabletop Miniatures Game. So we can't assume that the strengths or weaknesses of GW's setup will be the same as Archon's. GW either has another supplier or has bought its own machines.
There's no word yet on when the new scenery will be available, but the smart money is on it coming out in the next wave of releases after the Armageddon launch box set. Since this is going to be the default terrain set for GW's biggest game, the price may be suppressed a little thanks to economies of scale.
But Archon's Prismacast kits cost 20%-33% more than their unpainted counterparts, and I don't expect Games Workshop to be any more generous. If I had to guess at the best deal we'll see, it'll be a bundle set with half a table's worth of terrain for $180-$200.
Are you going to pick some up? Has this made you more determined than ever to make your own DIY terrain? Are you just glad that we may finally be moving beyond the era of L-shaped ruins? Let us know in the Wargamer Discord community!