DOES Games Workshop make the best miniatures in the world?

[Mike X]

Not even close. With incredible sculpts from companies like Kingdom Death and Hawk Wargames, even the most detailed GW miniature is still sub-par to these new startups.

[Psychosplodge]

Ironically, Pepsi has never in the history of cocktails, been included as a mixer.

Maybe not listed as such, but I've certainly drank cocktails that used pepsi for the "coke" element of them.

[Iago Torres Piñeiro]

In my opinion, WG make excelent miniatures, but with the time they raise to much their prices.

now with de miniature digital edition to many company make high level minis

[40kGamer]

I always laugh when people say GW vehicle kits are unrealistic/stupid.

Do some research, a lot of them are actually based pretty shamelessly on real vehicles. Hell, even that ugly ol' Taurox is very close to a British vehicle currently deployed in Afghanistan, just with tracks instead of wheels...

The majority of gripes are all about the scale. Most of the vehicles are terribly proportioned, especially the transports.

[Erik Setzer]

It's all opinion based, but I'll throw in my own opinion, because why not?

I'm going to say "No." Not because I'm a GW hater (sit down, trolls), but because I'm a realist.

I love a lot of GW's figures. Heck, when I'm not using them, I'll gladly put the ones I've painted on display at home. (Yes, part of that is also personal ego showing off my decent artistic talent, but they're good canvases for that.) There's models I've loved for armies I don't play that almost got me to consider breaking my personal rule about not buying models I don't intend to use.

First, it's obvious that the non-gaming companies have a leg up, because they're making actual models for modelers. For all that Games Workshop loves to talk up how it makes the best models in the world and act like the games don't exist and aren't the reason people buy their models, they can't make models with the complexity of some of the top tank kits out there. Most gamers aren't modelers. They just aren't. Most of the new AoS models I've seen people playing with so far aren't even primed, much less have any amount of painting on them, and I have to stop myself from raging at all the mold lines I see. I remind myself that gamers aren't modelers, they just want to play games. Give these folks something with the complexity of the Dragon M1 kit that came out over 10 years ago (they've probably got a new one that's even better), and they would just skip over it, or lose their minds trying to assemble it.

So, okay, we've defined the parameters. But then that still leaves a lot of competitors.

Privateer Press has some models that are beautiful, but the warmachines that Warmachine is named for are not "top" quality. Oh, they look cool, to be sure, but that's not quite enough. So they can't top GW.

But then we get to ones like Wyrd and the guys who do Infinity. Those are absolutely amazing miniatures. Malifaux especially has impressive models, and Wyrd also makes a kit that lets you build eleven assorted female miniatures. That's meant for RPGs, sure, but it's still gaming miniatures.

The miniatures for the new Halo game are looking rather nice so far, especially considering the scale.

Bolt Action has some really good models. But it might be just shy of "the best."

Frostgrave has some really nice models.

Then there's Avatar of War. Holy smokes, those models look nice, especially characters, and I'd gladly use them in my Warhammer army.

And we have some third party companies. Kromlech makes Orks that, if I didn't play so often in situations that don't allow non-GW models, I'd gladly use them over the GW Orks. There are people making IG figures that are superior to the standard Cadians.

Keep digging, and you'll find more and more. And heck, Reaper makes some really nice miniatures as well, though mostly intended for RPGs. (We could possibly even toss in FFG with the miniatures for their games, but they're mostly a different style. Still, that AT-ST for Imperial Assault is awesome, and the figures are pretty good.)

Games Workshop's been giving themselves negative marks (again, in my opinion) lately as they've shifted more and more to throwing too much stuff on models just to claim "more detail," and, more importantly, making models with few or zero options (most times ZERO with characters), and models that require converting just to be useful in their given purpose (gaming) without looking weird, like Harlequins, where if you don't work at some hefty converting, even the squads end up looking way too similar. The new Stormfiends look nice individually, but as a unit they're disappointing because they look exactly the same and would require practically rebuilding the model to change the posing even the slightest. It's a similar situation with Verminlords or even Bloodthirsters, where you're encouraged to have multiples for the different sets of rules, but even with weapon swaps, the large bodies being the exact same pose is not a good look on the table (I've seen a guy with four of the new Bloodthirsters, using them all in a game last week... even being different types of BT didn't stop them blending in together). And then there's the Stormcast Eternals where you have an entire army that looks the same, with every piece of armor or weapon exaggerated, using an artistic style for basic troops that looks like Warmachine and first edition Warzone Bauhaus had a child together, and the characters try to make up for that by having way too much stuff thrown onto them. (The newer Khorne models, for the most part, look great though, although they do suffer from the lack of posing options, and the large beast in AoS looks pathetic, with more issues than I can list here.)

If you start taking all kinds of things into account, GW starts slipping badly with recent efforts. While they continue to push up their price claiming they're "premium" products, they've been producing more and more mono-pose models that are either ridiculously hard or impossible to convert. Characters are coming out in single poses without options, which is a bit of a shock to the system when you see prior kits that looked just as good but had a bunch of options. That single pose with no options also makes it hard to field more than one of a certain type of character, despite that being a desirable thing to do with many characters or units in-game. The cohesive look starts to degrade. The game pieces are becoming less useful to gaming, and at that point, they lose their appeal. The company seems to view them as museum pieces where you don't worry about their usability in a game or how they look in an army but rather in staged photos or on a shelf... but if I'm getting miniatures to look pretty on a shelf, I have plenty of better options, often at a better price.

So, going on just the artistic quality, they aren't "the best" (they're hanging in the top crowd, certainly), but if you start judging on usability, price, etc., they start falling behind.

And Failcast gets huge negative marks, because you should never rush to replace a material with a much cheaper material to save costs, make it more expensive, lie about the reasoning, and, worse of all, use a material that warps way too easily, making it useless in areas like Florida, or so brittle that it snaps with a glance. Even Chinese knock-offs aren't that bad, so shame on a major manufacturer for using such a horrible material.

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Do some research, a lot of them are actually based pretty shamelessly on real vehicles. Hell, even that ugly ol' Taurox is very close to a British vehicle currently deployed in Afghanistan, just with tracks instead of wheels...

The only problem with the Taurox was that choice to put silly looking tracks on it. Swap them for wheels and it looks pretty cool. I plan on getting one with a wheel kit to use as a transport for my Arbites (using IG Veteran rules). It seems like the perfect SWAT vehicle.

The scale, as mentioned, is off by a good bit, and sometimes it's a bit weird to consider a vehicle as opposed to the fluff, i.e. how the Crusader carries more guys than a normal Land Radier but has the exact same interior. Similarly, a Razorback loses seats from a Rhino, but there's nothing about the model to suggest that. Sure, they're saving money, which in another dimension would have been passed on to the consumer, but if you're just judging how "realistic" it is, that does become an issue. (Not one I care about, because these are game pieces, so some fudging of dimensions and all is okay.)