Any way WGA can provide a side-by-side of one of these 32mm guys next to a 28mm guy for comparison?
I think the 32mm scale will be the least of anyone’s problems – I expect the scales are much closer than some of us think, but:
If you assume that WGA’s 28mm figures are 6’ tall (a safe enough assumption for military figures, though that’s taller than average for most humans in history), then 32mm characters would still be a few inches short of 7’ tall (about 6’8" tall if I calculated right) – taller than the average 28mm grunt, but not remarkably tall compared to a typical professional basketball team, for example.
About normal for typical fantasy RPG character models, which tend to be about 30-32mm rather than their typically advertised “28mm” size thanks to “scale creep”. And, like fantasy RPG charqacters, this scale is suitable for “hero” character models, which is what these guys appear to be.
Bits between the two scales are generally close enough to mix-and-match, with the usual caveats about the difference between the more realistic vs. chunkier styles you’ll generally find in historical vs. fantasy/sci-fi figures: some arms and heads will look a little more natural than others depending on how slender/chunky the modeling is between the two kits. In any case, these guys will mix alright on the table with other WGA figures, they’ll just be a little taller, as befits champions, legends, heroes, leaders, and the like. And that power armor would look perfect with either scale.
In short, I doubt kitbashes between these guys and other WGA kits would be all that weird looking, all other things being even.
But, THAT brings us to the bigger “problem”, such as it is, for kitbashing here: these appear to be designed as “hero” character models, with posing that will likely be different from the usual 28mm WGA kits: these guys look like they’ll have more natural and unique poses, at the expense of compatibility of bits between models and kits. So, even if they were 28mm, I don’t think that 28mm arms and heads are likely to swap very naturally onto these models without a little extra modeling.
On the other hand, based on that sample sprue of the power-armored guy, looks like each character will be supplied with a nice variety of very unique optional bits suitable for these models. So, I doubt that it’ll be common for any two kits will be built the same, with a lot of variety out of the box.
Worrying about the price is probably fair enough, but these characters do seem to have a nice variety of unique bits that won’t resemble anything else in any WGA kits, in some nice, elaborate detail that you don’t usually see in the usual 28mm kits (see he sniper rifle in the preview photo for what I mean!) There’s a little tradeoff in detail, character, and so on, for the price-per-mini of a 28mm kit. Still not a great price-per-mini bargain, but for a set of nice character models in plastic, it’s not an outlandishly high price: I think Reaper runs about US$ 8-9 for a character model these days (usually no options at all), Wizkids runs about US$ 5 or so and appear to mostly be out of print with no options, D&D “Frameworks” kits are similar to these Trench Crusade guys but run about US$ 15 per figure… You might get better bargain prices from Archon Studios, 3D-printing, or other options, and certainly from a WGA “army builder” box, but Wargame’s Atlantic’s Trench Crusaders are running about $US 6 or 7 each – fair enough compared to the big-name competitors, especially given the subject matter, options, and quality.
Anyway, as I see it, the bigger problems for kitbashers look like they’ll be the price-per-mini, and what I assume to be the likelihood that these figures are probably not meant to share bits between them, nor between kits. I don’t expect the scale to be as bad as some of you might fear.
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