Maybe it was just a kneejerk reaction, but I couldn't help but feel my stomach sink when I read that press release. Fantasy Flight does indeed make great games. Beautiful games. And, if they had produced a Mutant Chronicles miniatures game before the first incarnation of Warzone, I would probably have looked on the preview figures at GenCon with appreciation.
But, unfortunately, this game does not predate Warzone. It is, for all intents and purposes, the successor of the game that keeps all of us coming to this site. And, this successor is about as far from the original as it can get while still being called a miniatures game. While we no doubt all love the MC background, I'm pretty sure that most of us were first attracted to the game after being introduced to its solid rules system. And FFG has, for all intent and purposes, informed us that they won't be using the same rules system. While I can appreciate an elegant, stream-lined system, one that touts itself as alleviating the tedium of assembling army lists leaves me worried. I've yet to meet a person who found constructing armies in WZ to be intimidating.
And while FFG seems to have found a remedy for the concern that any licensee would have to worry about a glut of old WZ figs in the market, the choice of 36mm means that I'll be doing nothing more than admiring the figs at GenCon. I truly think that FFG could have built themselves a market without making part of that market old fans of MC figures who need to buy a whole new scale just to stay current. Keep the scale and armies consistent to satisfy the veterans, but release only new toys to attract a new market.
Oh well, as numerous others have mentioned, we've still got our figures and copies of our favorite incarnations of the rules. Guess we'll just have to see whether or not FFG produces a game that attracts us the same way the originals did.