Star Wars Shatterpoint Released, Terrain Pieces and Expansion Packs Offering Unlimited Potential for Immersive Tabletop Gaming

I'm a little confused what this offers that Legion doesn't.

And man, for $165, 16 minis seems abysmal, even with some terrain pieces. You can get the Clone Wars coreset for Legion for under $100, and it has well more than double that at 39 minis.

edit:

Having watched an unboxing...

- Can confirm minis aren't painted (I had a suspicion maybe the high price point to low mini cost might mean they were pre-painted, but that's not the case)

- Terrain seems okay. Scatter terrain is something I've been really interested in lately in making for my D&D campaigns, so I get the appeal. But I'm still not sure it warrants the price.

 

I have to agree. Personally, I'm done with these ever-expanding games for which you have to buy endless add-ons. There's something here that makes tabletop gaming smell just a bit like games-as-a-service videogaming. 'Free to play, and you can buy some stuff for it' (whaling). I'm not a fan of it. On the other hand, I dislike seeing tabletop rpg systems stop receiving any real support after they deem a line 'completed'. How many books got produced for any given edition of D&D? Why won't these companies allow third parties to produce anything? The character of this end of the gaming industry has gotten too... corporate. Asmodee's treatment of Fantasy Flight's SW license is a perfect example of this for me.

 

Yeah, I don't mind when a game has a good system and it receives optional expansions. I would've been ecstatic if Imperial Assault had at least gotten yearly waves through the current day.

I remember when Legion came out, I was worried it spelled the end for Imperial Assault. I was told by many that the games were different enough, that they wouldn't directly compete. One was a narrative dungeon crawler, the other a tabletop wargame... which, fair enough. But I was right. Legion came out in early 2018, and IA was over before the year was done.

The cynical part of me thought that maybe after Asmodee's acquisition of the SW gaming license, maybe someone else managed to get a piece of the pie and created Shatterpoint... but that seems not to be the case, this is Asmodee too. Just really, really confusing why the same company would make two competing products like this, especially when:

- while the gameplay is different (seems to focus on even smaller skirmishes) it's not that different. Legion was, despite its name, a game with "oversized" minis noticeably larger than the common 28mm scale, and battles that featured a pretty limited number of combatants. If anything, the Clone Wars setting would've been a great way to introduce huge battles with minis more at the 20mm scale like Battles of Westeros. Just heaps and heaps of minis at a smaller, more manageable scale. But nope, that's not what they went with.

- Also, as far as I can tell, Shatterpoint (so far) isn't really offering a lot of figures that differentiate it from Legion. Like, it would've been one thing if Legion never got Clone Wars content, or if Shatterpoint shipped with minis that weren't in Legion yet (I see Luminara is in an expansion, and some Dathomir witches, but that's about it). Or hey, what if instead of Clone Wars, Shatterpoint was set in the Sequel era, or the High Republic, or the Old Republic, or embraced more Legends content? But no, it's basically just minis that are already pretty easy to get in Legion.

Just confusing, really. Doesn't really bother me at all, since I'm not really invested in either game. If I were to get anything, it would just be for minis for RPGs anyway, so I guess having more options potentially actually benefits me... I just hate to see the license wasted so badly like this.

 

Yeah, there are parts of IA I'll never be able to get because they're now held and overpriced by... game scalpers.

I would say that Shatterpoint is their answer to the 'kill team' squad-focused kind of tabletop miniatures gaming that has been introduced by Games Workshop and has even appeared in D&D.

Add to that that these miniatures are unpainted and there's just that much less value...