I gave feedback in person to Will as he was packing up on Sunday, but now that I see this thread I just have to post on it.
I LOVE THESE WEAPONS.
In particular, I love the pluggable blades, which allow me to use different haft lengths to create one-hand, two-hand, or cavalry versions of these weapons, as well as to customize the colors of the hafts that I use. (My big bad guy can use a black haft with a dark metal color, while my hero guy could use a brown, tan, or even white haft with a really shiny blade color.) I love that idea for customization, as a great improvement over the classic LEGO axe, where the whole thing was brown (including the blade?!), black, or gray (including the haft?!). Love it, love it, love it.
Will also asked what we thought about the size of the weapons, and I generally have two basic approaches for this: line troops, and heroes/villains. The big bad guy always gets a huge, epic-looking weapon, maybe with banners or radical colors or huge size, because I want to draw a viewer's eye to that guy. Sauron (as shown in flashbacks) in the Lord of the Rings movies was enormous, with armor that was ridiculously distinctive. So when it comes to that type of guy, you can't possibly have a weapon too big or too outrageous. As for individual troopers, I want something that looks good in scale, and which lends itself to having large groups of troopers literally lined up in rank and file. In that regard, my initial feedback to Will was that the halberd and pickaxe might be slightly large; however, in looking at them more (and posing some guys with them), I want to amend my feedback. Now I think they work pretty well.
The only one I'm a little meh about is the saber. For one thing, I don't really look at that shape and think "saber", but maybe that's a bit pedantic. (I do try to maintain enough perspective to realize that this is all molded plastic, and that the whole notion of "realistic" with small toys has to be taken with a grain of salt.) I think my bigger problem with it, though, is that its shape doesn't strike me as really distinctive. It's not curved enough to be a proper saber or scimitar, nor does it have the distinctive straight-then-curve of a khopesh, or the convex-to-concave curve of the LotR elven sword, etc. Its current design looks like a single-bladed, slashing sword, but to look really fierce to me it needs to have more material/mass toward the striking end of the blade along the lines of a Roman sword or a falcata/kopis/kukhri.
This is getting long. Key takeaway: I really hope that Will gets into this space, and I like what he's done here so far.
Feel free to PM me for contact info if you want more feedback, a researcher, or a participant for focus groups with additional prototypes.
All things in moderation, particularly moderators.
Flickr: [url]http://www.flickr.com/photos/sedmison/[/url]
