Mage said:
Honestly, I don't think warzone would work. It seemed it didn't sell. I mean, correct me if i'm wrong, but didnt two companies have this? I believe the first one went bankrupt and I never even heard about the second (so it must have been really bad).
From a practical business point of view, I belive it would be unfeasible for mongoose to do this game.
First company, Target Games, closed not due to itself the the holding company, Target Holdings, owning it went bankrupt. Unfortunately this left a glut of minis on the market (soon to fill the discount bins) and two great but somewhat incomplete game systems (Warzone 2nd Edition had only 2 army books out of 8 in print). This sort of left a bad taste in alot of distributors and retailers mouths.
The second company, Excelsior Entertainment, had an uphill battle due to trying to convince distributors to carry a product they just got done dumping and gamers who had either abandoned the game and sold off their collection or are all stock up after raiding the discount bins and hording stuff off of eBay. Furthermore Ultimate Warzone, although a great rules system (probably the best version of the three and one of my all time favorite TTG) was a horrible execution as it was the most poorly edited book I had ever paid money for. Unfortunately the people at Excelsior could design a great game system (Chronopia 2nd Edition was also great, and did not have the editing errors UWZ had), but couldn't run a company to save themselves. Strapped with lack of manpower, lack of money, and lack of focus, Excelsior could not release enough new product to keep supporting their game systems and just continued to frustrate their die-hard fans.
The owner of the license, Paradox Entertainment, pulled the license and gave it to Fantasy Flight Games as part the support for their recent movie deal.
Pretty much UWZ is no longer officially supported and last I had heard, all the molds and masters for the models were ordered destroyed. Fortunately UWZ was a pretty complete system and rather balanced with lots of playability and repeatability. Still tons of minis are out there and there's still lots of proxy potential. As it is, the game can still go on and be played rather well without any company support.
I myself love the game and own about 95% of the minis and have been working on proxies for units that never had models made. I would think that Mongoose would have done Warzone justice, much like it revitalized the B5 mini line. I've never played any of FFG's games but I've heard good things about them. I'm not interested in prepainted randomly packed minis, so it'll take alot to convince me to buy into the new version.