Anathir wrote: I wonder where this is going to go. GW can either knock this out of park or it will fizzle out. It depends which races they support. If they support the secondary and tertiary races like kislev, nippon, cathay and araby and don't include some of the famous races like high elves, dwarfs, lizardmen, etc then I don't expect this to last long. Surely GW know it is the races that made Total War Warhammer such a success. People don't want asian humans, slavic humans, indian humans, etc. .
But that’s basically what HH is...“which flavor of Marines do you want to play?”
And, I’d love to see them release things that were never explored before than the same old Tolkien based game we had...because that failed before, why rehash it?
Anathir wrote: Anything less than all 16 of the original races would be a disaster because they are what makes the WHFB setting what it is. It would be like making a 30k Horus Heresy game but basing on what the Eldar were doing at that time, or leaving whole chapters or primarchs out.
Expect it to be a “disaster” then. GW have never got close to simultaneously releasing 16 different forces for any game, ever. And to expect them to is unreasonable
Anathir wrote: Anything less than all 16 of the original races would be a disaster because they are what makes the WHFB setting what it is. It would be like making a 30k Horus Heresy game but basing on what the Eldar were doing at that time, or leaving whole chapters or primarchs out.
Expect it to be a “disaster” then. GW have never got close to simultaneously releasing 16 different forces for any game, ever. And to expect them to is unreasonable
Allow me to introduce you to 6th ed and Ravening Hordes, which contained lists for every single army including Chaos Dwarfs because they'd just invalidated every single Army Book.
Expect it to be a “disaster” then. GW have never got close to simultaneously releasing 16 different forces for any game, ever. And to expect them to is unreasonable
yeah 6th Edition Fantasy and 3rd & 8th Edition 40k were not made by GW I guess
Did they release models for 16 different armies at the same time? And were those armies at least between 5-10 model kits per army?
Cause that's what people mean when they say GW releasing 16 armies at once.
As opposed to rules for 16 armies and releasing only models for 2 or 4 or so at launch. Personally as I see it GW has nothing to gain releasing a huge host of rules for armies that they don't sell models for; esp in the modern market where 3rd parites would very fast undercut GW online and get armies out onto the market far quicker.
Why should GW risk that competition and have customers moving to other firms when they can just release a few armies and then add in new armies in stages adding in the rules when the army comes out through an Armybook
Anathir wrote: Anything less than all 16 of the original races would be a disaster because they are what makes the WHFB setting what it is. It would be like making a 30k Horus Heresy game but basing on what the Eldar were doing at that time, or leaving whole chapters or primarchs out.
Expect it to be a “disaster” then. GW have never got close to simultaneously releasing 16 different forces for any game, ever. And to expect them to is unreasonable
Allow me to introduce you to 6th ed and Ravening Hordes, which contained lists for every single army including Chaos Dwarfs because they'd just invalidated every single Army Book.
Not seeing any models there chuck. GW got out of the rules only business a while ago.
Overread wrote: Did they release models for 16 different armies at the same time? And were those armies at least between 5-10 model kits per army?
To be fair, they've given themselves at least three years to prepare... Given that (if they're just reusing the old models for the most part) some of this stuff would have still been sitting in the warehouse from last time around, and most of it is likely to be direct order rather than needing to be shipped around the planet to stores, and that they almost always under-produce for new releases anyway, it's not actually too outlandish an idea.
Overread wrote: Did they release models for 16 different armies at the same time? And were those armies at least between 5-10 model kits per army
all models from those lists were available by that time
Yes, over a period of 20 years. Not in the same month or 2
Why are you suggesting they don’t have the ability to release minis that already exist?
They could easily rerelease their entire plastic range circa 8th edition along with a handful of flavorful new kits that expand the setting and generate new interest.
Overread wrote: Did they release models for 16 different armies at the same time? And were those armies at least between 5-10 model kits per army?
To be fair, they've given themselves at least three years to prepare... Given that (if they're just reusing the old models for the most part) some of this stuff would have still been sitting in the warehouse from last time around, and most of it is likely to be direct order rather than needing to be shipped around the planet to stores, and that they almost always under-produce for new releases anyway, it's not actually too outlandish an idea.
I don't know if "reusing the old models for the most part" is the right terminology for it. A lot of the stuff that could show up(Dwarf Warriors/Rangers, Glade Guard/Deepwood Scouts/Waywatchers, High Elf Spearmen/Swordmasters/Archers/Silver Helms) would show its age as kits now. The Glade Guard kit in particular really doesn't live up to the same aesthetic that they've established now for the Wanderers range(and that quite a bit of artwork for the Wood Elves in recent years had, stuff like leaf/dagged mail)...so it might be that they're kits that will have dual purpose?
BobtheInquisitor wrote: The Glade Guard might not fit whatever the Wanderers are, but they fit Warhammer Fantasy Wood Elves just fine.
The Glade Guard fit the Wanderers just fine...but they got cut. In any regards, the design ended up fitting the concept of scouts more than anything else as time wore on. There was some art in the WHFB 8th(and possibly 7th?) core books done up in the Paul Dainton style of Wood Elves for what we might see for a 'Glade Guard' redesign. They still look like lightly equipped and armored archers, but they have a bit of actual protection afforded to their torsos.
They were very in line with this art:
Spoiler:
I'll see if I can find page numbers later for the specific piece I'm referring to.
Overread wrote: Did they release models for 16 different armies at the same time? And were those armies at least between 5-10 model kits per army
all models from those lists were available by that time
Yes, over a period of 20 years. Not in the same month or 2
Why are you suggesting they don’t have the ability to release minis that already exist?
They could easily rerelease their entire plastic range circa 8th edition along with a handful of flavorful new kits that expand the setting and generate new interest.
Given their track record I don't think anyone is expecting them to re-release old miniatures. Apart from anything else they have a quality standard now that is far and away higher than any previous WFB products, so releasing old miniatures wouldn't look good to them.
I think you'll find the main reason no one is expecting the entire range to reappear is that no one seriously thinks GW will release 10+ year old sprues again as a core product line.
As nice and 'easy' as that is, it wouldn't make financial, reputational, or qualitative sense to do so.
Overread wrote: Did they release models for 16 different armies at the same time? And were those armies at least between 5-10 model kits per army
all models from those lists were available by that time
Yes, over a period of 20 years. Not in the same month or 2
Why are you suggesting they don’t have the ability to release minis that already exist?
They could easily rerelease their entire plastic range circa 8th edition along with a handful of flavorful new kits that expand the setting and generate new interest.
Given their track record I don't think anyone is expecting them to re-release old miniatures. Apart from anything else they have a quality standard now that is far and away higher than any previous WFB products, so releasing old miniatures wouldn't look good to them.
I think you'll find the main reason no one is expecting the entire range to reappear is that no one seriously thinks GW will release 10+ year old sprues again as a core product line.
As nice and 'easy' as that is, it wouldn't make financial, reputational, or qualitative sense to do so.
Well, if they think they’re going to give us the Old World with a handful of redesigned and thrice-as-expensive core kits we already own...They’ll probably make a decent amount of money—not my money—for a couple quarters before they flush it all again. It strikes me as wasteful to bring back the Old World and then redesign it from the ground up.
Graphite wrote:Isn't the sea one of the reasons that the Norse are less chaotic?
All this time I wondered why the norscans had any kind of distinctiveness when everything north of troll country was warpdust-coated crazy nutso Chaos territory, and why they weren't just typical spiky chaos warriors and marauders. That there was an extra sea there all this time, cutting Norsca off, helps explain it. Still Chaos influenced, but not swamped.
Interested to see a bit more about norse dwarfs too.
Well, for one thing, Dwarfs are naturally resistant to magic, so Chaos can't affect them as much. It's why the Chaos Dwarfs aren't hideously mutated.
Given their track record I don't think anyone is expecting them to re-release old miniatures.
I am, if the game is intended to be a full-scale recreation of WHFB. Because the alternative would be them taking a decade to get all of the forces re-released, and I just don't see that being a viable plan.
So I expect that it will either be a 'Forces of Good' and 'Forces of Evil' type affair, with a bunch of new sculpts for each side drawn from the various WHFB and all blobbed in together in mixed race armies... or it will be more like the old WHFB and will feature a handful of new units for each faction alongside the old plastics.
I think you'll find the main reason no one is expecting the entire range to reappear is that no one seriously thinks GW will release 10+ year old sprues again as a core product line.
We don't know that this is going to be a core product line.
And we have precedent for GW releasing old and sub-par kits when it suits them. See the Battle for Vedros sets.
BobtheInquisitor wrote: The Glade Guard might not fit whatever the Wanderers are, but they fit Warhammer Fantasy Wood Elves just fine.
The Glade Guard fit the Wanderers just fine...but they got cut. In any regards, the design ended up fitting the concept of scouts more than anything else as time wore on. There was some art in the WHFB 8th(and possibly 7th?) core books done up in the Paul Dainton style of Wood Elves for what we might see for a 'Glade Guard' redesign. They still look like lightly equipped and armored archers, but they have a bit of actual protection afforded to their torsos.
They were very in line with this art:
Spoiler:
I'll see if I can find page numbers later for the specific piece I'm referring to.
There's a bit more detailing to the art than what the actual Glade Guard models had. Notably the scalemail that you can see on both the Sisters of Twilight and the art below.
On the physical models of the Glade Guard? That was just bare skin. Then there's the separation between the cape/mantle and the skirting around the legs that's better shown in the lower piece of art.
When Glade Guard first came out? Those kits were gorgeous...but they can do so, so much better now.
Given their track record I don't think anyone is expecting them to re-release old miniatures.
I am, if the game is intended to be a full-scale recreation of WHFB. Because the alternative would be them taking a decade to get all of the forces re-released, and I just don't see that being a viable plan.
So I expect that it will either be a 'Forces of Good' and 'Forces of Evil' type affair, with a bunch of new sculpts for each side drawn from the various WHFB and all blobbed in together in mixed race armies... or it will be more like the old WHFB and will feature a handful of new units for each faction alongside the old plastics.
I think you'll find the main reason no one is expecting the entire range to reappear is that no one seriously thinks GW will release 10+ year old sprues again as a core product line.
We don't know that this is going to be a core product line.
And we have precedent for GW releasing old and sub-par kits when it suits them. See the Battle for Vedros sets.
It's possible and I'd love them to do it, but 3 years is far too long if 90% of your releases are existing product.
the battle for vedros was released under their easy to build starter line, not as a whole 'new' (old) game. It was a way to put cheap minis out for people to get into.
I'd be happy to be wrong. But It seems to me that GW are very much 'the new hotness' strategically, and only a very few ranges from WFB are new enough to get that re-release.
Maybe what they'll do is focus on a couple of new ranges, updated empire knights etc, plus kislev and release small supporting faction sets using only the best of their old stuff? Dwarf ironbreakers for example?
I can see them reusing units they still sell for AOS as they were originally WFB anyway.
While they're at it I'd love them to delve back into their EPIC and BFG plastic moulds and start producing those again...
It's possible and I'd love them to do it, but 3 years is far too long if 90% of your releases are existing product.
It's really not, particularly if they don't have a lot of old stock still in the warehouse. They had been reducing the amount of stuff they wanted to store for some time now (one of the reasons for the constant out of stocks) and getting that many sprues back into production isn't something that can happen overnight, particularly without affecting their production of everything else.
We also don't know what state the rules are in at this point.
I'd be happy with them just bringing back 6th ed ravening hordes style as that was IMO probably the simplest and best WFB ever was.
They seem to be doing something at least a little new though.
My prediction is:
A new ruleset, but perhaps based on an older version of the game (not just 8th ed rejigged) to bring back the nostalgia people (they did this with Necromunda and AT), not designed as a tournament game but as a nostalgia narrative one based around the Great War, and similar to Horus Heresy.
Focusing on armies of new miniatures, starting with Kislev, Empire and Chaos.
I don't see them reusing existing miniatures in AOS for this because it could dilute or confuse their brands if customers don't know what is what. also if they're going for square bases they'd have to RE RE box old units with square bases again.
You'd either get two of the same unit with different bases, or a single box with twice the bases so you can choose which game you want them for.
It seems to me that the bases and separation of games are a big reason why'd they'd not want to mix units up.
In that reimagining vein perhaps they go for a Warmaster type system but using WHFB scale models with multi basing as an inherent part of the game.
The rules being aimed at more of a 3000-4000 point size in relation to 8th Fantasy in the way HH was built to have bigger units and more toys than the standard game of the time.
I don't see them reusing existing miniatures in AOS for this because it could dilute or confuse their brands if customers don't know what is what. also if they're going for square bases they'd have to RE RE box old units with square bases again.
You'd either get two of the same unit with different bases, or a single box with twice the bases so you can choose which game you want them for..
They've done the twin base thing before - Space Marines with both 25mm and the newer, larger bases, and Chaos Daemons for a long time came with both square and round.
Assuming they're going to ranked fantasy (which the square base teased a while back would seem to suggest) it would only be those models previously released for WHFB that would be suitable for this treatment, though, as the newer models released specifically for AoS aren't designed to rank up.
As another thought - maybe the reason we're seeing "unreleased faction" artwork for Kislev before anything else is that Total War 3 will be coming out before The Old World - and they're unifying their art direction with CA
Everything south of Kislev already exists and doesn't need concept art.
Graphite wrote: As another thought - maybe the reason we're seeing "unreleased faction" artwork for Kislev before anything else is that Total War 3 will be coming out before The Old World - and they're unifying their art direction with CA
Everything south of Kislev already exists and doesn't need concept art.
Its plausible. There are fan mods for Kislev and its possible that CA sees that as a demand for Kislev and wants to add them in the next game to get more appeal.
Its also possible for GW and CA to collaborate to help drive profits for each other.
They'll need 4 races for Total War 3 if they want to keep with the previous pattern. Also on previous experience they expand the map, and north and east are the logical directions to go.
That brings in Ogres (who are already pretty sorted for design) and Chaos Warriors of various non-norscan tribes. Probably Daemons. Possibly Chaos Dwarfs rather than Warriors if they feel that the Chaos roster is fleshed out enough, but I suspect they're more likely to be DLC.
To get to either of those things, you have to go through or near Kislev.
I'd be surprised if the campaign doesn't involve a massive Chaos incursion. Possibly The End Times.
So either you expand Kislev, or you leave them like Tilea and the other minor human kingdoms.
Graphite wrote: They'll need 4 races for Total War 3 if they want to keep with the previous pattern. Also on previous experience they expand the map, and north and east are the logical directions to go.
That brings in Ogres (who are already pretty sorted for design) and Chaos Warriors of various non-norscan tribes. Probably Daemons. Possibly Chaos Dwarfs rather than Warriors if they feel that the Chaos roster is fleshed out enough, but I suspect they're more likely to be DLC.
To get to either of those things, you have to go through or near Kislev.
I'd be surprised if the campaign doesn't involve a massive Chaos incursion. Possibly The End Times.
So either you expand Kislev, or you leave them like Tilea and the other minor human kingdoms.
Been thinking about this. My guess would be Kislev, Ogres, Chaos Dwarves definitely, and then possibly Tamurkhan's horde, or another Turkic/Kurgan-flavoured army, especially given the rivalry of kurgan and kislev.
If they do decide to flesh out any of those not-historical historical stereotypes, my bet would be on Araby rather than Estalia, Tilea, Ind, Nippon or Cathay.
I suppose they may even make a couple of mono-chaos-god armies based on any of the aforementioned factions perhaps, in addition to the potential Tamurkhan's horde.
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Graphite wrote: As another thought - maybe the reason we're seeing "unreleased faction" artwork for Kislev before anything else is that Total War 3 will be coming out before The Old World - and they're unifying their art direction with CA
Everything south of Kislev already exists and doesn't need concept art.
Graphite wrote: Don't know about that. Daemon armies must surely be on the cards ahead of Chaos Dwarfs.
That's also seems very likely. However, a potential problem with daemon faction in a TW game is the campaign map aspect. Sure, they may put them in the heart of the chaos wastes and give them some sort of building roster, but with them not being a people (naton/fraction/whatever) may end up boring and probably immersion breaking.
Even on the tabletop, I always thought daemon armies in WHFB never amounted to more than simply being a magical gimmick because of that.
They don't really have a stake of their own (or relatable/understandable longer-term agency) for one to immerse oneself with unlike the rest of the factions, and that may only be more noticeable in a game like TW. It's mainly because of that I'd prefer daemon/mortal combined monogod factions, but again, this is just wishlisting, not a prognosis.
All that said, we'll most probably see an all-daemon faction.
Graphite wrote: Don't know about that. Daemon armies must surely be on the cards ahead of Chaos Dwarfs.
That's also seems very likely. However, a potential problem with daemon faction in a TW game is the campaign map aspect. Sure, they may put them in the heart of the chaos wastes and give them some sort of building roster, but with them not being a people (naton/fraction/whatever) may end up boring and probably immersion breaking.
Even on the tabletop, I always thought daemon armies in WHFB never amounted to more than simply being a magical gimmick because of that.
They don't really have a stake of their own (or relatable/understandable longer-term agency) for one to immerse oneself with unlike the rest of the factions, and that may only be more noticeable in a game like TW. It's mainly because of that I'd prefer daemon/mortal combined monogod factions, but again, this is just wishlisting, not a prognosis.
All that said, we'll most probably see an all-daemon faction.
I would rather they went down the Powers route so you have armies of [[Chaos God]] and mix and match Daemons and Mortals then have rules for bringing in other Powers or making Unaligned armies
Daemon's objective should be the continued expansion of the Realm of Chaos so that they can get further south, with severe attrition if they're outside the RoC. Granted "holding territory" as such shouldn't be a major thing for them. It's going to put them in direct conflict with human Chaos worshippers too, as it should be.
Diplomacy should either be nonexistant or very Tzeentchian.
Anyway, this is getting away from the main topic, which is that I think GW are laying down markers of what Kislev should look like as guidance for Total War as priority before dealing with The Old World.
I'd be happy with them just bringing back 6th ed ravening hordes style as that was IMO probably the simplest and best WFB ever was.
They seem to be doing something at least a little new though.
My prediction is:
A new ruleset, but perhaps based on an older version of the game (not just 8th ed rejigged) to bring back the nostalgia people (they did this with Necromunda and AT), not designed as a tournament game but as a nostalgia narrative one based around the Great War, and similar to Horus Heresy.
Focusing on armies of new miniatures, starting with Kislev, Empire and Chaos.
I don't see them reusing existing miniatures in AOS for this because it could dilute or confuse their brands if customers don't know what is what. also if they're going for square bases they'd have to RE RE box old units with square bases again.
You'd either get two of the same unit with different bases, or a single box with twice the bases so you can choose which game you want them for.
It seems to me that the bases and separation of games are a big reason why'd they'd not want to mix units up.
But we'll just have to see...
Tend to agree.
I suspect it'll roughly follow the pattern of the recent Adeptus Titanicus.
Empire versus Empire ( ie mainly human versus human) initially -- basic game rules, army lists etc -- with some flavour units on one side or the other and then the possibility to flavour armies in certain ways later -- say Empire province specific lists or rules or special knightly orders -- much like the various titan legion rules.
This keeps things simple early on and -- much like they had to in the original AT -- keeps the costs down model wise as they can duplicate most/the majority of sprues for each force -- ie both sides might have "Imperial Spearmen" or whatever -- with perhaps one or two unique units for side -- as well as characters perhaps.
This also has the benefit that one could combine the opposing factions into one larger Empire army for later games or as a larger starter army.
I'd then go with something like the next book and minis being something like the 1st Great war against chaos -- uses largely the same empire minis plus new units -- like the Kislev stuff -- and brings chaos into the game -- faction wise not rules wise..... although knowing GW ... -- which is kind of the defining BIG BAD of warhammer.
You could release/test some rules for allied units like dwarfs and/or elves -- and perhaps ramp up the magic quotient/use of spells etc -- maybe whatever equivalent of Endless Spells they might do or just spell affect markers etc.
Then do something like the war of the beard/vengeance -- which subject to scale brings in a lot of units like dragons or those large stone golems the dwarfs had at the time and there was scuttlebutt about at various time back in the WFB era -- maybe new/expanded siege rules too.
Then greenskins -- fight everyone -- and maybe expanded chaos stuff and off you go.
With undead etc etc all rolling out at a later date.
I don;t think it's feasible for them to release mins and/or rules for every faction at once nor do I think it's likely it'll play with existing models any more so than the current Adetus Titanicus does.
We know Kislev's coming in the first setup. They talked about Magnus, they've talked about the Great War Against Chaos. I do not expect anything remotely like Adeptus Titanicus for this.
Additionally, nobody has even remotely suggested there will be "minis and/or rules for every faction at once". Lizardmen, Dark Elves, Ogres, Bretonnia, Vampire Counts, Tomb Kings and Orcs wouldn't be involved with The Great War Against Chaos--or if they choose to make them involved, it would be small one-off sections(and it really only works for Dark Elves since part of the reason why the High Elves sent so little to aid the humans was because the Dark Elves were in the midst of their largest invasion of Ulthuan since the Sundering) that don't necessarily require anything more than rules.
It's all speculation and we can argue about what a limited launch would look like, but it's almost certainly going to be limited and focused at first based on SG's track record.
Anathir wrote: Anything less than all 16 of the original races would be a disaster because they are what makes the WHFB setting what it is. It would be like making a 30k Horus Heresy game but basing on what the Eldar were doing at that time, or leaving whole chapters or primarchs out.
Expect it to be a “disaster” then. GW have never got close to simultaneously releasing 16 different forces for any game, ever. And to expect them to is unreasonable
Allow me to introduce you to 6th ed and Ravening Hordes, which contained lists for every single army including Chaos Dwarfs because they'd just invalidated every single Army Book.
Not seeing any models there chuck. GW got out of the rules only business a while ago.
We weren't talking about models there, duder, we're talking about them releasing the rules for armies that already had models pre-End Times so that people can play with the stuff they have at release alongside the newer stuff. You know, like they did with Blood Bowl.
gorgon wrote: It's all speculation and we can argue about what a limited launch would look like, but it's almost certainly going to be limited and focused at first based on SG's track record.
Edit: Which will lead to much gnashing of teeth.
Out of curiosity, does anyone know how Horus Heresy launched? As in, what was available rules and model-wise at launch?
While it might not be the same, it might give us an idea what we could consider possibly plausible at launch.
Also, I personally find the notion that all this could sort of coincide with a Total War video game release to make some degree of sense. It gives each product a sort cross-merchandise potential, video game players might buy models, table top players might look into the video game.
Kanluwen wrote: We know Kislev's coming in the first setup. They talked about Magnus, they've talked about the Great War Against Chaos. I do not expect anything remotely like Adeptus Titanicus for this.
Additionally, nobody has even remotely suggested there will be "minis and/or rules for every faction at once". Lizardmen, Dark Elves, Ogres, Bretonnia, Vampire Counts, Tomb Kings and Orcs wouldn't be involved with The Great War Against Chaos--or if they choose to make them involved, it would be small one-off sections(and it really only works for Dark Elves since part of the reason why the High Elves sent so little to aid the humans was because the Dark Elves were in the midst of their largest invasion of Ulthuan since the Sundering) that don't necessarily require anything more than rules.
Very true - if it is the period they are doing you can have the forces of Chaos as one big force and then:
Kiselv and their Dwarf allies
Empire, their Dwarf allies and Teclis, a few Archmages and their Swordmaster bodyguard
Throw in some Tilean/Estalian and Ogre Mercs
Maybe even the odd Vampire - Lahmians and others were active.
How big a launch could this possible be? Necromunda got 6 kits to start off and that was a huge launch. Assuming this is 28mm 6 kits wouldn't even be one faction, much less all. Will GW really support 3 25mm/28mm mass combat games?
Thinking about it this might be a 2 faction launch, Kislev and Chaos. 4-6 kits each.
Both Blood Bowl and Necromunda had bare bones lists for the old factions on release despite only having models for a couple (albeit Necromunda only had the house gangs not the outlanders) hopefully this will do the same
Ravening Hordes is probably the right comparison - very slimmed down with minimal special rules (USRs aside) or flavour (and 1 para of fluff per army), but enough to use everything.
Kid_Kyoto wrote: How big a launch could this possible be? Necromunda got 6 kits to start off and that was a huge launch. Assuming this is 28mm 6 kits wouldn't even be one faction, much less all. Will GW really support 3 25mm/28mm mass combat games?
Thinking about it this might be a 2 faction launch, Kislev and Chaos. 4-6 kits each.
Probably a starter box with both those faction to start, maybe rules for a few more but no model support right away maybe? I do like the idea of a Kislev/Chaos box. Although maybe it won't be "chaos" in the general sense. Maybe somethign we're not expecting. I mean Kislev is right next to Troll Country so maybe a monstrous horde? Or even something different like Kurgan Raiders.
Kid_Kyoto wrote: How big a launch could this possible be? Necromunda got 6 kits to start off and that was a huge launch. Assuming this is 28mm 6 kits wouldn't even be one faction, much less all. Will GW really support 3 25mm/28mm mass combat games?
Thinking about it this might be a 2 faction launch, Kislev and Chaos. 4-6 kits each.
Probably a starter box with both those faction to start, maybe rules for a few more but no model support right away maybe? I do like the idea of a Kislev/Chaos box. Although maybe it won't be "chaos" in the general sense. Maybe somethign we're not expecting. I mean Kislev is right next to Troll Country so maybe a monstrous horde? Or even something different like Kurgan Raiders.
There was lots of really cool Kurgan stuff in all the SoC era books that never saw models as the army was always very chaos warrior focussed.
Similarly some interesting marauder units in the TW army that were never represented but are in keeping with the fluff.
So if they want to make it new and different (and minimise cannibalising AoS) Kislev vs Kurgan/Norse with the latter being very marauder heavy might be the way to go .
gorgon wrote: It's all speculation and we can argue about what a limited launch would look like, but it's almost certainly going to be limited and focused at first based on SG's track record.
Edit: Which will lead to much gnashing of teeth.
Out of curiosity, does anyone know how Horus Heresy launched? As in, what was available rules and model-wise at launch?
While it might not be the same, it might give us an idea what we could consider possibly plausible at launch.
Also, I personally find the notion that all this could sort of coincide with a Total War video game release to make some degree of sense. It gives each product a sort cross-merchandise potential, video game players might buy models, table top players might look into the video game.
Well...HH was a big campaign book with basic legion lists and some rules changes. Because it was basically a supplement for 6th edition 40K. There was no plastic, it was all resin. And that was 8 years ago. So I don't think we should take too many cues from HH.
gorgon wrote: Well...HH was a big campaign book with basic legion lists and some rules changes. Because it was basically a supplement for 6th edition 40K. There was no plastic, it was all resin. And that was 8 years ago. So I don't think we should take too many cues from HH.
That's a good point. I do think, that without any other information, correlating it with the notion of HH and the notion of possible Total War cross merchandising are plausible ways to think about it, both necessarily are not indicative of what we are likely going to actually get. Of course, 8 years and moving away from resin, a no-longer supported rules set and so on means what "like HH" actually means to GW is anybody's guess. Frankly, it might still be, at this moment, something GW isn't sure about yet either.
Personally, I'd guess that, rules wise, we get something like a modified 8th rules set, we get "Campaign Books" or something like it, which might line up with whatever the story/setting of a "new" Total War game might be, so featuring a limited set of armies/units. That being said, there is no knowledge here, no manner to infer how likely that is or is not, of course.
Mr Morden wrote: Are Ice Warrior Women or Bear Cavalry in Total war II?
I don't think Kislev is in the game at all. The prospective idea here was that possibly Kiselev might be something featured in a new version of the game, say Total War 3, or something like it, and this project is a sort of collaborative effort in a sense, to have something table top to "go with" the game.
Of course, that is out and out speculation with nothing to back it but the notion of it making some sense in a way. But that doesn't mean it will actually be the case in any way, shape or form.
The problem I'm having at the moment is none of the theories/possibilities quite work for me in the sense of their target audience and long term viability.
The Total War newbies are going to want big armies with big units, and probably won't buy in unless one of their favourite factions gets a look in(and it's worth noting that the "weird" factions seem to have a much broader appeal in this new segment of the audience, probably because they're not playing second-fiddle in the videogame as they often did on tabletop).
A lot of the old grogs are going to want their old armies to be playable.
They're not going to rope in many of the came-in-with-AoS fans unless they really tie the AoS fluff in hard, retconning in explicit links between whatever time period/s they end up using and AoS.
The most plausible theory seems to be an approach consistent with the various Specialist Games, of a very limited possibly even monoarmy AT-style launch, and a Heresy-style buildup that might eventually see other armies involved. The target audience there - and I believe I'm probably in it, for the record - seems *very* small; you're talking about whatever small subset of all the above fanbases care enough about the history of the Empire specifically and this period in particular that they'll buy in to slow-burn campaign style system, that can at least tolerate whatever rule system they end up using, and buy in big enough to at least keep it from getting cancelled.
That seems...questionable. Especially since, at least from what I've seen, the crossover between people who fit that very niche playerbase and the people who're not overly fond of all the high-magical stuff they're choosing to start the marketing push with is quite high.
But then what are the alternatives? They could scale down the size of the battles to more of a Warhammer Skirmish level to enable them to bring out more period-specific factions, but that'll turn off a lot of folk who want their rank & flank mass battle game back/their videogame made real. And if they were planning to go small, you'd think they'd take advantage of their existing catalogue and just begin with Mordheim.
Honestly the only two approaches I can see that *might* work are either a really big initial release with three or four factions, fully realised, and then a "main game" level of support to keep adding more of them asap, or else a Ravening Hordes style set of army lists and the WHFB range as it was in 2014 - or as close as possible - put back up for sale even if direct-only as a basis, and then the new campaign stuff and factions/minifactions as the ongoing releases. Neither seems particularly likely though.
Mr Morden wrote: Are Ice Warrior Women or Bear Cavalry in Total war II?
I don't think Kislev is in the game at all. The prospective idea here was that possibly Kiselev might be something featured in a new version of the game, say Total War 3, or something like it, and this project is a sort of collaborative effort in a sense, to have something table top to "go with" the game.
Of course, that is out and out speculation with nothing to back it but the notion of it making some sense in a way. But that doesn't mean it will actually be the case in any way, shape or form.
They're sort of in it. There's a Kislev faction but AFAIK they're just a copy of the Empire units.
Yodhrin wrote: The problem I'm having at the moment is none of the theories/possibilities quite work for me in the sense of their target audience and long term viability.
The Total War newbies are going to want big armies with big units, and probably won't buy in unless one of their favourite factions gets a look in(and it's worth noting that the "weird" factions seem to have a much broader appeal in this new segment of the audience, probably because they're not playing second-fiddle in the videogame as they often did on tabletop).
A lot of the old grogs are going to want their old armies to be playable.
They're not going to rope in many of the came-in-with-AoS fans unless they really tie the AoS fluff in hard, retconning in explicit links between whatever time period/s they end up using and AoS.
The most plausible theory seems to be an approach consistent with the various Specialist Games, of a very limited possibly even monoarmy AT-style launch, and a Heresy-style buildup that might eventually see other armies involved. The target audience there - and I believe I'm probably in it, for the record - seems *very* small; you're talking about whatever small subset of all the above fanbases care enough about the history of the Empire specifically and this period in particular that they'll buy in to slow-burn campaign style system, that can at least tolerate whatever rule system they end up using, and buy in big enough to at least keep it from getting cancelled.
That seems...questionable. Especially since, at least from what I've seen, the crossover between people who fit that very niche playerbase and the people who're not overly fond of all the high-magical stuff they're choosing to start the marketing push with is quite high.
Well, we might be thinking about this in the wrong direction though. Thinking of how this "pays" as a tabletop game might be putting the cart before the horse so to speak. What if it is the case that, somehow, the financial incentive is really on the part of making Total War assets: concept art, setting, story, for use in the game, which then, since it already exists will be (re)used (or repurposed) for a specialist game?
We already know that specialist games are very limited scope and still manage to be made. So, I don't know that, a priori, a limited scope thing is necessarily out of the picture. Of course, we don't know that it is in the picture either. All we can do is guess a plausible, possible cases.
Mr Morden wrote: Are Ice Warrior Women or Bear Cavalry in Total war II?
Not really no, They are a proper full faction in Warhammer 3 though, along with Chaos Dwarfs, Chaos Daemon and Ogre Kingdoms. It would not surprise me if some cross promotional work will be involved as well.
Graphite wrote: They'll need 4 races for Total War 3 if they want to keep with the previous pattern. Also on previous experience they expand the map, and north and east are the logical directions to go.
That brings in Ogres (who are already pretty sorted for design) and Chaos Warriors of various non-norscan tribes. Probably Daemons. Possibly Chaos Dwarfs rather than Warriors if they feel that the Chaos roster is fleshed out enough, but I suspect they're more likely to be DLC.
To get to either of those things, you have to go through or near Kislev.
I'd be surprised if the campaign doesn't involve a massive Chaos incursion. Possibly The End Times.
So either you expand Kislev, or you leave them like Tilea and the other minor human kingdoms.
Ogres, Daemons, Chaos Dwarfs, Kislev would be my bet. 4 varied races and the most popular races not yet released.
Lord Zarkov wrote: Both Blood Bowl and Necromunda had bare bones lists for the old factions on release despite only having models for a couple (albeit Necromunda only had the house gangs not the outlanders) hopefully this will do the same
Ravening Hordes is probably the right comparison - very slimmed down with minimal special rules (USRs aside) or flavour (and 1 para of fluff per army), but enough to use everything.
Yes, when they rereleased Blood bowl and Necromunda they did that. But they are not rereleasing Warhammer Fantasy Battles. They are releasing a new game for the first time, from a different time period. They didn’t provide rules for Mordheim gangs when they released Warcry, for example. That’s the better comparison.
Overread wrote: Did they release models for 16 different armies at the same time? And were those armies at least between 5-10 model kits per army
all models from those lists were available by that time
Yes, over a period of 20 years. Not in the same month or 2
Why are you suggesting they don’t have the ability to release minis that already exist?
They could easily rerelease their entire plastic range circa 8th edition along with a handful of flavorful new kits that expand the setting and generate new interest.
Given their track record I don't think anyone is expecting them to re-release old miniatures. Apart from anything else they have a quality standard now that is far and away higher than any previous WFB products, so releasing old miniatures wouldn't look good to them.
I think you'll find the main reason no one is expecting the entire range to reappear is that no one seriously thinks GW will release 10+ year old sprues again as a core product line.
As nice and 'easy' as that is, it wouldn't make financial, reputational, or qualitative sense to do so.
The thing is that they could whip up Battalion sets in their sleep from older kits, market them at a good (for GW) price point, and they'd have only to worry about packaging. This would work even better if they had some kits that pulled double duty, ie. Black Guard/Executioners for the Dark Elves.
Lord Zarkov wrote: Both Blood Bowl and Necromunda had bare bones lists for the old factions on release despite only having models for a couple (albeit Necromunda only had the house gangs not the outlanders) hopefully this will do the same
Ravening Hordes is probably the right comparison - very slimmed down with minimal special rules (USRs aside) or flavour (and 1 para of fluff per army), but enough to use everything.
Yes, when they rereleased Blood bowl and Necromunda they did that. But they are not rereleasing Warhammer Fantasy Battles. They are releasing a new game for the first time, from a different time period. They didn’t provide rules for Mordheim gangs when they released Warcry, for example. That’s the better comparison.
Is it a better comparison? Warcry is a completely new game in a new setting (AoS), initially focussing on new factions (the various Chaos warbands). We know next to nothing about the kind of game this Old World business will be, but given the square bases and nostalgia it is more likely than not to resemble WHFB in at least some ways, it may play out in a slightly different time period which means next to nothing in Warhammer Fantasy (an Orc horde from the year 1500 would look the same as one from 2500 albeit led by some other warboss, and for Elves or Undead even that doesn't have to be the case), and this "new" game is unlikely to only cover new factions (they'd hardly focus on Kislev, Norsca, Estalia and Araby without covering the better known factions neighbouring them).
The only way in which Warcry is a good comparison is that it was released with some dedicated models for new factions, but also saw several waves of rules for existing kits to enable players of those factions easy access to the new game (or attract players to new factions by requiring just a box of two of those figures, rather than a full AoS army). In the future, dedicated warbands for some other factions are to be released too. In the same way, they are clearly planning to make new models for the Old World for new(ish) factions (Kislev for starters), and may provide rule support for old factions to begin with (not even needing to put all old armies back on sale; just rules to get veterans of WHFB and possibly AoS something to do), maybe alongside some Made-to-Order miniature support, with updated sculpts for those factions slowly rolled out over the next years.
Commodus Leitdorf wrote:
Mr Morden wrote: Are Ice Warrior Women or Bear Cavalry in Total war II?
Not really no, They are a proper full faction in Warhammer 3 though, along with Chaos Dwarfs, Chaos Daemon and Ogre Kingdoms. It would not surprise me if some cross promotional work will be involved as well.
Unless I missed some big news, we don't know that yet. They are likely to appear as a proper full faction in Warhammer 3 though, presumably along with Chaos Dwarfs, Chaos Daemon and Ogre Kingdoms.
All that's known for sure is that a third Total War game is to be released at some point (it was intended to be a trilogy from the start), that certain factions are missing, and that the above would make for a geographically sensible group, although especially how Chaos is to be treated is anyone's guess.
I really, really, really doubt there will be any synergy with Warhammer Total War.
I can't recall GW ever synergizing their models and their video games. 3 video game versions of BFG, no model release or rerelease. 3 Dawn of War games, no Codex Blood Ravens. Various FPS type games, none of the lead characters got models.
I can't for a second believe that Total War will drive what gets released for WHFB. We're more likely to see tie in models for Warhammer Monopoly and Munchkin.
Overread wrote: Did they release models for 16 different armies at the same time? And were those armies at least between 5-10 model kits per army
all models from those lists were available by that time
Yes, over a period of 20 years. Not in the same month or 2
Why are you suggesting they don’t have the ability to release minis that already exist?
They could easily rerelease their entire plastic range circa 8th edition along with a handful of flavorful new kits that expand the setting and generate new interest.
Given their track record I don't think anyone is expecting them to re-release old miniatures. Apart from anything else they have a quality standard now that is far and away higher than any previous WFB products, so releasing old miniatures wouldn't look good to them.
I think you'll find the main reason no one is expecting the entire range to reappear is that no one seriously thinks GW will release 10+ year old sprues again as a core product line.
As nice and 'easy' as that is, it wouldn't make financial, reputational, or qualitative sense to do so.
The thing is that they could whip up Battalion sets in their sleep from older kits, market them at a good (for GW) price point, and they'd have only to worry about packaging. This would work even better if they had some kits that pulled double duty, ie. Black Guard/Executioners for the Dark Elves.
I agree. lots of models from 8th edition are still in use after all. The focus on Kislev is because they dont have any old plastic models. It would be weird for GW to make a nostalgia game and then resculpt the whole range. They also mentioned how this was great news to anyone that has been to lazy to re-base their old models from squares Just look at the lord of the rings reboot when they started of with a basic box of new plastics and then opened up their old range again.
Funny thing is, I think I will like it whichever way they go, even if they decide to do silly bear cavalry. Very exited to see if they dare do generic knights for Bretonnia -non uniqe GW-IP is what brought the end times to begin with. Just imagine the pegasus knights they could do with modern sculpting technology.
Kid_Kyoto wrote: I really, really, really doubt there will be any synergy with Warhammer Total War.
I can't recall GW ever synergizing their models and their video games. 3 video game versions of BFG, no model release or rerelease. 3 Dawn of War games, no Codex Blood Ravens. Various FPS type games, none of the lead characters got models.
I can't for a second believe that Total War will drive what gets released for WHFB. We're more likely to see tie in models for Warhammer Monopoly and Munchkin.
They are getting better at it - they finally released a Blood Ravens codex in WD, they advertise Total War - its a bit of reah but they even released the new Eltharion in AOS as TW did the same with him in TW2?
I think its more that GW and CA have likely used the same source materials and references. So it might be closer that CA could have advanced ideas on what designs could be or could have been which might line up with what GW releases. That said there's a lot of differences in moving things from a game to a tabletop. Many of the models CA uses can likely achieve higher levels of detail and detail in different places because they've not got to think about parting it for casting.
The regimental standard doing a funny piece related to a new release is about as syncronised as GW get.
Launching AoS about the same time as Total War is probably the most monumental "bad timing" GW ever had.
Perhaps well see "the old world" the same time they release that animated AoS series
If Kislev are to be one of the initial factions in Total War number 3, the releases of it and the "Warhammer The Old World" are not exactly going to be synchronised anyway. The latter is years away, much later than the former is expected.
That said, I wouldn't be surprised if there is some cooperation in terms of the design. The Total War people have been allowed to come up with some of their own stuff (though each design would have to be approved by GW I think), but if they're designing Kislev at the same time GW has detailed plans and concepts for them, the fortunate timing might as well be taken advantage of by sharing the plans and ensuring Creative Assembly incorporated the new units and aesthetics.
Not expecting many of Creative Assembly's ideas to make it into the Old World though, although I wouldn't mind a new forest dragon following their design.
The whole AoS launch in itself was about the of the worst bits of marketing you'll ever see. GW was so focused on keeping secrets secret back then that they forgot to actually market their biggest game update in decades. This being right after they decided to pay attention to the Old World game in a big way after years of neglect.
So yeah really short sighted madness went on. Heck I believe there's some interview floating around where it was revealed taht the rules for AoS were far more detailed and ready to go but were dropped last minute in the weeks/months before launch - leaving them with just the getting started open play fun rules alone.
Anyway best not to dwell on those dark days too much.
Not expecting many of Creative Assembly's ideas to make it into the Old World though, although I wouldn't mind a new forest dragon following their design.
I wouldn't be shocked if Creative Assembly's "ideas" aren't strictly theirs. GW supposedly works fairly close with their digital partners--to the point of some of the later army books for Warhammer Fantasy having "With thanks to EA/Mythic" in there for stuff relating to lore and art. My Wood Elf army book from 8th has that smackdab in the front.
No evidence to suggest it's what happening with Old World but someday GW will have to respond to 3D printing. Warhammer Fantasy is inherently generic in many regards (already a lot of knockoffs), so it wouldn't be a bad spot to start. Producing files has to be cheaper than physical manufacture of models and they still have AoS and 40k for the casual market. Bet GW still has the digital files for discontinued units like the High Elf bolt thrower and dragon princes. Could move the whole HE line to digital. Would only need new archers and spearelves.
GW will worry about addressing 3D printing when 3D printing becomes something worth addressing. There's no point spend resources adapting your niche hobby product to an even more niche hobby.
EnTyme wrote: GW will worry about addressing 3D printing when 3D printing becomes something worth addressing. There's no point spend resources adapting your niche hobby product to an even more niche hobby.
It took 20 years for them to acknowledge the internet as anything other than a new way to publish catalogues.
EnTyme wrote: GW will worry about addressing 3D printing when 3D printing becomes something worth addressing. There's no point spend resources adapting your niche hobby product to an even more niche hobby.
It took 20 years for them to acknowledge the internet as anything other than a new way to publish catalogues.
Well look how that turned out! Nobody uses the Internet anymore. You definitely can't play Warhammer with it or use it as a discussion place....
EnTyme wrote: GW will worry about addressing 3D printing when 3D printing becomes something worth addressing. There's no point spend resources adapting your niche hobby product to an even more niche hobby.
It took 20 years for them to acknowledge the internet as anything other than a new way to publish catalogues.
Well look how that turned out! Nobody uses the Internet anymore. You definitely can't play Warhammer with it or use it as a discussion place....
Isn't that literally his point? That GW was 20 years behind when it came to optimizing their use of an incredibly useful resource? And therefore they're probably never going to acknowledge 3D printing, even on the off chance it does become a viable competitor for their product?
Can't see it being something worth considering for TOW, though. Given the choice between buying a unit of spearmen in plastic or having to print the same designs out, in resin, one miniature at a time? Convenience alone will take me to the plastic every time, to say nothing of the durability. It's not going improve enough in the next 3-5 years for it to be a consideration for anyone but the most diehard of 3D printer enthusiasts.
EnTyme wrote: GW will worry about addressing 3D printing when 3D printing becomes something worth addressing. There's no point spend resources adapting your niche hobby product to an even more niche hobby.
It took 20 years for them to acknowledge the internet as anything other than a new way to publish catalogues.
Well look how that turned out! Nobody uses the Internet anymore. You definitely can't play Warhammer with it or use it as a discussion place....
Isn't that literally his point? That GW was 20 years behind when it came to optimizing their use of an incredibly useful resource? And therefore they're probably never going to acknowledge 3D printing, even on the off chance it does become a viable competitor for their product?
Can't see it being something worth considering for TOW, though. Given the choice between buying a unit of spearmen in plastic or having to print the same designs out, in resin, one miniature at a time? Convenience alone will take me to the plastic every time, to say nothing of the durability. It's not going improve enough in the next 3-5 years for it to be a consideration for anyone but the most diehard of 3D printer enthusiasts.
According to People I've Spoken To(who give every appearance of being plausible sources of info) GW have already thoroughly considered 3D printing as a potential avenue for their business, but rejected it out of hand when they were told straight up that the level of control they would demand over the process(make the machines themselves, proprietary gcode replacement, per-print license sales ie pay once print only once) would A; cost a small fortune to develop, B; cost an actual fortune for a customer to buy to recoup A, and C; inevitably be cracked within a matter of months anyway.
For the moment, they seem content to exist in a state of cold war with 3D printing - their lawyers periodically trawl for stuff they can DMCA, knowing that safe harbour means platforms will comply and that nobody making knockoff 3D models as a hobby and giving them away for free is likely to challenge them in court over a mild inconvenience, the designers of stuff then either just reupload or on occasion get scared away, rinse & repeat. Going after the community too hard just risks exposing it to more of their customer base or even another Chapterhouse scenario, so they're content to just bug people enough that they don't get too cocky.
Can't see it being something worth considering for TOW, though. Given the choice between buying a unit of spearmen in plastic or having to print the same designs out, in resin, one miniature at a time? Convenience alone will take me to the plastic every time, to say nothing of the durability. It's not going improve enough in the next 3-5 years for it to be a consideration for anyone but the most diehard of 3D printer enthusiasts.
Pretty much this and, of course, quality. I've yet to see anyone put up photos of 3D printed products that aren't covered with hashmarks from the printing process. Part of GW's product statement is that they consider themselves produces of 'fine quality' hobby products, and won't attach their name (or IP issues and control issues) to 3D printing. They'll make it a point of pride that their minis are better. Some will disagree or consider it unimportant, but to me the gap between 3D printing and the garage company products is a lot bigger than the gap between garage companies and GW.
It seems a non issue for GW in general or the 'Old World' in particular.
“We’ll be revisiting the Old World for the latest look behind the scenes at the forthcoming game, reminiscing about the evolution of the humble Land Speeder, and seeing what competitive Warhammer 40,000 players have come up with in Battle Forge.”
"However, one name, in particular, stands apart from all others, for it’s a name steeped in Bretonnia’s glorious history – that of the incumbent ruler, King Louen Orc-Slayer."
Louen Leoncoeur you mean? Who's Louen Orc-Slayer? I've never heard him called that
Sledgehammer wrote: Here's hoping it's an alternate universe where the world doesn't get blown up.
It’s set before Warhammer was set anyway, so it’s a moot point.
That depends, it could be a moot point, or GW could decide to litter the new fluff with references and elbow-nudgey wink-wink "foreshadowing" of ET and AoS stuff to treble-down on a "it's a single timeline that ends in the world exploding and AoS happening, Deal With It" type attitude. Setting it in an alternate version of the world explicitly would preclude that definitively, but yeah it doesn't need to be that explicit if GW can keep it in their pants.
Sledgehammer wrote: Here's hoping it's an alternate universe where the world doesn't get blown up.
It’s set before Warhammer was set anyway, so it’s a moot point.
That depends, it could be a moot point, or GW could decide to litter the new fluff with references and elbow-nudgey wink-wink "foreshadowing" of ET and AoS stuff to treble-down on a "it's a single timeline that ends in the world exploding and AoS happening, Deal With It" type attitude. Setting it in an alternate version of the world explicitly would preclude that definitively, but yeah it doesn't need to be that explicit if GW can keep it in their pants.
If they're at all sensible, they won't mention End Times or anything like it at all. That's the benefit of moving 300 years into the past - along with freshening up characters. That way they can avoid the constant WHFB/AOS flame wars and any confusion between the two. Of course some characters will cross over but that's just the nature of the beast. If they focus entirely on the Old World, they can keep characters like Morathi/Malekith/Tyrion firmly in the background and avoid any confusion. Shifting 300 years into the past, means human characters being in both settings won't be an issue.
In other news, Louen Orc Slayer puts us firmly in the latter period of the Time of Three Emperors and after the Vampire Wars. Going to be a lovely continuity task to make sure that this, WHFB and WHFRPG (it's doing The Enemy Within atm, set shortly before the WHFB present time but with a substantially different political set up) all align correctly - which I suspect they won't given GW's usual record on this kind of thing.
So what does the time period imply the differences could be compared to WHFB? I've seen mentions that some of the races weren't too active, but I have no idea what specifically might be missing/different other than the characters who quite obviously aren't born yet.
Sledgehammer wrote: Here's hoping it's an alternate universe where the world doesn't get blown up.
It’s set before Warhammer was set anyway, so it’s a moot point.
That depends, it could be a moot point, or GW could decide to litter the new fluff with references and elbow-nudgey wink-wink "foreshadowing" of ET and AoS stuff to treble-down on a "it's a single timeline that ends in the world exploding and AoS happening, Deal With It" type attitude. Setting it in an alternate version of the world explicitly would preclude that definitively, but yeah it doesn't need to be that explicit if GW can keep it in their pants.
If they're at all sensible, they won't mention End Times or anything like it at all. That's the benefit of moving 300 years into the past - along with freshening up characters. That way they can avoid the constant WHFB/AOS flame wars and any confusion between the two. Of course some characters will cross over but that's just the nature of the beast. If they focus entirely on the Old World, they can keep characters like Morathi/Malekith/Tyrion firmly in the background and avoid any confusion. Shifting 300 years into the past, means human characters being in both settings won't be an issue.
In other news, Louen Orc Slayer puts us firmly in the latter period of the Time of Three Emperors and after the Vampire Wars. Going to be a lovely continuity task to make sure that this, WHFB and WHFRPG (it's doing The Enemy Within atm, set shortly before the WHFB present time but with a substantially different political set up) all align correctly - which I suspect they won't given GW's usual record on this kind of thing.
Interestingly the recent AOS Soulborn supplements seems to have been written with communication with GW with Anvilgard plots in particular and even named elements/characters being the same in both. So there is some hope!
Yeah the 300 step back is a good move - its only the human notables that are really effected - most of the other races can have their named favs active....even the Skaven - some of the Council of 13 are pretty damn old!
Then there are some major differences including no Colleges of Magic - probably nearest would be the Guild in Middenheim which has always been friendly to wizards. Technologically not a huge difference on the battlefield I don't think - maybe less human and dwarf war machines.
Mentlegen324 wrote: So what does the time period imply the differences could be compared to WHFB? I've seen mentions that some of the races weren't too active, but I have no idea what specifically might be missing/different other than the characters who quite obviously aren't born yet.
2201 means
* Vampire Wars about 50 years in the past with Mannfred defeated. Vampires still around but power reduced.
* Latter stages of the Age of Three Emperors in The Empire - different provincial set ups, Marienburg still in the Empire, no Colleges of Magic.
* Bretonnia - Mousillon should still have a duke, as this is pre the Affair of the False Grail. I think this also means it's not an undead ruin (shame). More Orcs present than in previous continuity.
Orcs confirmed too. Which is great for fans of the old greenskin models, most of which got discontinued last year from AOS. I'm hoping for all new models, but if they re-release Boar boyz unchanged, I'll be just as happy.
Edit: I wonder if factions that are more or less present in AOS won't get as much/any love. Take the Dark elves for example. As of the latest lore, their old range is pretty much back in action. You can get scourges, witch elves, hydras, black dragons, etc, all in the same army. Plus, the majority of their range is still available. Not sure how present the DE were at this time, but there doesn't seem as big a need to get them models, save for a few lords and heroes, compared to Brettonia, high (and some wood) elves, normal greenskins and goblins, etc.
If they actually do intend to include the whole breadth of the classic factions as people hope this map suggests, rather than just doing a Heresy-style "one main army with themed lists and a few other minifactions" approach, I don't really think they have any alternative to bringing back the old range.
GWHQ might have given them the resources to do a single full faction of minis, maybe even two, but all of them? Even accounting for the more modern WHFB minis that are still used in AoS and so could be re-reboxed(although that approach wouldn't bode well for the affordability of TOW - they're hardly going to provide classic models in the affordable bulk necessary for a rank & flank system when that would make a lot of the "legacy" models in AoS packaging look like poor value by comparison), there's a *lot* of stuff that's gone the way of the dodo, with even the more complete ranges still having big gaps and of course a couple being gone entirely.
Either TOW is a much bigger project than anyone suspects, or it's exactly as small as people previously thought and all the map stuff is just background fluff, or they'll be bringing back the classic models. My money is still on this being a smaller project and the maps are just fluff being used to keep reminding people the project exists and is coming eventually, but I certainly wouldn't say no to the classic plastics returning even if only as an initial offering that would be very gradually replaced over time.
Given how good the empire blood bowl models are of the new release I'm very much looking forward to the models they put out. It's also a while before Mordheim is flattened by the comet so maybe.. just maybe that gets a cheeky refresher too. Who knows..
Even if it doesn't, a new range of models will make for some fun new warbands.
I'm expecting a focus on the Human nations for the models and the narrative. Orcs and Chaos can be ported straight(back) from AoS, while the Elves and Dwarves could be limited to rare appearances with a unit or two.
GoatboyBeta wrote: I'm expecting a focus on the Human nations for the models and the narrative. Orcs and Chaos can be ported straight(back) from AoS, while the Elves and Dwarves could be limited to rare appearances with a unit or two.
And I’m expecting my beloved Wood Elves to get all of the love. AoS did them dirty, but now they can return to prominence as deserving the best!
Ohh, yes pleas! Lovely map, gorgeous infact and is certainly something I wouldn't mind adorning the wall of the nerdy space at home. (it's a lot nicer than anything similar I've seen from AoS to boot!)
Very excited to see what becomes of this project especially if it means updated Brettonians and more Goblin Wolf Rider sculpts.
Comparison to 30k is a cause for trepidation, if only because that will price me out immediately! :(
I'm really happy the Old World is returning and I'm even more interested in how they will approach this. I don't think returning to the old models is a good idea and I don't think GW will go this route, new technology, and new kits are what GW is interested in. (I do think GW should sort out it's 'legacy' collection)
Either TOW is a much bigger project than anyone suspects, or it's exactly as small as people previously thought and all the map stuff is just background fluff, or they'll be bringing back the classic models. My money is still on this being a smaller project and the maps are just fluff being used to keep reminding people the project exists and is coming eventually, but I certainly wouldn't say no to the classic plastics returning even if only as an initial offering that would be very gradually replaced over time.
I think the fact that it is years off is a giveaway that its its a big sculpting process. If it were just going to be rules and a setting of an empire civil war they really could just use existing models from the old warhammer range and be done with it in a rather trivial rules suppliment.
But I think GW see there is money to be made in a rank and flank style system, and they are slowly getting ready to take the market by storm.
Olthannon wrote: Given how good the empire blood bowl models are of the new release I'm very much looking forward to the models they put out. It's also a while before Mordheim is flattened by the comet so maybe.. just maybe that gets a cheeky refresher too. Who knows..
Even if it doesn't, a new range of models will make for some fun new warbands.
Mordheim is destroyed in 2000 so its been a deamon/Skaven/mutant infested pile rubble for a couple of hundred years.
GoatboyBeta wrote: I'm expecting a focus on the Human nations for the models and the narrative. Orcs and Chaos can be ported straight(back) from AoS, while the Elves and Dwarves could be limited to rare appearances with a unit or two.
Orcs can't. AoS orcs ride weird Henson puppets, not boars and wyverns, with comical 40k style armor.
The goblins we've seen so far (wolf riders and night gobbos) largely can. Mostly because they didn't really touch the actual gobbos, and the heroes are largely call backs to very early editions with the moon helmets.
I'm guessing the latter. Probably a few powerful individuals. Or maybe just a scant few level 1 wizards, since they didn't know how to fully unlock their powers. Though, based off the Kislev previews, the ice witches seemed pretty well attuned, despite a lack of Teclis teaching.
Alpharius wrote: No Colleges of Magic is sad for me...but then, what did the human side of magic look like back then?
Non-existent?
A big mess until the Colleges were established?
You do have some organised elements like the Wizards and Alchemists Guild in Middenheim and I think Otila I establishes a Magic school when she declares herself Emperor in Talebheim otherwise its hedge magic, alchemists, and Elemetalists - often risking being burnt at the stake.
Ironically the worst place is likely Altdorf as a Sigmar focussed city rather then aforementioned Ulric focussed ones.
Also some nobles will employ them unofficially.
GaroRobe wrote: I'm guessing the latter. Probably a few powerful individuals. Or maybe just a scant few level 1 wizards, since they didn't know how to fully unlock their powers. Though, based off the Kislev previews, the ice witches seemed pretty well attuned, despite a lack of Teclis teaching.
Good point re Ice Witches - they were fully organised and powerful politically and magically.
Alpharius wrote: No Colleges of Magic is sad for me...but then, what did the human side of magic look like back then?
Non-existent?
A big mess until the Colleges were established?
In short, patronage and hypocrisy. All magic users are actively hunted by Sigmarites(and Ulricans aren't much better) so you survive by either hiding, or by finding someone or somewhere with enough power or leverage to protect you from them. Hedges, court wizards, rare organised guilds like in Middenheim, that sort of thing. I would conjecture that there's a generally lower "power level" since very few are naturally as talented as a College wizard can become after decades of studying Elf-given wisdom, but a lot more variance in how magic manifests itself since individual magic users aren't being shaped by a set curriculum and probably aren't limiting themselves to a single Wind. Also probably a lot more "folk wisdom", superstition, and general ignorance - look at how eagerly everyone jumped on Wyrdstone when the hammer fell on Mordheim and thought it was a miracle substance, until they started growing extra eyeballs in their armpits etc.
Did they ever actually say it is going to be a normal 28mm game? Could it turn out to be something like Epic was for 40k? The smaller scale would both make it need less sculpting work so possible to have more armies and wouldn't make it as expensive as you would need to have big armies
Maybe not as small as Epic was but still smaller than 28mm?
No, exactly that, they’ve said nothing so it could mean anything.
But it’s surely an expectation by showing that and saying people who miss the game they destroyed etc, it’s coming back for them.
To make it something else would be harsh..
Matrindur wrote: Did they ever actually say it is going to be a normal 28mm game? Could it turn out to be something like Epic was for 40k? The smaller scale would both make it need less sculpting work so possible to have more armies and wouldn't make it as expensive as you would need to have big armies
Maybe not as small as Epic was but still smaller than 28mm?
They've said basically nothing. Its not even clear if they've moved beyond concept art yet and world background yet. Based on the original article (November 2019), 2022 would be the very earliest it will release.
They've been clear that Old World is to AoS what 30K is to 40K. Which means the same scale.
There's no reason for them to change the scale. A scale change is a totally separate venture and GW aren't even sure if they are going to remake epic let alone warmaster (heck AT and AN regularly get comments from designers saying that they are not making epic and that they aren't confirming anything along those lines - heck AT hasn't even got Chaos titans let alone xenos)
Overread wrote: They've been clear that Old World is to AoS what 30K is to 40K. Which means the same scale.
I don't think that's clear, that can be interpreted in several ways. "The Old World is to Warhammer Age of Sigmar, as the Horus Heresy is to Warhammer 40,000" was the start of a paragraph that said how the Horus Heresy is the prequel story that sets up the foundations of the setting and lets players use heroes and armies of a bygone era, so not necessarily anything to do with how the game itself will compare.
Overread wrote: They've been clear that Old World is to AoS what 30K is to 40K. Which means the same scale.
I don't think that's clear, that can be interpreted in several ways. "The Old World is to Warhammer Age of Sigmar, as the Horus Heresy is to Warhammer 40,000" was the start of a paragraph that said how the Horus Heresy is the prequel story that sets up the foundations of the setting and lets players use heroes and armies of a bygone era, so not necessarily anything to do with how the game itself will compare.
And then you couple that with the base they show - a 32mm normal base.
Basically GW has given every hint it will be the same scale and no hint it will be a different scale.
kodos wrote: so 2200, 50 years after and 100 years before the next big war in the timeline
so no real Horus Heresy of AoS as the missed the most exiting wars of that time
but really just the human civil war with minor conflicts
and I guess another year of nothing but artworks and the hope that GW won't mess it up again
hype train does not move for me
If anything it's perfect. Great big sandbox to do whatever you want with, especially with the highly fractured Empire. GW learned it's lesson with the issues in WHFB and not being able to change much fluff wise without having massive impacts on the game. This way we can do whatever we want, GW can run narrowly defined narrative campaigns that still have actual results and the vast majority of non human characters are still around. Hell even a lot of the Skaven are, Ikit Claw is, he was around before the 1850s.
Also this Epic debate never fails to amuse me. Warmaster could barely sustain a large enough audience to be relevant when WHFB was riding high in 6th, let alone now when 10mm gaming is barely existant in the mainstream. Unless GW want to lose a load of money, there is no way they're doing that scale. Especially after advertising with bases in the way they have.
Great news! This is set about 150 years before the rediscovery of Blood Bowl, and therefore is in a parallel dimension where The End Times never happened.
Matrindur wrote: Did they ever actually say it is going to be a normal 28mm game? Could it turn out to be something like Epic was for 40k? The smaller scale would both make it need less sculpting work so possible to have more armies and wouldn't make it as expensive as you would need to have big armies
Maybe not as small as Epic was but still smaller than 28mm?
As discussed multiple times before, the entire reason for this venture is to get WHFB veterans to "return to the fold". Some things will be different of course (see also: Blood Bowl, Necromunda, AI), so that GW can sell old players new things, but as radical a departure as a completely different scale for a game of this scope is unlikely to either be welcomed by the old players or be a commercial success, and GW cares at least about one of those. Some newer players may like what they see and buy in to it, but I don't imagine many people who witnessed the original destruction of their beloved setting will be enamoured by something along the lines of a completely different scale.
As for the latest news, well, it's good to be able to put a date on things at least, given the lengthy earlier discussion about who the names of the Empire characters referred to and what that may mean for the setting. The current maps still imply a potentially reduced setting (literally the Old World rather than the whole Warhammer Fantasy scope), with the new High Elf presence near Bretonnia a convenient excuse for their inclusion. From a production point of view, this means they could first focus on a limited number of factions, fill in the map, and then expand outwards after enough of the ranges are made and seeing how successful the game is anyway. Tomb Kings, Dark Elves, Ogres and Lizardmen may have to wait a while, although the latter two are still doing okay in terms of the miniature ranges' survival into AoS (and when did the Lizards get a foothold in Albion, which is clearly depicted on the map?); then again, Tomb Kings were mentioned in the first announcements' memes several times, due to which I'm not sure if they would in fact be excluded as such.
Matrindur wrote: Did they ever actually say it is going to be a normal 28mm game? Could it turn out to be something like Epic was for 40k? The smaller scale would both make it need less sculpting work so possible to have more armies and wouldn't make it as expensive as you would need to have big armies
Maybe not as small as Epic was but still smaller than 28mm?
As discussed multiple times before, the entire reason for this venture is to get WHFB veterans to "return to the fold". Some things will be different of course (see also: Blood Bowl, Necromunda, AI), so that GW can sell old players new things, but as radical a departure as a completely different scale for a game of this scope is unlikely to either be welcomed by the old players or be a commercial success, and GW cares at least about one of those. Some newer players may like what they see and buy in to it, but I don't imagine many people who witnessed the original destruction of their beloved setting will be enamoured by something along the lines of a completely different scale.
As for the latest news, well, it's good to be able to put a date on things at least, given the lengthy earlier discussion about who the names of the Empire characters referred to and what that may mean for the setting. The current maps still imply a potentially reduced setting (literally the Old World rather than the whole Warhammer Fantasy scope), with the new High Elf presence near Bretonnia a convenient excuse for their inclusion. From a production point of view, this means they could first focus on a limited number of factions, fill in the map, and then expand outwards after enough of the ranges are made and seeing how successful the game is anyway. Tomb Kings, Dark Elves, Ogres and Lizardmen may have to wait a while, although the latter two are still doing okay in terms of the miniature ranges' survival into AoS (and when did the Lizards get a foothold in Albion, which is clearly depicted on the map?); then again, Tomb Kings were mentioned in the first announcements' memes several times, due to which I'm not sure if they would in fact be excluded as such.
I think the Lizardmen "returned" to Albion in Dark Shadows and some of the older ruins are part of the Great Work I think . As a (very) old Warhammer player - its all very exciting
Dark Elves raid everyone anyway so thats not a issue. Ogres can go back to being mainly mercs for hire if nothing else.
Yodhrin wrote: Either TOW is a much bigger project than anyone suspects, or it's exactly as small as people previously thought and all the map stuff is just background fluff, or they'll be bringing back the classic models.
I approximate the chances of GW bringing back old plastics at just below death by meteor.
Beyond the fact that this whole WFB revival thing is an excuse to sell models, and new models sell better than old ones, there's the issue of many of the old moulds likely being damaged beyond usefulness or outright scrapped. The masters might not exist, and if they do, GW would have to digitize and clean them up for new mould cutting, at which point designing new stuff is likely a better solution anyway.
In truth, I just want new Empire State Troop kits. I have hundreds of the old ones.
Yodhrin wrote: Either TOW is a much bigger project than anyone suspects, or it's exactly as small as people previously thought and all the map stuff is just background fluff, or they'll be bringing back the classic models.
I approximate the chances of GW bringing back old plastics at just below death by meteor.
Beyond the fact that this whole WFB revival thing is an excuse to sell models, and new models sell better than old ones, there's the issue of many of the old moulds likely being damaged beyond usefulness or outright scrapped. The masters might not exist, and if they do, GW would have to digitize and clean them up for new mould cutting, at which point designing new stuff is likely a better solution anyway.
In truth, I just want new Empire State Troop kits. I have hundreds of the old ones.
I seem to recall people saying the same about Sisters, Squats, Bloodbowl, Necromunda, Adeptus Titanicus
Yodhrin wrote: Either TOW is a much bigger project than anyone suspects, or it's exactly as small as people previously thought and all the map stuff is just background fluff, or they'll be bringing back the classic models.
I approximate the chances of GW bringing back old plastics at just below death by meteor.
Beyond the fact that this whole WFB revival thing is an excuse to sell models, and new models sell better than old ones, there's the issue of many of the old moulds likely being damaged beyond usefulness or outright scrapped. The masters might not exist, and if they do, GW would have to digitize and clean them up for new mould cutting, at which point designing new stuff is likely a better solution anyway.
In truth, I just want new Empire State Troop kits. I have hundreds of the old ones.
I seem to recall people saying the same about Sisters, Squats, Bloodbowl, Necromunda, Adeptus Titanicus
You're making his point. They didn't just bring back/re-issue the old stuff, they replaced it all (except Squats, beyond a one-off or two) with completely new rules and models.
Even with a different scale in the case of AT.
Kanluwen wrote: The specific names of the High Elf stuff might be new, but them being present in Bretonnia is far from new.
Were they still there that late - I thought they mainly relied on Marienburg by this point in the Old World?
They might not have had full settlements there, but it would not be beyond belief for them to reclaim old citadels for the duration of the War against Chaos.
Agreed, if GW did epic scale again for fantasy they'd use AoS - the most current game - rather than Old World. Heck with godbeasts and the like AoS would actually work really well with warmasters scale.
Kanluwen wrote: The specific names of the High Elf stuff might be new, but them being present in Bretonnia is far from new.
Were they still there that late - I thought they mainly relied on Marienburg by this point in the Old World?
They might not have had full settlements there, but it would not be beyond belief for them to reclaim old citadels for the duration of the War against Chaos.
The article talks about treaty trading ports so I think they are shifting things a bit - be interesting to see what else they bring in or not.
Overread wrote: Agreed, if GW did epic scale again for fantasy they'd use AoS - the most current game - rather than Old World. Heck with godbeasts and the like AoS would actually work really well with warmasters scale.
Very true - Cog forts and the like - be like Dystopian Wars
Matrindur wrote: Did they ever actually say it is going to be a normal 28mm game? Could it turn out to be something like Epic was for 40k? The smaller scale would both make it need less sculpting work so possible to have more armies and wouldn't make it as expensive as you would need to have big armies
Maybe not as small as Epic was but still smaller than 28mm?
Goddamn it, here we go again, hopefully for the last time...
For the 17 people across the globe that played Warmaster: no, they will most assuredly NOT be doing this in a different scale. Warmaster has the second fastest death spiral at retail. The only reason it lived on at Fanatic as long as it did is because they thought they could fleece a few more bucks out, and because a couple studio guys liked it.
Give it a rest: this will NOT be Warmaster. Anything stating different without some sort of legitimate leak is essentially gak posting.
NOW...
Giving this game this much leeway as far as explicit setting allows for a ton of old kits to be used with little to no investment on GW's part.
Yodhrin wrote: Either TOW is a much bigger project than anyone suspects, or it's exactly as small as people previously thought and all the map stuff is just background fluff, or they'll be bringing back the classic models.
I approximate the chances of GW bringing back old plastics at just below death by meteor.
Beyond the fact that this whole WFB revival thing is an excuse to sell models, and new models sell better than old ones, there's the issue of many of the old moulds likely being damaged beyond usefulness or outright scrapped. The masters might not exist, and if they do, GW would have to digitize and clean them up for new mould cutting, at which point designing new stuff is likely a better solution anyway.
In truth, I just want new Empire State Troop kits. I have hundreds of the old ones.
I seem to recall people saying the same about Sisters, Squats, Bloodbowl, Necromunda, Adeptus Titanicus
Uuuh...what of those got old models back?
Sisters. Either metal models that were on sale continued to be sold(priests, death cult assasins) or new plastics.
Squats? New sculpts.
Bloodbowl? Now on 2nd new model round. Did they rerelease any old models?
Necromunda? Again new models.
At? Old models would be ridiculously small to true 6mm scale(old ones were more like 2mm scale) so no. All new models.
Pretty thin on old models having been brought back...
Matrindur wrote: Did they ever actually say it is going to be a normal 28mm game? Could it turn out to be something like Epic was for 40k? The smaller scale would both make it need less sculpting work so possible to have more armies and wouldn't make it as expensive as you would need to have big armies
Maybe not as small as Epic was but still smaller than 28mm?
Goddamn it, here we go again, hopefully for the last time...
For the 17 people across the globe that played Warmaster: no, they will most assuredly NOT be doing this in a different scale. Warmaster has the second fastest death spiral at retail. The only reason it lived on at Fanatic as long as it did is because they thought they could fleece a few more bucks out, and because a couple studio guys liked it.
Give it a rest: this will NOT be Warmaster. Anything stating different without some sort of legitimate leak is essentially gak posting.
NOW...
Giving this game this much leeway as far as explicit setting allows for a ton of old kits to be used with little to no investment on GW's part.
I don't know if modern GW is really bound by past failures. They released AI again despite it originally being a failure (though they managed to screw it up again and make it a failure a 2nd time round unfortunately!).
Warmaster didn't really fail because of the scale. 10 to 15mm is actually a great scale for a rank and file style fantasy game.
As far as I'm aware, at this point we don't really know anything about what GW intends to do with it. Unless I missed something, they've been pretty tight lipped on what it's actually going to be. I'd be no less surprised to see a new run of models than reusing the old models, as GW makes most their money off new models I imagine they'll try and exploit that. For every old kit that might make them a bit of money if they release it again, there's probably 2 or 3 old kits that no one would want, especially with many of the old models being well due for an update when they were killed.
Matrindur wrote: Did they ever actually say it is going to be a normal 28mm game? Could it turn out to be something like Epic was for 40k? The smaller scale would both make it need less sculpting work so possible to have more armies and wouldn't make it as expensive as you would need to have big armies
Maybe not as small as Epic was but still smaller than 28mm?
Goddamn it, here we go again, hopefully for the last time...
For the 17 people across the globe that played Warmaster: no, they will most assuredly NOT be doing this in a different scale. Warmaster has the second fastest death spiral at retail. The only reason it lived on at Fanatic as long as it did is because they thought they could fleece a few more bucks out, and because a couple studio guys liked it.
Give it a rest: this will NOT be Warmaster. Anything stating different without some sort of legitimate leak is essentially gak posting.
NOW...
Giving this game this much leeway as far as explicit setting allows for a ton of old kits to be used with little to no investment on GW's part.
So, clearly this game will be a re-boot to Warmaster since that game was popular enough to spin off Warmaster Ancients, the Battle of 5 Armies, and eventually the entire Warlord series of Blackpowder, Hail Ceasar, and Pike and Shotte. With such a popular base set of rules, they can steal the wind right out of Warlord's sales! See what I did there!
<Runs off giggling uncontrollably>
No, in all actuality I agree with Tony. There is no way this is a Warmaster re-boot. It is WHFB all the way or nothing.
Eiríkr wrote: My only wish for this is for the Bretonnia range to return unchanged.
You're not getting that wish. Those molds are already ancient to begin with, and the sculpts are not up to GWs modern standards. Let the past die, kill it if you have to.
If they actually do intend to include the whole breadth of the classic factions as people hope this map suggests, rather than just doing a Heresy-style "one main army with themed lists and a few other minifactions" approach, I don't really think they have any alternative to bringing back the old range.
GWHQ might have given them the resources to do a single full faction of minis, maybe even two, but all of them? Even accounting for the more modern WHFB minis that are still used in AoS and so could be re-reboxed(although that approach wouldn't bode well for the affordability of TOW - they're hardly going to provide classic models in the affordable bulk necessary for a rank & flank system when that would make a lot of the "legacy" models in AoS packaging look like poor value by comparison), there's a *lot* of stuff that's gone the way of the dodo, with even the more complete ranges still having big gaps and of course a couple being gone entirely.
Either TOW is a much bigger project than anyone suspects, or it's exactly as small as people previously thought and all the map stuff is just background fluff, or they'll be bringing back the classic models. My money is still on this being a smaller project and the maps are just fluff b
My expectations largely remain unchanged (assuming GW doesn't grant my wish of making it a Warmaster reboot instead). It will be a human-centric game (with an apparent 4 Empire factions and another 14 Bretonnian factions based on this map, plus Kislev which isn't included for some reason, theres certainly a lot of humans to go around) with the majority of units being buildable from just a handful of kits - really you can probably boil it all down to three kits: a "conscript troops" tier, a "professional troops" tier, and a "knightly" tier. These kits will be basic - i.e. bodies (and horses where applicable), plain weapons, etc. Add a handful of upgrade sprues with faction specific bits like heads, armor pieces, special weapons, etc. to spice up your units (Bretonnian sprue makes your knights look like grail knights, etc. your conscripts look like peasant bowmen, and your professionals look like men at arms, Empire sprue makes your knights look like Knightly Orders, your professionals look like state troops, etc., Kislev sprue makes your knights look like winged lancers or something, and I expect the basic kislev infantry would look a lot like Empire troops otherwise). Each faction then maybe gets a couple of unique kits (Kislev gets Ice Guard and bear cavalry, Empire gets a Steam Tank and artillery, Bretonnia gets Pegasus Knights and a Trebuchet), a couple characters, and that covers the initial wave of releases. Further units will be additional upgrade sprues or resin add-ons, with occasional unique kits, similar to the release models establshed by games like Adeptus Titanicus, Aeronatuica Imperialis, Necromunda, etc.).
I think we will end up seeing Dogs of War, Estalians, Border Princes, and Tileans as resin upgrades to the same basic kits used by the other factions (maybe Kislev falls in here instead of having a sprue) and a handful of additional unique standalone kits for some of the more unique units.
Vampires I think will be able to utilize the majority of the human kits, with at a minimum a special Sylvania upgrade sprue to make them more representative of the humans enthralled/enslaved by the Vampires, and at best an undead upgrade sprue to make things more deadish (knights become blood knights, professionals become grave guard, conscripts become skeletons and zombies, add a couple of unique kits like the others, etc.). Some of the Age of Sigmar range I think doesn't sit well in the AoS range and will be back-ported over to The Old World, specifically the Coven Throne and Mortis Engine which are kind of forgotten bastard children of the Death Grand Alliance both aesthetically and thematically. The Soulblight range as a whole is actually somewhat unloved, most of us are hoping to see them get redone but maybe its possible GW has decided the faction will work better in the Old World and has no place in Age of Sigmar. TBH I think most of us are expecting the Soulblight faction to be remade as vampirates, so theres room for GW to remake the Vampire Counts largely as they were without overlapping with the Age of Sigmar range.
Other factions come after, I expect them to be for the most part fairly limited in scope and support (i.e. limited numbers of units, the basics will be in plastic, with most of the rest of the range being resin, etc.). I think the "major factions" here which will get significant plastic releases will be Wood Elves, Orcs/Greenskins, and Dwarves. These factions have effectively been squatted and remade in Age of Sigmar in a way that is wholly unique to the setting (Sylvaneth, Bonesplitterz/Ironjawz, and Kharadron/Fyreslayers respectively), so there is room for "Old World" versions of all three that do not have much overlap (but could borrow some units, the treefolk from Sylvaneth could crossover into the Wood Elf roster in a limited fashion, for example).I think we see extensive plastic support for these factions and we can expect them to be fairly complete rosters.
High Elves I think end up being primarily resin upgrades to the Wood Elves (I expect the wood elves to be designed in a way that will easily accept parts to make them look like something other than Wood Elves, similar to how I expect the human sprues to be designed - perhaps we'll even get a plastic High elf upgrade sprue here - basically just basic garb in a standard infantry/cavalry kit, for example, and then the upgrade kits contain separate armor sets and accessories that you put over them to make them "high elf" or "wood elf"). Of course I can see a couple unique plastic/resin kits here as well, but I think overall they will be a "minor faction" - we're not going to see the full High Elves army list of old, just outpost garrisons/vanguard type forces representing the forces mustered to defend the elven colonies. I don't expect to see Dragons or any of the super elite units of yore here - perhaps they are limited to being allies rather than a standalone force. Likewise I could see Dark Elves being introduced in similar faction - but we're getting corsairs and raiders, not the core of the armies found in Naggaroth or assaulting Ulthuan. In the lore the "Sea Elves" are also kicking around near Marienburg around this timeframe, maybe they finally get introduced too? In any case, the Wood Elves seem to be the main Elf faction, as they are the only one who have a power base in the Old World vs overseas.
I think Tomb Kings make a comeback in a big way, not on release, but after a couple years. Aside from Bretonnia, they are the only other faction that was completely squatted from the range during the transition to Age of Sigmar in a manner that makes the minis virtually wholly unusable. Unlike Bretonnia, a lot of their kits were pretty much brand new when the transition was made. Lorewise, there were Tomb Kings slaving raids along the coasts and a Tomb King invasion of Sylvania, as well as a Tomb King invasion of Norsca, within the general time period covered by the game (I don't think The Old World will be set in any one year, I think its going to cover a period of history a couple hundred years long similar to Horus Heresy, I think at least one of the Vampire Wars will be included within that timeframe alongside a few other notable events), so it wouldn't be out of left field or beyond the geographic scope to include them. Similarly a number of Empire and Bretonnian invasions of the Tomb Kings domains are attempted during this timeframe.
Lizardmen I think are left for Age of Sigmar - they sit outside the setting of the game and the near-entirety of their miniatures range exists as a cohesive entity and faction within Age of Sigmar. Ogre Kingdoms are in a similar boat, but I think (maybe not on release, but not long after) some of their units show up as mercenaries that you can take alongside your other armies - maybe there will be just enough of them that you can take them as a small standalone army with limited options, but I don't think the entirety of their range makes it into the game. I would expect it to be something like Tyrant, Gluttons/Ironguts, Leadbelchers, and the Ironblaster only. Maybe Gnoblars + Scraplauncher and Maneaters too. Doubt they bring over the Beastclaw parts of the faction - even though they originated in WHFB I think they've established a stronger identity within Age of Sigmar. Skaven are an interesting one, because they are somewhat iconic to the WHFB setting, but have (similar to some of the other factions) made a solid home for themselves in Age of Sigmar. I can't see them being excluded, but I struggle to see how GW includes them in a manner that doesn't cost them potential sales of new minis, etc. think they probably will only end up being the "generic" aspects of the faction (I.E. none of the special/named clans) - lorewise it doesn't seem the Skaven were too active within the era of the games setting, but they weren't completely absent either. Chaos Dwarves are outside of the geographic scope of the game for the most part, though FW has the Legion of Azgorh line which would fit in well as a limited faction (certainly fits into the Old World better than they do in AoS as they are largely unloved).
In general, the big questionmark here is how they handle Chaos - I struggle to imagine GW won't include them, especially when Norsca makes up almost half of the setting map. Daemons are basically omnipresent in all of GWs 28mm games, I don't expect this one to be any different (seriously, I hesitate to say that people are hobbying wrong but - if you don't collect daemons as a 2nd army at least, then you're probably doing it wrong as they are the most versatile minis range in the hobby and are your passport to basically all of GWs games). Beastmen and Warriors have found a bit of a home in Age of Sigmar but are both so intrinsic to the WHFB setting, I struggle to imagine Chaos won't be a fully featured faction in TOW, but I don't know how GW does that without losing out on potential sales to existing customers. If nothing else, I imagine that this will be a good excuse for GW to recapitalize the warriors and beastmen ranges with new sculpts, etc. usable for both games, as the mini ranges are long in the tooth (and the expected revamp of Slaves to Darkness seems to be nowhere in sight after the release of the start collecting box).
Interested in the snow army they teased a while back - the one with the "Golden Compass" bears. As a Frostgrave player I'd be up for that...
Have some respect for Kislev you peasant!
They've been clear that Old World is to AoS what 30K is to 40K. Which means the same scale.
The only part of 30k seeing active and consistent releases at the moment is Adeptus Titanicus - which is decisively *not* the same scale. The "proper" Horus Heresy game seems to be in a state of semi-limbo/development hell with occasional new resin releases, a book every few years, and zero plastic support (can you even buy the handful of old 30k plastic kits they released a few years back anymore???).
For the 17 people across the globe that played Warmaster: no, they will most assuredly NOT be doing this in a different scale. Warmaster has the second fastest death spiral at retail. The only reason it lived on at Fanatic as long as it did is because they thought they could fleece a few more bucks out, and because a couple studio guys liked it.
This again? Pretty sure I remember slapping this argument down on facebook a few months ago pretty hard, was that you? Warmaster was around for over a decade and got continuous new releases about once a year through that time. The "second fastest death spiral at retail" gak is nonsense, it arguably had more support than Battlefleet Gothic did and spun off a ton of games in the historicals genre, some of which have been nipping at GWs heels for over a decade now.
Mind you, I doubt its a warmaster reboot, though if the goal is to do rank and file it would work much better in a smaller scale than 28mm unless GW is committed to limiting this to a smaller skirmish sized game of a couple heroes, 3-4 blocks of up to 20 troops each, and a warmachine/monster.
kodos wrote: so 2200, 50 years after and 100 years before the next big war in the timeline
so no real Horus Heresy of AoS as the missed the most exiting wars of that time
but really just the human civil war with minor conflicts
and I guess another year of nothing but artworks and the hope that GW won't mess it up again
hype train does not move for me
If anything it's perfect. Great big sandbox to do whatever you want with, especially with the highly fractured Empire. GW learned it's lesson with the issues in WHFB
well, current releases with 40k, AoS, BB show that GW did everything but learning something from the past
the big Sandbox is AoS, if they want an anything is possible R&F game they just need to release rules for that
and to make TOW into a similar big Sandbox, it would take many more years and it being the main game that get Space Marine like treatment
for now it is more likley it will start with 2 to 6 factions with small armies and slowly expand into more
the strong point of Warhammer here is the same as with HH, the main story and not the sandbox
This again? Pretty sure I remember slapping this argument down on facebook a few months ago pretty hard, was that you? Warmaster was around for over a decade and got continuous new releases about once a year through that time. The "second fastest death spiral at retail" gak is nonsense, it arguably had more support than Battlefleet Gothic did and spun off a ton of games in the historicals genre, some of which have been nipping at GWs heels for over a decade now.
Once a year releases are actually a great argument for why Warmaster is never coming back. That is absolute life support, especially when it was being managed by a quasi-independent part of the company solely created for the purposes of supporting lower volume games.
Anyone with any idea of marketing and business, knows that Warhammer Fantasy is not coming back in Warmaster scale based upon the marketing released thus far. It would be absolutely baffling, potentially the stupidest thing modern GW (post Kirby) has ever done if they went down that route. I'm honestly baffled by why some people keep pushing this idea.
This again? Pretty sure I remember slapping this argument down on facebook a few months ago pretty hard, was that you? Warmaster was around for over a decade and got continuous new releases about once a year through that time. The "second fastest death spiral at retail" gak is nonsense, it arguably had more support than Battlefleet Gothic did and spun off a ton of games in the historicals genre, some of which have been nipping at GWs heels for over a decade now.
Once a year releases are actually a great argument for why Warmaster is never coming back. That is absolute life support, especially when it was being managed by a quasi-independent part of the company solely created for the purposes of supporting lower volume games.
Its the same amount of support that games like Necromunda, Mordheim, Battlefleet Gothic, Adeptus Titanicus/Epic, Blood Bowl, Aeronautica Imperialis, Man O War, Warhammer Quest, Space Hulk, and others received. Actually, Warmaster had *more* support than most, if not all of the games I just listed when you factor in the Warhammer Historicals and Lord of the Rings spinoffs. If that level of "life support" was enough to justify the revitalization of some of those games (and demands to revitalize some of the others) then its sure as gak enough to justify a return of Warmaster, or are we throwing logical consistency to the wind now?
kodos wrote: so 2200, 50 years after and 100 years before the next big war in the timeline
so no real Horus Heresy of AoS as the missed the most exiting wars of that time
but really just the human civil war with minor conflicts
and I guess another year of nothing but artworks and the hope that GW won't mess it up again
hype train does not move for me
If anything it's perfect. Great big sandbox to do whatever you want with, especially with the highly fractured Empire. GW learned it's lesson with the issues in WHFB
well, current releases with 40k, AoS, BB show that GW did everything but learning something from the past
the big Sandbox is AoS, if they want an anything is possible R&F game they just need to release rules for that
and to make TOW into a similar big Sandbox, it would take many more years and it being the main game that get Space Marine like treatment
for now it is more likley it will start with 2 to 6 factions with small armies and slowly expand into more
the strong point of Warhammer here is the same as with HH, the main story and not the sandbox
I'm not really sure of that. What would be the main story here? We're between major wars, and they've already mapped out everything from Kislev to the coasts of Bretonnia so far.
So far, faction-wise, they've already name dropped:
Kislev
Empire (in four sub-factions)
Bretonnia (in a mess of possibilities)
Orcs
Wood Elves (two big icons on the new map)
they're even pointing out some High Elf outposts
It'd be weird not to have Beastmen (since they affect Empire, Brets and Wood elves) and Undead (even if its just vampire counts) as internal enemies.
And of course, never discount some Chaos or Skaven fun.
Oh, I'm pleased to be wrong for once, thanks for the tip off about it being set earlier than the typical WFB time period and that explaining the Louen Orc-slayer thing. Explains a lot!
Olthannon wrote: Given how good the empire blood bowl models are of the new release I'm very much looking forward to the models they put out. It's also a while before Mordheim is flattened by the comet so maybe.. just maybe that gets a cheeky refresher too. Who knows..
Even if it doesn't, a new range of models will make for some fun new warbands.
Mordheim is destroyed in 2000 so its been a deamon/Skaven/mutant infested pile rubble for a couple of hundred years.
Yep! Sorry I meant it's also a while *after* - brain had a little moment there.
Eiríkr wrote: My only wish for this is for the Bretonnia range to return unchanged.
You're not getting that wish. Those molds are already ancient to begin with, and the sculpts are not up to GWs modern standards. Let the past die, kill it if you have to.
If they actually do intend to include the whole breadth of the classic factions as people hope this map suggests, rather than just doing a Heresy-style "one main army with themed lists and a few other minifactions" approach, I don't really think they have any alternative to bringing back the old range.
GWHQ might have given them the resources to do a single full faction of minis, maybe even two, but all of them? Even accounting for the more modern WHFB minis that are still used in AoS and so could be re-reboxed(although that approach wouldn't bode well for the affordability of TOW - they're hardly going to provide classic models in the affordable bulk necessary for a rank & flank system when that would make a lot of the "legacy" models in AoS packaging look like poor value by comparison), there's a *lot* of stuff that's gone the way of the dodo, with even the more complete ranges still having big gaps and of course a couple being gone entirely.
Either TOW is a much bigger project than anyone suspects, or it's exactly as small as people previously thought and all the map stuff is just background fluff, or they'll be bringing back the classic models. My money is still on this being a smaller project and the maps are just fluff b
My expectations largely remain unchanged (assuming GW doesn't grant my wish of making it a Warmaster reboot instead). It will be a human-centric game (with an apparent 4 Empire factions and another 14 Bretonnian factions based on this map, plus Kislev which isn't included for some reason, theres certainly a lot of humans to go around) with the majority of units being buildable from just a handful of kits - really you can probably boil it all down to three kits: a "conscript troops" tier, a "professional troops" tier, and a "knightly" tier. These kits will be basic - i.e. bodies (and horses where applicable), plain weapons, etc. Add a handful of upgrade sprues with faction specific bits like heads, armor pieces, special weapons, etc. to spice up your units (Bretonnian sprue makes your knights look like grail knights, etc. your conscripts look like peasant bowmen, and your professionals look like men at arms, Empire sprue makes your knights look like Knightly Orders, your professionals look like state troops, etc., Kislev sprue makes your knights look like winged lancers or something, and I expect the basic kislev infantry would look a lot like Empire troops otherwise). Each faction then maybe gets a couple of unique kits (Kislev gets Ice Guard and bear cavalry, Empire gets a Steam Tank and artillery, Bretonnia gets Pegasus Knights and a Trebuchet), a couple characters, and that covers the initial wave of releases. Further units will be additional upgrade sprues or resin add-ons, with occasional unique kits, similar to the release models establshed by games like Adeptus Titanicus, Aeronatuica Imperialis, Necromunda, etc.).
I think we will end up seeing Dogs of War, Estalians, Border Princes, and Tileans as resin upgrades to the same basic kits used by the other factions (maybe Kislev falls in here instead of having a sprue) and a handful of additional unique standalone kits for some of the more unique units.
Vampires I think will be able to utilize the majority of the human kits, with at a minimum a special Sylvania upgrade sprue to make them more representative of the humans enthralled/enslaved by the Vampires, and at best an undead upgrade sprue to make things more deadish (knights become blood knights, professionals become grave guard, conscripts become skeletons and zombies, add a couple of unique kits like the others, etc.). Some of the Age of Sigmar range I think doesn't sit well in the AoS range and will be back-ported over to The Old World, specifically the Coven Throne and Mortis Engine which are kind of forgotten bastard children of the Death Grand Alliance both aesthetically and thematically. The Soulblight range as a whole is actually somewhat unloved, most of us are hoping to see them get redone but maybe its possible GW has decided the faction will work better in the Old World and has no place in Age of Sigmar. TBH I think most of us are expecting the Soulblight faction to be remade as vampirates, so theres room for GW to remake the Vampire Counts largely as they were without overlapping with the Age of Sigmar range.
Other factions come after, I expect them to be for the most part fairly limited in scope and support (i.e. limited numbers of units, the basics will be in plastic, with most of the rest of the range being resin, etc.). I think the "major factions" here which will get significant plastic releases will be Wood Elves, Orcs/Greenskins, and Dwarves. These factions have effectively been squatted and remade in Age of Sigmar in a way that is wholly unique to the setting (Sylvaneth, Bonesplitterz/Ironjawz, and Kharadron/Fyreslayers respectively), so there is room for "Old World" versions of all three that do not have much overlap (but could borrow some units, the treefolk from Sylvaneth could crossover into the Wood Elf roster in a limited fashion, for example).I think we see extensive plastic support for these factions and we can expect them to be fairly complete rosters.
High Elves I think end up being primarily resin upgrades to the Wood Elves (I expect the wood elves to be designed in a way that will easily accept parts to make them look like something other than Wood Elves, similar to how I expect the human sprues to be designed - perhaps we'll even get a plastic High elf upgrade sprue here - basically just basic garb in a standard infantry/cavalry kit, for example, and then the upgrade kits contain separate armor sets and accessories that you put over them to make them "high elf" or "wood elf"). Of course I can see a couple unique plastic/resin kits here as well, but I think overall they will be a "minor faction" - we're not going to see the full High Elves army list of old, just outpost garrisons/vanguard type forces representing the forces mustered to defend the elven colonies. I don't expect to see Dragons or any of the super elite units of yore here - perhaps they are limited to being allies rather than a standalone force. Likewise I could see Dark Elves being introduced in similar faction - but we're getting corsairs and raiders, not the core of the armies found in Naggaroth or assaulting Ulthuan. In the lore the "Sea Elves" are also kicking around near Marienburg around this timeframe, maybe they finally get introduced too? In any case, the Wood Elves seem to be the main Elf faction, as they are the only one who have a power base in the Old World vs overseas.
I think Tomb Kings make a comeback in a big way, not on release, but after a couple years. Aside from Bretonnia, they are the only other faction that was completely squatted from the range during the transition to Age of Sigmar in a manner that makes the minis virtually wholly unusable. Unlike Bretonnia, a lot of their kits were pretty much brand new when the transition was made. Lorewise, there were Tomb Kings slaving raids along the coasts and a Tomb King invasion of Sylvania, as well as a Tomb King invasion of Norsca, within the general time period covered by the game (I don't think The Old World will be set in any one year, I think its going to cover a period of history a couple hundred years long similar to Horus Heresy, I think at least one of the Vampire Wars will be included within that timeframe alongside a few other notable events), so it wouldn't be out of left field or beyond the geographic scope to include them. Similarly a number of Empire and Bretonnian invasions of the Tomb Kings domains are attempted during this timeframe.
Lizardmen I think are left for Age of Sigmar - they sit outside the setting of the game and the near-entirety of their miniatures range exists as a cohesive entity and faction within Age of Sigmar. Ogre Kingdoms are in a similar boat, but I think (maybe not on release, but not long after) some of their units show up as mercenaries that you can take alongside your other armies - maybe there will be just enough of them that you can take them as a small standalone army with limited options, but I don't think the entirety of their range makes it into the game. I would expect it to be something like Tyrant, Gluttons/Ironguts, Leadbelchers, and the Ironblaster only. Maybe Gnoblars + Scraplauncher and Maneaters too. Doubt they bring over the Beastclaw parts of the faction - even though they originated in WHFB I think they've established a stronger identity within Age of Sigmar. Skaven are an interesting one, because they are somewhat iconic to the WHFB setting, but have (similar to some of the other factions) made a solid home for themselves in Age of Sigmar. I can't see them being excluded, but I struggle to see how GW includes them in a manner that doesn't cost them potential sales of new minis, etc. think they probably will only end up being the "generic" aspects of the faction (I.E. none of the special/named clans) - lorewise it doesn't seem the Skaven were too active within the era of the games setting, but they weren't completely absent either. Chaos Dwarves are outside of the geographic scope of the game for the most part, though FW has the Legion of Azgorh line which would fit in well as a limited faction (certainly fits into the Old World better than they do in AoS as they are largely unloved).
In general, the big questionmark here is how they handle Chaos - I struggle to imagine GW won't include them, especially when Norsca makes up almost half of the setting map. Daemons are basically omnipresent in all of GWs 28mm games, I don't expect this one to be any different (seriously, I hesitate to say that people are hobbying wrong but - if you don't collect daemons as a 2nd army at least, then you're probably doing it wrong as they are the most versatile minis range in the hobby and are your passport to basically all of GWs games). Beastmen and Warriors have found a bit of a home in Age of Sigmar but are both so intrinsic to the WHFB setting, I struggle to imagine Chaos won't be a fully featured faction in TOW, but I don't know how GW does that without losing out on potential sales to existing customers. If nothing else, I imagine that this will be a good excuse for GW to recapitalize the warriors and beastmen ranges with new sculpts, etc. usable for both games, as the mini ranges are long in the tooth (and the expected revamp of Slaves to Darkness seems to be nowhere in sight after the release of the start collecting box).
Interested in the snow army they teased a while back - the one with the "Golden Compass" bears. As a Frostgrave player I'd be up for that...
Have some respect for Kislev you peasant!
They've been clear that Old World is to AoS what 30K is to 40K. Which means the same scale.
The only part of 30k seeing active and consistent releases at the moment is Adeptus Titanicus - which is decisively *not* the same scale. The "proper" Horus Heresy game seems to be in a state of semi-limbo/development hell with occasional new resin releases, a book every few years, and zero plastic support (can you even buy the handful of old 30k plastic kits they released a few years back anymore???).
For the 17 people across the globe that played Warmaster: no, they will most assuredly NOT be doing this in a different scale. Warmaster has the second fastest death spiral at retail. The only reason it lived on at Fanatic as long as it did is because they thought they could fleece a few more bucks out, and because a couple studio guys liked it.
This again? Pretty sure I remember slapping this argument down on facebook a few months ago pretty hard, was that you? Warmaster was around for over a decade and got continuous new releases about once a year through that time. The "second fastest death spiral at retail" gak is nonsense, it arguably had more support than Battlefleet Gothic did and spun off a ton of games in the historicals genre, some of which have been nipping at GWs heels for over a decade now.
Mind you, I doubt its a warmaster reboot, though if the goal is to do rank and file it would work much better in a smaller scale than 28mm unless GW is committed to limiting this to a smaller skirmish sized game of a couple heroes, 3-4 blocks of up to 20 troops each, and a warmachine/monster.
I don't know whether to be concerned about all the faction name drops, I hope they are not going to be overambitious and end up crashing with this project!
I'm as excited to see the return of Ungol Horse Archers as the next bloke, but I rather hope they focus on a handful of key factions like Orks, Dwarves, Empire and Chaos to start with.
I can't believe some people are still extremely salty about Age of Sigmar all these years later. You'd think Age of Sigmar killed their mom or something.
As someone who was looking to get into Fantasy but couldn't back in the day (too young, too expensive) I'm glad its coming back so I can play a good rank and file mini game. Age of Sigmar is still great and I love playing it though. I don't see why you can't like both.
Lets hope they can fix some of the major glaring flaws with WHFB though. Lets not kid ourselves that it was a perfect game. The amount of matches I've seen end after the first turn is ridiculous and tbh is a failure of a wargame. Also if it is going to be a rank and file game I hope the unit sizes are more manageable, either being priced cheaper or smaller/more durable.
Assuming they keep to the same scale, I think the Old World will be comparatively "skirmish" sized as opposed to the mass battle game that was WHFB around 7th/8th edition. Basically a return to pre-6th edition where armies were a hero, 3-4 block of cavalry/infantry (not more than 20 models each), and a monster/warmachine each.
The apparent trend towards smaller tables started by 40k (almost guaranteed to role over into Age of Sigmar next year with the supposed launch of AoS 3 if Warcry is any indication) will likely kill any possibility of The Old World being a "mass battle" type game the way WHFB was. It was already difficult enough to maneuver larger armies around a 6x4 table, and you were basically forced to play in an open field sans terrain because of the difficulty involved with positioning blocks on the table. Cutting table sizes by about 20-30% would make a game like that impossible to play.
Basically the only way I think we're seeing "big battles" back is if they go smaller scale with the minis.
Don Savik wrote: I can't believe some people are still extremely salty about Age of Sigmar all these years later.
Considering it crashed a lot of people out of the hobby, the fact that it was a ludicrous thing to do and the fact that the replacement was a bizarro mockery of 40k fantasy of course people still hate it with a passion.
chaos0xomega wrote: Assuming they keep to the same scale, I think the Old World will be comparatively "skirmish" sized as opposed to the mass battle game that was WHFB around 7th/8th edition. Basically a return to pre-6th edition where armies were a hero, 3-4 block of cavalry/infantry (not more than 20 models each), and a monster/warmachine each.
Not too familiar with the differences in old editions so this is helpful. I think that would be perfect for an army. One of the great things about Age of Sigmar is that it plays really well with 1000 point armies, which are relatively cheap (like 2 start collectings). If that can mirror that with this game then it would work great. Have the option for large battles but don't make it the standard.
I will say I still think AoS is crap, even now. I loved Fantasy because it felt better as a different system to 40k. Now they feel too similar for my liking, so yeah I still don't like AoS.
Haven't kept all up with this but hope it's good and a return to fantasy as I loved it.
Don Savik wrote: I can't believe some people are still extremely salty about Age of Sigmar all these years later.
Considering it crashed a lot of people out of the hobby, the fact that it was a ludicrous thing to do and the fact that the replacement was a bizarro mockery of 40k fantasy of course people still hate it with a passion.
It wasn't ludicrous to re-imagine a game that was costing them money. Old GW didn't know how to make people buy that game. It was too confusing and expensive for new players to get into. Could they have done it more gracefully? Sure, but that was during the time when old management of GW was still in charge.
And its not a mockery of 40k or fantasy, its just the difference between high fantasy and low fantasy in a setting. While obviously a difference in style for people, I don't think that warrants the amount of hatred it gets. Is it a bummer that people can't play their game because it got discontinued? Sure. Does that mean Age of Sigmar is a bad game? No.
Also nothing is stopping you from playing it. I still play Mordheim from time to time. Games get discontinued sometimes, that's just life.
edit: I guess I am just saying that harboring all that negative emotion all these years is bad for you. Reconcile and move on.
Don Savik wrote: I can't believe some people are still extremely salty about Age of Sigmar all these years later.
Considering it crashed a lot of people out of the hobby, the fact that it was a ludicrous thing to do and the fact that the replacement was a bizarro mockery of 40k fantasy of course people still hate it with a passion.
It also destroyed several armies outright at the start and removed several others. Yep I can get why some really are salty about AoS and what it did; especially as it didn't need to be done. Old World was already picking up in the End Times and had GW put the same resources into it; improved the 500-1000 point games (ergo that bracket newbies play in as they build up) etc... And Old World could have survived very well. Heck they could have just trashed most of the Old World back and basically done the Age of Sigmar Old World style - Sigmar marching in with legions of loyal warriors after a period of chaos blight where Chaos mostly won and beat everyone back and re-set many national boundaries etc...
Anyway enough of what might or could have been - we have to live with what is.
I think provided GW gets the price point right there's no reason a 2K rank and file games can't work. All they need is the right marketing; the right models; the right price point and the right support leading up to 2K. One issue that Old World had originally was that the 500-1000 point games where beginners were going to mostly be; didn't work all that well. It also was not all that fun for rank and file and was far more open to imbalances and auto win/loss situations (bad match ups). AoS has improved on that a lot and its clearly something GW recognise as a concern. You can't drop big games entirely because your loyal fanbase desire them and they are visually more impressive. But you can provide Underworlds and Warcry and Meeting Engagement rules; you can make something like Killteam and Warcy into their own product lines with their own marketed rules not just have them as a back page in the big rule book. Plus being a specialist game GW might expect reduced return on investment compared to a main-studio game. Ergo its profiting thresholds might be lower or at least accepted to grow more slowly.
The real trick is sitting LotR alongside Old World and alongside AoS without them poaching each others roster and market too much. I do have a sneaking thought that perhaps Old World is going to be what we have when the LotR licence expires. It might be the Tolkien Estate isn't going to renew it in 3 years time; or that they don't want to allow it to develop or perhaps want a bigger percentage cut than GW wants to give. Or perhaps GW just feels that with the films done the golden age of profit is gone from LotR and as much as they might have staff who love working on it; as a company they want a product they don't pay royalties on and have full control over - and which hasn't got the risk that if it takes off well, you end up having to pay more in royalties next time the licence comes up for renewal/review
The real trick is sitting LotR alongside Old World and alongside AoS without them poaching each others roster and market too much. I do have a sneaking thought that perhaps Old World is going to be what we have when the LotR licence expires. It might be the Tolkien Estate isn't going to renew it in 3 years time; or that they don't want to allow it to develop or perhaps want a bigger percentage cut than GW wants to give. Or perhaps GW just feels that with the films done the golden age of profit is gone from LotR and as much as they might have staff who love working on it; as a company they want a product they don't pay royalties on and have full control over - and which hasn't got the risk that if it takes off well, you end up having to pay more in royalties next time the licence comes up for renewal/review
Wouldn't surprise me at all. In all honesty the golden age of profit from LOTR was gone more than a decade ago. The Hobbit movies came and went with only a minor blip in profits. I get the feeling that these days GW keeps on the LOTR licence more to prevent a competitor getting it more than anything else.
I also wouldn't be surprised if this is lined up to replace 30k, which has struggled since Alan Bligh's unfortunate passing and is getting near the end of content anyway - unless GW decides to go down the Scouring route. Given the constant bubbling up of rumours that Forge World may be folded into central GW, ending 30k and replacing it with a plastic TOW might be GW's way of creating a third in house line. I'm open minded to the idea that plastics may be more widespread in this range than people expect because a) a resin army at WHFB scales would be cost prohibitive b) Blood Bowl is primarily plastic and c) GW recently massively increased their production facilities.
The real trick is sitting LotR alongside Old World and alongside AoS without them poaching each others roster and market too much. I do have a sneaking thought that perhaps Old World is going to be what we have when the LotR licence expires. It might be the Tolkien Estate isn't going to renew it in 3 years time; or that they don't want to allow it to develop or perhaps want a bigger percentage cut than GW wants to give. Or perhaps GW just feels that with the films done the golden age of profit is gone from LotR and as much as they might have staff who love working on it; as a company they want a product they don't pay royalties on and have full control over - and which hasn't got the risk that if it takes off well, you end up having to pay more in royalties next time the licence comes up for renewal/review
Wouldn't surprise me at all. In all honesty the golden age of profit from LOTR was gone more than a decade ago. The Hobbit movies came and went with only a minor blip in profits. I get the feeling that these days GW keeps on the LOTR licence more to prevent a competitor getting it more than anything else.
There may be some wait and see on the Amazon LotR series.
First, if it creates a bump.
Second, if they can get (did get?) the license for that material (if its separate).
That assumes that GW wants to take a risk on a license agreement for a Second Age show with largely unknown characters, and deal with Amazon (not sure how well they'd cope being the minnow next to the orca in the room)
Graphite wrote: Great news! This is set about 150 years before the rediscovery of Blood Bowl, and therefore is in a parallel dimension where The End Times never happened.
At least, that's how I'm going to think of it!
(Map looks awesome. Orcs with a "c")
I was wondering when the Nuffle tome or whatnot was found.
Ooh it could be indeed for people that don’t like AoS.
And then normal history for anyone else
LotR wasn't competition for WFB when LotR was at its best, and it won't be now. Those are very different games and fill (or will fill) different niches in GW's portfolio. If a customer overlap exists between the two, it's in the form of people who play multiple systems anyway.
The real trick is sitting LotR alongside Old World and alongside AoS without them poaching each others roster and market too much. I do have a sneaking thought that perhaps Old World is going to be what we have when the LotR licence expires. It might be the Tolkien Estate isn't going to renew it in 3 years time; or that they don't want to allow it to develop or perhaps want a bigger percentage cut than GW wants to give. Or perhaps GW just feels that with the films done the golden age of profit is gone from LotR and as much as they might have staff who love working on it; as a company they want a product they don't pay royalties on and have full control over - and which hasn't got the risk that if it takes off well, you end up having to pay more in royalties next time the licence comes up for renewal/review
Wouldn't surprise me at all. In all honesty the golden age of profit from LOTR was gone more than a decade ago. The Hobbit movies came and went with only a minor blip in profits. I get the feeling that these days GW keeps on the LOTR licence more to prevent a competitor getting it more than anything else.
There may be some wait and see on the Amazon LotR series.
First, if it creates a bump.
Second, if they can get (did get?) the license for that material (if its separate).
That assumes that GW wants to take a risk on a license agreement for a Second Age show with largely unknown characters, and deal with Amazon (not sure how well they'd cope being the minnow next to the orca in the room)
It’s fedinit a different license. Only the Tolkien estate is the same. The rest of the production side is all different and that’s who they’d need to deal with also.
Don Savik wrote: I can't believe some people are still extremely salty about Age of Sigmar all these years later.
Considering it crashed a lot of people out of the hobby, the fact that it was a ludicrous thing to do and the fact that the replacement was a bizarro mockery of 40k fantasy of course people still hate it with a passion.
A ludicrous thing to do and yet its selling better than WHFB ever did and is in fact the best selling fantasy miniatures product line on the planet, whereas WHFB was playing second fiddle in sales to LotR for a number of years - even when LotR was post-peak and barely selling in and of itself.
think provided GW gets the price point right there's no reason a 2K rank and file games can't work. All they need is the right marketing; the right models; the right price point and the right support leading up to 2K. One issue that Old World had originally was that the 500-1000 point games where beginners were going to mostly be; didn't work all that well. It also was not all that fun for rank and file and was far more open to imbalances and auto win/loss situations (bad match ups). AoS has improved on that a lot and its clearly something GW recognise as a concern. You can't drop big games entirely because your loyal fanbase desire them and they are visually more impressive. But you can provide Underworlds and Warcry and Meeting Engagement rules; you can make something like Killteam and Warcy into their own product lines with their own marketed rules not just have them as a back page in the big rule book. Plus being a specialist game GW might expect reduced return on investment compared to a main-studio game. Ergo its profiting thresholds might be lower or at least accepted to grow more slowly.
The real trick is sitting LotR alongside Old World and alongside AoS without them poaching each others roster and market too much. I do have a sneaking thought that perhaps Old World is going to be what we have when the LotR licence expires. It might be the Tolkien Estate isn't going to renew it in 3 years time; or that they don't want to allow it to develop or perhaps want a bigger percentage cut than GW wants to give. Or perhaps GW just feels that with the films done the golden age of profit is gone from LotR and as much as they might have staff who love working on it; as a company they want a product they don't pay royalties on and have full control over - and which hasn't got the risk that if it takes off well, you end up having to pay more in royalties next time the licence comes up for renewal/review
There is no "getting the price point right". GW is going to price the minis the way it prices its minis, its going to be $40-50 for a box of 10 infantry or 5 cavalry, the horde factions might get a box of 20 guys for $60, and the elite guys will get a box of 3-5 dudes for $50. If its a big battle game at 2k points you'll need 100+ minis average, if its a small battle game at 2k points you'll only need 50-60. As a publicly traded company GW also isn't going to let an underselling less profitable product line drag it down and feth up its profit margins - games like Blood Bowl and Adeptus Titanicus have seen the support they have because they blew GWs own sales expectations away on release date. I forget the numbers but from what we've been told by GW staff past and present, Blood Bowl exceeded GWs one-year sales forecast by a huge margin on release day, Adeptus Titanicus sold several times more copies within its first two weeks of sales than GWs bean counters figured it would sell over the course of an entire year. Necromundas success was similarly explosive.
GW is pushing more specialist games because it can see a bigger return on investment from them than it can with its mainline games, rather than the other way around. Everyone playing Adeptus Titanicus is buying stuff produced from a smaller number of molds than what would be needed to develop the model range of a single 40k faction, i.e Space Marines notwithstanding, Adeptus Titanicus sees better ROI than most 40k or AoS factions do because everyone is buying the same handful of kits regardless of what faction they are playing. Blood Bowl teams each only require a single set of molds each and see consistent sales because most blood bowl players collect multiple teams rather than just sticking to one particular faction - it means less development costs for GW overall because they don't need to continually support any one faction and can focus on continually pumping out new stuff that they know will sell consistently and predictably, which is the best thing anyone in this industry can hope for as its low risk and you can easily forecast it. Necromunda makes money hand over fist for similar reason - the entirety of its plastic miniatures range is currently captured in just 17 model kits, 13 of which are divided across 8 or so "factions" and the remaining 4 are available for use with any faction (and 2 of those 4 utilize the same molds and are simply packaged differently) - the buy in is low enough that most people collect 2 or 3 of these factions simultaneously and most people end up buying 2 copies of each kit for maximum flexibility. Specialist Games sell, they sell very very well, especially when compared to the actual investment GW needs to make on its end to support them.
As for LotR - thats another example of a game that hasn't done well as a big battle rank and file game. GW has tried to make it relevant multiple times over the past decade and none of those attempts have ever really succeeded. LotR's main success came when it was a narrative skirmish game, the attempts to revamp it as a big battle game have not really caught on with the community (and thats part of the reason why we've only really seen releases of one-off heroes and characters, etc. and re-releases of older kits the last couple years instead of the whole new armies and units that GW promised us when they relaunched the game a couple years ago). Your suggestion that maybe The Old World is being implemented because they are going to lose the LotR license is an interesting one though, it makes sense (although maybe not within the context of the new LotR material rolling down from Amazon - it'll depend on whether their license covers that as well though I would think GW would benefit from a "knock on" effect regardless), but as it stands I don't really see them really being potential competitors with one another, as that would imply that LotR was actual selling well enough to warrant the concern of internal competition.
Don Savik wrote: I can't believe some people are still extremely salty about Age of Sigmar all these years later.
Considering it crashed a lot of people out of the hobby, the fact that it was a ludicrous thing to do and the fact that the replacement was a bizarro mockery of 40k fantasy of course people still hate it with a passion.
It also destroyed several armies outright at the start and removed several others. Yep I can get why some really are salty about AoS and what it did; especially as it didn't need to be done. Old World was already picking up in the End Times and had GW put the same resources into it; improved the 500-1000 point games (ergo that bracket newbies play in as they build up) etc... And Old World could have survived very well. Heck they could have just trashed most of the Old World back and basically done the Age of Sigmar Old World style - Sigmar marching in with legions of loyal warriors after a period of chaos blight where Chaos mostly won and beat everyone back and re-set many national boundaries etc...
Anyway enough of what might or could have been - we have to live with what is.
I think provided GW gets the price point right there's no reason a 2K rank and file games can't work. All they need is the right marketing; the right models; the right price point and the right support leading up to 2K. One issue that Old World had originally was that the 500-1000 point games where beginners were going to mostly be; didn't work all that well. It also was not all that fun for rank and file and was far more open to imbalances and auto win/loss situations (bad match ups). AoS has improved on that a lot and its clearly something GW recognise as a concern. You can't drop big games entirely because your loyal fanbase desire them and they are visually more impressive. But you can provide Underworlds and Warcry and Meeting Engagement rules; you can make something like Killteam and Warcy into their own product lines with their own marketed rules not just have them as a back page in the big rule book. Plus being a specialist game GW might expect reduced return on investment compared to a main-studio game. Ergo its profiting thresholds might be lower or at least accepted to grow more slowly.
The real trick is sitting LotR alongside Old World and alongside AoS without them poaching each others roster and market too much. I do have a sneaking thought that perhaps Old World is going to be what we have when the LotR licence expires. It might be the Tolkien Estate isn't going to renew it in 3 years time; or that they don't want to allow it to develop or perhaps want a bigger percentage cut than GW wants to give. Or perhaps GW just feels that with the films done the golden age of profit is gone from LotR and as much as they might have staff who love working on it; as a company they want a product they don't pay royalties on and have full control over - and which hasn't got the risk that if it takes off well, you end up having to pay more in royalties next time the licence comes up for renewal/review
Yeah that ain't happening. They've just invested heavily in getting the game back on its feet, they're not just going to drop it after doing that. Especially when they're ramping up the plastic kits with a new, much more in scale plastic Treebeard coming soon. Also, they just hired another member to the Middle-Earth team not long ago. Not really something to do if they're planning on shutting it down.
Don Savik wrote: I can't believe some people are still extremely salty about Age of Sigmar all these years later.
Considering it crashed a lot of people out of the hobby, the fact that it was a ludicrous thing to do and the fact that the replacement was a bizarro mockery of 40k fantasy of course people still hate it with a passion.
A ludicrous thing to do and yet its selling better than WHFB ever did and is in fact the best selling fantasy miniatures product line on the planet, whereas WHFB was playing second fiddle in sales to LotR for a number of years - even when LotR was post-peak and barely selling in and of itself.
Correlation and causation are not the same. Age of Sigmar may be more popular and selling better, but that does not automatically indicate the complete replacement of the WHFB lore and game was the right move or that it is the reason for its success in the first place, just that something within the situation overcame the problem of attracting new players. I doubt many of those new players started AoS because of reasoning along the lines of "they destroyed WHFB, finally I'm interested!" but rather it was a game that was actually getting new stuff and generating interest again, while overall being more accessible. Those changes could have been made to WHFB too. I'm not expecting this to be a complete return to what there was before, but it'll at least be interesting to see how this turns out and what that indicates about the lore-change side of the AoS initial fiasco being a good decision or not.
chaos0xomega wrote: Your suggestion that maybe The Old World is being implemented because they are going to lose the LotR license is an interesting one though
I really don't see it.
WFB is coming back because it's a unique, established IP that the previous management squandered to the point of killing it off. If anything, it's AoS that'd be the product GW would like people to buy in case they can no longer sell LotR.
Which, really, isn't all that likely to happen. New Line isn't going to get a better deal on the licence (who's going to buy it, only to re-release at best comparable designs into a cold market? Anyone knows a company dumb enough?) and the costs are likely covered by the sales, so holding on and trickling out content is in GW's best interest.
chaos0xomega wrote: Your suggestion that maybe The Old World is being implemented because they are going to lose the LotR license is an interesting one though
I really don't see it.
WFB is coming back because it's a unique, established IP that the previous management squandered to the point of killing it off. If anything, it's AoS that'd be the product GW would like people to buy in case they can no longer sell LotR.
Which, really, isn't all that likely to happen. New Line isn't going to get a better deal on the licence (who's going to buy it, only to re-release at best comparable designs into a cold market? Anyone knows a company dumb enough?) and the costs are likely covered by the sales, so holding on and trickling out content is in GW's best interest.
I fully agree it isn’t going anywhere.
But to answer the question, who would buy the license?
Mantic probably.
They love a good licensed game.
Also nothing is stopping you from playing it. I still play Mordheim from time to time. Games get discontinued sometimes, that's just life.
edit: I guess I am just saying that harboring all that negative emotion all these years is bad for you. Reconcile and move on.
It's extremely good for me, it helps with my posture.
As you yourself said the post above, you don't know the older editions that well. But for a lot of people who played WHFB since the dawn of time AOS cut deep. I don't know if you know, but people love to harbour old grudges. Some people even write them down in a big book.
There's a huge audience who will absolutely spill cash on good fantasy, GW know that. AOS is just new Coke.
Don Savik wrote: I can't believe some people are still extremely salty about Age of Sigmar all these years later.
Considering it crashed a lot of people out of the hobby, the fact that it was a ludicrous thing to do and the fact that the replacement was a bizarro mockery of 40k fantasy of course people still hate it with a passion.
A ludicrous thing to do and yet its selling better than WHFB ever did and is in fact the best selling fantasy miniatures product line on the planet, whereas WHFB was playing second fiddle in sales to LotR for a number of years - even when LotR was post-peak and barely selling in and of itself.
Correlation and causation are not the same. Age of Sigmar may be more popular and selling better, but that does not automatically indicate the complete replacement of the WHFB lore and game was the right move or that it is the reason for its success in the first place, just that something within the situation overcame the problem of attracting new players. I doubt many of those new players started AoS because of reasoning along the lines of "they destroyed WHFB, finally I'm interested!" but rather it was a game that was actually getting new stuff and generating interest again, while overall being more accessible. Those changes could have been made to WHFB too. I'm not expecting this to be a complete return to what there was before, but it'll at least be interesting to see how this turns out and what that indicates about the lore-change side of the AoS initial fiasco being a good decision or not.
GW tried to make changes and revitalize the game for a decade - its actually really dumb to think they didn't or that there were still other viable options on the table that they could have exercised considering the costs involved with them not only abandoning all their past work and development but also the investment needed to launch the new game.
WFB is coming back because it's a unique, established IP that the previous management squandered to the point of killing it off.
Theres literally nothing unique about it, which is why countless knockoff minis from 3rd parties exist for it, and why I expect that whatever they do with The Old World is going to leave a lot of people unhappy that there is going to be some sort of major departure from the expectation of what these minis are supposed to look like.
If anything, it's AoS that'd be the product GW would like people to buy in case they can no longer sell LotR.
Sure, but that doesn't mean that audience interest is going to necessarily be channeled into AoS - the thematic and aesthetic jump from LotR to AoS is huge, the jump from LotR to The Old World is significantly smaller.
New Line isn't going to get a better deal on the licence (who's going to buy it, only to re-release at best comparable designs into a cold market? Anyone knows a company dumb enough?) and the costs are likely covered by the sales, so holding on and trickling out content is in GW's best interest.
Licensing isn't that clear cut or simple. It could be possible that New Lines license is sunsetting under the Tolkien estate and GW is going to lose the license regardless. Amazon is also apparently licensing the tv show from both the Tolkien estate AND New Line for its TV series (apparently Amazon is using production assets from the films to maintain visual consistency, etc. with the film universe, so its not a setting reboot but rather a continuation/spinoff of the settings), its possible that New Line would be receiving royalty checks from any game licensed under the Amazon license anyway, so in that sense New Line doesn't really even care - but that also indirectly makes the film license more valuable, which means GW may be asked to pony up more money to renew the license or lead another firm to more aggressively pursue the rights and outbid GW in the process (I could see Asmodee doing it, they already have the Marvel and Star Wars miniatures gaming licenses, they could always add LotR to the stable).
There's a huge audience who will absolutely spill cash on good fantasy, GW know that. AOS is just new Coke.
This comparison would be apt if new Coke was more financially successful than old Coke had ever been.
Lotr isn't going anywhere. It was dead about years ago from GWs side but they realized there's still a significant playerbase in some countries so they resurrected the game. If they kill the game it would be end times 2.0 at this point, driving players away. The Lotr Community would also probably rather move to a historic setting or just a different rulebook (Saga age of magic, for example is already pretty popular) than to Old World or AoS, the Design difference between those two Fantasy settings is already too large with the one being heroic high fantasy and the other one true scale low fantasy. Or they would do the same they did in the Kirby years, continue to play the game as usual but slowly dwindle because of the lack of support and limited availabality of models.
StarFyre wrote: Will lizardmen be part of the old world since they have been on the planet for ages?
Sf
We don't know, but my guess is unlikely. The Old World isn't the name of the planet, its the name of a continent - and the lizardmen don't really ever go to that continent.
Don Savik wrote: I can't believe some people are still extremely salty about Age of Sigmar all these years later.
Considering it crashed a lot of people out of the hobby, the fact that it was a ludicrous thing to do and the fact that the replacement was a bizarro mockery of 40k fantasy of course people still hate it with a passion.
It wasn't ludicrous to re-imagine a game that was costing them money. Old GW didn't know how to make people buy that game. It was too confusing and expensive for new players to get into. Could they have done it more gracefully? Sure, but that was during the time when old management of GW was still in charge.
And its not a mockery of 40k or fantasy, its just the difference between high fantasy and low fantasy in a setting. While obviously a difference in style for people, I don't think that warrants the amount of hatred it gets. Is it a bummer that people can't play their game because it got discontinued? Sure. Does that mean Age of Sigmar is a bad game? No.
Also nothing is stopping you from playing it. I still play Mordheim from time to time. Games get discontinued sometimes, that's just life.
edit: I guess I am just saying that harboring all that negative emotion all these years is bad for you. Reconcile and move on.
You're the one who stated "I can't believe some people are still extremely salty...". It's not like I go to sleep every night thinking about it, but yeah, it still pissed me off the way GW did it when someone brings it up.
At the time Fantasy died, I had been playing on and off for about 20 years and had unfinished armies that remain unfinished.
Fantasy was always my preferred game to 40k, preferring rank and file to skirmish games. AoS may be a perfectly fine skirmish game, I didn't really play it because I simply did not want another skirmish game. It could be the best skirmish game in the world, it doesn't matter because I was perfectly happy in my rank and file world.
The way GW did it was always going to piss a lot of people for a long time. They didn't just let Fantasy die off then stop selling it, they killed it. I don't blame GW for stopping support of Fantasy, but the way they did it was bad.
chaos0xomega wrote: GW tried to make changes and revitalize the game for a decade - its actually really dumb to think they didn't or that there were still other viable options on the table that they could have exercised considering the costs involved with them not only abandoning all their past work and development but also the investment needed to launch the new game.
Very little was done in the few years prior to Fantasy's death, and the few things that were done in the years prior to that weren't well received. They made WHFB a very hard game to start, with very large armies becoming the norm it was getting prohibitively expensive and time consuming for new blood and my goodness were the rules far more complicated than they needed to be. I remember after a hiatus and getting back into the game after the new rulebook and even though I broadly knew how the game worked, it took us agggges to play flipping back and forth through several different books with many bookmarks needed by the end (unfortunately it was a game that was massively dominated by luck also, the side which made worse decisions won and the end result was the person we were introducing to the game got put off). Rules were overcomplicated and unnecessarily fragmented through multiple sections and IMO were far too luck based.
I agree Warhammer Fantasy wasn't as sexy as 40k for a long time before it died, but it's not like the Fantasy setting didn't have a lot of fans and potential at its death. Other companies would loved to have a world with so many pre-existing fans and potential.
If GW wanted WHFB to continue, they needed to rewrite the rules from scratch (even if it was in the same vein, they were just becoming bloated rules), start pushing a version of the game that worked well at a couple of hundred points, have a skirmish based offshoot game, trim down the range, and either redo or cull some of the old crusty models, and maybe start expanding the races to give existing players something new to buy.
I also think the random charge distance was horrible and reduced many games to winning or losing on 1 or 2 unlucky rolls, which definitely put me off in later years. It was brought in to stop people inching forward to stay out of charge distance, but something like a counter charge and bracing system would have worked a lot better than random movement distances.
Don Savik wrote: I can't believe some people are still extremely salty about Age of Sigmar all these years later.
snip
edit: I guess I am just saying that harboring all that negative emotion all these years is bad for you. Reconcile and move on.
I can't believe people are still worried about other people disliking what they like. Thinking something is bad isn't in any way detrimental to your health, neither is expressing that opinion. Besides I highly doubt you are qualified to make that assessment, and even if you are you have no way of knowing.
How come it is so common that when someone criticises a thing (like a game) the fans of that thing start attacking the person/s that is critical?
Ill take it like my club owner said about the death of Fantasy....
Back in the days of 5th and even older editions, he could charge $100s for a full massive weekend campaign and fill every single slot. By 7th and 8th Edition he'd charge half as much and be unable to even fill up half. As he was told it wasn't the lore or armies that was the issue for players, it was the rules that pushed those out of playing the game. Back to back bad editions followed by a lack of new models save for at the tail end of 8th.
GW killed Fantasy already through their own incompetence and now when the average teenager knows more about the Old World then that of the Sigmarized one by large margins to the point of hilarity do they come crawling back. Most of my friends are versed in Total Warhammer or Vermintide, have played the old Rpg as well. I had to explain to them wtfAoS even was and all I've gotten was, "O they ported Marines to it." It's a sad fact as someone whom does like the game of AoS but it is real.
StarFyre wrote:Will lizardmen be part of the old world since they have been on the planet for ages?
Sf
There's no reason they shouldn't be, if the setting is picking up anywhere between the Fall Of The Old Ones and the End Times, Lizardmen have been there.
chaos0xomega wrote:
StarFyre wrote: Will lizardmen be part of the old world since they have been on the planet for ages?
Sf
We don't know, but my guess is unlikely. The Old World isn't the name of the planet, its the name of a continent - and the lizardmen don't really ever go to that continent.
They've been to the Old World continent lots. By boat, by magic portal, or from the Southlands. No reason to discount 5hem out of hand, especially with all the other races that just pop in constantly.
I have some hope in this new system, that it will be them making things better for the players they divorced with the explosion of Fantasy but I also know what hope is the first step on as well. I'd love to be wrong however.
I expect the biggest change to be the usual GW scale increase.
20mm bases will be no more and move to 25mm, the 25mm squares will move to a new and trendy 32mm size square. Although GW will tell us it's the same scale as previously, the older models will probably look puny to encourage sales of new models. Who knows, they may even avoid 25mm squares to stop their models being used for Oathmark.
BlackoCatto wrote: ... now when the average teenager knows more about the Old World then that of the Sigmarized one by large margins to the point of hilarity do they come crawling back. Most of my friends are versed in Total Warhammer or Vermintide, have played the old Rpg as well...
Hmm. While anecdotal, that is interesting. And I don't think there are many AoS computer games. It's not like GW is shy about licensing - it implies that The Old World still has a lot more brand recognition to appeal to computer game developers.
Don Savik wrote: I can't believe some people are still extremely salty about Age of Sigmar all these years later.
Considering it crashed a lot of people out of the hobby, the fact that it was a ludicrous thing to do and the fact that the replacement was a bizarro mockery of 40k fantasy of course people still hate it with a passion.
It wasn't ludicrous to re-imagine a game that was costing them money. Old GW didn't know how to make people buy that game. It was too confusing and expensive for new players to get into. Could they have done it more gracefully? Sure, but that was during the time when old management of GW was still in charge.
And its not a mockery of 40k or fantasy, its just the difference between high fantasy and low fantasy in a setting. While obviously a difference in style for people, I don't think that warrants the amount of hatred it gets. Is it a bummer that people can't play their game because it got discontinued? Sure. Does that mean Age of Sigmar is a bad game? No.
Also nothing is stopping you from playing it. I still play Mordheim from time to time. Games get discontinued sometimes, that's just life.
edit: I guess I am just saying that harboring all that negative emotion all these years is bad for you. Reconcile and move on.
Yeah top3 selling miniature game in the world cost them money.sure.
BlackoCatto wrote: ... now when the average teenager knows more about the Old World then that of the Sigmarized one by large margins to the point of hilarity do they come crawling back. Most of my friends are versed in Total Warhammer or Vermintide, have played the old Rpg as well...
Hmm. While anecdotal, that is interesting. And I don't think there are many AoS computer games. It's not like GW is shy about licensing - it implies that The Old World still has a lot more brand recognition to appeal to computer game developers.
Total War 3 can't be that far off, surely?
not a surprise
old world is there for a long time now, still available in fantasy books and I know people who like to read Gotrek & Felix without knowing anything about the game
Total War is doing its thing to keep people talking about
AoS on the other hand is much more generic to give much more space for development and ideas
yet has no iconic "history" or famous characters for people outside the tabletop bubble and is too generic to be an alternative to other fantasy genres
same for the game
AoS is a Mass-Skirmish game among many other Skirmish games
there is nothing special about it, neither the design of the models nor the rules
it is just there because it is from GW and without constant support and pushing would be gone faster than Warmaster (because there is nothing unique about it that would keep people playing it)
Warhammer on the other side was a mix between Mass-Skirmish and R&F that took the best of both worlds at its peak
it failed for the same reason why LotR failed, because GW did not understand why people played the game and bought the models
and because some people are still salty about Warhammer (of course spending several 1000$ and years of time in "hope" to finally get the new models and rules that were promised but than just get the world blown up) there is also a chance to fail hard with this one
and I see no hint that GW learned from the past mistakes or will finally give people the game they are waiting for
(shitstorm will be big after the initial hype if the game does not deliver what some people expected not matter if GW said something different before or not)
chaos0xomega wrote: A ludicrous thing to do and yet its selling better than WHFB ever did and is in fact the best selling fantasy miniatures product line on the planet, whereas WHFB was playing second fiddle in sales to LotR for a number of years - even when LotR was post-peak and barely selling in and of itself.
[...]
Necromunda makes money hand over fist [...]
You have access to detailed sales information I take it? Apart from scarce hints during Twitch interviews (I recall Andy Hoare occasionally referring to "producing more Y than they previously made for release X" and perhaps things selling "well", such specific information is rarely made public.
LotR's main success came when it was a narrative skirmish game, the attempts to revamp it as a big battle game have not really caught on with the community [...]
There has only ever been one attempt, a new set of rules called War of the Ring, it was dropped after one supplement and the game continued with the skirmish rules, that were never dropped or meant to be superseded anyway.
(and thats part of the reason why we've only really seen releases of one-off heroes and characters, etc. and re-releases of older kits the last couple years instead of the whole new armies and units that GW promised us when they relaunched the game a couple years ago).
They never promised anything of the sort. In fact, when they relaunched the game, the official line was not to expect any new plastics (aside from the Lake-town terrain that was already produced but never released), and that the only new sculpts would be in the form of books and FW resin figures. Due to seemingly good sales, they have since started making new figures in plastic too.
Inquisitor Gideon wrote: When did LotR fail exactly? I don't call a game that's been constantly in print for 20 years a failure.
first of all, it was not constantly in print for 20 years (otherwise you could say the same about Necromunda) but was "paused" in between and re-released
sometime after the 3rd film, GW made famous decision to half the box content and double the price
yes, this is not just a meme but they really did it with the LotR plastic boxes
problem was that a big part of the community did not come from GW or Warhammer but either from historical games or was new to the wargaming hobby at all and with being used to different prices and thing did not worked out well
not only stopped people buying the models, but also stopped playing the game because "vote with your wallet" was something that community did take seriously and meant no support at all (including making events or playing public in shops or clubs)
it was basically dead and GW just did not drop the license for the one reason that someone else could take it and easily make it big again while moving it to the FW Specialist Games
LotR went from the main Fantasy Game into a niche game over night because GW thought they can treat the community the same way as the Warhammer players
Inquisitor Gideon wrote: When did LotR fail exactly? I don't call a game that's been constantly in print for 20 years a failure.
It certainly balked during the Hobbit years due to insane price hikes on new products and comparatively poorer sculpts made exclusively in resin as opposed to metal Perry Twin magic, but all that means is that it failed to capture the returning popularity of the franchise and just continued steadily as it had for years. It's what introduced me to the hobby back in 2008, well after the initial frenzy had dropped and plateaued, and still took up a significant section of the store walls. It could have been considered dead by the same corporate metrics that declared WHFB dead, but I think we all agree that wasn't entirely accurate to the average person's perception.
Speaking of Middle-Earth, 25mm bases are what I'd expect to be the standard in The Old World. 20mm just feels too small now. Based on absolutely nothing except for the size of the project, I'd expect armies to be smaller than they were when the End Times ended, so a slightly larger minimum base size shouldn't have too much of an impact on games.
Yes it was. The core rules and miniatures you needed to play have always been available. They have never been unavailable on the site, unlike necromunda which was completely Oop for s number of years.
Yes the box reduction happened (and has since been reversed) did happen, but didn't stop people playing.
The historical comment really isn't true. Most people who got into it weren't even wargamers previously (myself. Included). Historicals really had nothing to do with it then or now.
Call it dead if you want, but it's wrong. The game continued and continues to be played without issue and is getting back a lot of player base it had lost before.
chaos0xomega wrote: Theres literally nothing unique about it, which is why countless knockoff minis from 3rd parties exist for it, and why I expect that whatever they do with The Old World is going to leave a lot of people unhappy that there is going to be some sort of major departure from the expectation of what these minis are supposed to look like.
There's nothing unique about anything, ever. Or something.
Look, we know WFB is just early Renaissance Europe with magic, but the way all those familiar elements that are so easy to 'knock off' are combined does add up to a unique blend. People do know what Warhammer Fantasy is as a complete package and are able to distinguish it from other popular settings, much like 40k is just marines fighting Aliens and space elves, and yet it is a also one of the most distinct pieces of fantasy world building in existence.
Which is why I considered motivations, not unknown contractual details. In my view, GW is the only player on the market that can utilize the licence effectively and is possibly willing to pay a premium for that, and both New Line and GW know that. I don't see anyone rocking that particular boat for a penny or two.
BlackoCatto wrote: Ill take it like my club owner said about the death of Fantasy....
Back in the days of 5th and even older editions, he could charge $100s for a full massive weekend campaign and fill every single slot. By 7th and 8th Edition he'd charge half as much and be unable to even fill up half. As he was told it wasn't the lore or armies that was the issue for players, it was the rules that pushed those out of playing the game. Back to back bad editions followed by a lack of new models save for at the tail end of 8th.
GW killed Fantasy already through their own incompetence and now when the average teenager knows more about the Old World then that of the Sigmarized one by large margins to the point of hilarity do they come crawling back. Most of my friends are versed in Total Warhammer or Vermintide, have played the old Rpg as well. I had to explain to them wtfAoS even was and all I've gotten was, "O they ported Marines to it." It's a sad fact as someone whom does like the game of AoS but it is real.
Total War does a good job keeping interest in the Old World. It has its flaws, but it's so good at conveying the feeling of WHFB.
Total War convinces me that 15mm scale is ideal for a WHFB-like game, because 60+ large regiments look soooo cool and 15mm is big enough that you still fit a decent amount of detail on the models, but not so big that you can't paint them quickly. I'd love to have a crack at painting a 100 large regiment of 15mm scale Night Goblins (I have painted 120 28mm scale NGs, but it took so bloody long).
The problem with 15mm is your characters don't look as distinctive, but I think it's a good compromise for being able to represent something that looks like an actual army.
yadda yadda AoS and financially superior and WHFB sucks etc
To cut a long wossname short, there's absolutely no point trying to jam debatable logic over human emotion. You can say AoS sells better than WHFB all the live long day and it matters not a jot to a whole bunch of people. Because in the end it really doesn't matter in the slightest.
GW knows fine well that if they give us new Warhammer fantasy and it looks good, then people like me are going to scuttle out of our caves with our money bags and suck up all that Bretonnian goodness with a crazy straw.
Inquisitor Gideon wrote: Yes it was. The core rules and miniatures you needed to play have always been available. They have never been unavailable on the site, unlike necromunda which was completely Oop for s number of years.
maybe I miss some years here, but the time the rules were OOP they were available for free to download (at least the german version)
Call it dead if you want, but it's wrong. The game continued and continues to be played without issue and is getting back a lot of player base it had lost before.
failed =/= dead and I don't see it regain any player base but more of a constant flow
the community is there, but far from were it was once and it neither grows nor declines, similar to the Warhammer community that still play the game with the legacy rules
Warhammer is not dead either and there are more people around here playing one of the re-worked legacy rules (WarhammerCE, Fluffhammer, Warhammer Armies) than playing LotR
kodos wrote: Warhammer is not dead either and there are more people around here playing one of the re-worked legacy rules (WarhammerCE, Fluffhammer, Warhammer Armies) than playing LotR
It's a shame that the final iterations of Warhammer weren't widely liked. I know some people liked it, but so many people didn't, so there's no unifying voice of what edition (or cobbled together mess of multiple editions) are most likely to be played. Some editions had better core rules with worse army books or vice versa, and the latter editions are what caused many people to stop playing before GW actually killed it.
AoS really needs its own big breakout videogame to really entrench itself in the minds of people, but with CA being busy with TWW and Relic being dead there's few opportunities to take advantage of that.
However even then, GW have sort of designed themselves into a corner with AoS where it is on the one hand very generic high fantasy with few unique or evocative twists of its own... while also having some very weird aesthetic choices that make people bounce off of it super hard. Most actual antagonism I see towards it nowadays are from people who never even played WHFB; at most they've played one of the games or read one of the Gotrek and Felix books, but other than that they have no real attachment to the old world or old game. And yet some of the visual and lore choices GW made are like Kryptonite. I thought OBR were fairly popular or at least looked on positively, but apparently people in the game and outside of it really hate their designs. The Lumineth can't be described as anything but "Mixed" in terms of reception and of course Stormcast have not set the world on fire and in fact are usually the main point of contention for people who dislike the game.
Plus, there's the issues of the entire narrative and setting making it very difficult to become immersed in it. Maybe because people when they hear Fantasy expect and prefer more grounded and gritty settings (which is why the Old World still has legs), but there's certainly an issue when it's harder to relate and feel a sense of place in AoS than it is in 40K (and 40K can be so unfathomably huge and miserable at times so that's quite a feat)
Of course AoS is still in it's early days, but I still don't feel that GW have done a good enough job of crafting a good sense of place and history throughout much of its setting. You can bring up WHFB's long period of existence as a counter, as if GW was continually developing it over 30-odd years, but really how much development of the game was there? And even then, a small miniature company mostly being run out of bedrooms and garages in the first stages of its existence in the misery that was 80's Britain and trying to develop and nail down an entirely new idea is very different from a giant corporation in 2015-2020 with all the resources of the world on its side and decades of experience to draw upon. I play Gloomspite Gitz and while I enjoy Skragrot da Loonking, he still doesn't hold a candle to Skarsnik or Grom in terms of evocative imagery or entertainment. Very few of the characters in AOS hold up well to WHFB ones honestly, even the ones carried over are now unfathomable God-things that lose basically everything that made them somewhat compelling.
None of this is insurmountable or unchangeable of course, I've heard lots of good things about the Morathi book for instance, but it also shouldn't be taking this long for GW to create something a bit more interesting. At the very least if they wanna do something new, then actually do something new, because they keep going back to the Old World Nostalgia Well to dredge up iconic and fun characters (Sigvald) because they just seem to be incapable of making new ones.
BlackoCatto wrote: ... now when the average teenager knows more about the Old World then that of the Sigmarized one by large margins to the point of hilarity do they come crawling back. Most of my friends are versed in Total Warhammer or Vermintide, have played the old Rpg as well...
Hmm. While anecdotal, that is interesting. And I don't think there are many AoS computer games. It's not like GW is shy about licensing - it implies that The Old World still has a lot more brand recognition to appeal to computer game developers.
Total War 3 can't be that far off, surely?
TWW3 is widely expected to come out next year. It's been hinted that there would have been an annoucement this year but for COVID.
AoS just doesn't have the appeal or a distinctive enough identity (yet?) to replace WHFB in the minds of people, which is why there won't be any breakout video game about it anytime soon.
Maybe a generation or two from now, after children have grown up with Sigmarines, it might develop a similar iconic status, but I feel the design philosophy attached to the game is actively preventing that.
If it does come back as it was, they would need severe changes.
I was a die hard WHFB player for years and loved everything about it.
In its final years though it was starting to die off at a worrying rate.
Buy in costs for new armies, rules bloat, poorly written rules etc all added to this and made it nose dive.
It got to the point that most gaming groups in my area almost stopped playing it entirely.
Tournaments were a rare thing and took months of prep work just to get the attendance.
When AoS hit is was a dumpster fire.
I had maybe 10-12 games and left it alone, writing it off as a lost cause due to no balance and just poor rules.
Then the fans came in and started to add some order to the game, adding points, limitations and tweaking rules.
I had a few games and it was at least playable at this point.
Jump forward to now and in my area, it has overtaken just about every other GW game.
Constant tournaments, new players etc.
It’s like the golden years of fantasy again.
Don’t get me wrong, still not happy about the factions and named characters that got killed off.
If they want to revive the old world it will take some changes though.
Bringing back a game as it was after it died just won’t work.
Sure, it will have a fan base, but not enough to really justify an entire restart of a system.
don't think that AoS can ever replace the Warhammer lore
for the main reason that GW is not doing that kind of lore any more
it already started prior 8th Editon Warhammer that those kind of things changed and the new stuff was not as detailed and consistent as the older ones (like that the daily raids of Dark Elves on the Imperium and Bretonnia took a number of Slaves equal to the people living in the biggest cities) and was mostly ignored by people
also the change with Chaos from being neither good or evil and "just there" to be an evil personification of something
Warhammer, Fantasy and 40k, lives from what was done in the past and the new stuff just builds on it
with AoS, there is no well build world as base were you can just throw stuff on it and it will work somehow
without investing time and money into basic world building and not just add stuff to justify a new release, AoS won't get that iconic status
Inquisitor Gideon wrote: Yes it was. The core rules and miniatures you needed to play have always been available. They have never been unavailable on the site, unlike necromunda which was completely Oop for s number of years.
maybe I miss some years here, but the time the rules were OOP they were available for free to download (at least the german version)
What time/rules are we talking about here?
As far as the English-language rules are concerned, I think some of the faction books (Fallen Realms, Kingdoms of Men, those things) were out of stock for a while, and one of the big things for the new team was to get those printed again as soon as possible. The core Hobbit-era rulebook I don't think ever went out of production; the "limited edition" starter set containing the small version famously never actually selling out in the first place.
Translated versions may well be different though; just like how recent publications had the rules section downloadable in German when they decided to no longer create full translations of the books.
Miniatures were always available (in general; specific ones of course being dropped or selling out occasionally), and as such I would consider the game to be officially supported since 2001, even if there were some times when new releases were scarce.
Carlovonsexron wrote: It's difficult to imagine being successful without lower buy-in costs, that's for sure.
I think this is why the 10mm idea continues to get mentioned.
Just the Empire or Bretonia would require 3-5 new kits each for their core, plus characters and special stuff. Which players need to buy, build and paint.
A 10mm game could do most factions on a single sprue and would take just a few hours for players to have something ready to go.
I'm not saying I want 10mm or even expect it, but relaunching all of TOW, in plastic, while supporting 2 other fantasy games just seems so... unlikely.
there was a timeframe were the game was a Specialist Game
this was before The Hobbit re-print of the rules
during this time, all Specialist Games rules were available to download (including Necromunda, BFG etc.) except for the LotR rules which might have still been available in English but was not over the German GW site (which did not sold any SG stuff but provided the German rules for download)
kodos wrote: don't think that AoS can ever replace the Warhammer lore
for the main reason that GW is not doing that kind of lore any more
it already started prior 8th Editon Warhammer that those kind of things changed and the new stuff was not as detailed and consistent as the older ones (like that the daily raids of Dark Elves on the Imperium and Bretonnia took a number of Slaves equal to the people living in the biggest cities) and was mostly ignored by people
also the change with Chaos from being neither good or evil and "just there" to be an evil personification of something
Warhammer, Fantasy and 40k, lives from what was done in the past and the new stuff just builds on it
with AoS, there is no well build world as base were you can just throw stuff on it and it will work somehow
without investing time and money into basic world building and not just add stuff to justify a new release, AoS won't get that iconic status
Actually 8th Edition Army Books had alot of lore as it was building up to the End Times - all the time lines had long add on bits rather than the simple reprints of the last couple of editions. I was not keen on some of it but it was there.
Alot of the world building was done outside the Army books and shifted and changed over the editions - see 1st-3rd Edition Slann vs 4-8th Edition. Much of this was in the RPG, the novels, the lorebooks etc.
AOS has been building up on the latter - the novels have expanded considerably the background and base to build on- although again this is shifting and changing somewhat, the new Morathi campaign book has quite a bit of good lore. The Soulbound RPG is also oing a good job with this.
If they do a Total War: Age of Sigmar set in a single Realm that could be both a big boost to people knowing about it and impressive
Total War: Warhammer def has kept the Old World in focuss for many.
Buy In Costs were only one of many issues. Old World suffered on multiple fronts at once. It's the same as why Warmachine has dwindled dramatically over the last few years - its' not one singular cause and effect, it is multiple factors that add together.
Each issue on its own isn't a huge problem. AoS has armies like Daughters of Khaine who can put down 90 witch aelves at £35 for a box of 10. We already have large armies that would fit rank and file at high costs and it still works.
Buy in cost was one factor of many for Old World. It's not good enough to just fix that and its not good to fixate on price as the only barrier to entry. If anything a greater barrier to entry was the fact that the game didn't really work well till you hit 1500 to 2000 points. So the price to buy in on individual models wasn't the barrier, it was that you needed a big investment in time and money (build and paint) to get an army ready for the field; with limited game engagement options in your build up toward that point.
And when you reached that point most of your opponents were experienced. Even if they weren't pros they still had years of gaming under their belt. So there was then the fact that if you made it through the huge struggle to get an army down you might well lose - a lot. With fewer newbies of your own skill level to play with.
If anything a greater barrier to entry was the fact that the game didn't really work well till you hit 1500 to 2000 points. So the price to buy in on individual models wasn't the barrier, it was that you needed a big investment in time and money (build and paint) to get an army ready for the field; with limited game engagement options in your build up toward that point.
I think for me personally, I do see that as the buy-in cost. It's fine that you have a different perspective, but it's worth it to take the time to clarify my own also.
As if you can't really play without x-investment into a game, then x becomes the buy in cost. (for me)
If anything a greater barrier to entry was the fact that the game didn't really work well till you hit 1500 to 2000 points. So the price to buy in on individual models wasn't the barrier, it was that you needed a big investment in time and money (build and paint) to get an army ready for the field; with limited game engagement options in your build up toward that point.
I think for me personally, I do see that as the buy-in cost. It's fine that you have a different perspective, but it's worth it to take the time to clarify my own also.
As if you can't really play without x-investment into a game, then x becomes the buy in cost. (for me)
Oh don't get me wrong, cheaper buy in costs per model most certainly do help large format games. My point was more that the cost that's important isn't so much the cost per model or per box but the cost per "game" or rather per army. My view is that you can have a higher buy in cost per model and have it work so long as you've got a higher game engagement system that works at more varied lower point values. So each box you add feels rewarding and can be used in games.
Rather than a system whereby you don't really get the game reward until much later.
I mentioned in a previous post, WHFB in the latter years sucked for new players because it encouraged large armies which is both expensive and time consuming to paint, and also the rules were not well written for learning how to play.
On top of sucking for new players, a lot of older previously loyal players didn't like the changes in the latter years.
So you have a game that appeals to neither newcomers nor veterans.
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Kid_Kyoto wrote: Just the Empire or Bretonia would require 3-5 new kits each for their core, plus characters and special stuff. Which players need to buy, build and paint.
I think combined kits are a good way of building a game quickly. Like, don't make a box of men at arms and a box of archers, make a box of men at arms and archers together.
Considering how fantasy has often worked you could have one box of mounted knights for Bretonnia and with a variation in heads, arms and perhaps a few armour segments for the horse you could get several different types of unit out of it. Heck just look at what Hawk Wargames have done with their model line for Dropfleet Commander - a single cruiser kit builds something like 7 or so different classes of cruiser from light to heavy.
The real issue for WHFB started in 7th ed, where in the core rules the rank bonus was changed to basically encourage larger regiments with a width of 5 models, while at the same time a lot of new plastic kits were coming out with fewer models in them. Overnight a box of 20 Empire state troops went from £15-18, to £15 for 10 of the new ones, basically doubling the cost while also increasing the numbers needed in-game. Some old regiment sets couldn't even get maximum rank bonuses from what was in the base box anymore as now a 4x4 size regiment would get no bonuses whatsoever. Obviously running them that way was never the most optimal choice, but you had the option to if money was tight or you were playing a casual friendly game.
I was essentially stopped buying new WHFB armies from that point on, long before 8th edition, just sticking to my Greenskins and Ogres.
I recall looking at Skaven and being turned off not just by the number of slave rats that you needed (a kit that GW only sold in metal - though most people just used clan rats in plastic); but also by the fact that for the most part they went on the table just to die and come off the table. Ergo they were purely a chaff unit and you needed LOADS of them for the 1 or two cool things to do their job.
So for Skaven it wasn't just numbers, it was what they also did on the table itself. Whilst its a fun concept, its just not practically fun to build a huge army where most of it is there to purely die and nothing else.
As a kid, it was a money issue more than anything (back then a lot of stuff was metal and unaffordable to me, buying 3 metal Terradons was a big deal). As an adult with a job, the cost wasn't so much an issue as the time. I think if people were realistic about how much time it takes to paint 1 Skaven model, thus how long will it take to paint 200 of them, there'd probably be less 80-90% unpainted armies on ebay, lol.
But yeah, GW really needed to push the small game more. A while back there was the "skirmish" format, it still used rank and file but it was written around armies of a couple of hundred points and could have been developed into a good starter for new players on their way to buying and painting an entire horde.
But yeah, GW really needed to push the small game more. A while back there was the "skirmish" format, it still used rank and file but it was written around armies of a couple of hundred points and could have been developed into a good starter for new players on their way to buying and painting an entire horde.
GW seems far more aware of it today. AoS has Underworld (a handful of models); Warcry (two handfuls of models); Meeting Engagements (small armies) and the full 2K. You can easily build up a 500 point army with a few boxes for Warcry to give you diverse model options so you're already half way to a proper meeting engagement; by which point you're already half way to a 2K army. Provided you're gaming and changing your army composition now and then you'll add models in excess of your target point value for a game steadily any way. So it all adds up. Someone playing lots of Warcry is going to pick up the odd new box or new beasty now and then.
I think a big change has been taking those smaller format games and marketing them as their own game with their own book and products even if its just reboxing existing core market products. In the past we had those smaller format games, on the back pages of the main book. They were mostly pitched as "here's your intro game - now get ready for your next week 2K game" kind of deals. Rather than being the kind of thing you'd script a month long campaign around or things that long term fans would engage with regularly.
it was not to push the small game, but to use different rules for the small games
Because of the ongoing changes for larger units and more expensive larger models, we saw the same point rise for standard games we have now in 40k
2000 points being the standard with a mounted knight being 30-40 points
ending up in 8th with 2500-3000 being the new standard and the same knight at 15-20 points
with the minimum sized Infantry unit changing from 16 models to 20 and 40, at the same time were new plastic models became more expensive than the metal models they replaced because of "more" options
GW did sell models made and priced for smaller Skirmish games for a Mass Battle R&F game hoping that enough people will pay the price to keep things running
going back and having different rules for minimum sized units, amount of heroes, wizard levels etc <1500 points, would have solved some of the problems
but not the main issue increasing the price per model the same time as the points per model decreased and raising the total army points
the problem was not there within the game system by default but because GW got to greedy
kodos wrote: GW did sell models made and priced for smaller Skirmish games for a Mass Battle R&F game hoping that enough people will pay the price to keep things running
Yeah, I remember having this discussion back in the day. It wasn't that GW charged so much money for a single model, but they charged that much for a model while having the expectation of needing many many many of them.
I don't know whether it was a GW-wide thing or just my local GW store, but they did once have a campaign where you'd gradually build up a small army (I think 1000pts) over the course of several weeks in this campaign, where you'd start at a few hundred points. You could of course use an existing army, but the idea was to encourage starting a new army without the insane goal of immediately building 2000pts. It was a good idea, it got me to buy into Wood Elves, but still moved a bit too fast for my painting speed and the rules didn't really function great at those very low point values and games were often very unbalanced.
I don't know whether it was a GW-wide thing or just my local GW store, but they did once have a campaign where you'd gradually build up a small army (I think 1000pts) over the course of several weeks in this campaign, where you'd start at a few hundred points. You could of course use an existing army, but the idea was to encourage starting a new army without the insane goal of immediately building 2000pts. It was a good idea, it got me to buy into Wood Elves, but still moved a bit too fast for my painting speed and the rules didn't really function great at those very low point values and games were often very unbalanced.
"Growth campaigns" have been common for many many years. Stores likely ran their own when the manager wanted too and there'd have been coordinated efforts from on high too. And gamers would run their own. They are a great idea and work even today at getting a group of people to "start up small and work to big" all at the same time. As you say whilst the idea is to start a new army; nothing stops someone with an existing army using it and just building up slowly over time. A great way to get newbies and experienced players playing together on the same points values over weeks.
They can be great fun, esp if whoever runs them pairs it not just with games but building/painting days/tutorials as well
I'd been playing since early 5th ed WFB. For me the golden spot as an edition was 6th with early 7th being pretty great until the double whammy of Daemons and VC dumpstering the game. I genuinely tried to get into 8th but I tried to show up to 3 RTT's and everytime I was the only person who showed. 8th felt like a wasteland of a game.
Now, part of this is GW's upper management fault of trying to squeeze blood out of a turnip in regards to fantasy. The pricing was unsustainable and 8th took that to 11. Part of it was recognizing that the humble tactical squad accounted for more sales than the entire fantasy line in the early 2000's but not knowing how to make it more attractive. They tried, they created/brought back armies and did massive campaigns in 6th and 7th but it was a black hole that they seemed to have just said f-it. Milk it to in 8th.
Fantasy was always the game that seemed to be the hobby suck. It didn't benefit GW's core buying group of early teens. Remember that in 6th edition fantasy you still generally needed to paint about 100 models. 4ed 40k on the other hand rarely had you painting more than 50. That's a huge difference.
WFB had a lot of issues especially as times moved on. AOS is crushing partly because the current generation of buyers love over the top. Fantasy wasn't giving that and being stuck at perpetual midnight didn't help.
All that said I'm excited for the return of the old world. But I'm trying to temper my anticipation with reality. Reality is that I barely have time to get games in as an adult with 2 kids for 40k and AOS which are significantly easier to get games with than other systems. I've got Underworlds, Armada, and failed Wrath of Kings that I love to play but opportunities are rare. I bought Titanicus stuff but again, time. So I know that even if this game is amazing it's going to be hard to justify timewise unless it goes ham which is unlikely. So that means I have to decide on painting whatever an army of this is that'll sit on my shelf 99% of it's lifespan or add the same number of models to various 40k or AOS armies.
For me I'd like this to be very 6th ed style with some modifications. Calvary in late 6th breaking full regiments with a frontal charge got a bit out of hand and the amount of unbreakable style rules did as well. But I still think that should be the initial template game size and model content wise. I assume this will be a 28mm version of the game even if I'd prefer 10mm. But honestly I think I'd prefer 10mm for an AOS mass battle game over WFB. There just aren't enough super big style models in WFB to make it as cool as AOS. But AOS outside of a few armies suffers from small numbers of overall units so it would have to be more of a Order/Chaos/Beasts/Undead style of system instead of individual armies.
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Commodus Leitdorf wrote: The fact that 8th edition made models in a unit mostly really expensive wound counters didn't help in attracting new players.
Be real, models in units were mostly wound counters throughout WFB. Or worse they were ablative wounds for a character in the front rank.
kodos wrote: GW did sell models made and priced for smaller Skirmish games for a Mass Battle R&F game hoping that enough people will pay the price to keep things running
Yeah, I remember having this discussion back in the day. It wasn't that GW charged so much money for a single model, but they charged that much for a model while having the expectation of needing many many many of them.
I don't know whether it was a GW-wide thing or just my local GW store, but they did once have a campaign where you'd gradually build up a small army (I think 1000pts) over the course of several weeks in this campaign, where you'd start at a few hundred points. You could of course use an existing army, but the idea was to encourage starting a new army without the insane goal of immediately building 2000pts. It was a good idea, it got me to buy into Wood Elves, but still moved a bit too fast for my painting speed and the rules didn't really function great at those very low point values and games were often very unbalanced.
Those escalation leagues are pretty common for all systems but problem is games are hardcoded to 2k and outside that balance breaks down.
kodos wrote: 2000 points being the standard with a mounted knight being 30-40 points
ending up in 8th with 2500-3000 being the new standard and the same knight at 15-20 points
with the minimum sized Infantry unit changing from 16 models to 20 and 40, at the same time were new plastic models became more expensive than the metal models they replaced because of "more" options
...
the problem was not there within the game system by default but because GW got to greedy
This is half of why WFB died. The other half of the equation was the fallout of the Chapterhouse lawsuit court resolution, which put the writing on the wall for GW that everything they sold had to be IP defensible. A game of Tolkein derivatives and factions almost entirely designed as historical analogues wasn't worth carrying. This is why AoS is full of gobbledygook names for elves, ogres, orcs, etc. And why their factions are more refined copies of existing ideas (IE, not-300 Persian slaanesh) instead of blatant copies (IE, Egyptian skeletons).
I'm excited for this new project, but when I look at how GW's business model has evolved since I was regularly buying the game, my excitement is generally tarnished. They've moved to armies that require 150 dollar centrepiece models and then a DLC system for some games (look at necromunda). I wish I lived somewhere that there was enough of a gaming community that people still played 6th edition fantasy.
Eh more than half the AoS line is Old World models - the only thing GW needed to change and has changed are unit names. Medusa are melusai is all they've done.
One way to help mitigate the "you need to paint a hundred Core models" would be to take a page from ASOI&F - when you buy a unit, that's your unit. You can't buy six boxes of it to turn it into a Legion or whatever, the unit out of the box is what you get, twelve men or none at all. Want more? Buy another unit/box of it, but it will be it's own unit.
Now GW will never do that of course because they lick their lips at the idea of discounted horde mobs (see: AoS continuing this) but hey, I can hope.
kodos wrote: 2000 points being the standard with a mounted knight being 30-40 points
ending up in 8th with 2500-3000 being the new standard and the same knight at 15-20 points
with the minimum sized Infantry unit changing from 16 models to 20 and 40, at the same time were new plastic models became more expensive than the metal models they replaced because of "more" options
...
the problem was not there within the game system by default but because GW got to greedy
This is half of why WFB died. The other half of the equation was the fallout of the Chapterhouse lawsuit court resolution, which put the writing on the wall for GW that everything they sold had to be IP defensible. A game of Tolkein derivatives and factions almost entirely designed as historical analogues wasn't worth carrying. This is why AoS is full of gobbledygook names for elves, ogres, orcs, etc. And why their factions are more refined copies of existing ideas (IE, not-300 Persian slaanesh) instead of blatant copies (IE, Egyptian skeletons).
I'm excited for this new project, but when I look at how GW's business model has evolved since I was regularly buying the game, my excitement is generally tarnished. They've moved to armies that require 150 dollar centrepiece models and then a DLC system for some games (look at necromunda). I wish I lived somewhere that there was enough of a gaming community that people still played 6th edition fantasy.
The Chapterhouse thing always seemed odd to me. From memory, the outcome of the Chapterhouse case was that other companies WERE allowed to market their bits as "compatible with XYZ", they just weren't able to market models as actually being XYZ as that could be confusing to the consumer. So you aren't allowed to say "these are bretonnians" but you are allowed to say "these are compatible with GW's bretonnian models" the same way a 3rd party car parts company is allowed to say their part is compatible with a Toyota Yaris even though they aren't allowed to make their own car and call it a Toyota Yaris.
So renaming everything non-generic terms and avoiding things that can be copied with historical miniatures doesn't really make sense, as companies are still allowed to market their bits as compatible with Aelves just as they were previously compatible with Elves.
There was the trademark bullying crap that GW started to pull (remember Spots the Space Marine that GW got removed from Amazon's shelves?) where GW was starting to try and enforce their trademark of common names outside of the realm of wargaming, I'm not really sure how that helped them with much though.
If there was a Total Warhammer AoS I find it would be highly likely it would receive the same thing that happened to it's table top equivalent. This would be sadly hilarious.
kodos wrote: 2000 points being the standard with a mounted knight being 30-40 points
ending up in 8th with 2500-3000 being the new standard and the same knight at 15-20 points
with the minimum sized Infantry unit changing from 16 models to 20 and 40, at the same time were new plastic models became more expensive than the metal models they replaced because of "more" options
...
the problem was not there within the game system by default but because GW got to greedy
This is half of why WFB died. The other half of the equation was the fallout of the Chapterhouse lawsuit court resolution, which put the writing on the wall for GW that everything they sold had to be IP defensible. A game of Tolkein derivatives and factions almost entirely designed as historical analogues wasn't worth carrying. This is why AoS is full of gobbledygook names for elves, ogres, orcs, etc. And why their factions are more refined copies of existing ideas (IE, not-300 Persian slaanesh) instead of blatant copies (IE, Egyptian skeletons).
I'm excited for this new project, but when I look at how GW's business model has evolved since I was regularly buying the game, my excitement is generally tarnished. They've moved to armies that require 150 dollar centrepiece models and then a DLC system for some games (look at necromunda). I wish I lived somewhere that there was enough of a gaming community that people still played 6th edition fantasy.
All the weird names just reduces gw models being used for other games. 3rd party companies can do count as modeis same as before.
Fb sales tanked because gw didn't release anything. When gw started aos development fb was top3 miniature game seller. Then no new kits, no sales. kits sell most of lifelong sales in first few months.
The Chapterhouse thing always seemed odd to me. From memory, the outcome of the Chapterhouse case was that other companies WERE allowed to market their bits as "compatible with XYZ", they just weren't able to market models as actually being XYZ as that could be confusing to the consumer. So you aren't allowed to say "these are bretonnians" but you are allowed to say "these are compatible with GW's bretonnian models" the same way a 3rd party car parts company is allowed to say their part is compatible with a Toyota Yaris even though they aren't allowed to make their own car and call it a Toyota Yaris.
this was one part
the more important part was that GW was not able to copyright/trademark models that they did not released yet
so as long as GW had Bretonnian Knights in the Army Book, but did not made any model for it (no need to sell it, but there must be a model, Render/Green or Artwork is not enough), everyone could make Bretonnian Knights and sell them as such
hence GW changed their whole release model from full army books to only provide rules for models that they can make/release in one go
one of the reasons why the Adeptus Mechanicus for 40k was split into 2 books, it was too much for a single release and therefore instead of making it 1 book with 2 release slots they made it 2 armies that were merged into one later
and this affected Warhammer as the Armies were already flashed out and rather big and a new book with the whole line of new models needed was impossible to make
hence why we see Mini-Factions and book splits/re-releases for AoS as well (no 1 Dwarf Army book, but split into 3 sub-factions with their own release)
BlackoCatto wrote: If there was a Total Warhammer AoS I find it would be highly likely it would receive the same thing that happened to it's table top equivalent. This would be sadly hilarious.
chaos0xomega wrote: A ludicrous thing to do and yet its selling better than WHFB ever did and is in fact the best selling fantasy miniatures product line on the planet, whereas WHFB was playing second fiddle in sales to LotR for a number of years - even when LotR was post-peak and barely selling in and of itself.
[...]
Necromunda makes money hand over fist [...]
You have access to detailed sales information I take it? Apart from scarce hints during Twitch interviews (I recall Andy Hoare occasionally referring to "producing more Y than they previously made for release X" and perhaps things selling "well", such specific information is rarely made public.
[
Between icv2, statements made by past and present GW staff (James Hewitt revealed quite a bit about how financially successful the various specialist games were in various interviews) and GWs own statements in legally binding financial disclosures. The info is out there if you know where to look.
There has only ever been one attempt, a new set of rules called War of the Ring, it was dropped after one supplement and the game continued with the skirmish rules, that were never dropped or meant to be superseded anyway.
Thats not accurate at all, War of the Ring was already their 2nd or 3rd attempt at making it a big battle game, before War of the Ring there was Legions of Middle Earth and various sipplements and white dwarf articles have contained rules for bigger battles. A few years after War of the Ring they launched Battle Companies which was for smaller battles than war of the ring but larger battles than the original game. The current iteration of the game laucched 2 years ago completely superceded everything that came before and is pushing the game as a more mass battle experience than it was a decade ago. The original game could be played with a few dozen minis on the table, the current game is played with a few dozen minis *per side*, unless you use the new iteration of battle companies that pushes gamecsize back down to about a dozen minis per side.
They followed this up with more clarification at one of their events saying they had plans for new plastics and to explore parts of middle earth that nobody has ever looked at before.
However even then, GW have sort of designed themselves into a corner with AoS where it is on the one hand very generic high fantasy with few unique or evocative twists of its own.
Theres nothing generic high fantasy about age of sigmar, its very much a unique mythic sword and sorcery fantasy setting replete with living gods and planar realities that are a far cry from traditional high fantasy staples. The lack of those generic high fantasy tropes like a world map featuring kingdoms with well defined borders, thousand year long histories, and notable heroes is probably the biggest issue people have with the setting. Whereas Warhammers setting felt like am actual world, Age of Sigmar feels like a backdrop that people travel through once and will never revisit because its so vast and undefined.As much as I like the setting as a concept, the execution thus far has failed as its absent any well defined locales or regions.
In WHFB you have places like Ulthuan, Altdorf, Mordheim, Praag, Bretonnia, Araby, Blackfire Pass, etc etc etc.
In 40k you have Terra, Cadia, the Eye of Terror, Armageddon, Kar Duniash, the Damocles Gulf, the Nachtmund Gauntlet, etc.
In Age of Sigmar you have.... 8 planar realms that are less places and more thematic concepts and... thats basically it. Theres Azyrheim, the Eightpoints/Archaons tower, a handful of "free cities", and as of late "the Great Parch" seems to be popping up as a popular corner of the setting to explore, but all of these things exist without any real context relevant to eachother or the wider setting. Azyrheim notwithstanding, I dont think most people know which realm any of the free cities or the great parch are in or what trade routes between them might look like or what the surrounding geography looks like, etc. I think thats the challenge AoS has for itself as a setting and why so many people bounce off it so hard - theres nothing to connect to.
kodos wrote: 2000 points being the standard with a mounted knight being 30-40 points ending up in 8th with 2500-3000 being the new standard and the same knight at 15-20 points with the minimum sized Infantry unit changing from 16 models to 20 and 40, at the same time were new plastic models became more expensive than the metal models they replaced because of "more" options ... the problem was not there within the game system by default but because GW got to greedy
This is half of why WFB died. The other half of the equation was the fallout of the Chapterhouse lawsuit court resolution, which put the writing on the wall for GW that everything they sold had to be IP defensible. A game of Tolkein derivatives and factions almost entirely designed as historical analogues wasn't worth carrying. This is why AoS is full of gobbledygook names for elves, ogres, orcs, etc. And why their factions are more refined copies of existing ideas (IE, not-300 Persian slaanesh) instead of blatant copies (IE, Egyptian skeletons).
I'm excited for this new project, but when I look at how GW's business model has evolved since I was regularly buying the game, my excitement is generally tarnished. They've moved to armies that require 150 dollar centrepiece models and then a DLC system for some games (look at necromunda). I wish I lived somewhere that there was enough of a gaming community that people still played 6th edition fantasy.
The Chapterhouse thing always seemed odd to me. From memory, the outcome of the Chapterhouse case was that other companies WERE allowed to market their bits as "compatible with XYZ", they just weren't able to market models as actually being XYZ as that could be confusing to the consumer. So you aren't allowed to say "these are bretonnians" but you are allowed to say "these are compatible with GW's bretonnian models" the same way a 3rd party car parts company is allowed to say their part is compatible with a Toyota Yaris even though they aren't allowed to make their own car and call it a Toyota Yaris.
So renaming everything non-generic terms and avoiding things that can be copied with historical miniatures doesn't really make sense, as companies are still allowed to market their bits as compatible with Aelves just as they were previously compatible with Elves.
There was the trademark bullying crap that GW started to pull (remember Spots the Space Marine that GW got removed from Amazon's shelves?) where GW was starting to try and enforce their trademark of common names outside of the realm of wargaming, I'm not really sure how that helped them with much though.
It's probably more to do with 'brand awareness'. If Lil Timmy searches for Dwarf Warriors then Google might give him World of Warcraft, D&D, or - GASP - a different company's minatures!!!
However if he searches for Duradin Karakwardun (or whatever) he's only going to get results tailored to Games Workshop, or at least articles/sellers only talking about GW.
That's probably also why we ended up with 'Astra Militarum'. Stick Imperial Guard on Google and odds are you'll get results for Napoleon's Best Bois or the Praetorian Guard which might include historical miniatures and GW can't have that.
It's less copyright and more about keeping eveything contained within a GW bubble without any outside influence potentially tainting Lil Timmy to knowledge there's other companies who produce minatures.
GW tried to make changes and revitalize the game for a decade - its actually really dumb to think they didn't or that there were still other viable options on the table that they could have exercised considering the costs involved with them not only abandoning all their past work and development but also the investment needed to launch the new game.
If AoS and therefore the destruction of the setting was the only solution, why would they be bothering to return to that in a big way like this project seems to be? This doesn't appear to be some small nostalgia-focused thing aimed at just a few people who still have interest, so it's absurd to think that the heavy-handed solution to the problem they went for was the only option available to them. They could have done something similar to the gameplay changes and lore updates that came with AoS but without the complete destruction of the game and the setting, which is pretty much what they're doing now with this project. The reasons for WHFB not doing well were not so much to do with the lore of WHFB and neither was the gameplay changes of AoS something that couldn't have been done with the setting without the AoS lore side of it, it wasn't doing well due to difficulty getting into it and not really recieving that much attention from GW in comparison to 40K or how they do things now.
The success of AoS now does not really necessarily support that it was the right move in itself to get rid of WHFB as a lot has happened since then, It's not like the nitial launch of AoS was some sort of overnight success either - it took a lot of extra-effort after that to get the game and lore into something that was worthwhile, something that also happened to coincide with a change in management and overall approach to things like interacting with the community. I see no reason to think that if they'd done with they did but without the destruction part, so instead continued to update WHFB lore while providing a more concise easy to get into scale game, that WHFB would have also become much more successful than it used to be, especially when when video games like Total War Warhammer and Vermintide introduced people the setting shortly after.
They had the option to put the same level of effort as AoS receives now or this project will seemingly have into WHFB at the time, the full reboot they went for was not the only thing they hadn't tried. The End Times event was already generating far more interest in the game than it had for a long time, because they were actually doing something with it again.
Be real, models in units were mostly wound counters throughout WFB. Or worse they were ablative wounds for a character in the front rank.
Yes but the goal of good game design is to make it feel like they weren't just a bunch of wound counters, 8th didn't even try to hide that. 6th edition, while not that divergent from 8th rule wise, by virtue of the fact units weren't super killy and could hold out a turn or two even with bad break tests, felt like the unit was fighting and holding their own.
8th was such a dice roll kill fest you needed two tables to play. One for the game and the other to hold the casualties.
Be real, models in units were mostly wound counters throughout WFB. Or worse they were ablative wounds for a character in the front rank.
Yes but the goal of good game design is to make it feel like they weren't just a bunch of wound counters, 8th didn't even try to hide that. 6th edition, while not that divergent from 8th rule wise, by virtue of the fact units weren't super killy and could hold out a turn or two even with bad break tests, felt like the unit was fighting and holding their own.
8th was such a dice roll kill fest you needed two tables to play. One for the game and the other to hold the casualties.
It didn't work however. In no edition has it ever felt like any models mattered outside of the front rank and the characters. It's what put me off for the longest time that 90% of the army felt utterly redundant compared to the few that actually felt like they were doing something.
Thanks for the thoughts. I sold my 6k pts of lizards
other than a few models back when Sigmar was starting and rumors were lizards won't get new models anymore.
Just wondering.
Hopefully whatever it is, the armies that are part of it get some awesome models
StarFyre wrote:Will lizardmen be part of the old world since they have been on the planet for ages?
Sf
There's no reason they shouldn't be, if the setting is picking up anywhere between the Fall Of The Old Ones and the End Times, Lizardmen have been there.
chaos0xomega wrote:
StarFyre wrote: Will lizardmen be part of the old world since they have been on the planet for ages?
Sf
We don't know, but my guess is unlikely. The Old World isn't the name of the planet, its the name of a continent - and the lizardmen don't really ever go to that continent.
They've been to the Old World continent lots. By boat, by magic portal, or from the Southlands. No reason to discount 5hem out of hand, especially with all the other races that just pop in constantly.
StarFyre wrote: Thanks for the thoughts. I sold my 6k pts of lizards
other than a few models back when Sigmar was starting and rumors were lizards won't get new models anymore.
Just wondering.
Hopefully whatever it is, the armies that are part of it get some awesome models
Sf
Lizardmen about to get new models via Warhammer Underworlds eg:
Carlovonsexron wrote: It's difficult to imagine being successful without lower buy-in costs, that's for sure.
I think this is why the 10mm idea continues to get mentioned.
Just the Empire or Bretonia would require 3-5 new kits each for their core, plus characters and special stuff. Which players need to buy, build and paint.
A 10mm game could do most factions on a single sprue and would take just a few hours for players to have something ready to go.
I'm not saying I want 10mm or even expect it, but relaunching all of TOW, in plastic, while supporting 2 other fantasy games just seems so... unlikely.
Was anyone else on here collecting and/or playing in the early 2,000's? Does anyone else remember the "toybox" promotion where they ran fresh copies of 2nd Ed. 40K plastics, along with Talisman, Warhammer Quest, and 4th and 5th edition Fantasy plastics? Quite a few characters in my many armies came from the Adventurers and Wizards boxes, and all my Swarms and a fair share of my Minotaurs came from the Dungeon Denizens box. Some of those molds were at least a decade old when the promotion ran, so there's literally nothing stopping GW from running fresh frames off as long as they kept the dies. Hell, Revell just ran off a bunch of out of print 40K plastics, you can't tell me it's not possible.
Eliminate production overhead and this becomes even cheaper to start up than another small scale game that'll crash and burn like the last one...
Just Tony wrote: Was anyone else on here collecting and/or playing in the early 2,000's? Does anyone else remember the "toybox" promotion where they ran fresh copies of 2nd Ed. 40K plastics, along with Talisman, Warhammer Quest, and 4th and 5th edition Fantasy plastics? Quite a few characters in my many armies came from the Adventurers and Wizards boxes, and all my Swarms and a fair share of my Minotaurs came from the Dungeon Denizens box. Some of those molds were at least a decade old when the promotion ran, so there's literally nothing stopping GW from running fresh frames off as long as they kept the dies. Hell, Revell just ran off a bunch of out of print 40K plastics, you can't tell me it's not possible.
I remember those! I still have the Talisman Witch Elf and that sorceress that looked like the Dark Elf Sorceress from the OLD DE army book!
I think I still have the plastic Light Wizard, Bright Wizard, and halfling, come to think of it.
chaos0xomega wrote: A ludicrous thing to do and yet its selling better than WHFB ever did and is in fact the best selling fantasy miniatures product line on the planet, whereas WHFB was playing second fiddle in sales to LotR for a number of years - even when LotR was post-peak and barely selling in and of itself.
[...]
Necromunda makes money hand over fist [...]
You have access to detailed sales information I take it? Apart from scarce hints during Twitch interviews (I recall Andy Hoare occasionally referring to "producing more Y than they previously made for release X" and perhaps things selling "well", such specific information is rarely made public.
[
Between icv2, statements made by past and present GW staff (James Hewitt revealed quite a bit about how financially successful the various specialist games were in various interviews) and GWs own statements in legally binding financial disclosures. The info is out there if you know where to look.
Games Workshop's financial statements and annual reports don't contain game-specific numbers.
There has only ever been one attempt, a new set of rules called War of the Ring, it was dropped after one supplement and the game continued with the skirmish rules, that were never dropped or meant to be superseded anyway.
Thats not accurate at all, War of the Ring was already their 2nd or 3rd attempt at making it a big battle game, before War of the Ring there was Legions of Middle Earth and various sipplements and white dwarf articles have contained rules for bigger battles. A few years after War of the Ring they launched Battle Companies which was for smaller battles than war of the ring but larger battles than the original game. The current iteration of the game laucched 2 years ago completely superceded everything that came before and is pushing the game as a more mass battle experience than it was a decade ago. The original game could be played with a few dozen minis on the table, the current game is played with a few dozen minis *per side*, unless you use the new iteration of battle companies that pushes gamecsize back down to about a dozen minis per side.
Despite the name, Legions had nothing to do with big battles; if anything it restricted them (bringing in a model limit for certain points sizes). Every iteration has been playable with a few models or dozens of models on the table. Battle Companies was always smaller than the typical game, with only a dozen models per side (aside from Goblin warbands, and Hobbits once those were added). While the basic game would typically have a few dozen per side (the figures were typically sold in boxes of 24 for a reason), the very first rulebook (Fellowship of the Ring, released with the first movie) already included a scenario with 50 Men of Gondor and 50 High Elves against 248 Mordor Orcs. (And this was when the Orcs were only available in metal!) So, yeah, the game was always one for potentially large armies. Literally since the very start.
They followed this up with more clarification at one of their events saying they had plans for new plastics and to explore parts of middle earth that nobody has ever looked at before.
Yeah, that article doesn't state anything of what you mentioned. No interview with Adam Troke nor Jay Clare I've ever read (or conducted) said what you claim. "Don't expect new plastics" was the post-Hobbit line. Only in recent years has that become a possibility due to presumably good sales numbers, but it was never promised or even expected.
Just Tony wrote: Was anyone else on here collecting and/or playing in the early 2,000's? Does anyone else remember the "toybox" promotion where they ran fresh copies of 2nd Ed. 40K plastics, along with Talisman, Warhammer Quest, and 4th and 5th edition Fantasy plastics? Quite a few characters in my many armies came from the Adventurers and Wizards boxes, and all my Swarms and a fair share of my Minotaurs came from the Dungeon Denizens box. Some of those molds were at least a decade old when the promotion ran, so there's literally nothing stopping GW from running fresh frames off as long as they kept the dies. Hell, Revell just ran off a bunch of out of print 40K plastics, you can't tell me it's not possible.
I remember those! I still have the Talisman Witch Elf and that sorceress that looked like the Dark Elf Sorceress from the OLD DE army book!
I think I still have the plastic Light Wizard, Bright Wizard, and halfling, come to think of it.
Depending on how attached to those models you are, we may want to have a financially related chat...
I'm really looking forward to this game. So much so, that I'm basically focusing on finishing what I have, and selling off what I don't want to finish so that I jump into this when it launches.
Egyptian Space Zombie wrote: I'm really looking forward to this game. So much so, that I'm basically focusing on finishing what I have, and selling off what I don't want to finish so that I jump into this when it launches.
The game doesn't launch for another 2-3 years minimum it seems, so you may want to hold on to your stuff for a while longer yet.
Don Savik wrote:I can't believe some people are still extremely salty about Age of Sigmar all these years later. You'd think Age of Sigmar killed their mom or something.
As someone who was looking to get into Fantasy but couldn't back in the day (too young, too expensive) I'm glad its coming back so I can play a good rank and file mini game. Age of Sigmar is still great and I love playing it though. I don't see why you can't like both.
Lets hope they can fix some of the major glaring flaws with WHFB though. Lets not kid ourselves that it was a perfect game. The amount of matches I've seen end after the first turn is ridiculous and tbh is a failure of a wargame. Also if it is going to be a rank and file game I hope the unit sizes are more manageable, either being priced cheaper or smaller/more durable.
What I don't get is why people cling to GW games despite all the disapointment. There are other companies that make good games.
You want rank and file games? Have you had a look at Kings of War, Conquest, A Song of Ice and Fire, Oathmark or Age of Fantasy?
Eiríkr wrote: My only wish for this is for the Bretonnia range to return unchanged.
I would expect something like the new chaos warriors.
SamusDrake wrote:Hoping that this will also involve a return to Man O' War, being set in the old world and all that.
If you want an fantasy game involving boats; Mantic released Kings of War: Armada recently.
If you are under the impression that Mantic only produces subpar models; then it's time to look again.
DarkBlack wrote: What I don't get is why people cling to GW games despite all the disapointment. There are other companies that make good games.
You want rank and file games? Have you had a look at Kings of War, Conquest, A Song of Ice and Fire, Oathmark or Age of Fantasy?
It takes a lot of impetus to get into a new rank and file game. It's not like a skirmish game where you only need a handful of models to buy and paint and you may very well be able to buy and paint both sides of a game yourself to try and get others into it. With a rank and file game, deciding on a game, learning some of the lore, learning the rules then buying and painting a bunch of models, you kind of need a group of a few people all willing to invest heavily their time and money to give it a go.
I'd suggest a large portion of the people who started WHFB did so because a group already existed that played it.
Aside from that you have things like the aesthetic, finding a game where there's 3 or 4 armies that 3 or 4 different people actually want to paint and play is sometimes a challenge. I think WHFB only really started to snowball after there were a wide range of well fleshed out and appealing factions.
DarkBlack wrote: What I don't get is why people cling to GW games despite all the disapointment. There are other companies that make good games.
You want rank and file games? Have you had a look at Kings of War, Conquest, A Song of Ice and Fire, Oathmark or Age of Fantasy?
It takes a lot of impetus to get into a new rank and file game. It's not like a skirmish game where you only need a handful of models to buy and paint and you may very well be able to buy and paint both sides of a game yourself to try and get others into it. With a rank and file game, deciding on a game, learning some of the lore, learning the rules then buying and painting a bunch of models, you kind of need a group of a few people all willing to invest heavily their time and money to give it a go.
I'd suggest a large portion of the people who started WHFB did so because a group already existed that played it.
Aside from that you have things like the aesthetic, finding a game where there's 3 or 4 armies that 3 or 4 different people actually want to paint and play is sometimes a challenge. I think WHFB only really started to snowball after there were a wide range of well fleshed out and appealing factions.
Lore wise it was huge and well built up too. So it was a lot to lose for people to move on from it after too. Particularly if it took such heavy investment to get in.
I think that’s the other reason people are still a bit hit by this whole thing. And where the “you can still pay it” argument falls down if you’re in it for more than just playing a rule set (at which point moving in to a different game might have been preferable anyway).
An End Times follow on game that had a brand new rule set for smaller easier games, even in round bases style, would have still been WHF.
It was the destruction and then whole new world which ended it for many that I know..
Was anyone else on here collecting and/or playing in the early 2,000's? Does anyone else remember the "toybox" promotion where they ran fresh copies of 2nd Ed. 40K plastics, along with Talisman, Warhammer Quest, and 4th and 5th edition Fantasy plastics? Quite a few characters in my many armies came from the Adventurers and Wizards boxes, and all my Swarms and a fair share of my Minotaurs came from the Dungeon Denizens box. Some of those molds were at least a decade old when the promotion ran, so there's literally nothing stopping GW from running fresh frames off as long as they kept the dies. Hell, Revell just ran off a bunch of out of print 40K plastics, you can't tell me it's not possible.
Eliminate production overhead and this becomes even cheaper to start up than another small scale game that'll crash and burn like the last one...
No one says they can't reuse older molds. Heck Atlantis models is reissuing kits from the 60s that still work.
It's more that what little we've seen so far says TOW will be a new game with new units and ideas, not just a nostalgic reissue of old kits. I could see this if it was Necromunda or Realms of Chaos style skirmish game. But it will also be a rank and file, square base game.
Which to me still doesn't make sense. How can a 28mm game that was ruled unprofitable and not worth it just 5 or 6 years back now be a great idea with a huge relaunch and dozens of kits? Especially when the Perrys, Fireforge, Ice & Fire, and Frostgrave (and more) already make plastic kits that cover a lot of this ground?
Maybe it is just an attempt to outflank possible challengers?
It takes a lot of impetus to get into a new rank and file game.
It's not a zero sum thing though, it's not like you have to go all in with two armies without making an informed choice (seems like KS hype train culture has blinded us a bit to that fact). The models and general aesthetic either grab you or they don't, there are tons of good batreps on youtube and if the core system is a concern the rank&file games translate especially well into some cardboard cutout bases to give it a try.
And as far as TOW goes I don't understand why anyone would risk making a fool of themselves by so desperately wanting to form a comprehensive opinion on it at this stage. However much you might know of the history of Warmaster (and how well it sold at your FLGS) or Fantasy's editions, the fact is we still don't know even the scale of the new model line. Of course GW isn't helping by blowing hot air into the balloon once a year ... Personally I just hope it's done more like AT where it is a loving modern interpretation of a beloved classic and less like Necromunda.
Maybe it is just an attempt to outflank possible challengers?
IIRC the announcment came out just as Mantic published KoW 3.0 (and they, in turn, ran that "you don't have to wait years for an awesone rank&file game" teaser), so the theory isn't entirely far-fetched.
Add the disgruntled and loud WHF community, the successful 3rd party rank&file model Kickstarters, the Total War franchise and the overall "second life" that the Old World got in other computer games, BB and the new pen&paper RPG edition and all of a sudden the project doesn't seem commercially unviable. I completely understand why GW would want to be back behind the helm of the thing that spawned so many succesful products.
Yeah GW's reasons for reintroducing a game or IP are usually because a competitor is making a similar game and having it be successful, which shows GW that this old game that they mismanaged and let die does actually have some legs. We wouldn't have gotten the reborth of AI if not for X-Wing, just like all the various skirmish games out there basically led to the rebooting of Necromunda, investment in Kill Team and introduction of Warcry. The success of KoW is absolutely a big part of the TOW project.
I'm quite interested to see if KoW itself has any real influence on TOW's rules writing too. For me, I never stopped using my WHFB army, because I could just transplant it over to KoW with no issues whatsoever. And honestly, after playing KoW I'd find it really hard to go back to any game based on 7/8th WHFB. Even 6th Edition (the Golden Age) would be difficult to go back to just because KoW feels like a progression or an attempt to solve the issues of Warhammer, which makes sense since it was primarily designed by Alessio Cavatore. That's not to say it's perfect and that WHFB doesn't do certain things better, but if you're wondering how to make a massed battle rank and file game easily accessible, straight-forward to play, but still with oodles of tactical depth and all taking less than an hour and a half for a 2k game (!!!) then it's basically what you should be looking at for inspiration.
DarkBlack wrote: What I don't get is why people cling to GW games despite all the disapointment. There are other companies that make good games.
You want rank and file games? Have you had a look at Kings of War, Conquest, A Song of Ice and Fire, Oathmark or Age of Fantasy?
It takes a lot of impetus to get into a new rank and file game. It's not like a skirmish game where you only need a handful of models to buy and paint and you may very well be able to buy and paint both sides of a game yourself to try and get others into it. With a rank and file game, deciding on a game, learning some of the lore, learning the rules then buying and painting a bunch of models, you kind of need a group of a few people all willing to invest heavily their time and money to give it a go.
I'd suggest a large portion of the people who started WHFB did so because a group already existed that played it.
Aside from that you have things like the aesthetic, finding a game where there's 3 or 4 armies that 3 or 4 different people actually want to paint and play is sometimes a challenge. I think WHFB only really started to snowball after there were a wide range of well fleshed out and appealing factions.
but this is the same for TOW
there is no difference in starting KoW or Oathmark than starting TOW when it comes out, except that you can use any models you want (and KoW might need less models to play)
Which to me still doesn't make sense. How can a 28mm game that was ruled unprofitable and not worth it just 5 or 6 years back now be a great idea with a huge relaunch and dozens of kits? Especially when the Perrys, Fireforge, Ice & Fire, and Frostgrave (and more) already make plastic kits that cover a lot of this ground?
Maybe it is just an attempt to outflank possible challengers?
Success of KoW going into its 3rd Edition with growing community
Success of Horus Heresy which is still a niche Specialist Game
GW realising that the IP is their strongest selling point and they need to do something with it
and people rather wait 3-4 years for a new GW game that might be similar to Warhammer with all the problems of GW games and the possibility that they cannot use their existing collection as it is (new scale, new bases, different unit organisation etc) than use rules from a different company
there is the possibility that we won't see a game here anytime soon but just an announcement from time to time to keep the people away from other games
Kid_Kyoto wrote:Which to me still doesn't make sense. How can a 28mm game that was ruled unprofitable and not worth it just 5 or 6 years back now be a great idea with a huge relaunch and dozens of kits? Especially when the Perrys, Fireforge, Ice & Fire, and Frostgrave (and more) already make plastic kits that cover a lot of this ground?
Maybe it is just an attempt to outflank possible challengers?
Pretty much, I imagine. It fits with how GW tries to monopolize "the hobby" as being just them, basically not acknowledging other companies and ranges. Ever since the end of WHFB, companies have tried to fill that gap, and customers have been looking for replacements. Same as bringing back the former Specialist Games. Where they seemingly used to think sales of the smaller ranges were cannibalizing those of their main games, or that they were not returning sufficiently on investment, I think GW now sees them as complementing their other ranges and attracting players who would otherwise not be their customers. There's also the difference between making a lower profit than other games and actively losing money. If you only ever compare your sales numbers to your best-selling Space Marines, everything will look poor, but that doesn't mean you should only produce Space Marines. (Yeah, okay, they admittedly haven't fully dropped that idea, but at least they didn't continue the Sigmarine train in AoS, instead focussing on other ranges eventually.)
Just Tony wrote:I don't see why people say WFB didn't scale well. Our gaming groups during 6th played 1,000 battles all the time.
Never understood why GW didn't advertise that side of the game more.
My first games were with these skirmish rules originally from WD I think, where you had the reduced unit sizes (minimum 3 infantry, 2 cav and 1 for troll-sized figures), and it allowed you to play a proper game with multiple units manoeuvring and outflanking with just some odd boxes and blisters from an army. Just because a game could be played that way, didn't mean you'd stop buying as soon as you had that: monsters and artillery were greatly restricted, and the game clearly looked more impressive with more on the table. But it gave you something to do when you were just starting out, a short-term goal, plus the ability to learn the rules, without having to first spend hundred of euros and hours of work to get a full 2000pts army ready. It does seem GW is realizing that more now, but even then it could be part of the main rules rather than some additional supplement/separate game (which just means having to buy yet more books, and thus a higher threshold for new players).
6th scaled well and also had rules for Skirmish games, different asymmetric Scenarios (Heroes VS Horde) etc
this was less a thing with 7th and not really possible any more with 8th
main reason why GW did not advertise it more was for the same reason they increased the minimum unit size
to sell more models and people thinking the full 2500 points game is the only possibility need more models to start with the game
it is just now that GW has realised that slowly growing collections lead to more overall sales than buying a 2k point army at once and drop the game soon after
It's more that what little we've seen so far says TOW will be a new game with new units and ideas, not just a nostalgic reissue of old kits. I could see this if it was Necromunda or Realms of Chaos style skirmish game. But it will also be a rank and file, square base game.
Which to me still doesn't make sense. How can a 28mm game that was ruled unprofitable and not worth it just 5 or 6 years back now be a great idea with a huge relaunch and dozens of kits? Especially when the Perrys, Fireforge, Ice & Fire, and Frostgrave (and more) already make plastic kits that cover a lot of this ground?
Maybe it is just an attempt to outflank possible challengers?
I think the only person with any inside knowledge of numbers was Hastings, who said WHFB was still making them money it just wasn't the amount they wanted to make. Clearly they thought if Space Marines sell double literally any other GW product, making fantasy Marines will make them even more money, but since they didn't fit into WHFB it had to go. I genuinely believe that if they'd kept up with WHFB instead of killing it, that it would be enjoying the same success as AoS right now, because AoS' recent success' are attributed more to GW itself doing well than AoS being a better ruleset - it was completely dead during 1e and any LFGS will tell you the boxes were just gathering dust on shelves. It's not a coincidence AoS started taking off around the point GW had it's 8th 40k resurgence and started pushing it's very aggressive release policy (which WHFB absolutely didn't have).Sure the General's Handbook also helped, but I think that's overstated as the main reason (and I've say 2e was a bigger deal than GHB). Even Lord of the Rings is doing well again despite not that much changing from 2014 beyond the odd resin blister now and again.
TOW's announcement was 100% an attempt to hurt KOW. The timing of it with 3e was far too obvious, especially when we know GW hate reveal new projects to the public until they're almost finished and sitting in warehouses. The worst part is that it worked and all you really hear about KoW is the occasional "I'm playing it until TOW is out." TOW could be the worst version of WHFB ever, but you know it's going to kill KOW completely because people will always take a GW alternative.
On a less grim note if you're looking for a rank-and-file game that's lighter on the pocket and with a solid ruleset, A Song of Ice and Fire is a good option. Most armies you only need their starter and maybe a couple of boxes and you're at the 40pt 'average game size' and some like Night's Watch you need less than that. The community for TTS is also very active and done a lot to try and mitigate some of TTS' usual clunkiness.
Was anyone else on here collecting and/or playing in the early 2,000's? Does anyone else remember the "toybox" promotion where they ran fresh copies of 2nd Ed. 40K plastics, along with Talisman, Warhammer Quest, and 4th and 5th edition Fantasy plastics? Quite a few characters in my many armies came from the Adventurers and Wizards boxes, and all my Swarms and a fair share of my Minotaurs came from the Dungeon Denizens box. Some of those molds were at least a decade old when the promotion ran, so there's literally nothing stopping GW from running fresh frames off as long as they kept the dies. Hell, Revell just ran off a bunch of out of print 40K plastics, you can't tell me it's not possible.
Eliminate production overhead and this becomes even cheaper to start up than another small scale game that'll crash and burn like the last one...
No one says they can't reuse older molds. Heck Atlantis models is reissuing kits from the 60s that still work.
It's more that what little we've seen so far says TOW will be a new game with new units and ideas, not just a nostalgic reissue of old kits. I could see this if it was Necromunda or Realms of Chaos style skirmish game. But it will also be a rank and file, square base game.
Which to me still doesn't make sense. How can a 28mm game that was ruled unprofitable and not worth it just 5 or 6 years back now be a great idea with a huge relaunch and dozens of kits? Especially when the Perrys, Fireforge, Ice & Fire, and Frostgrave (and more) already make plastic kits that cover a lot of this ground?
Maybe it is just an attempt to outflank possible challengers?
Need to look at GW’s changes since the demise of WHFB.
Not only have they massively diversified their offerings, but they’re now a very profitable business.
With AoS and 40k doing the heavy lifting between them, there’s less need for every game to deliver reliable profits. So if TOW returns the sort of money WHFB was making, it’s still more money in their coffers - and not going to competitors.
Is it necessarily a calculated blow to kill off other game systems? Perhaps, I guess. But I suspect it’s still mostly about keeping the consumer’s attention on GW. After all, if they’re tickling the tastebuds of the majority of the market, how does anyone else get a look in? This is reflected in their approach with Warhammer Community. Overall, it’s content is actually pretty trivial, no? But it is daily. It offers comics, articles, interviews, painting showcase etc.
Their competitors? X-Wing and Armada tend to have quite sporadic releases and previews. Mantic? My friend is their chief resin caster, but I couldn’t tell you what’s coming up, apart from that Naval game - because they don’t have my attention.
TOW feeds into that. First, we have the anticipation of an old, beloved game returning. Whilst I for one would prefer far more regular updates and insights, their current stuff is clearly having the desired affect. And I dare say that as the project roles on, we might get articles showing insights into the actual game design process.
Eyes on. That’s what they’re up to these days, if you ask me. And I accept I could be way off!
DarkBlack wrote: What I don't get is why people cling to GW games despite all the disapointment. There are other companies that make good games.
You want rank and file games? Have you had a look at Kings of War, Conquest, A Song of Ice and Fire, Oathmark or Age of Fantasy?
It takes a lot of impetus to get into a new rank and file game. It's not like a skirmish game where you only need a handful of models to buy and paint and you may very well be able to buy and paint both sides of a game yourself to try and get others into it. With a rank and file game, deciding on a game, learning some of the lore, learning the rules then buying and painting a bunch of models, you kind of need a group of a few people all willing to invest heavily their time and money to give it a go.
I'd suggest a large portion of the people who started WHFB did so because a group already existed that played it.
Aside from that you have things like the aesthetic, finding a game where there's 3 or 4 armies that 3 or 4 different people actually want to paint and play is sometimes a challenge. I think WHFB only really started to snowball after there were a wide range of well fleshed out and appealing factions.
but this is the same for TOW
there is no difference in starting KoW or Oathmark than starting TOW when it comes out, except that you can use any models you want (and KoW might need less models to play)
Sure, but at this stage I'm only talking about WHFB and not judging TOW because I have no idea what it'll be. Maybe I can use my old armies and it costs me nothing, maybe it's a whole new thing, maybe it's 15mm scale.
GW in general does a better job than other random games because I live near a couple of GW stores and so the stores foster a community. FLGSs (at least the ones I've been to around here) just cater to whatever is already popular. If a game isn't popular, an FLGS won't stock it and won't have games nights for that game, so you're left forming your own community or a club to do that. I've had the annoying experience of seeing a certain game on the shelf of my local FLGS, buying a few items, then a month later it's not on the shelves any more and the store owner tells me they stopped selling it because it wasn't popular. GW will work to make an unpopular game popular because they can't afford to do anything less.
DarkBlack wrote: What I don't get is why people cling to GW games despite all the disapointment. There are other companies that make good games.
You want rank and file games? Have you had a look at Kings of War, Conquest, A Song of Ice and Fire, Oathmark or Age of Fantasy?
It takes a lot of impetus to get into a new rank and file game. It's not like a skirmish game where you only need a handful of models to buy and paint and you may very well be able to buy and paint both sides of a game yourself to try and get others into it. With a rank and file game, deciding on a game, learning some of the lore, learning the rules then buying and painting a bunch of models, you kind of need a group of a few people all willing to invest heavily their time and money to give it a go.
I'd suggest a large portion of the people who started WHFB did so because a group already existed that played it.
Aside from that you have things like the aesthetic, finding a game where there's 3 or 4 armies that 3 or 4 different people actually want to paint and play is sometimes a challenge. I think WHFB only really started to snowball after there were a wide range of well fleshed out and appealing factions.
If you played WHFB then you can use those armies to play Kings of War, Oathmark or Age of Fantasy.
Most KoW players start that way.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: With AoS and 40k doing the heavy lifting between them, there’s less need for every game to deliver reliable profits. So if TOW returns the sort of money WHFB was making, it’s still more money in their coffers - and not going to competitors.
If TOW only makes a trickle of money it's not necessarily a terrible thing, but I think GW can't afford to have such a massive range as they had for WHFB if it's not making the big bucks.
One thing that hurt WHFB over the years is that it just kept growing, GW is a company that lives off the sales of new releases more than existing products, so they need to resolve the issue of ranges just getting bloated. There's nothing wrong with a game where for each army you only have a couple of hero options, a couple of core options and a couple of special/rare options. But I don't know what the solution is to that.
DarkBlack wrote: What I don't get is why people cling to GW games despite all the disapointment. There are other companies that make good games.
You want rank and file games? Have you had a look at Kings of War, Conquest, A Song of Ice and Fire, Oathmark or Age of Fantasy?
It takes a lot of impetus to get into a new rank and file game. It's not like a skirmish game where you only need a handful of models to buy and paint and you may very well be able to buy and paint both sides of a game yourself to try and get others into it. With a rank and file game, deciding on a game, learning some of the lore, learning the rules then buying and painting a bunch of models, you kind of need a group of a few people all willing to invest heavily their time and money to give it a go.
I'd suggest a large portion of the people who started WHFB did so because a group already existed that played it.
Aside from that you have things like the aesthetic, finding a game where there's 3 or 4 armies that 3 or 4 different people actually want to paint and play is sometimes a challenge. I think WHFB only really started to snowball after there were a wide range of well fleshed out and appealing factions.
If you played WHFB then you can use those armies to play Kings of War, Oathmark or Age of Fantasy.
Most KoW players start that way.
I'll be the first to admit I haven't really tried hard to adapt my models to a new game. By the time WHFB died for real, most people I knew had already shelved their armies (I myself was rarely playing and disliked the latter editions), when it was killed for real some people sold their armies. A few of us tried KoW but as a group it wasn't well liked enough keep things going, and the community rules for WHFB didn't seem to be taking off anywhere.
I think for the general population, you really can't underestimate the value of the ready made community WHFB and GW games in general enjoy. Having ubiquity is probably more important for a wargame company than it is for a fast food company like McDonald's.
Yeah, no question it could make money, but Return on Investment is a thing. Spending time and money on a game that makes $1 million profit is still considered a waste when that same time and money could have gone into a game that made $10 million.
Which again, is why I still can't quite get my head around his, except as a mirage to scare off anyone thinking of making a low fantasy Rank and File game.
A small release like Mordheim or Warmaster or Man O War to test the market for Olde Worlde games and Olde Worlde fluff would feel very likely. This just... does not.
Kid_Kyoto wrote: A small release like Mordheim or Warmaster or Man O War to test the market for Olde Worlde games and Olde Worlde fluff would feel very likely. This just... does not.
Considering the IP is doing very well in other mediums, I don't see why they'd need to test the market.
Sure, but at this stage I'm only talking about WHFB and not judging TOW because I have no idea what it'll be. Maybe I can use my old armies and it costs me nothing, maybe it's a whole new thing, maybe it's 15mm scale.
GW in general does a better job than other random games because I live near a couple of GW stores and so the stores foster a community. FLGSs (at least the ones I've been to around here) just cater to whatever is already popular. If a game isn't popular, an FLGS won't stock it and won't have games nights for that game, so you're left forming your own community or a club to do that. I've had the annoying experience of seeing a certain game on the shelf of my local FLGS, buying a few items, then a month later it's not on the shelves any more and the store owner tells me they stopped selling it because it wasn't popular. GW will work to make an unpopular game popular because they can't afford to do anything less.
But we'll see how it goes with TOW.
This is why I'm worried KoW/Conquest/Oathmark/maybe ASOIAF will suffer so much when TOW lands.Their offers are almost always far weaker, more flawed, less balanced rulesets and more expensive models than their alternatives. The difference is that it's this mindset of people not wanting to buy into other games because GW is so popular that leads to the self-fulfilling prophecy.
LFGS stocks non-GW game -> dedicated, very small core buy and play it -> that core works to foster a community around it, makes some progress -> new GW edition/game comes out -> almost everyone runs off back to the GW game because it's what everyone is playing -> game dies or that tiny core is all that remains -> none picks it up again because it's perceived as a dead game -> Repeat
It's like the episode of The Simpsons when Lisa tries to make a less sexist alternative to Malibu Stacy and everybody's chomping at the bits to grab it, but then Malibu Stacy releases a new doll (with a new hat) seconds prior and only one person ends up buying the alternative doll.
Kid_Kyoto wrote: Yeah, no question it could make money, but Return on Investment is a thing. Spending time and money on a game that makes $1 million profit is still considered a waste when that same time and money could have gone into a game that made $10 million.
Which again, is why I still can't quite get my head around his, except as a mirage to scare off anyone thinking of making a low fantasy Rank and File game.
A small release like Mordheim or Warmaster or Man O War to test the market for Olde Worlde games and Olde Worlde fluff would feel very likely. This just... does not.
To be fair this is likely a relatively small release similar to their Necromunda/AT/Warcry set ups. I think people are getting slightly unreasonable expectations because they are showing the old world map and old big name races/factions. I feel like off the bat we're getting a starter, some mild terrain, and likely an infantry, a cavalry, and a hero type box sets (so 3). They'll be able to be used by the initial "factions" which will all be Empire affiliated. Similar to the initial Horus Heresy "Board Game" they released but without the smoke and mirrors of releasing a "board game" as a starter to get it past old GW.
They can then rapid release another faction or two like Kislev or "Undead" which will use some of the core plastics but get some of their own sets. With Brets and Woodelves being a later combined release.
Essentially look at the Necromunda style with just a couple of extra kits. The difference is they'll likely push a lot more stuff quickly out so they need the time to design and build up stock as this is likely a much larger release than Necromunda or AT and both of those went gangbusters upon release.
Sure, but at this stage I'm only talking about WHFB and not judging TOW because I have no idea what it'll be. Maybe I can use my old armies and it costs me nothing, maybe it's a whole new thing, maybe it's 15mm scale.
GW in general does a better job than other random games because I live near a couple of GW stores and so the stores foster a community. FLGSs (at least the ones I've been to around here) just cater to whatever is already popular. If a game isn't popular, an FLGS won't stock it and won't have games nights for that game, so you're left forming your own community or a club to do that. I've had the annoying experience of seeing a certain game on the shelf of my local FLGS, buying a few items, then a month later it's not on the shelves any more and the store owner tells me they stopped selling it because it wasn't popular. GW will work to make an unpopular game popular because they can't afford to do anything less.
But we'll see how it goes with TOW.
I wouldn't say GW do a 'better job'. Their offers are almost always far weaker, more flawed, less balanced rulesets and more expensive models than their alternatives. The difference is that it's this mindset of people not wanting to buy into other games because GW is so popular that leads to the self-fulfilling prophecy.
LFGS stocks non-GW game -> dedicated, very small core buy and play it -> that core works to foster a community around it, makes some progress -> new GW edition/game comes out -> almost everyone runs off back to the GW game because it's what everyone is playing -> game dies or that tiny core is all that remains -> none picks it up again because it's perceived as a dead game -> Repeat
It's like the episode of The Simpsons when Lisa tries to make a less sexist alternative to Malibu Stacy and everybody's chomping at the bits to grab it, but then Malibu Stacy releases a new doll (with a new hat) seconds prior and only one person ends up buying the alternative doll.
I don't think it's nearly that simple. Not including that a game can get stagnant if stuff isn't releasing fairly regularly and that kills games as much as new gw shiney;
-a lot of gamers have limited time. So formats that have events and presence where you can get a lot of games in on a small schedule are critical. Hence why the only real competition GW has at a LGS level has ever been X-wing and Warmachine with a distant third of Armada. Because those game systems have or had robust support from their creators and regular "tournaments" which are really just an excuse to get a lot of games in in a single day.
-GW has their own stores. So they recruit. And so people's first taste is GW and GW has been around FOREVER. Buy into a game or two and have the company stop supporting (not just locals) and you get real gunshy real quick.
-Cost isn't that different for the models you get nowadays. Most "alternatives" are fairly close to GW pricing for some equal but mostly slightly to massively poorer models most of the time in a worse medium (a lot of resins and poorer plastics). Difference is quantity needed but quality and ACCESSIBILITY wise GW tends to be super high.
-The rules thing isn't really the same thing it was in the past. A lot of people harp on it but I see the same type of discussions for nearly every game I follow that I see for GW nowadays. The exception being Armada but I'm sure they're coming with the switch to 1.5. To be fair I don't follow tiny skirmish games as those aren't what I'm looking to play. But GW is writing fairly tight rules and updating issues in a reasonable way now.
GW is top dog because they are safe, they are accessible, they are reasonable for most hobby costs nowadays, they are recognizable, and you can get a game in with GW's main games in pretty much any place that has a hobby space.
Sure, but at this stage I'm only talking about WHFB and not judging TOW because I have no idea what it'll be. Maybe I can use my old armies and it costs me nothing, maybe it's a whole new thing, maybe it's 15mm scale.
GW in general does a better job than other random games because I live near a couple of GW stores and so the stores foster a community. FLGSs (at least the ones I've been to around here) just cater to whatever is already popular. If a game isn't popular, an FLGS won't stock it and won't have games nights for that game, so you're left forming your own community or a club to do that. I've had the annoying experience of seeing a certain game on the shelf of my local FLGS, buying a few items, then a month later it's not on the shelves any more and the store owner tells me they stopped selling it because it wasn't popular. GW will work to make an unpopular game popular because they can't afford to do anything less.
But we'll see how it goes with TOW.
This is why I'm worried KoW/Conquest/Oathmark/maybe ASOIAF will suffer so much when TOW lands.Their offers are almost always far weaker, more flawed, less balanced rulesets and more expensive models than their alternatives. The difference is that it's this mindset of people not wanting to buy into other games because GW is so popular that leads to the self-fulfilling prophecy.
LFGS stocks non-GW game -> dedicated, very small core buy and play it -> that core works to foster a community around it, makes some progress -> new GW edition/game comes out -> almost everyone runs off back to the GW game because it's what everyone is playing -> game dies or that tiny core is all that remains -> none picks it up again because it's perceived as a dead game -> Repeat
It's like the episode of The Simpsons when Lisa tries to make a less sexist alternative to Malibu Stacy and everybody's chomping at the bits to grab it, but then Malibu Stacy releases a new doll (with a new hat) seconds prior and only one person ends up buying the alternative doll.
People like GW models. You don't have to pretend this isn't the case, like everyone is sheeple and only buy their product because of social conditioning or something. People like their models, which is one of the main reasons people they play their games. Yes, some of them aren't great, but the good ones are usually better than the vast majority of the competition.
People like GW models. You don't have to pretend this isn't the case, like everyone is sheeple and only buy their product because of social conditioning or something. People like their models, which is one of the main reasons people they play their games
and just because someone likes the models means they must play the game as well?
KoW, Oathmark or OnePage rules are all model agnostic, they are fine to be played with any models you like (not like Warhammer or 40k, were you must use the GW models but people just don't care and hope to not get caught in the GW store, you can do that officially)
So yes, if you think you cannot play other games because you like GW models and/or you need to play the game as well because you like the models, this is the pure product of social conditioning (or something)
I think you guys are grossly overestimating Kings of War. Mantic is a company that employs a dozen people and has estimated revenue of about $5 million a year. GW makes a million dollars per day at this point (not an exaggeration), why would it even care? Kings of War isn't even Mantics most successful revenue generator if kickstarter is any indication. They've run three KoW kickstarters over the past decade, the first pulled $350k from 1500 backers, the second $370k from 2700 backers, and the most recent $270k from 2200 backers. GW literally makes more money in the 8 hours thst its stsff are asleep every night than Kings of War has been able to pull in any 30 day block of time on kickstarter.
If you take that entire market segment together, lumping Kings of War in with Conquest, Song of Ice and Fire, and random fantasy ministures lines for other games, etc you're *maybe* looking at $5-10 million in revenue per year if we are being generous. Again, why would GW even care?
People like GW models. You don't have to pretend this isn't the case, like everyone is sheeple and only buy their product because of social conditioning or something. People like their models, which is one of the main reasons people they play their games
and just because someone likes the models means they must play the game as well?
KoW, Oathmark or OnePage rules are all model agnostic, they are fine to be played with any models you like (not like Warhammer or 40k, were you must use the GW models but people just don't care and hope to not get caught in the GW store, you can do that officially)
So yes, if you think you cannot play other games because you like GW models and/or you need to play the game as well because you like the models, this is the pure product of social conditioning (or something)
He's talking about buying models from another game. It's the second sentence that I quoted.
the whole marketing is made up to give people "The Hobby" experience, Wargaming = GW
so it does not matter how much money Mantic makes with KoW, there are enough people playing it that GW feels the need to release their own Fantasy Rank&File system to cover that niche
same reason we have Kill-Team, Necromunda, Adeptus Titanicus, and AI. Not because they make so much money or there is a big player base here.
but GW wants to cover all kind of games the "The Hobby" might offer so that no one needs to go to someone else
the biggest threat that Kings of War offers to GW is that people forget Warhammer Fantasy as a game and think of KoW rules first when someone say "R&F game"
Kid_Kyoto wrote: Yeah, no question it could make money, but Return on Investment is a thing. Spending time and money on a game that makes $1 million profit is still considered a waste when that same time and money could have gone into a game that made $10 million.
The trick being the game that makes $10 million is already there (40K) and there's no more room for growth. Thus, you try something new to grow your company and make even MORE money.
Or as they put it in the business world, if your company is not growing, you're about to go bankrupt.
Sure, but at this stage I'm only talking about WHFB and not judging TOW because I have no idea what it'll be. Maybe I can use my old armies and it costs me nothing, maybe it's a whole new thing, maybe it's 15mm scale.
GW in general does a better job than other random games because I live near a couple of GW stores and so the stores foster a community. FLGSs (at least the ones I've been to around here) just cater to whatever is already popular. If a game isn't popular, an FLGS won't stock it and won't have games nights for that game, so you're left forming your own community or a club to do that. I've had the annoying experience of seeing a certain game on the shelf of my local FLGS, buying a few items, then a month later it's not on the shelves any more and the store owner tells me they stopped selling it because it wasn't popular. GW will work to make an unpopular game popular because they can't afford to do anything less.
But we'll see how it goes with TOW.
This is why I'm worried KoW/Conquest/Oathmark/maybe ASOIAF will suffer so much when TOW lands.Their offers are almost always far weaker, more flawed, less balanced rulesets and more expensive models than their alternatives. The difference is that it's this mindset of people not wanting to buy into other games because GW is so popular that leads to the self-fulfilling prophecy.
LFGS stocks non-GW game -> dedicated, very small core buy and play it -> that core works to foster a community around it, makes some progress -> new GW edition/game comes out -> almost everyone runs off back to the GW game because it's what everyone is playing -> game dies or that tiny core is all that remains -> none picks it up again because it's perceived as a dead game -> Repeat
It's like the episode of The Simpsons when Lisa tries to make a less sexist alternative to Malibu Stacy and everybody's chomping at the bits to grab it, but then Malibu Stacy releases a new doll (with a new hat) seconds prior and only one person ends up buying the alternative doll.
I think you overestimate the ability of a GW game to take away the community of another company's game, more likely that other company's game never established a significant community in the first place, stopped being supported by the company, or died a natural death.
he is talking about building a non-GW game community
Literally saying that other models are cheaper, implying people make their model buying decisions based on the price of the models. It's there for you to read twice, first where he wrote it and then when I quoted it.
chaos0xomega wrote: I think you guys are grossly overestimating Kings of War. Mantic is a company that employs a dozen people and has estimated revenue of about $5 million a year. GW makes a million dollars per day at this point (not an exaggeration), why would it even care? Kings of War isn't even Mantics most successful revenue generator if kickstarter is any indication. They've run three KoW kickstarters over the past decade, the first pulled $350k from 1500 backers, the second $370k from 2700 backers, and the most recent $270k from 2200 backers. GW literally makes more money in the 8 hours thst its stsff are asleep every night than Kings of War has been able to pull in any 30 day block of time on kickstarter.
If you take that entire market segment together, lumping Kings of War in with Conquest, Song of Ice and Fire, and random fantasy ministures lines for other games, etc you're *maybe* looking at $5-10 million in revenue per year if we are being generous. Again, why would GW even care?
You don't get to be the big dog by letting smaller companies take a piece of the pie. Big companies do their best to overwhelm or buy out smaller companies all the time.
Maybe GW think that consumer spending on wargaming is a finite resource and $5-10 million spent at another company is $5-10 million they aren't making.
GW have (wisely) started to diversify their income more instead of relying on 40k, and maybe they're thinking the rank and file game is a place they can spread their income once again, and don't want to come up against another established product.
But GW *did* become the big dog by letting smaller companies take a piece of the pie. There are countless genres of miniatures games and scales out there that GW has zero market presence in (naval games for one thing are a market segment that GW has absolutely zero presence in, whereas The Old World is an area that overlaps with their other offerings thematically even if not mechanically), both past and present. The idea that GW is moving into The Old World because it somehow feels threatened or needs to shore up some sort of moat around itself is pretty laughable in the face of the reality of the industry and ignores the fact that there is market overlap between Age of Sigmar and The Old World (i.e. the potential gains from The Old World are offset by potential losses to Age of Sigmar, assuming hobby dollars are limited).
If GW was concerned about smaller companies taking a piece of the pie then it would be pumping out more products in smaller scales, 6mm remains a hugely popular scale for miniatures gamers (the recent Battletech kickstarter proved the importance and viability of the scale, far moreso than anything that ASOIF, Kings of War, Conquest, Frostgrave, or any other 28mm fantasy miniatures line has done) yet they seem to not be in any rush to recreate Epic (which would pretty much compete directly with Battletech which I assure you is a far larger drain on those supposedly limited hobby dollars than 28mm fantasy rank n file games are). 10/15mm is likewise a hugely popular scale, second only to 28mm (read: much bigger potential slice of pie than 6mm, and probably a bigger slice of pie than what The Old World will be able to get them access to), and another segment of the market that GW has zero presence in.
Naval wargaming is another area that GW has absolutely zero presence in whatsoever at the moment, and probably accounts for the single greatest potential pie slice that GW might help itself to (and come on, Battlefleet Gothic is probably the single most requested product from the community at large) - and it would be *easy* because there is no big player in that market segment currently, GW would basically establish itself as the market leader for naval wargaming overnight.
GW isn't making this business decision because of Kings of War, I assure you.
chaos0xomega wrote: But GW *did* become the big dog by letting smaller companies take a piece of the pie. There are countless genres of miniatures games and scales out there that GW has zero market presence in...
Yeah, and this is a genre they have in the past had a presence and in the future may want to again.
GW isn't making this business decision because of Kings of War, I assure you.
Of course, I'd go as far as "well, duh". But KoW may be a small part of a larger equation in them deciding to do it (alongside other strategy changes within the company since WHFB was killed, or a general realisation that maybe WHFB died because of their choices rather than a lack of market, or the more recent success of WHFB based video games, or a hundred other things), and I doubt it's an accident that GW decided to announce it just after KoW was announcing their new edition even though it's supposedly years away, I don't think GW has announced a product so far in advance in the many years I've been involved in their games. Again, it's not going to be the reason GW decided to go down the path of TOW, but the timing of the announcement may well do.
and I doubt it's an accident that GW decided to announce it just after KoW was announcing their new edition even though it's supposedly years away, I don't think GW has announced a product so far in advance in the many years I've been involved in their games.
KoW 3rd Edition was announced July 19th 2019 and released sometime in October of the same year. GW announced The Old World November 15 2019. I don't really see any correlation there, if GW wanted to steal Mantics thunder they could have made the announcement much sooner.
As for forecasting releases, the only thing comparable to that is Sisters of Battle, which they gave an 18 month notice on, so not quite as much lead time on it as on TOW. Incidentally, I think The Old World announcement probably had more to do with the Sisters than it did Mantic, the Sisters box set went on preorder the same weekend that GW announced The Old World, which basically marked the end (or at least the beginning of the end) of the 18 month saga of the Sisters product development. Theres a much stronger correlation between these two events than there are between Kings of War 3rd and the announcement, I'm thinking GW recognized how effective the hype generated by publicly tracking the almost two year long development of SoB was and wanted to hold on to that lightning in a bottle and thus decided to pre-announce another long term project in the same vein.
Kid_Kyoto wrote: Yeah, no question it could make money, but Return on Investment is a thing. Spending time and money on a game that makes $1 million profit is still considered a waste when that same time and money could have gone into a game that made $10 million.
Which again, is why I still can't quite get my head around his, except as a mirage to scare off anyone thinking of making a low fantasy Rank and File game.
A small release like Mordheim or Warmaster or Man O War to test the market for Olde Worlde games and Olde Worlde fluff would feel very likely. This just... does not.
Prior to the release of AoS, my FLGS owner was in Memphis for Games Day and met with the NA upper management. He was on good terms with them because his store was one of the top independent sellers in the US. He complained to them about the state of WHFB and asking for them to justify the wall space it took up. He still supported it because he loved the game, but the sales had become abysmal. Two things that came out of the conversation were that WHFB had peaked at the beginning of 6th, it had been in constant decline since. Second, they talked about how the game had become hard to justify continuing because it's development and productions costs were the same as 40k, but sales were a fraction. I don't remember if the whole Tac Squad out selling it was mentioned.
I don't see this as trying to compete with other companies, I see this as trying to tap a nostalgia vein. Many of those people who played 4th/5th and quit now have kids close to their age when they started. Likely a move to get them to reclaim a bit of their youth and also introduce it to their kids.
How GW will handle it, I don't know. The big difference is that most the management team (Kirby/Merrett) that is seen as making the horrible choices that hurt WHFB and kneecapped AoS' start are gone. My only concern is who they put in charge of the rules development. I hope they keep Jervis far away from this. He can make fun games, but he never makes balanced games.
Hulksmash wrote: To be fair this is likely a relatively small release similar to their Necromunda/AT/Warcry set ups. I think people are getting slightly unreasonable expectations because they are showing the old world map and old big name races/factions. I feel like off the bat we're getting a starter, some mild terrain, and likely an infantry, a cavalry, and a hero type box sets (so 3). They'll be able to be used by the initial "factions" which will all be Empire affiliated. Similar to the initial Horus Heresy "Board Game" they released but without the smoke and mirrors of releasing a "board game" as a starter to get it past old GW.
They can then rapid release another faction or two like Kislev or "Undead" which will use some of the core plastics but get some of their own sets.
If this were the case, why would they spend so many years preparing the release?
And if that were all, why would they start designing things like the Kislev bear cavalry and Ice Witch infantry units? Those aren't anywhere on the list as the first few things they would release for a Kislev range. Even the little we know hints at a range that's certainly larger than what Necromunda Houses get.
As for the armies that are to be covered, why would they add new High Elven colonies around Bretonnia, and add an Orc infestation in part of the kingdom, if the aim is to initially limit the scope of the game/range to only human factions centred on the Empire?
The idea that everything will resolve around a few plastic sets of just Empire troops feels largely based on the supposed similarities to 30k, but GW referring to the Horus Heresy when W:TOW was first previewed should, I think, only be regarded as "this is the same setting as our main game, but in the past". Similarities end there. When 30k was first announced, I don't think they were talking about what the Eldar were getting up to during this era, were they?
AllSeeingSkink wrote: Of course, I'd go as far as "well, duh". But KoW may be a small part of a larger equation in them deciding to do it (alongside other strategy changes within the company since WHFB was killed, or a general realisation that maybe WHFB died because of their choices rather than a lack of market, or the more recent success of WHFB based video games, or a hundred other things), and I doubt it's an accident that GW decided to announce it just after KoW was announcing their new edition even though it's supposedly years away, I don't think GW has announced a product so far in advance in the many years I've been involved in their games. Again, it's not going to be the reason GW decided to go down the path of TOW, but the timing of the announcement may well do.
That's an interesting point. The long lead time is unusual.
And actually, given the speed they've been churning out editions for the last couple decades, TOW may end up with the longest development time of any project GW has done in the 21st century.
Assuming it comes out as early as 2022 (and it may be longer), the development for this game will have been longer than the entire runtime of 8th edition 40k.
People keep talking about popularity of games with anecdotal popularity of their local groups, the closest thing I could think of to any kind of real metric would be members of game-specific Facebook Groups or Subreddits
Facebook Groups Warhammer 40K: 67K members
Age of Sigmar: has 2 similar sized groups of 24K & 23K members, I'd assume most of the members overlap between both groups
Lord of the Rings: 11K members
Warhammer Fantasy (any/all editions, but AoS discussions specifically not allowed): 5K members
Warhammer Fantasy 6th edition: 4K members
Warhammer The Old World: 13K members in a group just based on the announcement of WHFB returning
Kill Team: 2 similar sized groups of 19K and 16K members, lots of overlap now but the 16K group started as a Heralds Of Ruin fan-made rules Kill Team group
Warcry: 10K members
Underworlds: 2 similar groups of 10K and 9K members, probably lots of overlap
Mordheim: 14K members
Blood Bowl: 24K members
Necromunda: 16K members
Kings of War: 11K members
Oathmark: 3K members
Conquest: 153 members of the US group, 128 for a UK group
Infinity: 8K members
X-Wing: mostly regional groups, largest is an 8K member general group, but there's a 14K member trading group and a 10K member painting group
Legion: 18K members
ASoIaF: 8K members
Reddit Warhammer (generic all-things-warhammer group) 198K members
Warhammer 40K: 352K members
Age of Sigmar: 70K members
Lord of the Rings: 14K members
Warhammer Fantasy: 30K members
Kill Team: 33K members
Warcry: 10K members
Underworlds: 12K members
Mordheim: 4K members
Blood Bowl: 21K members
Necromunda: 14K members
Kings of War: 4K members
Oathmark: only 105 members (although Frostgrave has 4K)
Conquest: 77 members
Infinity: 10K members
X-Wing: 1.5K members
Legion: 16K members
ASoIaF: 3K members
40K is pretty much more popular than everything else combined (no surprise), but AoS is hardly chump-change by comparison. And yet there's clearly still a LOT of people who are at least discussing WHFB. I don't know how much is related to Total War keeping the IP alive and how much is merely nostalgia, but there's very much a large amount of people that still love The Old World even if they now play AoS or have moved on to KoW or others, and there's more interest in WHFB/ToW, a dead OOP game, than the currently produced LotR (which is sad, LotR is great and should be more popular). There's more people interested in a dead OOPWHFB game than the currently produced Kings of War, Conquest, Oathmark and ASoIaF. If LotR is still popular enough to keep the entire line in production (even if much of it is mail-order) then so long as GW makes WHFB/ToW accessible it will be a success. Certainly the interest is more than the 4% of total sales that GW quoted when they killed WHFB, it's just a matter of GW making the game intro-friendly like they have with 40K and AoS
chaos0xomega wrote: But GW *did* become the big dog by letting smaller companies take a piece of the pie.
You and I remember the last ~20 years very differently. I remember a GW in the ascendancy which was putting out a Specialist Game a year and expanding into licensed IP with LotR, and then I remember the previous management steadily narrowing the scope and focus of the company in a way that damaged their brands, reduced their customer base, and forced them to cannibalise their own assets to afford to keep paying out dividends. Then I remember the new management undoing basically every one of the previous decisions one by one, including re-entering into every niche market they could find.
There was a period of time there where GW's place as the "big dog" was in serious danger, at least outside of the UK. They seem to have learned the lesson pretty well: you don't allow potential competitors to even *approach* the point where they might become a threat, even if that means valuing some intangible benefits like market share and general brand awareness over raw earnings potential when it comes to your more niche ranges.
Are they quivering in their boots at the thought of Mantic? Of course not. But the current management are at least reasonable enough to recognise that today's Mantic can be tomorrow's peak-Privateer Press, and it doesn't actually cost GW all that much to make sure that doesn't happen.
Yeah, just look at the numbers I posted, people are overwhelmingly supporting GW even when other miniatures are comparable quality or other games are objectively better. That was NOT the case 5+ years ago, when GW was hemorrhaging customers to Warmachine and X-Wing and the dozen of other games that gobbled up the formerly Specialist Game market. GW was always the "Big Dog" even then, but not by a big margin in 2010~2015. The turn-around GW made with the current management is astonishing and has more than re-established them as the king of the market, even if the other games still have a healthy playerbase in certain gaming circles.
IIRC - "The Old World" facebook group predates the game announcement, I think it was a legacy WHFB group that converted over to "The Old World" after the announcement.
Certainly the interest is more than the 4% of total sales that GW quoted when they killed WHFB, it's just a matter of GW making the game intro-friendly like they have with 40K and AoS
Only if theres a way to convert that interest into sales. One of the big problems with WHFB was that GW kept releasing new products for it and nobody was buying it. Overwhelmingly, the community for the game had gone "full grog", they were content to keep playing with their oldhammer minis and couldn't be bothered to continue expanding their collections with newer products. Unlike 40k, the "meta chasing" aspect of the hobby never took firm hold in WHFB like it did with 40k - I think in large part because TO's for WHFB effectively clamped down on that by implementing hard army comp restrictions which often neutered the flavor of the month armies from dominating the tournament circuits. So basically, a static community with static collections that refused to finance continued support for the game despite the existence of new minis, etc.
This is the number one reason I think GW will have found a way to meaningfully invalidate everyones old WHFB collections with the new game somehow - its the only way they can ensure that the new game will see ROI.
There was a period of time there where GW's place as the "big dog" was in serious danger, at least outside of the UK.
Not really. For all the doom and gloom here and in the community at large, GWs revenues never dipped below 100 million pounds annually. The next biggest company in the industry at the time, Privateer Press was *maybe* a $20 million/yr revenue company. Maybe. Publicly available data for PP indicates that as of 2020 its a slightly more than $5 million company, I know that they collapsed a bit over the previous couple years, but I struggle to imagine PP collapsed quite that much. I would guess at its peak it was maybe more realistically in the $10-15 million range. GWs dominance was never in serious danger.
Right now, the biggest product line behind 40k and Age of Sigmar are Wizkids unpainted DnD minis - I don't know how much those minis make, but i know WizKids is a $20-30 million company. X-Wing and Legion fall behind that mark (and I assume Armada is somewhere not to far behind that). Maybe atomic mass games might come close to threatening GWs market dominance in a couple years, but given that they are a license holder rather than a license creator, I don't think GW is too worried about them.
Hulksmash wrote: To be fair this is likely a relatively small release similar to their Necromunda/AT/Warcry set ups. I think people are getting slightly unreasonable expectations because they are showing the old world map and old big name races/factions. I feel like off the bat we're getting a starter, some mild terrain, and likely an infantry, a cavalry, and a hero type box sets (so 3). They'll be able to be used by the initial "factions" which will all be Empire affiliated. Similar to the initial Horus Heresy "Board Game" they released but without the smoke and mirrors of releasing a "board game" as a starter to get it past old GW.
They can then rapid release another faction or two like Kislev or "Undead" which will use some of the core plastics but get some of their own sets.
If this were the case, why would they spend so many years preparing the release?
And if that were all, why would they start designing things like the Kislev bear cavalry and Ice Witch infantry units? Those aren't anywhere on the list as the first few things they would release for a Kislev range. Even the little we know hints at a range that's certainly larger than what Necromunda Houses get.
As for the armies that are to be covered, why would they add new High Elven colonies around Bretonnia, and add an Orc infestation in part of the kingdom, if the aim is to initially limit the scope of the game/range to only human factions centred on the Empire?
The idea that everything will resolve around a few plastic sets of just Empire troops feels largely based on the supposed similarities to 30k, but GW referring to the Horus Heresy when W:TOW was first previewed should, I think, only be regarded as "this is the same setting as our main game, but in the past". Similarities end there. When 30k was first announced, I don't think they were talking about what the Eldar were getting up to during this era, were they?
How long did they take to completely revamp sisters? 1.5 YEARS! For a single faction in 40k they still had metals of and that arguably 75% of the army can be built of a single sprue. The line is bigger than that but the roll out took 6 months go get most of the product out. That was 5 infantry kits, 4 vehicles, and a fair number of characters. That kit number is pretty close to inline with what i expect total model kit wise out of the initial release over the first 6 months. But you know what they also have to do with this? DESIGN THE GAME SYSTEM.....This isn't a single codex going into an established pattern at the end of an edition. This is an entire game system which while it will bear similarities to fantasy isn't going to be a clone. And considering they spent most most of 8th 40k working on 9th that lines up.
And the 30k counter is just bull. 30k kinda happened organically because of the edition change and FW not having the resources to redo everything into 8th ed. 30k wasn't really it's own system until 40k moved on from that system.
I'd just say temper your enthusiasm. I doubt we're going to see 6 factions drop day one which is what we're up to now (Empire, Bret, HE, WE, Kislev, Orcs) and that doesn't count Empire subfactions or the all to likely chaos/BoC/dwarves/vampires.
Which to me still doesn't make sense. How can a 28mm game that was ruled unprofitable and not worth it just 5 or 6 years back now be a great idea with a huge relaunch and dozens of kits? Especially when the Perrys, Fireforge, Ice & Fire, and Frostgrave (and more) already make plastic kits that cover a lot of this ground?
Maybe it is just an attempt to outflank possible challengers?
I doubt top3 selling miniature game was unprofitable...and we know gw has killed games that exceeded their own sale expectations by 400% so unless they greenlight releases expecting them to be huge losses we can safely say that game was profitable yet was killed.
No. Issue wasn't it was unprofitable. Problem was it wasn't selling as much as space marines which for kirby was huge offense.
Kid_Kyoto wrote: A small release like Mordheim or Warmaster or Man O War to test the market for Olde Worlde games and Olde Worlde fluff would feel very likely. This just... does not.
Considering the IP is doing very well in other mediums, I don't see why they'd need to test the market.
They don't. At all. They know what their market is, and they know how well the IP is doing. They also know they already invested money in molds that I sincerely doubt are gone, so with the exception of the obvious addition of Kislev stuff which I will bet internal organs will most assuredly be AOS compatible for cross sell and conversion work, the releases will more than likely be padded with existing kits. This is ALSO why I think scale change is an incredibly stupid theory.
Also, while we're at it...
Apparently Warmaster was such a smash hit that games I've never heard of nor seen on any of my city's game store shelves (and I live in the same city as Purdue University, so no shortage of gamer customers). Am I understanding that garbage argument right? Food for thought: 40K is arguably the most popular tabletop game in the market, why is nobody aping THOSE rules?
I'll tell you why. Warmaster is so dead in the water that GW itself sees no point in chasing people away from the rule system. Warmaster was pushed at retail from March to July, 2000. Five months before being shoved off to hospice care at Specialist Games. I don't care how much certain people on this board think it's the super special bestest, it failed catastrophically. For a point of reference: Battlefleet: Gothic hit shelves in 1999 and stayed on shelves well past Warmaster getting pulled.
This whole waste of time scale change thing needs to die a death...
chaos0xomega wrote: IIRC - "The Old World" facebook group predates the game announcement, I think it was a legacy WHFB group that converted over to "The Old World" after the announcement.
Certainly the interest is more than the 4% of total sales that GW quoted when they killed WHFB, it's just a matter of GW making the game intro-friendly like they have with 40K and AoS
Only if theres a way to convert that interest into sales. One of the big problems with WHFB was that GW kept releasing new products for it and nobody was buying it. Overwhelmingly, the community for the game had gone "full grog", they were content to keep playing with their oldhammer minis and couldn't be bothered to continue expanding their collections with newer products.
This is revisionist nonsense of the highest order, to the point I struggle to believe it's not intentional. Plenty of people were buying new stuff in 6th Edition and into early 7th, and the financial reports for the time bore that out - it wasn't 40K, but nothing is 40K. The issues began with the genuinely heinous balance problems with the 7th army books, was then compounded by GW's slow and lax attitude to FAQs, then compounded even further by 8th's push for bigger armies and stagnant release schedule. Trying to blame the fans for GW's series of terrible decisions is bollocks.
There was a period of time there where GW's place as the "big dog" was in serious danger, at least outside of the UK.
Not really. For all the doom and gloom here and in the community at large, GWs revenues never dipped below 100 million pounds annually.
The point is that "all the doom and gloom" was based on the observable and verifiable reality that GW's market share and revenues were declining and the company was maintaining profitability with ruthless cost-cutting, while companies like Privateer Press were going from complete nothings to second place within the span of a couple of years by hoovering up disgruntled former GW customers. There's absolutely no rational basis for assuming those trends would have changed if GW hadn't changed their approach, which the new management at least were capable of grasping - Kirby era GW completely disengaged from the fanbase, nuGW has built up a huge social media and online presence; Kirby GW narrowed the focus of the company down to 40K above all and conceived a replacement for WHF which was clearly intended to ape 40K, nuGW has brought back specialist and boxed games in a big way; Kirby GW's strategy was to chase ever larger Whales with every more expensive models that the games would require in ever larger numbers, while nuGW has put a huge focus on bringing in new blood through partworks, feeder games, and starter bundles and uses niche products to ensure retention of the customers it already has.
The fact such a radical change in strategy was even considered necessary would be indicative enough that the previous approach was failing and would keep on failing, the fact that the changed strategy has yielded such huge returns and spurred such massive growth is proof positive, and it's bizarre to me that there are still people trying to pretend that GW Was Fine and there are no American tanks in Baghdad...
Kid_Kyoto wrote: A small release like Mordheim or Warmaster or Man O War to test the market for Olde Worlde games and Olde Worlde fluff would feel very likely. This just... does not.
Considering the IP is doing very well in other mediums, I don't see why they'd need to test the market.
They don't. At all. They know what their market is, and they know how well the IP is doing. They also know they already invested money in molds that I sincerely doubt are gone, so with the exception of the obvious addition of Kislev stuff which I will bet internal organs will most assuredly be AOS compatible for cross sell and conversion work, the releases will more than likely be padded with existing kits. This is ALSO why I think scale change is an incredibly stupid theory.
If you want to talk about garbage arguments, this is it. The majority of the old WHFB range is presently available, its just rebranded "Age of Sigmar" and comes with round bases instead of square. Theres a handful of kits from across the range that are no longer available (mainly the entirety of Bretonnia and Tomb Kings), most of which went "Last Chance to Buy" (which as one of the guys explained at one of those event days, often means the molds are being retired and/or destroyed, though sometimes they are just put into storage - given the age of the Bretonnian range, I doubt the molds are still kicking around). GW is currently selling us those products right now, whats the financial incentive to them to center a new game that they are spending 3+ years working on on old products that probably don't have much in the way of potential returns remaining on them?
Apparently Warmaster was such a smash hit that games I've never heard of nor seen on any of my city's game store shelves (and I live in the same city as Purdue University, so no shortage of gamer customers). Am I understanding that garbage argument right? Food for thought: 40K is arguably the most popular tabletop game in the market, why is nobody aping THOSE rules?
Uhhh... wow, this is an incredibly dumb take. I mean, I've never seen Kings of War on the shelves of my local stores, and nobody locally plays X-Wing or Legion, but I'm smart enough to understand that these are still games that have a following (however irrelevant they may be relative to GWs games). Beyond that though, 40k happens to probably be the most aped ruleset out there. Bolt Action, Konflikt 47, Flames of War, Team Yankee, and a thousand other less relevant games all of 40k in their dna and design pedigree. 40k is to wargame design as D&D is to RPG design, probably about half the games out there started out as an attempt to make a "better" version of the ruleset, and the other half are attempts to design a game that intentionally avoid the mechanics that they use.
I'll tell you why. Warmaster is so dead in the water that GW itself sees no point in chasing people away from the rule system. Warmaster was pushed at retail from March to July, 2000. Five months before being shoved off to hospice care at Specialist Games. I don't care how much certain people on this board think it's the super special bestest, it failed catastrophically. For a point of reference: Battlefleet: Gothic hit shelves in 1999 and stayed on shelves well past Warmaster getting pulled.
And yet Warlord games continues to release new product lines based on the Warmaster ruleset, as do countless other smaller designers in the historical space. Also, your understanding of Warmasters history seems a bit flawed. Warmaster was *always* a specialist games product line. It was published by specialist games, I have an original printing of the rulebook, says so right in the book. Likewise it was available for sale at GW hobby centers between 2007 and 2011 - I know this because the only times I've ever been in a GW store was when I was in college, and lo and behold they had warmaster product on the shelves for at least a few years within that timeframe. The apparent "failure" of Warmaster somehow resulted in GWs decision to publish a separate game based on the engine for Lord of the Rings in 2005, and a bunch of additional warhammer historicals rulebooks over the next few years, as well as additional updates and miniatures releases, including additional armies and minis in 2009 and a 2nd edition in 2010.
This is revisionist nonsense of the highest order, to the point I struggle to believe it's not intentional. Plenty of people were buying new stuff in 6th Edition and into early 7th, and the financial reports for the time bore that out - it wasn't 40K, but nothing is 40K. The issues began with the genuinely heinous balance problems with the 7th army books, was then compounded by GW's slow and lax attitude to FAQs, then compounded even further by 8th's push for bigger armies and stagnant release schedule. Trying to blame the fans for GW's series of terrible decisions is bollocks.
And yet according to statements made by others, the decline for WHFB started in 6th edition specifically, which was supposedly the "good" ruleset. It would make sense, actually, as GW started pushing bigger armies with 7th - that would be indicative of an attempt to drive sales by forcing people to buy more stuff, wouldn't it?
The point is that "all the doom and gloom" was based on the observable and verifiable reality that GW's market share and revenues were declining and the company was maintaining profitability with ruthless cost-cutting
But we're not talking about profitability here, we're talking about revenues - it doesn't care about cost-cutting at all. Theres a reason I've been referencing revenue and not profitability - this is it. GWs revenues were never in decline, sure they had a couple down years here and there where they made a few percent less than they did hte year prior, and a coupl eyears where they made a few percent more - revenue was flat, not declining.
while companies like Privateer Press were going from complete nothings to second place within the span of a couple of years by hoovering up disgruntled former GW customers.
Warmachine and Hordes have been around for over 15 years at this point. Warmachine launched in 2003, and Hordes a year or two later. By my count it took them about a decade to go from "complete nothing" to 2nd place - and even then 2nd place was only 10-20% of GWs market share.
The fact such a radical change in strategy was even considered necessary would be indicative enough that the previous approach was failing and would keep on failing, the fact that the changed strategy has yielded such huge returns and spurred such massive growth is proof positive, and it's bizarre to me that there are still people trying to pretend that GW Was Fine and there are no American tanks in Baghdad...
GWs problem wasn't that it was collapsing, GWs problem was that it wasn't growing. The total market size like doubled or tripled in a period where GWs own revenue remained basically flat - thats why other games like warmachine were growing even as GWs own sales weren't declining. GWs competitors growth weren't coming at the expense of its own market share, it was coming because the market grew but GW failed to effectively engage that growth and profit from it. The success of post-Kirby GW isn't that GW "turned itself around" and ended a period of losses or whatever it is you seem to think, the success of post-Kirby GW is that GW started growing again and within a couple years effectively doubled its Kirby era revenue and caught up to where it would have been had it grown consistently with the market (actually, its probably still slgihtly behind, but the gap has narrowed dramatically).
Kid_Kyoto wrote: A small release like Mordheim or Warmaster or Man O War to test the market for Olde Worlde games and Olde Worlde fluff would feel very likely. This just... does not.
Considering the IP is doing very well in other mediums, I don't see why they'd need to test the market.
They don't. At all. They know what their market is, and they know how well the IP is doing. They also know they already invested money in molds that I sincerely doubt are gone, so with the exception of the obvious addition of Kislev stuff which I will bet internal organs will most assuredly be AOS compatible for cross sell and conversion work, the releases will more than likely be padded with existing kits. This is ALSO why I think scale change is an incredibly stupid theory.
Also, while we're at it...
Apparently Warmaster was such a smash hit that games I've never heard of nor seen on any of my city's game store shelves (and I live in the same city as Purdue University, so no shortage of gamer customers). Am I understanding that garbage argument right? Food for thought: 40K is arguably the most popular tabletop game in the market, why is nobody aping THOSE rules?
I'll tell you why. Warmaster is so dead in the water that GW itself sees no point in chasing people away from the rule system. Warmaster was pushed at retail from March to July, 2000. Five months before being shoved off to hospice care at Specialist Games. I don't care how much certain people on this board think it's the super special bestest, it failed catastrophically. For a point of reference: Battlefleet: Gothic hit shelves in 1999 and stayed on shelves well past Warmaster getting pulled.
This whole waste of time scale change thing needs to die a death...
The whole Warmaster thing is just trolling from people who see this as a threat to AoS. They are worried that suddenly a bunch of people will go back to a square base game and that AoS will get fewer releases as they work on TOW. Total War has shown that people do still like the old IP, which makes some people worried about the future of their preferred game. In truth, I think that with smart execution, both games can thrive.
If you want to talk about garbage arguments, this is it. The majority of the old WHFB range is presently available, its just rebranded "Age of Sigmar" and comes with round bases instead of square. Theres a handful of kits from across the range that are no longer available (mainly the entirety of Bretonnia and Tomb Kings), most of which went "Last Chance to Buy" .
Have you looked at the WHFB range lately? Because that is absolutely not true
It's more that what little we've seen so far says TOW will be a new game with new units and ideas, not just a nostalgic reissue of old kits. I could see this if it was Necromunda or Realms of Chaos style skirmish game. But it will also be a rank and file, square base game.
Which to me still doesn't make sense. How can a 28mm game that was ruled unprofitable and not worth it just 5 or 6 years back now be a great idea with a huge relaunch and dozens of kits? Especially when the Perrys, Fireforge, Ice & Fire, and Frostgrave (and more) already make plastic kits that cover a lot of this ground?
Maybe it is just an attempt to outflank possible challengers?
I think the only person with any inside knowledge of numbers was Hastings, who said WHFB was still making them money it just wasn't the amount they wanted to make. Clearly they thought if Space Marines sell double literally any other GW product, making fantasy Marines will make them even more money, but since they didn't fit into WHFB it had to go. I genuinely believe that if they'd kept up with WHFB instead of killing it, that it would be enjoying the same success as AoS right now, because AoS' recent success' are attributed more to GW itself doing well than AoS being a better ruleset - it was completely dead during 1e and any LFGS will tell you the boxes were just gathering dust on shelves. It's not a coincidence AoS started taking off around the point GW had it's 8th 40k resurgence and started pushing it's very aggressive release policy (which WHFB absolutely didn't have).Sure the General's Handbook also helped, but I think that's overstated as the main reason (and I've say 2e was a bigger deal than GHB). Even Lord of the Rings is doing well again despite not that much changing from 2014 beyond the odd resin blister now and again.
TOW's announcement was 100% an attempt to hurt KOW. The timing of it with 3e was far too obvious, especially when we know GW hate reveal new projects to the public until they're almost finished and sitting in warehouses. The worst part is that it worked and all you really hear about KoW is the occasional "I'm playing it until TOW is out." TOW could be the worst version of WHFB ever, but you know it's going to kill KOW completely because people will always take a GW alternative.
On a less grim note if you're looking for a rank-and-file game that's lighter on the pocket and with a solid ruleset, A Song of Ice and Fire is a good option. Most armies you only need their starter and maybe a couple of boxes and you're at the 40pt 'average game size' and some like Night's Watch you need less than that. The community for TTS is also very active and done a lot to try and mitigate some of TTS' usual clunkiness.
This is a very good point. GW in 2020 is a completely different company to what it was in the butt end of Kirby's reign circa 2015, which is when WHFB was killed. They've massively embraced social media - even become quite competent at using it to build hype as opposed to the Kirby method of refusing to release any info until the week before something released, massively increased their release tempo (as opposed to a WHFB release every 3 months and 2 factions a year), brought back a load of specialist games, even made some box sets that offer a discount on separate purchase, become less aggressively 'it's all about the models, we're a miniatures company, we think people spend money at GW because they're miniatures collectors etc etc.
The state of GW before Rountree took over was depressing, any game system would (and did) suffer under that management. It's no surprise that it compounded WHFB's already known issues and likewise the modern leadership/company will increase the chance of TOW's success. At the time WHFB was killed, GW was in serious problems. People openly speculated, with only a little exaggeration, of GW's purchase by another company or potential going out of business in the long term if the trends continued. Revenue was only kept stable (not growing) through constant price increases, which were reaching their limit. Even 40k was struggling by it's own standards and being challenged by X-Wing. We're in a very different environment now.
Its absolutely not trolling - its people quite rightly wondering how GW intends to profit off of something that they didn't consider to be profitable enough to continue to support not even 5 years ago, and rationally extrapolating that if GW wants to profit from it they will have to drive sales of new miniatures vs allowing people to repurpose existing figures/figures from their competitors.
The most immediately logical way to do that would be to change the scale, as it prevents people from reusing their existing fantasy minis collections and also prevents GWs competitors from profiting from sales of their own cheaper sub-par 28mm fantasy lines. Theres very little in the way of decent small-scale fantasy miniatures out there on the market currently, and exactly 0% of it is in plastic, whereas everyone and their mother imagining themselves to be the next James Workshop is trying to sell 28mm fantasy plastics that would otherwise work in the old WHFB setting in a pinch. Hell, there are now *tons* of plastic 28mm historical minis that people can and do use as the basis for cheaphammer fantasy armies too. GWs other games all have decent "moats" that have limited the ability of outside entities to market decent alternatives to GWs own minis, 40k proper having the weakest moat of them all - but even then the best alternatives cost more than GWs own minis do, so you're not buying them to save a buck so much as you are because you want something different. Otherwise, other manufacturers haven't really been successful in producing popular alt-minis that you commonly see popping up on tables everywhere the way you started seeing mantics undead standing in for vampires/tomb kings, and historicals based conversions for empire armies, etc. the way you did towards the end of WHFB.
Mind you, there are other ways to go about doing it as well - I suspect the decision to set The Old World some 300 years prior to the last game will allow GW some leeway to feth around with the aesthetics of the setting in a manner that makes it harder to justify the use of other miniatures, but we'll see....
Also, IIRC the way UK copyright law works, as it was explained to me by another dakkite some years ago, requires that GW maintain usage/currency of its copyrights. i.e. if GW doesn't release anything further with the "Warmaster" label on it then the name goes up for grabs for a competitor to use after something like 10 or 15 years, etc. This was supposedly part of what led to the flurry of video game releases based on GWs older product lines and discontinued specialist games lines a few years back, as titles needed to be kept "current" before GWs rights sunsetted. Warlord branding its new 15mm plastics as "Epic Battles" might be the result of one of those copyright lapses.
(Okay, theres a little bit of trolling there, for me the warmaster suggestion started out as a "hey, it would be cool if they brought this back", and then became a knife to twist into the sides of people like Tony who seem to get incredibly offended at the mere suggestion of a mini in a scale other than 28mm).
Have you looked at the WHFB range lately? Because that is absolutely not true
Vampire Counts? With additional stuff under the Flesh-Eater Courts and Nighthaunt sections
Seems the only thing I was wrong about was that you can't really build an Orcs and Goblins army anymore the way you used to be able to.
Yes, there are a number of units and characters missing, mainly the things that were finecast/metal back in the day, but it looks like 90% or more of the above armies are still purchasable.
What people need to realise is that giant corporations often take decisions that seem ridiculous because capitalism is often kind of inherently ridiculous.
WHFB was never unprofitable, it just never pulled in the same sorts of numbers as 40k. It's like how Tomb Raider was rebooted in 2013, went on to sell 4.2 million copies in its first year and yet was still considered a financial disappointment by its Publisher, despite still turning a profit. A big part of that was misunderstanding the market and thinking every game could pull in CoD numbers and so reigning in the marketing budget would have probably gone a long way to keep the end cost down. And you can definitely say GW made big miscalculations with their market when it came to WHFB, but in a lot of ways their issue was lack of investment in the game, or at least poor priorities of investments. End Times almost revitalized the game in a lot of places and saw an uptick in sales for the game as a whole because people actually felt it was being paid attention to again. You still see this sort of attitude happening nowadays with game reboots or range refreshes: suddenly Necrons are one of the most popular factions in 40K.... hmmmm, I wonder why? The Sisters of Battle squad was the best selling kit of 2019? What the hell! How could that happen?!
But poor priorities? That's stuff like adding in a few new units for Tomb Kings, historically a pretty unpopular faction, while also having 0 community engagement, 0 marketing and keeping the core parts of the army the same and not updating them to fit in with the rest of the new stuff. Lets bring it back to Necrons again: a lot more people would give much less of a gak about the army if it wasn't for 5 months long media blitzes hyping them up and a restructuring and refreshing of some of their oldest models, which are also the ones most players are going to need to be buying and painting. Necrosphinx was a great model sure; but since new players would have to be buying 80 of those goofy old Skeleton Warrior sculpts before even considering it why would they even bother? Giving the faction good rules doesn't hurt either, something which the Tomb Kings didn't get.
Also the idea that WHFB players were not buying new stuff is kind of true, but this is because GW had basically given up trying to entice and draw new players into it. I think you severely underestimate how much new stuff people buy, even in 40K. New purchases are often a handful of times in a year and often very small for the majority of the playerbase and it's not like 40K doesn't have some fething entrenched diehards in it at this point. But even then, if people weren't buying stuff in WHFB it's because stuff wasn't being supported or updated. I would have jumped at the chance to buy plastic Wolf Riders, plastic Wolf Chariots, an updated Common Goblin kit, plastic Squigs, plastic Trolls and maybe some new plastic character types too. Did this stuff ever happen? Did it feth. Turns out, if you don't update or add models, existing people don't keep buying stuff in the army. Weird that. Ever noticed how poor Craftworlds sell in 40k nowadays? Do you really think if Primaris hadn't been introduced people would still be buying the same Tac Marines despite having 4-5 squads of them already?
(Although notice how some of those models have now actually since got plastic kits and people bought them. Crazy.)
Oh yeah and "The majority of the old WHFB range is presently available" is a complete and utter lie. Even outside of Bretonnians and Tomb Kings, a lot of factions are basically just extinct outside of 2-3 formerly special units. This includes many, many plastic kits, most of which are still newer than a lot of the plastic Troops choices still being sold in 40K currently.
See, chaos0xomega's post above is the thing: I already have a Bretonnian Army, made up 95% of the old metal infantry, plastic archers, 5th ed plastic and metal knights (of all stripes), and I've picked up metal grail reliquae, and used historical or GW trebs, foot knights, and sorceresses, etc. in metal. If GW re-did TOW in 28mm, I'd have to buy very little, most likely, to be able to play it, especially if it includes Bretonnia. And that's a loss for GW.
But, if they did it in 10mm or 15mm, I'd buy a ton of Brets, and enemies in a heartbeat. I'm already eyeing some Pendraken 10's (Normans and Arabs) for some Crusades gaming, but if GW did it for LOW, with either new or reskinned Warmaster rules. I'm in. Another 28mm effort? Changed aesthetics? I'm out, or using all my existing minis.
GW mentioned square bases. That could mean the units fit on their old square bases. That could mean its 28mm. That could mean they'll sell sabots to put rounds and squares onto a "frontage". AND, they have 2-3 years to change their minds about all of it. I'm not holding my breath.
I can build the core of a Wood Elf, High Elf, Dark Elf, Dwarf or Empire army from this section of their store alone. Daughters of Khaine get me a few of the missing Dark Elf units, Sylvaneth a few of the missing Wood Elf units.
You absolutely cannot build the core of a high elf or dwarf army from that list when they have absolutely no core units. Wood elves have no special or rare units.
Empire is one of the few and they're still missing a bunch of units from the list.
Cruentus wrote: See, chaos0xomega's post above is the thing: I already have a Bretonnian Army, made up 95% of the old metal infantry, plastic archers, 5th ed plastic and metal knights (of all stripes), and I've picked up metal grail reliquae, and used historical or GW trebs, foot knights, and sorceresses, etc. in metal. If GW re-did TOW in 28mm, I'd have to buy very little, most likely, to be able to play it, especially if it includes Bretonnia. And that's a loss for GW.
Much like a player that does not spend a dime on a free to play game is not a loss for the developer, you would not be a loss for GW.
There are new players out there ready to buy WFB, there are vets that will drop a grand on a new project. And then there's you, with an army ready to play, letting the newbies and vets with new, shiny toys find a game that much easier.
Sure, YOU would buy a ton of Brets in 10mm, and so would five to fifteen percent of the customer base than would otherwise invest in a system compatible with other GW ranges AND their pre-existing collections.
I'm sure there's a time and place for a Warmaster revival down the line, right after the inevitable, yet infuriatingly distant Epic remake.
Warhammer: The Old World is not that time and place.
Dwarf longbeards are core, at least as of 8th ed. You got me on High Elves, thought Shadow Warriors were core. You can easily use the lumineth minis as standins for stuff though. Wood elves still have Wildwood Rangers (Special), Sisters of the Thorn (Special), and Wild Riders (Special), as well as Treemen (Rare) under Sylvaneth.
Hulksmash wrote: To be fair this is likely a relatively small release similar to their Necromunda/AT/Warcry set ups. I think people are getting slightly unreasonable expectations because they are showing the old world map and old big name races/factions. I feel like off the bat we're getting a starter, some mild terrain, and likely an infantry, a cavalry, and a hero type box sets (so 3). They'll be able to be used by the initial "factions" which will all be Empire affiliated. Similar to the initial Horus Heresy "Board Game" they released but without the smoke and mirrors of releasing a "board game" as a starter to get it past old GW.
They can then rapid release another faction or two like Kislev or "Undead" which will use some of the core plastics but get some of their own sets.
If this were the case, why would they spend so many years preparing the release?
And if that were all, why would they start designing things like the Kislev bear cavalry and Ice Witch infantry units? Those aren't anywhere on the list as the first few things they would release for a Kislev range. Even the little we know hints at a range that's certainly larger than what Necromunda Houses get.
As for the armies that are to be covered, why would they add new High Elven colonies around Bretonnia, and add an Orc infestation in part of the kingdom, if the aim is to initially limit the scope of the game/range to only human factions centred on the Empire?
The idea that everything will resolve around a few plastic sets of just Empire troops feels largely based on the supposed similarities to 30k, but GW referring to the Horus Heresy when W:TOW was first previewed should, I think, only be regarded as "this is the same setting as our main game, but in the past". Similarities end there. When 30k was first announced, I don't think they were talking about what the Eldar were getting up to during this era, were they?
How long did they take to completely revamp sisters? 1.5 YEARS! For a single faction in 40k they still had metals of and that arguably 75% of the army can be built of a single sprue. The line is bigger than that but the roll out took 6 months go get most of the product out. That was 5 infantry kits, 4 vehicles, and a fair number of characters. That kit number is pretty close to inline with what i expect total model kit wise out of the initial release over the first 6 months. But you know what they also have to do with this? DESIGN THE GAME SYSTEM.....This isn't a single codex going into an established pattern at the end of an edition. This is an entire game system which while it will bear similarities to fantasy isn't going to be a clone. And considering they spent most most of 8th 40k working on 9th that lines up.
And the 30k counter is just bull. 30k kinda happened organically because of the edition change and FW not having the resources to redo everything into 8th ed. 30k wasn't really it's own system until 40k moved on from that system.
I'd just say temper your enthusiasm. I doubt we're going to see 6 factions drop day one which is what we're up to now (Empire, Bret, HE, WE, Kislev, Orcs) and that doesn't count Empire subfactions or the all to likely chaos/BoC/dwarves/vampires.
I'm not expecting 15 factions with 10 kits on release day; I was merely saying expecting just a few plastic sets on release was too low an estimate. There also isn't really any reason to believe there will be specific Empire subfactions by the way, that was (I think) just early speculation based on the first map which only showed different Imperial families. That may just have been a hint at the timeline not being the previous WHFB "present day", now confirmed with the Bretonnian names.
As for the comparison to Sisters of Battle: how many people were working on that? Full time? How many are working on W:TOW? Yeah, I don't know either.
chaos0xomega wrote:given the age of the Bretonnian range, I doubt the molds are still kicking around
At least some were still produced in a Made-to-Order just two years ago. I grabbed a Fay Enchantress then. Besides, some figures still in production are older than that.
Olthannon wrote:
I can build the core of a Wood Elf, High Elf, Dark Elf, Dwarf or Empire army from this section of their store alone. Daughters of Khaine get me a few of the missing Dark Elf units, Sylvaneth a few of the missing Wood Elf units.
You absolutely cannot build the core of a high elf or dwarf army from that list when they have absolutely no core units. Wood elves have no special or rare units.
Empire is one of the few and they're still missing a bunch of units from the list.
Wood Elves are also missing their Glade Guard and Glade Riders. That's half their core units gone too.
The only dwarf units left are the ones that came out with the last army book:
*Longbeards/hammerers
*Ironbreakers/Irondrakes
*Gryocopter/Gyrobomber
*Runesmith
*Cogsmith
*Warden King
At that time, a troll slayer was also released, dubbed an Unforged in AOS, before disappearing. Oddly enough, you can still buy him as "Grombrindal", same model, just not the same rules.
The dwarfs lost: Anvil of Doom, Thanes, Miners, Quarrelers/Thunderers, Grudge thrower, Bolt thrower, flame cannon, cannon/organ gun, etc. Sure, some of these were finecast, but a lot of them were pretty decent plastic kits and important staples of a dwarf army.
That's not even looking at how gutted High Elves (and Wood elves) are now. The latter kept their new plastic kits, and lost pretty much everything else. The former didn't even get to keep many of their newer kits. (Lore master, lothern skycutter, I guess the entire Island of blood army that got re-released for a bit). Empire lost things like the War altar, though they lost probably the fewest kits.
Don't get me wrong. I'm thankful those dwarf units exist. And although I may not have been a huge fan of the older dwarf kits that are gone, units like the cannon were still good models.
There are a lot of units that could make a comeback, thanks to The Old World. Wood Elf and High Elves have a lot of models that could be revisited. Dwarfs can get rangers, warriors, miners, etc. Goblins and Orcs can come back en mass, alongside models they lost, like the "regular" troll.
EDIT: Also, they can release new terrain as well. Not as likely since its a "smaller" project, unless they do something along the lines of necromunda. But basically all Fantasy terrain kits went away, so the chapel, arcane ruins, etc can come back too. Or different types of terrain that aren't like AOS' current range
Kalamadea wrote: People keep talking about popularity of games with anecdotal popularity of their local groups, the closest thing I could think of to any kind of real metric would be members of game-specific Facebook Groups or Subreddits
Spoiler:
Facebook Groups Warhammer 40K: 67K members
Age of Sigmar: has 2 similar sized groups of 24K & 23K members, I'd assume most of the members overlap between both groups
Lord of the Rings: 11K members
Warhammer Fantasy (any/all editions, but AoS discussions specifically not allowed): 5K members
Warhammer Fantasy 6th edition: 4K members
Warhammer The Old World: 13K members in a group just based on the announcement of WHFB returning
Kill Team: 2 similar sized groups of 19K and 16K members, lots of overlap now but the 16K group started as a Heralds Of Ruin fan-made rules Kill Team group
Warcry: 10K members
Underworlds: 2 similar groups of 10K and 9K members, probably lots of overlap
Mordheim: 14K members
Blood Bowl: 24K members
Necromunda: 16K members
Kings of War: 11K members
Oathmark: 3K members
Conquest: 153 members of the US group, 128 for a UK group
Infinity: 8K members
X-Wing: mostly regional groups, largest is an 8K member general group, but there's a 14K member trading group and a 10K member painting group
Legion: 18K members
ASoIaF: 8K members
Reddit Warhammer (generic all-things-warhammer group) 198K members
Warhammer 40K: 352K members
Age of Sigmar: 70K members
Lord of the Rings: 14K members
Warhammer Fantasy: 30K members
Kill Team: 33K members
Warcry: 10K members
Underworlds: 12K members
Mordheim: 4K members
Blood Bowl: 21K members
Necromunda: 14K members
Kings of War: 4K members
Oathmark: only 105 members (although Frostgrave has 4K)
Conquest: 77 members
Infinity: 10K members
X-Wing: 1.5K members
Legion: 16K members
ASoIaF: 3K members
40K is pretty much more popular than everything else combined (no surprise), but AoS is hardly chump-change by comparison. And yet there's clearly still a LOT of people who are at least discussing WHFB. I don't know how much is related to Total War keeping the IP alive and how much is merely nostalgia, but there's very much a large amount of people that still love The Old World even if they now play AoS or have moved on to KoW or others, and there's more interest in WHFB/ToW, a dead OOP game, than the currently produced LotR (which is sad, LotR is great and should be more popular). There's more people interested in a dead OOPWHFB game than the currently produced Kings of War, Conquest, Oathmark and ASoIaF. If LotR is still popular enough to keep the entire line in production (even if much of it is mail-order) then so long as GW makes WHFB/ToW accessible it will be a success. Certainly the interest is more than the 4% of total sales that GW quoted when they killed WHFB, it's just a matter of GW making the game intro-friendly like they have with 40K and AoS
That is quite interesting, though disheartening, thanks for compiling it. I can't think of better data either.
I wonder why the discrepency between Reddit and Facebook for some games? I don't use Reddit so I'm not sure what about it might affect a community preferring it.
That is a lot less than I expected for Conquest. It is rather new, but that is low even then.
-- which is kind of the defining BIG BAD of warhammer.
Very exited to see if they dare do generic knights for Bretonnia -non uniqe 
