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Are you really complaining about originality in a setting that is "Fantasy but in SPACE!"?

 Tyran wrote:
Are you really complaining about originality in a setting that is "Fantasy but in SPACE!"?

No, he is only complaining about being called out. Although I also wonder why he is lumping the Scrin in with 'Group Think' races.

Wow...good discussion.

Just a few thoughts.

1. This is science fiction, (and GW) if an idea could create some interesting stories and help GW sell more products, they'll stretch the lore to do it. Personally, I have no idea how they would explain it, but they could come up with something.

2. I think a story of "killing" off the hive mind would be cool. I say "kill" in quotes it wouldn't be really killing it outright. Probably more like causing the hive mind to splinter, which would cause individual queens to have more interesting unique personalities and the gene stealer cults, robbed of an end game would have to find something else to do.

3. This in turn would create new narratives as some Tyranid and gene stealer cult factions work to rebuild the united Hive Mind while others pursue their own agendas.

4. Also the story of HOW the other factions manage to splinter the hive mind would be cool and consistent with the direction GW is going with product development via the warzones products. (I.E. Just go crazy with the lore to gin up cool ideas for new missions and rules). In this case, the concept could lead to some truly unique missions including. Yes, Imperium actually allied with Chaos against the Nids.

I don't really see the gain for the losses here. The Tyranids fight themselves all the time, it's the Hive's go-to solution for cleaning up after itself and testing divergent strains after achieving victory. I agree it would be 'cool' in the same way killing off Nurgle or The Emperor would be cool, but it kneecaps the faction in a way that makes it much less threatening in the long term, and nid players are sick enough of being called the NPC Baddie faction already.

Moreover, a lot of these other sci-fi hive mind examples deserve examination:

The Zerg Overmind is a ghestalt conciousness that is dissembodied across the entire Zerg Hive, it makes the decision to manifest itself as a building (because in starcraft it's always a building) out of some kind of neccesity to assimilate the Protoss. It's a risk it took that ultimately cost it its life and severely disrupted the Zerg (or, it was a deliberate act of suicide on its part, depending on whether you choose to accept the narrative travesty that is SC2).

The Borg Queen is in many ways the same decision, except instead of being made by the Borg in-universe it was made by the writers outside of it, she is a direct contradiction of everything that made the Borg dangerous as a race. Over the course of one movie she is emotionally manipulated into changing the Borg's tactics to the heroes' benefit, gives away key details of their plot to satisfy her need to gloat, and destroys the rest of the Borg on the ship after she loses in single combat against a resonably fit man and an unresonably strong robot.

These are case studies in why a distributed or disembodied hive conciousness is superior to a centralized vulnerable one, Skynet from Terminator 3 is also a great example: T1 and T2 make a big point about how the computer overmind is at last defeated when mankind rushes its central facility and destroys it, and much of the action of T3 is to do the same, only for the big reveal at the end that there is not central core, Skynet is a networked inteligence distributed across every computer on the planet (...the same planet it nukes but ok, I didn't say T3's a smart movie), and the plan to destroy it the way they were told to do it in the previous stories is completely untenable.

Tyranid's fluff is indeed all over the place, but didn't the Imperium, by poisoning the Hive Queens on Taris Ultra, totally cut this splinter fleet from the Hive Mind ? I believe you don't have to kill all tyranids, only the most important ones. They all contribute to the hive mind, like every cell of you body contributes to who you are, but only a few are actually organizing and broadcasting it. Like the neurons in your brains articulate who you are and what you think.

 Dekskull wrote:
Wow...good discussion.

Just a few thoughts.

1. This is science fiction, (and GW) if an idea could create some interesting stories and help GW sell more products, they'll stretch the lore to do it. Personally, I have no idea how they would explain it, but they could come up with something.

2. I think a story of "killing" off the hive mind would be cool. I say "kill" in quotes it wouldn't be really killing it outright. Probably more like causing the hive mind to splinter, which would cause individual queens to have more interesting unique personalities and the gene stealer cults, robbed of an end game would have to find something else to do.

3. This in turn would create new narratives as some Tyranid and gene stealer cult factions work to rebuild the united Hive Mind while others pursue their own agendas.

4. Also the story of HOW the other factions manage to splinter the hive mind would be cool and consistent with the direction GW is going with product development via the warzones products. (I.E. Just go crazy with the lore to gin up cool ideas for new missions and rules). In this case, the concept could lead to some truly unique missions including. Yes, Imperium actually allied with Chaos against the Nids.

That's what happened to the newcrons and look at them now ... They are but a shadow of what they were and could be. If only GW has stopped making new fluff and recons in 4th...
We need less personalities, especially xenos, not more.