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You know, you can see me defending AoS and it's settings in a couple threads but I must admit that I miss the "World-That-Was" too. I've been a huge fan of the Empire and I basically loved everything about it - the structure, the armies, provinces, that weird, crazy architecture, the colleges of magic, the depth. I love cities in fantasy universes and I always loved noting all the cool stuff people came up with that I didn't for the sake of, firstly, my D&D sessions and nowadays as inspirations for the games my studio is developing and it has to be said - the Old World was unique, there's no doubt about that. Over all those years all those editions and novels really brought the world to life with all the detail (yes, even those silly, low quality paperbacks like Gotrek & Felix ones contributed) and I'm going to miss it.

But it has been stale for a long time too. There's only so much Chaos invasion from the north stuff you can do before it gets to the ridiculous point of Abaddon's 13 failed crusades. Such a failure! So the story had to progress... but which way? You either could have had good guys win - mobilize huge armies, beat the evil bad guys, push them back north and seal the chaos portals through some fancy heroic gizmo stuff of legends. And they lived happily ever after. Sounds extremely naive, childish and dull for me. I don't know, a happy end just doesn't cut it for me in grim, gothic fantasy.

So the other option was... to have Chaos win. To have Archaon assemble the greatest army of Chaos the world has ever seen and march south, grabbing all the allies he can and even tricking other evil guys into helping him (Nagash - I know it's shown the other way around and that Nagash somewhat reached his godly status, but let's not fool ourselves, Archaon was the one who won the End Times) and, well, finally succeed and bring the Old World to ruin.

And yes, that's what they did. Of two possible options of ending it to not keep it hovering in the bland, stagnant stalemate they picked the better one, they did a huge campaign with enormous events and sent it off with a huge bang.

It can be argued based on personal preferences whether the new setting of weird, half-mythical and half-alien realms is good or bad, it's definetely totally different, but it has it's potential - when we finally see the focus shift from the titanic clash of Sigmar's Stormhosts with those that occupy these new, weird worlds there will come regular human civilization and then I will see if I enjoy the way normal nations are designed - their armies, structure, architecture and all the ideas.

Right now this is Manowar's wet dream as this is the beginning of the greatest war yet and it has to go in with a bang, but then, after the dust smokes we'll see what AoS universe really looks like. We'll see if GW will add the depth we loved in Old World.