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40k has gotten pretty dark in recent years. Just look at the cover of the DV set with the blood spatter on it. I do like, it, as well as the art, but I was thinking in this other thread:

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/0/583410.page

That many of the older GW games would really have to be completely re-done in order to fit into the atmosphere that makes up 40k today.

Long gone are comical orks, dwarves called squats, and a lot of the color and fun that seemed to leap out from the covers of the games from the golden age of GW, when Epic, Man O War, Warhammer Quest, Necromunda, Bloodbowl, Talisman, Warhammer, 40k, and whatever else I am forgetting were all being supported at the same time. There was a lot of fun because the games were kind of written in away that was fun, humerous at times, and I think that carried over from game to game. I think 40k 3rd ed, things started getting serious and dark, and havent looked back. Now I wont say THAT hasnt worked, because 40k is very popular, but nevertheless, I didnt enjoy Epic A over SM2/TL, or the Necromunda v2 over v1. The orginal look of the gangs in necro1 are kind of ridiculous, and make the game look like a cartoon. Same with many of the games at the time, including 40k. Now everything looks dark and cool, but at the same time, would playing a dead serious gang warfare game in the 40k setting be appealing to many people? I am not so sure.

I remember laughing at some of the outcomes in GW's early games that are completely absent today. Dont get me wrong, I am impressed with 40k looks, but at the same time, wonder if expanding the universe, if they did like they had previously, would be as exciting as it used to be.

KTG17 wrote:
40k has gotten pretty dark in recent years. Just look at the cover of the DV set with the blood spatter on it. I do like, it, as well as the art, but I was thinking in this other thread:

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/0/583410.page

That many of the older GW games would really have to be completely re-done in order to fit into the atmosphere that makes up 40k today.

Long gone are comical orks, dwarves called squats, and a lot of the color and fun that seemed to leap out from the covers of the games from the golden age of GW, when Epic, Man O War, Warhammer Quest, Necromunda, Bloodbowl, Talisman, Warhammer, 40k, and whatever else I am forgetting were all being supported at the same time. There was a lot of fun because the games were kind of written in away that was fun, humerous at times, and I think that carried over from game to game. I think 40k 3rd ed, things started getting serious and dark, and havent looked back. Now I wont say THAT hasnt worked, because 40k is very popular, but nevertheless, I didnt enjoy Epic A over SM2/TL, or the Necromunda v2 over v1. The orginal look of the gangs in necro1 are kind of ridiculous, and make the game look like a cartoon. Same with many of the games at the time, including 40k. Now everything looks dark and cool, but at the same time, would playing a dead serious gang warfare game in the 40k setting be appealing to many people? I am not so sure.

I remember laughing at some of the outcomes in GW's early games that are completely absent today. Dont get me wrong, I am impressed with 40k looks, but at the same time, wonder if expanding the universe, if they did like they had previously, would be as exciting as it used to be.

Ironically, in taking out the sardonic humor, GW has glorified and whitewashed the grim darkness of Warhammer 40K and Fantasy, removing the oh-so-important criticisms of what should properly be seen as horrifying fictional universes.

I don't know if the lack of color and humor holds them back, but it's definitely a clear trend.

Weeble is definitely correct that the 40k universe lacks the self-reflection and self-awareness that marked the early universe. Rogue trader had arguably just as many dark elements, but also enough humor and satire to let you know that they got the joke. It's almost like going from Star Wars to Game of Thrones.

I kind of doubt it's what holds GW back though. Folks these days seem to want to wallow in the dark side. As referred to above,witness the massive popularity of Game of Thrones which doles out unceasing brutality to it's characters, and makes no effort to self-reflect. Not trying to be a reactionary here, (I've enjoyed much of GoT myself) just saying that grim-darkyness and brutish grittyness sells.

Also, from a sales perspective, the more they can limit the delightful chaos of the early editions and more narrowly focus their audience's attention on defined factions that can be easily purchased, the more $ they make.

40K is srs business for 12 year olds.

It's the more mature players who appreciate some dark humour in their science fantasy.

I understand what you are saying - I think in order to make really dark stuff more effective you need to have humour and light - IMO. Just being stylish and dark gets dull - on the other hand make you care for someone, have some jokes woith them and then do something horrible - that works better.

Its why the DC films don't work at all for me and the Marvel ones do.

play fantasy then. it's stupidly corny and funny looking these days. they have santa's sleigh with vampires ffs. and the skycutter is pretty hilarious too.

But way back there wasn't much color either!

GW used to be both more adult and humorous. They've taken out much of the humour and gone for more child friendly variety of grimdark that's really kewl if you're 12.

Yes, it's become an incredibly sterile game setting.

Yep, it's lost a little of its soul. This goes for both fantasy and 40k. The warhammer settings used to be unique in being self-parodying. They're playing it straight when the role calls for hamming it up to the max.

I've been re-reading the RT era rulebooks recently (just picked up a mint copy of Ere We Go for a song!) and it reminded me what I lost when 3rd came out - the zaniness. Orks just became another aggressive alien, out to conquer everyone, with none of the humour that gave us weird boyz, mad boyz, shokk attak guns etc...
I can understand going 'dark' but could they not have done it and kept the humour? Possibly. Well never know now.

There a difference between 'Dear Christ, he's been torn to shreds' and 'Jeez, they come apart easy, huh?'. One of those quotes is from a film by a guy that got quite famous...

Joyboozer wrote:
Yes, it's become an incredibly sterile game setting.

Except for all the killing an' genocide and occasional boob...I agree.

Seriously though its definitely changed but its a change that started with 2nd edition 40k imho.

RT was a very character book that captured allot of the Zeitgeist of the time. There were many references that were contemporary to the time so naturally one would expect allot of that to drop out over the next 25 years. You can keep saying the same old quips about Villanous Orks having names a bit like a politicians or invade a planet called something similar to a town near Nottingham. It would start to look juvenile after a while and internationally who would get UK biased references anyway.

The change of GW from a boutique type company to a full blown PLC will undoubtedly have cleansed the line of such things. More professional management and publishing is less likely to accept such things than getting it past Bryan Ansell back in the day.

Finally once RT took off around the world the move to 2nd edition saw a much more sanitised mass market product for an international (dare I say US?) market. I think in the past we have often seen allot of the British quirkiness removed from UK product aboard, e.g. the first Dredd movie. The violence tends to stay in of course.

Don't get me wrong I like a joke as much as the next chap but I can see why it would be dropped to the wayside.

There are still the Ciaphas Cain novels and anything to do with Dwarves in WHFB........?

 notprop wrote:
Except for all the killing an' genocide and occasional boob...I agree.

But you don't really have genocide. Sure, you have lots of yellling "PURGE THE XENOS" but you never actually see the death camps or any other ugly details of what "kill everyone" really means. True grimdark would be having a commissar execute some guardsmen for using heretic babies for target practice, not because it's wrong to murder civilians, but because it's a waste of valuable ammunition when you have perfectly good knives available. But instead we get a really shallow, childish version of grimdark where there's a bunch of superficial bragging about how evil everyone is, but then we all forget about it and play with our heroic space marines.

I remember when GW had images of Marines being riddled by bullets and cleaved by Orks! the fact that everything back then was fallible and had wins and losses and great imagery!

 notprop wrote:

Joyboozer wrote:
Yes, it's become an incredibly sterile game setting.

Except for all the killing an' genocide and occasional boob...I agree.

Seriously though its definitely changed but its a change that started with 2nd edition 40k imho.

RT was a very character book that captured allot of the Zeitgeist of the time. There were many references that were contemporary to the time so naturally one would expect allot of that to drop out over the next 25 years. You can keep saying the same old quips about Villanous Orks having names a bit like a politicians or invade a planet called something similar to a town near Nottingham. It would start to look juvenile after a while and internationally who would get UK biased references anyway.

The change of GW from a boutique type company to a full blown PLC will undoubtedly have cleansed the line of such things. More professional management and publishing is less likely to accept such things than getting it past Bryan Ansell back in the day.

Finally once RT took off around the world the move to 2nd edition saw a much more sanitised mass market product for an international (dare I say US?) market. I think in the past we have often seen allot of the British quirkiness removed from UK product aboard, e.g. the first Dredd movie. The violence tends to stay in of course.

Don't get me wrong I like a joke as much as the next chap but I can see why it would be dropped to the wayside.

There are still the Ciaphas Cain novels and anything to do with Dwarves in WHFB........?

I think that sums up the difference. A concept now has to answer by priority 'will it sell? what margin can we make? ' rather than 'does it make us smirk? will the customers enjoy it?'.

 Peregrine wrote:

 notprop wrote:
Except for all the killing an' genocide and occasional boob...I agree.

But you don't really have genocide. Sure, you have lots of yellling "PURGE THE XENOS" but you never actually see the death camps or any other ugly details of what "kill everyone" really means. True grimdark would be having a commissar execute some guardsmen for using heretic babies for target practice, not because it's wrong to murder civilians, but because it's a waste of valuable ammunition when you have perfectly good knives available. But instead we get a really shallow, childish version of grimdark where there's a bunch of superficial bragging about how evil everyone is, but then we all forget about it and play with our heroic space marines.

Some of the Black Library novels do exactly this - Looking at Imperial Glory and Wrath of Iron - the former for what happens in the story to especially the civilians and the latter for the inhumanity of the Iron Hands.

Now I often wonder who the actual codexes are written for and if the style would have appealed more to teenage me including all the Blood missiles and Wolf Lord with Wolf Claw riding giant wolf etc etc

Ultimately, most complaints about GW can be pared down to 'publicly traded companies suck!'

 notprop wrote:

Joyboozer wrote:
Yes, it's become an incredibly sterile game setting.

Except for all the killing an' genocide and occasional boob...I agree.

Seriously though its definitely changed but its a change that started with 2nd edition 40k imho.

RT was a very character book that captured allot of the Zeitgeist of the time. There were many references that were contemporary to the time so naturally one would expect allot of that to drop out over the next 25 years. You can keep saying the same old quips about Villanous Orks having names a bit like a politicians or invade a planet called something similar to a town near Nottingham. It would start to look juvenile after a while and internationally who would get UK biased references anyway.

The change of GW from a boutique type company to a full blown PLC will undoubtedly have cleansed the line of such things. More professional management and publishing is less likely to accept such things than getting it past Bryan Ansell back in the day.

Finally once RT took off around the world the move to 2nd edition saw a much more sanitised mass market product for an international (dare I say US?) market. I think in the past we have often seen allot of the British quirkiness removed from UK product aboard, e.g. the first Dredd movie. The violence tends to stay in of course.

Don't get me wrong I like a joke as much as the next chap but I can see why it would be dropped to the wayside.

There are still the Ciaphas Cain novels and anything to do with Dwarves in WHFB........?

Very good post. Think that explains it really.

There are still companies that do lots of tongue-in-cheek references (Corvus Belli releasing miniatures of their biggest fans, for instance!) - but as has been pointed out, a lot of it comes down to PLC and being a massive company. Atari became a company 'run by suits', as one commentator said at the time, and GW is no different.

 Asmodai Asmodean wrote:
Ultimately, most complaints about GW can be pared down to 'publicly traded companies suck!'

Actually customer satisfaction and shareholder satisfaction should go hand in hand since they are ultimately being paid dividends with our money.

I'd say the problem is lack of market research and disconection from reality among the top brass.
They don't know who they are selling to so there is no way to know what their customers want. They DO know however that they make the bestest models EVA and we will totally buy them no matter what.

If GW knew who their target audience really where then they could focus on making it grimdark again, or going back to the parody stuff, or focus on Calgar punching every bad guy to death instead of the scitsophrenic approach we are seeing now where every author has their own ideas about what 40k is.

Sorry, I really don't see this. I think there's still a lot of humor to be found in 40k, and I think it's ironic that some of the funniest stuff receives the hottest hate on this forum.

I mean, Dreadknights? Hilarious-- that's the whole space marine gag, being masculine and STRONG to the point of absurdity. But instead of being loved as a weird and funny model, people point to it as "part of the problem." It's in the same book as psilencers, idiot-savant chimpanzee mechanics, and a Russian author riding a power-throne and you think we're supposed to take it seriously? Come on.

Take a look at the leaked Ogryn models. You can't tell me those weren't modeled to look funny.

I think there is some confusion with regard to the rules & fluff, when it comes to targeted audience. I agree the rules have been dumbed down, but I think the fluff has been tightened up and not so much of a joke. Don't get me wrong I loved the Orks that Paul Bonner drew and the fluff that went with them... but and it's a fairly big but, it didn't match the strapline of "in the grim dark future...". In fairness the new Orks don't really help either. The Horus Heresy stuff and books inspired by it make the world of 40k more realistic and believable. Compare the original Space Wolf books with the ones that have come out since the Horus Heresy books started, a completely different feel to them.

I see a little darkness, but the for the most part still a great game and Visuals and articles written by GW.

I tend to think that the RT era stuff is a completely different game and even fluff in most respects. I try not to compare it to current 40k at all. RT era was over TWENTY years ago, so if lack of RT humor has been "holding" back then.. it's been holding it back for 20 years? I think it's time to just let RT fade into memories of something that was only around for a short time compared to the total life of 40k

There is a pretty HUGE difference between todays 40k and RT, first off 2nd edition had PLENTY of humor in it and it was still "current" 40k in terms of the direction. The shift happened when they started getting rid of every decent designer and writer they had starting with andy chambers.

Personally I'm glad they got out of the rogue trader era.. they just need better writers again.

I'm not in any way close to being a humourless, po-faced individual (although, we all have our moments) but I've always really struggled accepting "humour" in Warhammer, it really feths with my suspension of disbelief for some reason.

This goes double for player made stuff (wacky conversions etc) because most of it isn't really funny enough to sustain itself over a game, let alone the playing lifetime of a model.

So, for me, I'd be happy with the disposal of any attempt at humour and a focus with full in Grimdark (proper Grimdark, not the sanitised, tween friendly brand.)

The thing, to my mind, that holds GW back is the fact that the needs of a PLC and a creative company are diametrically opposed. For a creative company to succeed, it kind of needs the freedom to fail (not too often, but then, if it fails a lot, it isn't a very good creative company) but a PLC needs a steady and predictable stream of cash coming in, with low peaks and shallow troughs.

GW is risk averse in it's current set up, it isn't willing to put out product A, which might make it £x or might make it 1/2 of £x, when it can launch product B, which will definitely make, say, 70% of £x, and that's what holds it back.

 Peregrine wrote:

 notprop wrote:
Except for all the killing an' genocide and occasional boob...I agree.

But you don't really have genocide. Sure, you have lots of yellling "PURGE THE XENOS" but you never actually see the death camps or any other ugly details of what "kill everyone" really means. True grimdark would be having a commissar execute some guardsmen for using heretic babies for target practice, not because it's wrong to murder civilians, but because it's a waste of valuable ammunition when you have perfectly good knives available. But instead we get a really shallow, childish version of grimdark where there's a bunch of superficial bragging about how evil everyone is, but then we all forget about it and play with our heroic space marines.

Ok, I'm assuming you haven't read many Black Library books lately because I have been having my dose of "What kill everyone really means".

From skinning people alive to create glorious "art", from crushing countless civilians under the threads of a baneblade, murdering everyone on a planet to call the Imperium's attention, executing Guardsmen by tying them to a cannon and firing it, this going on for countless hours making each and every prisioner watch.

Some of them are really bad, tho. The Iron Warrior's "Space Marine Battle Novels" had some too comically evil characters. I swear, sometimes they were evil for the sake of being EEEEVIL, because they were EEEEEVIL Chaos Space Marines of EEEEVIIIL.

In a way, it was hilarious

I like how grimdark the setting is, it makes the rare moments when someone cracks a joke so much better and memorable

Utter despair, hopelessness, and futility puts the "grim" in grimdark.

GW has been losing the grim for a while now in favor of being 'moar darker' because dark is totes cool.

Grim doesn't mean skulls and crumbling gothic architecture, skull iconography and crumbling gothic architecture are window dressings on grimness.

Grim is the hopeless futility of never-ending warfare. It is a universe in which all victories are Pyrrhic, inevitably leading to an even greater downfall. It is a universe in which defeat is inevitable, and the most that anyone can do is to delay it. It is a universe in which something could, in theory, be done to set things right, but any such efforts are doomed to fail because the galaxy is in flames and no one has the will to piss on it to stop the burning. It is a golden god trapped in the lifeless husk of a corpse because its followers are too afraid to allow its body to die.

The grimness is an inherent commentary on the darkness. Without the grim, you simply have dark because dark is cool. There is subtext in the grimness. Haven't you ever noticed the allegorical implications of the Emperor's Golden Throne? A god in the form of a man does great works, but is struck down as if fated to die. If he dies his spirit will return and revitalize the universe but it can't because his followers construct a golden throne to keep his body alive, trapping him in limbo. A religion grows around this corpse God, bloated and decadent, their power tied to the maintenance of this limbotic half-life...In fact virtually the whole of human society is slaved to the ephemeral power of the Golden Throne, slowly sliding into an oblivion that could be averted with the push of a button.

Copse god is dark. Sacrificing 1000 psykers a day to keep the Emperor's body from dying is dark. The Grimness of it provides the meaningful subtext.

"In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war."

GW writes that in just about every publication, but GW has forgotten what it means.