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overtyrant wrote:

 Mindstrike1 wrote:
Most of these rumors that are floating around are fake and made up by some internet troll. GW is not going to get rid of their model range becase that would be incredibly stupid on a buisness perspective. They would be losing thousands of dollars if they did that. Round bases will not be the new standard for Warhammer fantasy. Any fantasy player would be pissed at GW and many players would probably quit. Whoever believes that 9th edition fantasy will be round bases, you are incredibly stupid.

You must be new here....

Are you kidding? Some of the rumors are true, I know that for a fact. Bubble dimensions are going to happen. But destroying a model range, you would have to be crazy to believe that.

Once again... Squats.

And if the rats did destroy Lustria, where does that leave the lizardmen?

Isn't all the new plastic hero models have the square base molded on to the frame with the miniature?
So they are going to need to recast all plastic hero models even ones that just came out?

 Genoside07 wrote:
Isn't all the new plastic hero models have the square base molded on to the frame with the miniature?
So they are going to need to recast all plastic hero models even ones that just came out?

They've stopped that with recent releases, they have a standard base included now.

BairdEC wrote:
Once again... Squats.

And if the rats did destroy Lustria, where does that leave the lizardmen?

Todays Beasts if War show discussed this, as their Lizardmen player mentioned losing his army when they talked about the original rumours a week or so back.

And they said that someone who would know got in touch behind the scenes to tell them not to worry about the army it would still be there. They to be accurate when they discuss what they have been told from their own internal contacts at GW, and explained it that the number of army books would definitely be reduced, but that the talk of all these armies disappearing was not what is coming.

I've come to the conclusion that if GW is serious about this reboot, and actually makes a good, modern ruleset then I might just buy into this madness.

If however, they maintain backwards compatibility by simply "developing" the gak heap of a rules system they currently have, then I'll keep my distance.

angryboy2k wrote:
I've come to the conclusion that if GW is serious about this reboot, and actually makes a good, modern ruleset then I might just buy into this madness.

If however, they maintain backwards compatibility by simply "developing" the gak heap of a rules system they currently have, then I'll keep my distance.

Due to the enormous damage to The Old World during the End Times Crisis there is only going to be one surviving army in the Fantasy setting.

The Space Marines.

The Auld Grump - remember, you heard it here first....

mhacdebhandia wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
[WHFB doesn't need to be 50/50 with 40k for it to be worth keeping. It just needs to be making more than it costs to maintain it, it doesn't need a new release every month, it doesn't need big shake ups, it doesn't even need the full range to be kept in each and every store. Support it with tournaments, advertising, events. GW's biggest expenses aren't maintaining games, it's maintaining the infrastructure to sell games, if they drop fantasy I'd suggest their expenses would barely even shift.

That's not quite right. Games Workshop also has to consider the opportunity cost of supporting Fantasy. Let's use some utterly ridiculous made-up numbers!

If it costs £100,000 to keep Fantasy running, and you get back a profit of £25,000, that sounds good. But if Games Workshop can put that same £100,000 into something new for 40K, and get back even £30,000, just £5,000 more, they might judge that to be a better use of their £100,000.

It's not as simple as that, either, because the Fantasy IP has a value of its own that is created and sustained by the existence of the game(s) which use it. But, again, if these rumours are true, perhaps Games Workshop are hoping that they can put their £100,000 into developing this new skirmish Fantasy game, and maybe get back the £30,000 they'd get from investing it in 40K, or more, which serves the dual purpose of increasing profits and keeping the IP alive. Or, even better, if they put £50,000 into this new game and get £15,000 back, that means they can put the other £50,000 into 40K as well and keep the IP viable for half the overhead.

I'm actually more inclined to believe that Games Workshop would try a radical revamp of Fantasy like this than I would be to believe they'd just give up on it, because of the value of the Fantasy IP. I also think the small-scale regular churn of limited-edition releases makes sense - it refreshes the IP, gets players into the store regularly for the new stuff, and doesn't leave a backlog of depreciating inventory taking up warehouse space.

I would be very surprised if Games Workshop makes much money on old metal figures like Sisters of Battle troops at this point. How long ago did they go out of production, and how much inventory has been sitting there costing them warehouse overhead and asset taxes?

But that only works conceptually if you consider "IP" to be nothing more than the branding. If someone is a fan of the IP(as opposed to someone who just plays because it's convenient, easy to get a game etc), it's because of the substance of the IP, not the name on the box. If the new game shares almost nothing recognisable with the old Warhammer, it doesn't matter what they call it, it won't really be Warhammer, it will be a new IP in a Warhammer-skin suit.

 AlexHolker wrote:

 Bottle wrote:
Thanks for the info, I didn't realize 6th did a hard reset too.

They did - they published a book of army lists (Ravening Hordes?) at the same time so you could keep playing your old army.

And that's the key point - GW may change the rules behind various models, but it is very rare that they don't allow you to keep playing the models you purchased, built and painted.

*cough*Dogs of War*cough*
*cough*Squats*cough*
*cough*Chaos Dorfs*cough*

Granted though those 3 armies disappeared over what a near 40 year time line of the company?

The big squattings of fully-playable armies occurred in the past 20 years:
- Squats disappeared with 40k3 (never had a 2E Codex).
- Chaos Dorfs got squatted in WFB6 (from WD compliation in 5E).
- Dogs of War got squatted hard in WFB7 (had full 5E Army Book, full WD list in 6E).

And Slann went from being an entire army of Aztec warrior frogs that waged war to stem their own burgeoning population to being sterile frog gods on a plate.

I pretty much count them as having been squatted.

The Auld Grump

*EDIT* One of the first folks to embrace Kings of War in my group had a Dogs of War army from Warhammer - he didn't need to change anything.

BairdEC wrote:
Once again... Squats.

It's a false equivalency.

The Squats had a tiny pathetic range and virtually no plastic minis. They received not a single model release after Rogue Trader/1st Ed. Lizardmen on the other hand have a complete range of mostly plastic miniatures. It's a far harder thing to believe that they'd dump such a thing, and so soon after their last book.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

BairdEC wrote:
Once again... Squats.

It's a false equivalency.

The Squats had a tiny pathetic range and virtually no plastic minis.

Surely squats had as many plastic miniatures as most armies did in those days - a single box with interchangeable weapons. It was only Marines that tended to have more due to being featured in boxed games funding the sprues (Space Marine Scouts and Terminators from Advanced Space Crusade & Space Hulk for example).

 Riquende wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

BairdEC wrote:
Once again... Squats.

It's a false equivalency.

The Squats had a tiny pathetic range and virtually no plastic minis.

Surely squats had as many plastic miniatures as most armies did in those days - a single box with interchangeable weapons. It was only Marines that tended to have more due to being featured in boxed games funding the sprues (Space Marine Scouts and Terminators from Advanced Space Crusade & Space Hulk for example).

They had more plastics than the Eldar for the entirety of the Rogue Trader/Chapter Approved days.

The Auld Grump

They also had more metals then than Sisters have models now!

Are we sure they're being squatted? I heard they were just flying above the old world, but not wiped out. If they were wiped out then yes, squatted, but until they are completed dead according to GW then no.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

BairdEC wrote:
Once again... Squats.

The Squats had a tiny pathetic range and virtually no plastic minis.

This line simply isn't true and I think you'll be quite surprised to find that the early squat range was SIGNIFICANTLY larger than any range that GW supports today.

My count of the Squat range for 1st edition was 173 individual metal models, of which three were artillery pieces (thudd gun, mole mortar, alternate thudd gun), three were repeats of earlier models that had separate backpacks and were later remolded with the backpacks as integral elements, ten were bikers (nine riders, one sidecar passenger) with a total of six different bike variants, eight were chaos squats, and three exo trikes used the same riders as three exo-armored squats I've counted separately.

At a bare minimum then, excluding variants and repeated bike riders there were 146 different metal infantry models, 9 different bikers, and 8 chaos squats.

In addition to this, there were three plastic bodies and three head designs in the "Space Dwarf" boxed set, which gave slightly less variety than the other plastic boxes of the time.

Eight unreleased squats were made for 2nd edition, and a ninth unreleased squat has been seen but they don't really count for the purposes of this post.

angryboy2k wrote:
This line simply isn't true and I think you'll be quite surprised to find that the early squat range was SIGNIFICANTLY larger than any range that GW supports today.

But the same could be said of any range that GW had in those days because they pretty much only did metal models meaning that every range had tons and tons or random garbage models in all sorts of poses.

By the time 2nd Ed rolled around Squats just weren't around any more (aside from Epic, which is a totally different story). They never got a new release - not a one! - and I can't recall ever seeing them in any White Dwarf for the time. Them getting the boot is significantly different to the concept of Lizardmen - an army that got a few new monsters and a new book not long ago - getting thrown aside.

For Squats it made sense - they were a nothing-y army with a mostly unavailable and ancient full-metal line of miniatures mostly made for a version of the game that simply didn't exist any more. For Lizardmen it makes far less sense.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

angryboy2k wrote:
This line simply isn't true and I think you'll be quite surprised to find that the early squat range was SIGNIFICANTLY larger than any range that GW supports today.

But the same could be said of any range that GW had in those days because they pretty much only did metal models meaning that every range had tons and tons or random garbage models in all sorts of poses.

By the time 2nd Ed rolled around Squats just weren't around any more (aside from Epic, which is a totally different story). They never got a new release - not a one! - and I can't recall ever seeing them in any White Dwarf for the time. Them getting the boot is significantly different to the concept of Lizardmen - an army that got a few new monsters and a new book not long ago - getting thrown aside.

For Squats it made sense - they were a nothing-y army with a mostly unavailable and ancient full-metal line of miniatures mostly made for a version of the game that simply didn't exist any more. For Lizardmen it makes far less sense.

I'm not actually addressing the wider issue of "squatting" the Lizardmen or whether or not "squatting the squats" made sense. I'm purely answering your statement that the Squat range was "tiny" and "pathetic". The range was large - I'd even say surprisingly so - and diverse with a great many poses, styles and possibilities. Even the plastic models, while slightly less interesting than other boxes out at the time, were quite comparable to the IG and Ork boxes of the era.

The line also wasn't "mostly unavailable". I ordered upwards of a hundred squat code models in 2000.

 Yodhrin wrote:
But that only works conceptually if you consider "IP" to be nothing more than the branding. If someone is a fan of the IP(as opposed to someone who just plays because it's convenient, easy to get a game etc), it's because of the substance of the IP, not the name on the box. If the new game shares almost nothing recognisable with the old Warhammer, it doesn't matter what they call it, it won't really be Warhammer, it will be a new IP in a Warhammer-skin suit.

Well, an advancement of the timeline and a shake-up of the factions isn't a new IP.

I take your point about the substance changing. As a D&D player, I'm very familiar with timeline advancements in settings and how it can screw things up for the fanbase.

But the thing is, they don't have to keep publishing 8E for, say, Total War: Warhammer to use that version of the setting, or something based on it. If they're saying, "This world of bubble-states floating in a chaos soup is the development of this older material," that keeps the older stuff protected.

Plus, the ultimate point is that "fans of Fantasy as it exists today" are presumably not enough to keep the line going as it exists today. So a drastic revamp at least has the chance of turning Fantasy into something that makes enough money to keep it going, which is presumably not the case right now, and would otherwise lead to the setting/IP/game being mothballed.

mhacdebhandia wrote:

 Yodhrin wrote:
But that only works conceptually if you consider "IP" to be nothing more than the branding. If someone is a fan of the IP(as opposed to someone who just plays because it's convenient, easy to get a game etc), it's because of the substance of the IP, not the name on the box. If the new game shares almost nothing recognisable with the old Warhammer, it doesn't matter what they call it, it won't really be Warhammer, it will be a new IP in a Warhammer-skin suit.

Well, an advancement of the timeline and a shake-up of the factions isn't a new IP.

I take your point about the substance changing. As a D&D player, I'm very familiar with timeline advancements in settings and how it can screw things up for the fanbase.

But the thing is, they don't have to keep publishing 8E for, say, Total War: Warhammer to use that version of the setting, or something based on it. If they're saying, "This world of bubble-states floating in a chaos soup is the development of this older material," that keeps the older stuff protected.

I can't agree. End Times, no matter how stupid I may think most of it is, is part of the same IP. Advancing the timeline by a substantial amount "off-screen" but leaving most of the recognisable elements intact would make the new game part of the same IP. But what's rumoured is a several-century "off-screen" timeline advance resulting in unrecognisable or entirely new factions, a completely new setting(Old World gone, Bubbleverse ho!), new characters, new fluff etc etc. You can try tying the new to the old by writing some blurb and retaining the name, but I've seen people write convincing fanfic that makes Terminator a prequel to 40K, they're still not the same thing. We're not talking about the difference between, say, 30K and 40K, we're talking about the difference between Warhammer Fantasy and Warmachine. Now, you could rename Warmachine as Warhammer, and write some blurb about how the former became the latter, but the latter still wouldn't actually be Warhammer to anyone who'd actually experienced real Warhammer.

And honestly, I'm not so much interested in seeing the "old" fluff "protected" as I am in seeing it developed and continued. I like Warhammer because of the characters, factions, and locations that comprise the setting, I want to see and purchase more content featuring that setting. I have exactly zero interest in buying Fantastical Marines for Bubblehammer.

Plus, the ultimate point is that "fans of Fantasy as it exists today" are presumably not enough to keep the line going as it exists today. So a drastic revamp at least has the chance of turning Fantasy into something that makes enough money to keep it going, which is presumably not the case right now, and would otherwise lead to the setting/IP/game being mothballed.

Well, perhaps. The issue is whether there are actually too few fans of Fantasy to make it a viable line, or whether GW's business decisions have driven away enough fans of Fantasy to make it non-viable, and if the latter is the case, then you have to question whether tearing the setting down is more likely to draw those players back than simply making better decisions.

The problems with Fantasy are primarily about cost. It's too expensive to get into and even more expensive to collect a complete army - it's extremely discouraging to see a box of lovely models on the shelf, and then realising there's no point buying one box unless you're prepared to buy four or five, because the newer rulesets require ever larger blocks of infantry; and it no longer has an entry-level game to draw people into the fiction since they got rid of Mordheim.

And frankly, personally, I'd rather they had mothballed Fantasy entirely until they had some serious ideas how to fix their mistakes than see them tear the whole setting to shreds and move forward with the sole objective of cutting costs, which seems to be their only play these days. Either way I'd be stuck playing a "dead" game, but at least if they'd mothballed it there would be a chance it would return in the foreseeable future as something recognisable.

Even if this Bubbleverse rumours are true, nothing stops them from reversing it in the future. Wizards of the Coast has just done exactly that with the Forgotten Realms.

In Fourth Edition D&D, the planet Toril that the Forgotten Realms setting is on underwent a patchwork "merger" with its sister planet, Abeir, with big chunks of the world literally replaced by chunks of Abeir, populated by different races and monsters and cultures. The timeline also jumped forward about a century, if memory serves.

In Fifth Edition D&D, all of those pieces of Abeir swapped places with what used to be there. Hell, while they haven't dialed back the timeline, what they have done is literally bring back to life all of the main characters of the most popular novel series set in the Forgotten Realms, most of whom either died while adventuring or of old age when they did the time-jump. They're even rejuvenated to the prime of life.

This is obvious pandering to everyone who hated the Fourth Edition changes - but the analogy is that nothing stops them from publishing a future 10E of Fantasy where all the bubbles come together and reform the Old World more or less as-was, maybe with a few lasting changes to keep whatever was successful in 9E alive.

Anyway, look, D&D also offers another bit of insight, in that it's extremely hard to get back fans and players once they've decided they've had enough and moved on to something else. Even if Games Workshop were willing to take Fantasy back to an earlier era and try to recapture the grognards who have moved on, I think that's a hard sell. Everyone likes different editions' rules, everyone likes different editions' lore. Wizards of the Coast is having a hell of a time recapturing the lapsed playerbase with Fifth Edition D&D even though they explicitly wanted it to be a "greatest hits" version combining the best features of everything that came before.

I guess we'll see what happens when and if this is confirmed or debunked.

Oh man, I loved it when they destroyed Forgotten Realms.

How I learned to stop worrying and love the bubbleverse...

 melkorthetonedeaf wrote:
Oh man, I loved it when they destroyed Forgotten Realms.

How I learned to stop worrying and love the bubbleverse...

Bet you that Wizards didn't love it when they realized that they had also destroyed the market....

Becoming the second best selling RPG is not a good thing, at least when you started out as number one.

The Auld Grump

"Don't worry, we can fix it later" is rarely a good reason to do something daft.

I think GW is watching the money coming from WFB circling down the drain and the line has probably been running in the red for some time. Add in the CHS which proved they had a lot of stuff that was just too generic to protect and I think we have all the right ingredients to lead to a drastic change to try and save the game before they are forced to kill it completely.

Yes, this is a thing that angers a lot of veteran players, but how often are veteran players actually buying anything for WFB? Locally it's only when a release comes out and then it's just the rulebook, and maybe some of the new kits. There are little to no new players joining the game anymore because starting an army is as expensive, if not more expensive than starting a Sisters army, so when an old player leaves there is no money coming in to replace them.

The game is dying because GW tried to pander to veterans and collectors and have priced out everyone else by requiring huge model counts to even start an army. Could they just update things with a new edition and hope it starts to draw people in? Sure. But look at how much discussion is generating. I mean we've only had the smallest shreds of rumors on what the lore alone is doing and the smallest hinting of rules and we're at 35 pages and counting.

Sure, GW might lose some money from veteran players (though with rumors saying the rules will support a play style similar to 8th edition means that they could still use the rulebook even if they don't want to use new stuff or follow the new lore), but a drastic change like this is generating discussion and in turn will generate interest by newer players and may be the kind of shot in the arm the game needs to bring people back to WFB.

Are people going to be mad? Sure. People are always mad when things change in a different direction than they expect or want (I expect a LOT of rage when Star Wars Episode VII releases for just that reason), but if this helps the game in the long run then a few pissed off people now is worth it.

Worst case is this seals WFB's fate and they kill the game sooner than they would now, best case is it starts to grow a community again and the game stops running in the red all the time.

Fantasy Battles just needs to follow the modern video game format... reboot a classic, name is The Warhammer Fantasy Battles, make it grittier and streamline out a bunch of bullcrap.

Give it some HD polish and Bob's Your Uncle!

This year is going to be interesting.

 ClockworkZion wrote:
Yes, this is a thing that angers a lot of veteran players, but how often are veteran players actually buying anything for WFB?

Worst case is this seals WFB's fate and they kill the game sooner than they would now, best case is it starts to grow a community again and the game stops running in the red all the time.

I don't need to buy anything for my Grimdark(tm) counts-as Dogs of War. I have several in-progress conversions and whatnots that I could restart at any time, but I choose not to. If WFB9's rules put a damper on the bullgak, and the coming Grimdark(tm) Armies of Man book gives a decent way to play what I own, I'll dust off my Fantasy models and give the new edition a chance.

Fantasy won't die, but it could go on an even longer hiatus than what we've seen. GW made 40k a priority, which is why they rushed photo catalog Codices to protect the IP that actually matters. WFB 9 is going to parallel 40k7, to reset all of the Fantasy IP. After that, expect more WFB releases to bring the new look.

 melkorthetonedeaf wrote:
Oh man, I loved it when they destroyed Forgotten Realms.

How I learned to stop worrying and love the bubbleverse...

Yeah that never happened. At least I pretend that.

I'm hearing allot of chat about sisters but that's all it is chat, I've had more solid info about Skitari then sisters though people are saying that it's this year.


Lizardmen are probably gone just like Brets.