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RoperPG wrote:

Gharak wrote:
GW customers are more than keen to engage with them bit they just seem to be stuck in the wrong era.

Have a quick read through the Dakka forums for GW systems to get an idea on the sort of person that might approach GW via social media.
Being GW's social media team wouldn't be a job, it'd be a sentence...

GW created this issue via their treatment of their fans. Look at other similar wargames companies and you don't see this behavior amongst other fan groups. Its on GW's back to fix this problem as well, and the way to do that would be through honest and open communication to rebuild the sense of trust that does not exist amongst its customers. It would take time and effort, but its certainly doable. GW has shown zero interest in such communication however.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
If that's true that GW's design studio have completely lost the plot. 125 people working on AoS for three years and this is the best they could do?

It is definitely true, although the whole studio wouldn't have been involved, or working on it simultaneously. Models are 18 months from concept to box. The concepts for the new background would have had to have been planned and begun before the miniature designers had anything to work with, so probably the same again allowing for trial and error. As for the game, the changes are massive, and so there was a lot of passing back between rules team and the play testers, especially on trying to balance the warscrolls to be able to remove the points system.

I was exaggerating for effect.

What do you see as the massive changes in AoS compared to GW's other games?

Fair enough, I know a lot of people seem to think it was a Friday afternoon effort.

Tbh, I don't really see a huge change, you buy an army, you roll dice to hit and wound. It's essentially the same game, with simplified mechanics made complicated trying to remember the warscroll rules. The biggest chance that is meaningful that I can see is the freedom to buy whatever models you want without proxying and agreeing with opponents beforehand. Doesn't affect me as I only play socially, but might be useful in tournis. It's a change that I can't see changing much beyond the annual statement (hopefully).

What about you?

It took them three years to come up with this? I...wow.

Thanks for giving us a former insider's viewpoint! Is there anything else you can share about the development? I'm mostly curious about the decision to switch the background. Why on earth would they do that? Even if they were dead-set on having Chaos overrun everything and not hit the reset button again at the end of End Times, they could have at least kept the links by setting their new skirmish game in the ruins of the Old World. What sort of thought went into picking the new themes and style of the setting?

Just to throw in my $0.02 from an MTG point of view, I heard from the Head Designer for MTG (Mark Rosewater) on one of his podcasts that something like only 1 out of 100 ideas for a given card actually make it into production and off to stores. So, it could have actually taken a lot more time to write the AoS rules and Warscrolls than it appears on the surface.

SG

@spinner no idea, we kept hearing that the world was being battered down until it was just the old world, so no lustria, ulthuan, Cathay etc, and 9th ed would be set in the remains. As we read the end times it seemed to be confirming what we'd heard, so the last book came as a massive shock. I thought it was so they could sell the ip to make the total war game, but apparently it hasn't been the case.

Hm. Don't think I would have cared much for that either, to be honest - seems like cutting out variety just to cut it out - but it would have been better than what we got. Interesting that they kept it quiet from the people working for them. I wonder if that was to keep rumors under control? If so, it didn't work that well - the old 'bubblehammer' rumor is a little too close to be coincidence, in my mind.

3 years seems completely believable considering how much goes into the creation of a game (from concept to artwork to design to sculpting to rules to layout... etc etc etc) and the amount of playtesting and iteration they must have done, just imagine how many versions they probably threw away before arriving at what we have now. I said at least 6 months before but obviously I was way off.

The actual rules and warscrolls? It's probably a few weeks work for a small dedicated team that knows what they're doing plus playtesting and whatnot.

Obviously AoS as a whole would have taken longer as there would have been a lot of time spent on concept development first, artwork, miniatures, decisions on progressing the the story line. All that crap would have taken a lot longer than the rules and warscrolls themselves.

But if you just told a team of developers to design a game with the general parameters of AoS I don't see why it would take them more than a few weeks to come up with a final draft for approval and given how the rules are written it doesn't feel like there was much editing from the final draft to the published copy.

If you think that the AoS ruleset took more than a few weeks to develop, ask yourself honestly how one could spend more than a month developing those four pages. There's not a lot there. I cannot fathom or imagine grown adults spending a great deal of time creating that ruleset. What took so long? I'm genuinely curious how it would have been a such a drawn out process.

Iteration takes a looooong time.

 Sqorgar wrote:
I wouldn't be surprised if these rules have been worked on, in one capacity or another, for years. The lead time on the models and books alone are probably over a year (new art, fiction, and visual design takes time), which suggests they've at least had these rules for that long - I doubt they just made the rules and sat on them for a year, doing absolutely no playtesting or revisions during this time.

If you are asking how long the initial draft took? Probably a few weeks, at the least, but I guarantee you, it looked nothing like it does now. I'm sure it was much longer and much more complicated initially. I wouldn't be surprised if they went through five or six different rulesets before deciding on refining AoS.

AoS was developed throughout, at the minimum, 2014, as evidence by all the copyright dates on the first releases being 2014.

The copyright date is an error. The game was published in 2015.

The year date of publication does not show how long the
development process took.

It's likely they started in 2014 and slapped that year on everything, but it could have been at any time of the year.

Well End Times was obviously being developed in some form while writing Eighth Edition because 8th retconned various events to lead into ET. So probably started like 5 years ago or earlier.

Age of Sigmar most likely began a few years ago. The three year figure seems right.

Clearly this was more work than usual edition changes even if you don't like it.

The rules and warscrolls are a small part of what they've done.

 Thokt wrote:
If you think that the AoS ruleset took more than a few weeks to develop, ask yourself honestly how one could spend more than a month developing those four pages. There's not a lot there. I cannot fathom or imagine grown adults spending a great deal of time creating that ruleset. What took so long? I'm genuinely curious how it would have been a such a drawn out process.

The rules probably took them a trivially short period of time compared to all the other stuff. Firstly all the meetings and whatnot deciding to kill WHFB and then deciding what would replace it, then preparing all the supplementary materials, miniatures and all that junk would have taken quite a long time.

The 4 page set of rules? I really don't think that took them all that long to do. Neither do I think the rules in the warscrolls took them a hell of a long time to do.

^^ That is exactly what I think.

The rules simply are too simple and too similar to the previous 30 years of GW to have taken long to write. The decisions about canning WHFB and so on would have taken a lot longer.

It doesn't take long to write 4 pages of rules - of course. But I imagine those 4 pages are the result of draft and re-draft and re-draft and re-draft.

Condensing an entire rulebook into four pages is not an easy task. I challenge someone to do it with the 40k rulebook in one draft.

 Bottle wrote:
It doesn't take long to write 4 pages of rules - of course. But I imagine those 4 pages are the result of draft and re-draft and re-draft and re-draft.

Yeah, like 2 days for one draft... then 2 days for the redraft... then probably 1 day for the redraft... then half a day for the last redraft

Maybe a bit longer than that and I'm sure they did some amount of playtesting but I really can't see how it would have taken a hell of a lot of time to write those rules.

What would have taken a longer time is deciding that they want to make the rules 4 pages long in the first place, that decision making process would have taken a lot longer than writing the rules themselves.

 Bottle wrote:
Condensing an entire rulebook into four pages is not an easy task. I challenge someone to do it with the 40k rulebook in one draft.

If a professional, being paid and working full time, can't do that in a week I'd suggest that they should never have been hired for a game developer role.

And Games Workshop has a TEAM of game developers.

 Bottle wrote:
It doesn't take long to write 4 pages of rules - of course. But I imagine those 4 pages are the result of draft and re-draft and re-draft and re-draft.

Condensing an entire rulebook into four pages is not an easy task. I challenge someone to do it with the 40k rulebook in one draft.

I don't imagine they are the result of draft and re-draft.

It's impossible to imagine that these rules are the finely honed result of many iterations of test and refinement. They simply are too simple and too derivative of well established systems already familiar to GW.

AoS isn't a condensed version of 40K/WHFB. It's just a version with huge amounts of stuff left out and a few bits of simple rules like the terrain deployment table that are new or modified.

It is inconceivable that the fairly trivial changes in AoS took any significant amount of work to produce. Rival studios have produced much greater bodies of work much quicker with much smaller resources than GW commands.

These "trivial" changes (I don't see what's so trivial about them tbh) have a HUGE effect on how the game plays and I can absolutely see them being iterated on for quite a while (how long depends on how many resources were put into it). That's just my guess of course, for all I know you could be right and it took them 3 months and a couple of coffee breaks

I think it was in development too long to warrant the quality of rules that the final product represents.

 Mymearan wrote:
These "trivial" changes (I don't see what's so trivial about them tbh) have a HUGE effect on how the game plays and I can absolutely see them being iterated on for quite a while (how long depends on how many resources were put into it). That's just my guess of course, for all I know you could be right and it took them 3 months and a couple of coffee breaks

For example the movement and combat system are essentially the same as 40K.

It's not clear to me why having had 25 years of experience of 40K combat it would be necessary or helpful to do much testing, redesigning and retesting of a new combat system, only to result in the one that already existed. Especially given GW's previous history of copy-pasta,

Movement and Combat rules make up 75% of the rulebook. The rest of the rules are nearly one liners. It's hard to think the that the terrain roll-up table took months, for instance, or the idea of rolling for initiative every turn instead of at the beginning og the game.

If the new game actually had a lot of new, cleverly streamlined, exciting rules, it would be much easier to believe in a long development process.

you guys are being too dismissive in my opinion. Take the new magic phase for example. In 8th edition there must have been 40+ spells in the rulebook and then 6 or more in each army book.

Now there are 2 core spells and each caster has a unique spell plus any summoning spells.

That reduction in magic probably took a lot of refining. I doubt they decided to go with 2 core spells of the bat, and even if they did I'm sure they made lots of alternatives to test the waters before settling on just those 2.

Same with bravery. I imagine different ideas were put forward, drafted, refined, altered, removed etc etc before the final mechanic was introduced.

 Bottle wrote:
you guys are being too dismissive in my opinion. Take the new magic phase for example. In 8th edition there must have been 40+ spells in the rulebook and then 6 or more in each army book.

Now there are 2 core spells and each caster has a unique spell plus any summoning spells.

That reduction in magic probably took a lot of refining. I doubt they decided to go with 2 core spells of the bat, and even if they did I'm sure they made lots of alternatives to test the waters before settling on just those 2.

It took a 'select all' and 'cut' to be fair. Being cynical, The conversation preceding it probsbly took longer, but even then, 'cut all the excess, and boil it down to a basic set of things' isn't a lot of refining.

 Bottle wrote:
you
Same with bravery. I imagine different ideas were put forward, drafted, refined, altered, removed etc etc before the final mechanic was introduced.

That's called a 'conversation' with jervis. Put forward some ideas, the boss says 'yes, go with this one'. I can imagine it being done over the course of a few meetings. Knowing the corporate world though, that was probably a meeting a week over a month or two.

My impression is they didn't spend much time at all, the rules are not a big departure from mechanics they have already been using. Granted it is a very watered down version there is really nothing new or innovative about it. maybe 2 months tops.