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I've been sort of thinking, here and there, as to why it is I feel like there's something missing with GW franchises. The miniatures they put out is cool.... but at the same time has something off about it. Maybe its me just getting older and being a bit jaded. Though, that might be an easy out too - to dismiss some legit talking points. Here are a few items:

1. Contrast the hobby pictures from the 80s and 90s to today, and what do you see? It isn't better miniatures, it's something else. From the terrain to the 'generic' miniatures, you can tell there's a pioneering effort being churned during this time.

2. As cool and Blanchy as the new Rogue Trader kill team might be, the environment the miniatures are featured in, feel like a happy meal or play set vibe (you know like old toy commercials). Some immersive aspect feels missing (modeling or something).

3. Along the vein of immersion, the rule sets since 40k 3rd edition feel progressively more stale and generic. As cool and awesome as it is to make things simpler, one cannot help but wonder, if maybe less is more in the way of reducing complexity - as paradoxical as that might be. I mean, consider the lack luster contrast regarding stats. Or the cheesy gaminess that evolved (command points, objectives, formations, kill team cards, special dice, rock paper scissor lists). I mean there is a charm about things being a simulation, not just gaminess.

4. The story and setting. Where rogue trader the rule set, felt like a grim & novel space adventure in part (with low model count), there is now the persistent feeling of monotone, over the top gameplay / story telling, this includes fantasy. I use to feel like there was just scant information about the big problems in the universe, now we got an over elaborated sense of special characters doing super fantastic things + the (not surprising) 'grimdark' twist, that we are all suppose to be grin at. It's as though the designers think being anti trope is actually clever. It just makes things feel predictable. What's the fix? Less is more. Revert to generic spaghetti western feels, and leave big back drops unexplained and mysterious.

5 If they're really going to try and make a convincing skirmish game, they need a setting that's actually got some special progression/exclusions/environment to it.
I'll just say this on the side, AoS aesthetically looks dumb - that particularly will neuter itself if it attempts a serious progressive skirmish setting.. That's the nail in the coffin for that.



If they do create a lasting skirmish/RP setting in 40k, it needs a more convincing loot and skill system... really really needs it (like mordheim/necromunda). But that should be pretty straight forward to solve.

The 40k skirmish game problem is the global/galactic impact- why are you repeatedly interweaving with another player (outside of hive setting). How do you explain any consistent reoccurence of fighting against the same person over and over in a satisfying manner- in a league or home group? Yea... there is only so much you can do with that, when people in particular wanting to play space marines. This kind of setting has to get pretty creative vs a medieval fantasy skirmish game. How about instead of random convoluted, or limited story arcs due to the nature of sci fi, GW forges a 40k skirmish setting that is on a world cut off from imperial support (maybe warband xyz arrived via a warp gate, into a new galaxy, or in a restricted place within the realm of chaos). Hell, insert 40k into a fantasy setting (feudal world).Make a wide arc of magic items (imbued with chaos) and technological items. If you play as humans, you get access to a few astartes in your warband, but they have no gear (insert reasons). It's special and different, and both sides have some sort of meaningful progression, instead of ' I start with awesome gear'. I mean, imagine how cool an unarmoured astartes would be. Or a fancy generic plastic sprue of 40k humans that have various weapons/gear - like mordheim.

I'll stop there. Thoughts?

What you're seeing is simply the corporate impact on GW. The times you're referencing are the days when GW was being run by geeky gamers and it was a middling business. The hobby, the style, and the feeling was better and more enjoyable, but the company wasn't as profit-driven as it is now.

You can see the main differences in White Dwarf, etc. It's more or less like anything you really enjoy before they "make it big". It always gets dimmed down immensely when big money starts speaking.

PS: By the way, I agree...I'm not a huge fan of modern GW stuff compared to the "feel" I got back in the 90's.

I would say that things have lost their "edge" a bit. It's a common feeling; when there's a level of mystery and novelty, you can sense the potential in something and it has a palpable energy. But often in life, what is revealed out of mystery does not live up to the potential you could sense. You could say this is true of many things, not just 40k.

Rose tinted glasses. They've incorporated more from 2nd and 3rd to this edition than the past 3, too.

It's definitely not rose tinted glasses. The game is far less...geeky than it used to be, 100%.

Now, a lot of 40k kits feel like a toy with some assembly required.

I quite enjoyed the whole "You wanna make this dude? Kitbash and convert it like a real hobbyist and slice your finger while doing it."

I'm just happy that GW still has some creative juices left at all. 40k has outlived countless of its cultural contemporaries that started with life only to sputter to death in a boardroom. Even if they've gone a bit too far in explaining things that were better left to mystery, or sanitized the product for a larger market, it could be so much worse. Imagine if they had ever been sold to an even larger toy company or gaming company like Wizards of the Coast. As long as they maintain their independence I trust that part of the core vision will remain. If the hobby wasn't so niche as to require you to build and paint your own game pieces, there would probably be nothing left by now.

 Luciferian wrote:
If the hobby wasn't so niche as to require you to build and paint your own game pieces, there would probably be nothing left by now.

I can sit here and tell you, there are better games than 40k or any of its siblings and specialist offspring. Like, far better and more balanced...

...but absolutely none of those games have ever given me the satisfaction that 40k has, because of the insane degree of modularity and customization options across the entire line of models. I can look out at models I've kitbashed and converted and smile because "Those are my dudes, and even if someone else is playing the same army as me, he doesn't have my dudes. Those are truly my own." Hell, a single model in each of my 2 armies also serves as an RPG character, so I take pride in making things my own. You just can't get that with anything else, IMHO.

I mean, I built an entire CSM Army, with Warriors, Chosen, Havocs, Raptors and all the actual Chaos Space Marine units.. without buying any actual Chaos Space Marines. That felt kind of impressive to me, at least.

Oh, I'm sure that many of us share in that exact sense of enjoyment. It's probably why most of us are still around. The game itself has never been perfect or balanced, and even the kits have gone through varying phases of modularity, but the oddball, sandbox universe of 40k, paired with the potential to create your own stories within it, are the heart and soul of the whole enterprise.

I mostly agree.
Then again, I also thought 7th edition was a whole lot of fun, so maybe my opinion isn't the best.

Still, I list some of the crunchy flavor of a lot of rules. So many buffs and abilities these days come down to flat numbers or mortal wounds. It's very rare that I look at a rule and think, "Oh, that's really cool!", instead it comes down to, "Oh, that's a variant of rule X, I suppose that's useful." +/-1 to a roll or stat, rerolls on 1s or any roll, d3 mortal wounds or one mortal wound per X+ roll, do something twice if we're feeling really fancy. There's definitely some variance and cool interactions available, but it's just nothing compared to the 40k of yesteryear.

My first army was the 4th edition Ork codex, who were already incredibly watered down from the 3rd edition codex that I picked up by mistake when I first started playing, but even then we had random charts that could teleport your Big Mek across the board or just straight-up suck whole units off the map. Weirdboyz weren't just smite or teleport batteries, they had to roll to find out their powers and if we got lucky it could be some of the most powerful (autohitting) weapons in the game, or it might just cause our head to explode. Taking special characters could radically change how we designed our lists, and not just because they happened to have useful synergies.

Then we had Space Wolves, my second army, who had relics before they were cool, a model whose attacks increased off his base-to-base contact, if we wanted Sergeants we had to take a bunch of them and burn an elites slot, which was actually a big deal, and we'd have to work out how to deal with putting 11 models in a transport. (Hint: We didn't.)

Nowadays, even fancy relics don't feel half so interesting as some of the old basic weapons.

I think it's mainly that we've all been with the game for a long, long time. Nerds seem to love nostalgia, so we look back on things fondly.

I don't care for the stratagem bloat, but it's hardly like wargear cards (or random weapon tables, if we want to go back to 1E) weren't gamey. Or formation stacking in 7th, chopping up LoS by parking rhinos in stupid looking Vs in many editions, and so on.

AoS has gotten a lot better - people kvetch and kvetch about the silliness of it, but in many ways it's got the same off-kilter wackiness that doesn't take itself too seriously that gave us pun names for special characters and such - have you seen the kharadron boss? He has monocles patterned into his goggles and a moustache machine gun. Their miniature design team obviously is able to both like an aesthetic AND be aware of how silly it is - and that, it seems to me, is what a lot of grouchy grogs seem to forget was always part of the Warhammer worlds

The grim edgey angst has its place, and I will grant that the recent move to grandiose narratives has undermined that a bit, but at least with AoS they've been course correcting on that pretty hard with the BL fluff as well as the background books. Even 40k gets it every now and then - the Armour of Fate novella has a bit of comedy... not gold, but copper at least, when Roboute is trying to pick up paper with his ludicrously oversized hands. Because of course he does.

I think, at least for me, more than anything, the main problem is that the proclivity of even casual LGS players to listen to Serious Tournament Podcast/Blog Bigwigs has wound up killing a lot of creativity in approach to the game. Few people seem to want to play a scenario, or try an unbalanced game and swap sides, or do a campaign at home, etc, but instead discussion seems to be loudest around inane topics like which list is doing well at what ITC event or other irrelevant piffle.

Back when I was in high school*, my three mates and I got together and wrote up a campaign system for our BFG fleets. Was it any good? Who the heck knows, but I certainly remember the time the 42nd Destroyer Squadron flew through the teeth of the Planet Killers' guns to ram Abaddon's bridge. Heroes, ever last one of them. And I was playing Eldar in that campaign, so I wasn't even there during the game.

All of which is to say, I don't think it's really that Warhammer (of whichever stripe) has fundamentally changed, but rather that our belief about what's important in gaming has become different.

*ie. we had time, and few other responsibilities, and it was after the USSR fell but Before 9/11, so History was over, according to Fukuyama or Hegel or whomever.

 kveldulf wrote:

How do you explain any consistent reoccurence of fighting against the same person over and over in a satisfying manner- in a league or home group?

Same way I have for the past 30ish years: It's game night & those are the models {Bob} owns.

As for how to avoid having the fun/mystery/etc drained out of things via over-explanation, 30+ years of fluff etc? Do what I've done. Just stop reading it at some point. Myself? I haven't read more than about a dozen non-rules related pages in any of the codices I've picked up since I returned to playing back in Sept. (2018). I just don't care. Likewise with the novels - there's just so many better books to be read & not enough time to do so that GWs stuff simply isn't on my to-read list.

 Luciferian wrote:
Oh, I'm sure that many of us share in that exact sense of enjoyment. It's probably why most of us are still around. The game itself has never been perfect or balanced, and even the kits have gone through varying phases of modularity, but the oddball, sandbox universe of 40k, paired with the potential to create your own stories within it, are the heart and soul of the whole enterprise.

I can't agree with you more, if I had three thumbs I'd up them all for you and probably let you come to my house and poop with the door open.

Overall, I had a sort of 'being born again' experience with 40k. I got away from playing competitive and trying to make a good list and win at tournaments. I got away from competitive players that didn't know how to switch that mode off (I know a lot of great competitive players that are always glad to sit down and help people get more out of their army and improve their skills, and are still fully capable of playing casual and fun games). I got away from the players that say they aren't competitive, but secretly are super-competitive but can't win against someone who is also competitive. I got away from anyone who gloats about their wins to everyone. I got away from all of that crap, and said, "I wanna have fun with the things I like".

I saw 40k again the same way I'd seen it when I was a young kid- a big, crazy, wild hyper-violent and over-the-top setting where you play with toys and have rules for how the toys kill each other. I started seeing the rules as a toolkit, just a very basic structure of how to play the game- little numbers and words on a piece of paper to give you some guidelines, but something that a few guys could just use the basics of to do whatever they wanted and tack on whatever else they wanted for the sake of having fun with toys. I actually researched the way old Rogue Trader games were played and what made people love it so much.

I sought out like-minded people, who wanted the same thing and were having the same frustrations with the local meta and FLGS. You might hear people say it's wrong to be a gatekeeper, but that's exactly what I did- I screened people and analyzed them while I spent time with them like they were gonna be babysitting my kids and holding my bank account info. I made a literal list of candidates and I scratched a lot of people off this list over time. While the end result may have been about a dozen players, the "Dauntless Few" that I had were rock-solid, good people that just wanted to have fun and enjoy their stuff and honestly didn't give a damn about strict rules or limitations or even following specifics as long as the end result was having a lot of fun with little war figures.

Fast-forward a year and we've got more than one table, fully painted terrain, we're playing very narrative games, even sort of homebrewed games, incorporating others, playtesting odd things that aren't even things in regular 40k, and writing entire campaign histories and we might be looking into a Youtube channel or Livestream service, or at least making a site where we can share what we've got with others and have them giving feedback and ideas from everything to story ideas, crafting tips, and suggested rules to try. It's honestly the most fun I've had with any game ever, all because I stopped 'doing it the right way' and focused on having fun and put the "Rule of Cool" first and foremost.

Hands down, bolters to buttholes, I can't get that out of 'better' games. Because right now, the fun I'm having with 40k compared to other tabletop games is like comparing PC Gaming to checkers.

ccs wrote:

 kveldulf wrote:

How do you explain any consistent reoccurence of fighting against the same person over and over in a satisfying manner- in a league or home group?

Same way I have for the past 30ish years: It's game night & those are the models {Bob} owns.

As for how to avoid having the fun/mystery/etc drained out of things via over-explanation, 30+ years of fluff etc? Do what I've done. Just stop reading it at some point. Myself? I haven't read more than about a dozen non-rules related pages in any of the codices I've picked up since I returned to playing back in Sept. (2018). I just don't care. Likewise with the novels - there's just so many better books to be read & not enough time to do so that GWs stuff simply isn't on my to-read list.

/grins

Amusing candor this is.

 Daedalus81 wrote:
Rose tinted glasses. They've incorporated more from 2nd and 3rd to this edition than the past 3, too.

100%. In recent years with Genestealer Cult, Ad Mech, Blackstone, Rogue Trader etc. they've returned to classic material to incredible effect. They've been on a renaissance for the last three years. Age of Sigmar even more so.

While I do agree some of the mystery and appeal of the setting has been screwed up in recent times. GWs games have always had an over the top element. Remember obiwan sherlock clousseau? As if there is anything grim about that....

I do think things have been sanitized lately, mostly cause AoS has changed the feel of GW as a company. And the return of the primarchs IMO is a bad bad thing. I got into 40k around the time dawn of war 1 was the ideal iteration of the 40k universe. And have fond memories of WH mark of chaos and the era where GW got more serious with their image and lore and their artwork was great with kopinski and adrien smith stuff. They had their codex art done by proven fine artists and not deviantart commissions.

And to me that feel and look/style is always going to be what 40k truly is. As for the rules, could care less. I've never been crazy about the i go you go style of 40k, I much prefer the bolt action style of orders and activations. So to me 40k feels dated in most regards in terms of gameplay.

The problem with the new GW is they are trying to advance the story and setting when they had already evolved it into a good place to begin with. It's a big risk and they could create issues with their fans. I mean...i'm still mad about the matt ward stuff and necrons being turned into space tomb kings. I'm still unhappy about that and it's been quite some time.

Umbros wrote:
They've been on a renaissance for the last three years. Age of Sigmar even more so.

Agreed in part up until that last heretical bit. Miniature wise, they've been doing alright- mechanicus, genestealer cult and rogue trader. Hobby wise, nope. It's product, product, product. Age of Sigmar I sense was, in part, a posterity move from designers/producers vying for relevance/ job security.

That and AoS was an artifical thing ratcheted on the notion WFB was lacking in sales. At least that's my opinion.

 Elbows wrote:
It's definitely not rose tinted glasses. The game is far less...geeky than it used to be, 100%.

This.

You see it with other companies, most notable now Privateer Press. Compare the Mk1 and Mk3 Rulebooks, first they were the counter culture (to GW's oddly enough) with Page 5 and the general attitude, now they're "mainstream" and they ARE the culture.

GW is the same. Everything now feels so homogenized. We have very little unique artwork- every piece must represent the minis (and not the other way around). The most egregious example of this, to me; is on page 51 of the DG codex (which is odd, as on the following page the Plaguebearer artwork is ace). All of the PMs are just copies of what you see in Dark Imperium, even as far as there are a pair of twins at the bottom right. It's just so... sanitized () and doesn't seek to inspire.

The background has had a lot of the mystery sucked out of it. Back in the day there was loads of little mysteries to pore over that have since been retconned into oblivion by seventy million HH books to an almost pornographic level of detail. The setting morphed into a story. So all of a sudden everyone wants to be in the now and the galaxy doesn't feel as vast. You had 10,000 years of history to play in, on a galactic scale. This is longer than recorded human history so far. Yet this wasn't good enough.

Even the stores themselves. Everything is cookie-cutter. Everything, even the board you play on is off the shelf. All the music is the same (okay, I won't lie. This may actually be rose-tinted glasses speaking but I love Lithium by Nirvana as that song is part of the soundtrack of my beginnings in this hobby), all the scenery is the same. There's no thinking outside of the GW box. You can convert scenery but it has to be with GW parts and not random gak you can find in a toy shop.

I think it's a mix of making the game simpler for people to jump in and players in the past often complaining about "randumb charts" and lack of balance.


Bring back the random charts and real exp and campaign systems for narrative GW and less time fiddling with points changes which are ultimately irrelevant!

 Adeptus Doritos wrote:
Now, a lot of 40k kits feel like a toy with some assembly required.

I quite enjoyed the whole "You wanna make this dude? Kitbash and convert it like a real hobbyist and slice your finger while doing it."

That's the exact attitude that made me start the hobby in the late 90s as a kid who was a fan of Lego and saw in GW miniatures some sort of evolution of Lego, way more challenging. I started playing years later since I couldn't care less about the game, I was crazy about assembling, kitbashing, scratch building, painting the miniatures and 3rd had no appeal on me at all.

 Adeptus Doritos wrote:
Now, a lot of 40k kits feel like a toy with some assembly required.

I quite enjoyed the whole "You wanna make this dude? Kitbash and convert it like a real hobbyist and slice your finger while doing it."

But there are factions that have it like that still. GK for example don't have a chapter master or brother captin model, no champion, no GM NDK model everything has to be converted. Other stuff is only done by FW, and not everyone wants to buy recasts. So people do convert most of their armies.

I think it's a mix of making the game simpler for people to jump in and players in the past often complaining about "randumb charts" and lack of balance.

People that jump in to the game like that have to be really lucky with their initial faction and model picks, otherwise they get burned out real quick. But maybe that is the goal. Impulse buy 1000-1500pts get sick how bad it is, and then forced to buy a real army, means more money spent per player picking up the game.

@Karol I think this is an issue with the incompatibility between having expensive armies to purchase and a tight, "competition friendly" rules set. Even video game need patching for balance regularly and they have no such high buy in.

I know I seem like a CAAC jerk but I do believe that really if you are in gaming for the competition GW games are a bit of a terrible idea.

Maybe this is people migrating over from video gaming rather than having fallen in love with the GW IP's from a young age? I don't know.

As a counterpoint to this:

Bare in mind that you are viewing the things GW does now with VERY different eyes than you would have in the 80s or 90s.

I don't know your age, so I'll talk about my experience. I was 10 when I played 40k 2nd edition. There is a wonder in discovering something like that, at that age, that cannot be replicated for someone in their 30s.

Sure, I can find new things and enjoy them. Love them even. But it's never the same. I have that cynicism about why businesses do things at the back of my mind. Things don't seem as fresh because I'm more aware of what else is out there.

I don't think it's fair to expect them to capture that ever again in their long term customers, not to the same extent.

That isn't to say that everything is the same or better than it was. Just that some things are awesome now, it's just difficult to appreciate them as much.

Maybe. I know that no one who starts GK is thinking about winning tournaments, probablly the same with someone starting something like SW or BA. But there is a big difference between your army Working As Intended, but not winning the biggest of biggest events all year long. And your army just not working. Imagine if knights were in a state where all the knights and castellans plain sucked, but halverins were mid low tier as long as their had a screen in front and in the back. People who picked up knights because they like big robots wouldn't be happy, if the way to play was start with buying 1200pts of IG.

I introduced a work colleague to the hobby last year. I proposed it like a venn diagram. There's some folks who love the lore the extremes of this are reading the black library books and even role playing and fan fiction. Theres some folks who love the hobbying and painting and the extremes of this like converting and kitbashing. There's some folks who love the game as a game. The venn diagram shows that there are some that like all of it and others that pick and choose. Thats the way it is now.

Back in roguetrader and 2nd ed things were different. GW were building something. The venn diagram dodn't have as much game and as much lore in it. As the company has grown and the IP has been strengthened there so much more to do but in some case so much less.

In my venn diagram I see the converting and kitbashing to be shrinking and the game and lore to be expanding exponentially with so much more story content and a refocus on competitive play. Why is this? In some parts thats to do with money. The recasters and alternative miniatures are one of the reasons. GW are a PLC and work primarily to protect their shareprice and so they have chosen (sadly imho) to reduce the variabiity and customisability to protect their revenue and prevent others from making money from their IP.

Karol wrote:

 Adeptus Doritos wrote:
Now, a lot of 40k kits feel like a toy with some assembly required.

I quite enjoyed the whole "You wanna make this dude? Kitbash and convert it like a real hobbyist and slice your finger while doing it."

But there are factions that have it like that still. GK for example don't have a chapter master or brother captin model, no champion, no GM NDK model everything has to be converted. Other stuff is only done by FW, and not everyone wants to buy recasts. So people do convert most of their armies.

I think it's a mix of making the game simpler for people to jump in and players in the past often complaining about "randumb charts" and lack of balance.

People that jump in to the game like that have to be really lucky with their initial faction and model picks, otherwise they get burned out real quick. But maybe that is the goal. Impulse buy 1000-1500pts get sick how bad it is, and then forced to buy a real army, means more money spent per player picking up the game.

So most people in 40k convert their armies? Or most GK players? Seems you are trying to fudge a defense here.

And how are GKs really a great base example for flexing interesting/unique conversions? GKs, one of the mary sues of space marines?

It's all a part of GW growing their audience and consciously working to penetrate the mainstream. Everything GW is doing now is identical to what all major video games companies started doing around 15 years ago. Things like streamlining and simplifying their rulesets. Sanding away anything that could even remotely be considered unsavory or controversial from their lore and art direction. Prioritizing community engagement and player feedback. Lowering barrier to entry and improving accessibility and inclusivity all around. This is all very run-of-the-mill modern product development stuff that the software industry has exploited for years. GW is just playing catch-up.

If you were a fan of video games in the early 90s and watched it evolve from being this niche, nerdy pastime to the watered-down, mainstream, skinner box-fest we have now, then everything GW has been up to lately should look very familiar.

Humans tend to get dumber in large groups. Replace the word "humans" with "audiences" and it becomes really clear how GW is planning to shift its game plan in order to succeed in our new globalized economy.

GW has always fundamentally missed things. For years now they've had the approach that models come first and everything else comes second, if at all.

However as long as the GW fanbase only cares about models and not anything else, it'll never change. Their financial success recently after they "changed" (even though they really didn't change as much as take their head out of the sand) showed that the majority of GW's fans don't care about the game, even when they claim they do. So GW has no reason to go back and change the fundamentals since it's been proven that they can be tremendously successful without putting real effort in as long as they pump out overpriced, expensive models for the people who will snatch up anything they make.

This is why you see people who legitimately will proclaim every new model as amazing and the best model they've ever made, constantly dismiss anything not GW as "looking like gak" simply because it doesn't have the GW aesthetics, and why you see communities that play GW games despite its rules simply because it has enough traction that there's no point to try and play a better game if most of your people don't want to invest in something else.

 slave.entity wrote:
If you were a fan of video games in the early 90s and watched it evolve from being this niche, nerdy pastime to the watered-down, mainstream, skinner box-fest we have now, then everything GW has been up to lately should look very familiar.

Once you start talking about video games and comparing them to 40k, I start wondering how many times someone at GW has examined the possibility of 'blind bags' with 'super special characters' limited to 1 per 1000 boxes of Primaris Lieutenants.

 Adeptus Doritos wrote:

 slave.entity wrote:
If you were a fan of video games in the early 90s and watched it evolve from being this niche, nerdy pastime to the watered-down, mainstream, skinner box-fest we have now, then everything GW has been up to lately should look very familiar.

Once you start talking about video games and comparing them to 40k, I start wondering how many times someone at GW has examined the possibility of 'blind bags' with 'super special characters' limited to 1 per 1000 boxes of Primaris Lieutenants.

They did: Space Marine Heroes.