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The fluff is missed most by myself compared to the tepid fluff currently, also the rules are a big loss in comparison to the shallow puddle that is AoS.

I mean in regards to the fluff there were cities that had more and better fluff than the entire world of AoS.

 auticus wrote:
As in everything though there will be a time when the aos chapter will be viewed through what people called rose colored nostalgia when the next version of fantasy emerges from games workshop, whatever and whenever that may be.

And the people that loved the design decisions of aos will vent frustration. And the people that love the new direction will call that nostalgia.

The cycle of life?

Fair point. Definitely truth in this.

SeanDrake wrote:
The fluff is missed most by myself compared to the tepid fluff currently, also the rules are a big loss in comparison to the shallow puddle that is AoS.

I mean in regards to the fluff there were cities that had more and better fluff than the entire world of AoS.

Extremely subjective.

While I do enjoy AoS a decent amount, I do miss a fair bit of things from Fantasy.

I miss the feeling of an army being an army. With a lot of the ways to make elite things into battleline and such it makes the game feel less like an army vs army style of battle and more of a hodgepodge of models sometimes. While I get that it can be fun to run an army made up of just models you like such as the new CoS with nothing but steam tanks, it really takes away that feeling of army on army battle for me.

The old world was so nice to me because it was easy to envision it as a setting and a world. You could understand and get a sense for how things were in certain locations and the AoS Realms just don't do it for me.

Since we don't have all the many years of background history and such to go off, it makes a lot of armies feel kind of bland to me. There are so few named heroes for most armies that I miss being able to get caught up in various heroes stories and personalities. I also feel a bit sad when I use and fight against those old heroes now reduced to generic versions because I remember their stories and how cool some of them were.

I also miss how wizards and magic used to be. With almost all wizards now being able to cast 1-2 spells and everyone having the same 2 basic spells it makes most of the wizards just feel less interesting to me. I liked having the lores of magic and many of the spells we used to have felt a bit more interesting than a lot of the ones we have now. It feels like spells this day are just +1/-1 to a stat like hit, wound, armour or something like do 1-6 mortal wounds. Endless spells also don't really do it for me since a lot of times my opponent can control it and use it against me so I feel like they aren't really worth it most the time.

I miss comparative hit rolls. I do not like fixed hit rolls and wound rolls.

I miss understanding how the common people survive (outside of the cities). Do they have farms or livestock in the realm of metal for example. Is it like a typical medieval world with some peculiarities?

I miss knights on horses (My poor Knights Panther).

The Old World was some of my favorite fluff, I loved modeling my own characters from plastic bits. I miss the old characters like Grimgor and Archaon.

Really I don't understand the necessity of round bases, if they'd kept squares we could use movement trays as optional. Use the trays and your units gain formation and morale bonuses, don't use the tray and your unit gains skirmisher rules. It would've been cool to see the same unit gain flexibility or staying power depending on how you deploy them.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Narissra wrote:

I also miss how wizards and magic used to be. With almost all wizards now being able to cast 1-2 spells and everyone having the same 2 basic spells it makes most of the wizards just feel less interesting to me. I liked having the lores of magic and many of the spells we used to have felt a bit more interesting than a lot of the ones we have now. It feels like spells this day are just +1/-1 to a stat like hit, wound, armour or something like do 1-6 mortal wounds. Endless spells also don't really do it for me since a lot of times my opponent can control it and use it against me so I feel like they aren't really worth it most the time.

Dude, I miss how lores totally affected your army. Building my lizards (remember them) around Lore of Life was a really different list than, say, Beasts.

Lore of light was nice on lizards as well.
"Oh, think my lizards are initiative 1? Well, they are now initiative 10"

I miss the whole Old World. It was a magnificent land to place all the battles in. It had one of the most unique vibes I have ever gotten from a fantasy setting. The army I miss most is the Britonians. Everyone could bring the same army and they all would look different. It was a real riot of colors.

CthuluIsSpy and auticus cover what i miss in general, But i also miss my elves being a thing.
I loved my ranks of glade guard :( and was waiting for new ones for so long and GW just Disipoint me.

Also a undead faction that had some real bite to the themes and story behind them. I just cannot get into the new Negash, He just makes me think of the Big Dumb bad guy now.

Pointer5 wrote:
I miss the whole Old World. It was a magnificent land to place all the battles in. It had one of the most unique vibes I have ever gotten from a fantasy setting. The army I miss most is the Britonians. Everyone could bring the same army and they all would look different. It was a real riot of colors.

The old world was soo good. We still get a lot of interest for our mordheim campaigns from the Total war game crowd.
Vermintide as well has had a few people show interest, but i think a lot of people are surprised learning that the game world in total war has been dropped.

I had gone over to KoW before AoS hit, so I cant really say I miss much rulewise. Lorewise though I miss the Old World, it had its flaws, but it really is one of the more enjoyable fantasy settings out there

Lorewise? EVERYTHING before End Times. That was a hot mess.

Ruleswise? I went back to 6th Ed. with an admittedly small group, so I'm good there. The nice part is the group is slowly growing.

How do I handle AOS? When I want to play Magic: The Gathering, I don't do so with my Warhammer stuff. So I handle AOS by ignoring it. My life is much happier because of that.

 Narissra wrote:
The old world was so nice to me because it was easy to envision it as a setting and a world. You could understand and get a sense for how things were in certain locations and the AoS Realms just don't do it for me.

Definitely. Things are still messy in the mortal realms, there's no real sense of the history or structure. Everything started with the Sigmar reconquista of the mortal realms, although there are ancient ruins and people, it's hard to care for them and it'd require a talented writer to convince me otherwise. I enjoy the maps that the old WHFB books have, it simply gives me a point of origin, making it easier to immerse myself with the story and characters.

6th ed best ed IMO.

 Knight wrote:

 Narissra wrote:
The old world was so nice to me because it was easy to envision it as a setting and a world. You could understand and get a sense for how things were in certain locations and the AoS Realms just don't do it for me.

Definitely. Things are still messy in the mortal realms, there's no real sense of the history or structure. Everything started with the Sigmar reconquista of the mortal realms, although there are ancient ruins and people, it's hard to care for them and it'd require a talented writer to convince me otherwise. I enjoy the maps that the old WHFB books have, it simply gives me a point of origin, making it easier to immerse myself with the story and characters.

I do notice this with my Idoneth (the only foray into AOS I've done so far) this is definitely my biggest confusion. So...where are my guys? Where do they live in relation to the other races? I get that they're in the ocean, but like...what ocean, where?

Love the models. But, if I'm being honest, they've played more games as counts-as exodites in my 40k armies than as AOS idoneth.

 Narissra wrote:

The old world was so nice to me because it was easy to envision it as a setting and a world.

Not hard when all the creative changes from Earth were replacing certain groups of people with elves or lizards

Kholek.
Throgg and armored Chaos ogres

How's that a bad thing though? That's like, fantasy world building 101. Not everything has to be a super special creative snowflake.

It's not bad, but it's funny when you consider that people call Old World "unique" in this thread, by virtue of being least unique fantasy world to be ever devised short of alt-history genre. Strip away the mental shortcut of Empire being HRE with magic, and you're left with a setting as ill-defined as AoS. Move the focus away from Empire, and you have no clue how HE society works, short of "they have a king". What's HE farming system? What do they farm? Do they farm, or is their society so small in numbers they can get by on hunting and gathering? Either never described or maybe given one line somewhere in some obscure BL publication. The lore isn't deeper than AoS one, it just relies on you filling in the blanks with actual historical references.

Is there are a place where one could get to know more about warhammer role, before age of sigmar?

Cronch wrote:
It's not bad, but it's funny when you consider that people call Old World "unique" in this thread, by virtue of being least unique fantasy world to be ever devised short of alt-history genre. Strip away the mental shortcut of Empire being HRE with magic, and you're left with a setting as ill-defined as AoS. Move the focus away from Empire, and you have no clue how HE society works, short of "they have a king". What's HE farming system? What do they farm? Do they farm, or is their society so small in numbers they can get by on hunting and gathering? Either never described or maybe given one line somewhere in some obscure BL publication. The lore isn't deeper than AoS one, it just relies on you filling in the blanks with actual historical references.

I always viewed the old WHFB as just generic European history, but now with FANTASY.

Otherwise I really think we'll see rank and file when they release AoS Warmaster or something similar.

I don't think there is anything to lead us to believe that GW will ever do a warmaster type game unless its a one shot box game. Warmaster and what it entails would go over the head of a vast majority of the AOS playerbase and is probably the polar opposite of anything that they'd be interested in.

I mean, if they did release AoS Warmaster, there'd be a large AoS 28mm army on sale on ebay very soon, because I still hold that Warmaster was the best game GW ever written. Sadly it went over the heads of majority of WFB players, so it died too soon Which is the story of most of the really good Specialist games, honestly.

Warmaster is in my opinion the greatest GW tragedy. Even greater than the end times sacking thousands of dollars of my collection overnight.

I will say between WHFB 6th and Warmaster, those are to me the tippy top of the GW fantasy gamesets.

Warmaster's failing was not in its rules, but in its delivery. Some of it puzzles me because you can literally transport an entire warmaster army in a shoe box.

However, the 6-8mm scale of warmaster put off a lot of people who liked the 28mm scale of warhammer. Additionally even back then hero hammer was the thing fapped to most and warmaster characters were only support pieces. They could not by themselves wipe out chunks of army and that turned off a lot of players. The concept of having to use an entire army as a whole to win games instead of being able to use a ballpean hammer to sledge your way to victory, which is how many games are today and were moving towards back then, was offputting because using the entire army is a lot more difficult than maneuvering and executing a single death star.

Last - mixing of the scales was looked down on because that meant you needed to also have in your possession or access to not only normal warhammer scale terrain, but now warmaster scale terrain.

At its zenith we had like 6-7 warmaster players (back in 1999) compared to our 35 player warhammer club and all of those players were also 100% historical players.

This is one reason I got excited about Conquest. Alessio has blended warhammer with warmaster only at standard scale.

There is also Hail Caesar which draws heavily on the warmaster foundations, but is exclusively historical (there is a fantasy variant that is unofficial)

If GW did produce an actual warmaster type game with AOS lore (meaning movement matters, battlefield management matters, listbuilding is not your crutch, and you aren't creating all steam tank armies) then I too would be all in.

 auticus wrote:


Additionally even back then hero hammer was the thing fapped to most and warmaster characters were only support pieces. They could not by themselves wipe out chunks of army and that turned off a lot of players. The concept of having to use an entire army as a whole to win games instead of being able to use a ballpean hammer to sledge your way to victory, which is how many games are today and were moving towards back then, was offputting because using the entire army is a lot more difficult than maneuvering and executing a single death star.


This is one reason I got excited about Conquest. Alessio has blended warhammer with warmaster only at standard scale.

Yeah, Warmaster sounded great. I do understand the hesitation about the scale though; 8mm sounds pretty small and difficult to paint.
Conquest does look really appealing and I hope it does well, but I don't like the morale rules all that much and there's still not a whiff of it in France. If it does catch on though I will pick up an army. Dunno whether to go with Dweghom, or to wait for them to release other armies.

If they brought back close order formations in AoS, I might be tempted to return, provided the names aren't too cringeworthy.
I still don't like the lore and aesthetic, but 1 out of 3 isn't bad, and I still play Necrons even after Ward had his way with them, because they are still mechanically necrons.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Cronch wrote:
It's not bad, but it's funny when you consider that people call Old World "unique" in this thread, by virtue of being least unique fantasy world to be ever devised short of alt-history genre. Strip away the mental shortcut of Empire being HRE with magic, and you're left with a setting as ill-defined as AoS. What's HE farming system? What do they farm? Do they farm, or is their society so small in numbers they can get by on hunting and gathering?

Considering how Saphery is known for its wine, I dare say that the High Elves do know something about agriculture.
Yeah, the Empire is based on the Holy Roman Empire, but there's still enough stuff for it to be its own thing, and I'm pretty sure the Army Books describe the Imperial Realms and how the politics work.
HRE with magic is just short hand, really. 40k is also pretty derivative, but that doesn't stop it from being its own thing.

With AoS it feels like they want to make something 100% new unique, but without a framework to work with it feels really undeveloped, like really amateurish fan fiction. Its something they should have been working on for more than a decade. That's how Conquest was written, and it uses historical derivations to boot.

I was hoping this thread would make it further before going off the rails.

Edit: And the thread went back on the rails after this post... Coincidence?

I miss how WHFB was low fantasy compared to AoS, and grounded in the real world.

It was interesting to me how whereas 40K focused on superhuman space marines, the protagonist/focus of WHFB was the Empire, largely composed of Renaissance-era foot troops and a scattering of fantasy technology.

Even when playing the non-Empire factions, they were fairly grounded- fantasy staple races with comparable technology level. That made the really fantastic stuff like dragons or giants or vampires really stand out.

AoS lacks that 'baseline'. The poster boys are demigods, every faction has over-the-top monsters, and you can take an 'army' that's just a cadre of specialists if you want.

I love the imagery of Landsknecht with swords and shields fighting rat-men in the tunnels under a generic Germanic city. It's grim and gothic, and blends real-world history with its fantasy, to create concepts that are recognizable but still have their own twists.

Golden-armored reincarnated warriors fighting bone golems in the mystical plane of whatever has no 'hook' to me.

To be fair, there was quite a bit of fluff on how the different societies in the Old World worked. Not an exhaustive study on their cultural, economic and political structure (that would have been very cool!) but many articles like Olde Weirde's Incunabulum in White Dwarf gave proper descriptions about many regions and their inhabitants (norse culture, sylvania, troll country, hellpit, or even that Cathay explorer that hung out with the lizardmen) or those short stories describing a specific event (the night of sacrifice-thingy for Dark Elves or that Empire Engineer that uses warpstone to create modern heaters).

The fact it was some sort of alt-history regarding geography or political organization also gave it a proper ground. For example, if we know how a federal monarchy (or other similar systems) more or less works in the real world, we can also more or less deduct how the High Elves political system worked without need of every single detail. A King elected by other sovereigns with all the ensuing struggles it implies. So it's easy to get.
Basically, my point is that the Old World setting allowed it to have some sort of connection with something we know, which a lot of people perceived as having a foundation and simpler to relate to which they added tons of books, articles and material that cemented the fantasy-stuff to giving it the "Warhammer feel".

I think this is heavily opposed to what AoS is, as it wants to be completely out-there. Which is fine, unless you don't properly explain what are you actually trying to build. If from the very beginning AoS had a book that gave detailed insight to a new reality (the mortal realms), it would have been very favorable. Think a book like Rogue Trader, which presents something new in quite a bit of detail as to have people understand the designer's original idea. Or you can also go the Conquest road, have very clear fluff in droves that you release little by little with a structure and proper narrative thought out in advance. AoS did neither, and it shows.


To stay more on topic, I don't really miss anything of the old days, as I still play and read the old stuff just as if it were day 1
And I never envisioned AoS as a replacement of whfb, more like something totally new so there is just nothing that makes me think "I wish they kept this or that" because everything seems so incompatible. I was happy playing both games when AoS rolled out, but since v.2. dropped they have been taking the game into a direction I happen to dislike so I could probably say I miss the old days of AoS hahaha (in terms of gaming and miniatures... the official fluff never was and still isn't remotely interesting).

 catbarf wrote:
I miss how WHFB was low fantasy compared to AoS, and grounded in the real world.

This line always amuses me when someone talks about dead fantasy.

 Inquisitor Gideon wrote:

 catbarf wrote:
I miss how WHFB was low fantasy compared to AoS, and grounded in the real world.

This line always amuses me when someone talks about dead fantasy.

I'm afraid I have no idea what you're trying to say.

 catbarf wrote:
I miss how WHFB was low fantasy compared to AoS, and grounded in the real world.

It was interesting to me how whereas 40K focused on superhuman space marines, the protagonist/focus of WHFB was the Empire, largely composed of Renaissance-era foot troops and a scattering of fantasy technology.

Even when playing the non-Empire factions, they were fairly grounded- fantasy staple races with comparable technology level. That made the really fantastic stuff like dragons or giants or vampires really stand out.

AoS lacks that 'baseline'. The poster boys are demigods, every faction has over-the-top monsters, and you can take an 'army' that's just a cadre of specialists if you want.

I love the imagery of Landsknecht with swords and shields fighting rat-men in the tunnels under a generic Germanic city. It's grim and gothic, and blends real-world history with its fantasy, to create concepts that are recognizable but still have their own twists.

Golden-armored reincarnated warriors fighting bone golems in the mystical plane of whatever has no 'hook' to me.

I miss the WHFB style of fantasy as well. But I also like AoS's style of fantasy for what it is. What I do not miss was the strange pseudo-zone that WHFB got into starting around Storm of Magic where it felt like one level that GW wanted to be another level and the fluff was stuck in an identity crisis in-between.