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In something of a surprise (to me anyway) announcement it seems Warlord Games will no longer be developing Beyond the Gates of Antares.


https://warlord-community.warlordgames.com/the-future-of-beyond-the-gates-of-antares/?__s=aim2cn1jvjudi3hxypqr

Reportedly Rick Priestly and Tim Bancroft will continue the game with a free PDF Second Edition then further development in the future.

Never seen it played outside of a show.

 Grumpy Gnome wrote:

the-future-of-beyond-the-gates-of-antares

This is reminiscent of White Dwarf years ago when the Specialist Games were being culled.

Every article that was titled 'The Future of <insert game>' always meant it had no future.

Interestingly it seems the game will still be supported by Skytrex quite how this'll work I'm not sure. I've got a game of it onTuesday.

Was Warlord really supporting it in the first place?

 Theophony wrote:
Was Warlord really supporting it in the first place?

Sorta? The second edition was almost ready (and it will be released, from what I hear). There's also a big set of miniatures for all factions, but not many newer releases. I don't find that too weird in itself, as many smaller games tend to be like that.

They seem to be looking into STLs too (not sure if they mean community or by them).

They also cut some percentage of their US sales by making the US pay a minimum shipping of $25. When a $14 direct only unit if four miniatures costs almost $40 to arrive at your customer’s house, you may be doing something wrong

 privateer4hire wrote:
They also cut some percentage of their US sales by making the US pay a minimum shipping of $25. When a $14 direct only unit if four miniatures costs almost $40 to arrive at your customer’s house, you may be doing something wrong

And the move to Skytrek won't do them any favours in that regard, as they add the EU to the list of customers that will have that issue.

 Grumpy Gnome wrote:
In something of a surprise (to me anyway) announcement it seems Warlord Games will no longer be developing Beyond the Gates of Antares.


https://warlord-community.warlordgames.com/the-future-of-beyond-the-gates-of-antares/?__s=aim2cn1jvjudi3hxypqr

Reportedly Rick Priestly and Tim Bancroft will continue the game with a free PDF Second Edition then further development in the future.

I hope the second edition has more planning than the paper napkin's worth of scribbles and one half done mini they tried to crowdfund this with initially now that they're back on their own again without oversight. All half-joking aside, I did like the Algoryn models and the overall look of the faction and hope this game doesn't disappear.

There's a tight little game screaming to be let out of that big rulebook. Where Rogue Trader 40k was an amazing, atmospheric mess stuffed full of ideas, the Antares universe is just dull and incomprehensible. I do love that they tried to do a clean, high-tech universe with "networked" warfare, and actual gameplay was a lot of fun once you waded through the book to locate different drone and weapon rules.

An edited 2nd edition may have helped the game immensely, but I guess now isn't the time to be taking risks. Too many mistakes at launch - I see why Warlord wanted to get the Ghar battlesuits done in plastic as early as possible, but they overcomplicated the starter set. Crucially, they made for dull and weirdly "off" balance in those critical early review games.

It's a good update of the Bolt Action core rules.
In hindsight, it's very different - coping with vehicles and battlesuits is about either saturation shooting to get a lucky roll, or pinning them using specialist ammo. It's not 40k either, where heavy weapons are common.

The minis are a mixed bag. The metals coincided with an upturn in casting quality at Warlord and some, like the C3 drop troops, are among my favourite metal figures ever. The Isorians were at least an attempt to do something different. I use plastic Ghar battlesuits and support drones in way too many other games in 15 as well as 28mm. Too many others are just bad figures, sadly. Scaling between metal, plastic and resin figures was all over the place in the early C3 releases too.

Best of luck to them - it's always sad to see a game go.

I now plan to retire a billionaire on the back of all the plastic and metal I've accumulated for the game...

 Momotaro wrote:

I now plan to retire a billionaire on the back of all the plastic and metal I've accumulated for the game...

Retire? Gamers never retire; we all eventually die and pass on the responsibility to paint. The pile of shame is seemingly self replicating.

Some of the plastics are good. Hope to pick some up on sale somewhere. Me and the family have had a lot of fun doing conversions with the battlesuits.

I like their ideas, but I still wish the Ghar battleships were actually big enough to fit a Ghar. I know they shrink them to fit them inside, but if they were the size of an actual dreadnought then it would have felt more atmospheric.

I like the Concord a lot, wish the boromite were plastic, and the Isorians were more than chaos version of the C3.

Oh no.

Anyway.

Who?

Shame as it is a solid system. I think the sci-fi gaming market is extremely difficult to get into. 40k and Star Wars are just too big to allow any competition survive.

The game should have been a light Skirmish game to begin with.

I'll be snatching up the minis as I come across the whole... two, or so.

Antares might have caught on better if they'd done a small number of factions in all-plastic instead of doing a large number of factions with one plastic kit each and loads of metal.

 AnomanderRake wrote:
Antares might have caught on better if they'd done a small number of factions in all-plastic instead of doing a large number of factions with one plastic kit each and loads of metal.

The availability did them NO favors.

My local shop pretty much wrote it off, because of the lack of availability. Then the whole 2 figures they had when they actually got them in.


That did the game no favors at all. If anything, that ran future players off.

 Grot 6 wrote:
The game should have been a light Skirmish game to begin with.

I'll be snatching up the minis as I come across the whole... two, or so.

Agreed. I think there is too big of a rush to jump into the mass battle pool. I fully realize that Ben Kingsl.. I mean Rick Priestly was there front and center for the conversion of 40k from an RPG skirmish game hybrid to mass battle but he should have followed that process as well IMO.


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 AnomanderRake wrote:
Antares might have caught on better if they'd done a small number of factions in all-plastic instead of doing a large number of factions with one plastic kit each and loads of metal.

That one's trickier due to the huge upfront cost that they apparently didn't have and/or want to spend. In the decade since with the advent of affordable 3d printing and now semi-automated resin printing like Siocast, I think they'd have benefited from both. I agree that it would have been better in plastic though for a mass battle game.

The unit and weapons rules are a mess of complexity for what seems like complexity’s sake. There are rpgs with less detailed rules for weapons. Also, when you are looking up a rule, you are often cross referenced into multiple exceptions often written in paragraph form.

The standard human troopers have plasma carbines and HL armor.

The guns shoot in two modes. That’s not overly complicated. The armor does the following:
- At less than 10”, the armor adds a +1 to saves EXCEPT for blast hits
-At ranges > 10”, the armor boosts saves by 2+ EXCEPT for blasts
-Against any blast, it’s a 3+ save bonus
-Mounted troops with the armor gain an additional +1 added to all above saves

Those are the basic human dudes and there’s already that many effects/modifiers to track. That might be fine for a dozen or fewer models but the game is marketed as large forces play.

I want to like it but it’s too much like checking trig tables YMMV.

SAD.

I like the game and models. Glad it's not completely dead (yet).

That's a shame. I did pick up the boxset when it was released but struggled to find opponents for it. It's a shame, as I think the game mechanics were pretty good (as an adaptation of Bolt Action) and some of the concepts were quite cool - the little goblin guys in the big mecha suits (the Ghar I think) and also the human descendants that had merged with alien tech and were kind of spidery-looking. So not really sure why it didn't take off (at least locally) - maybe people in the UK are into GW for sci-fi/fantasy stuff, and then go to Warlord when they want to do historicals?

I also remember when they first tried to launch the game there was a failed Kickstarter campaign, but there were some really cool ideas - having a persistent, live campaign where players could submit their results and it actually updated the in-game universe and new lore. Always thought that was a really cool idea and just think it didn't have the fully formed admin or IT work behind it to realise its potential. Now that GW have uncorked the bottle and moved the 40k universe forward, I wouldn't be at all surprised if we see something like that in the future - it would certainly be an exciting and interesting way to keep players engaged, make use of social media, and would be easily possible using current tech.

I’ve always liked supporting Rick’s games as his rulesets are always fun, but absolutely none of the models appealed to me at all. I hope it sticks around though for its players - wherever and whoever they are.

Great game. Solid rules. No one played it. Because 40k or Legion.

I liked the rules for it, but the lore, factions and minis left me cold. Ghar was perhaps the most interesting, but unfortunately just barely so.

Yeah, mark me down as another "bolt action but SF sounds cool, but none of these factions visually capture my interest or make me want to dig further to find sub-ins that do."

Probably will pick up the pdf when it comes out though.

Same here. Good rules, but none of the factions really grabbed me. The designs were just okay, nothing to really get excited about. Closest was the Ghar, that is an interesting concept. And the concord models are nice. With cooler models it would have been more appealing. From the start I liked the description of the Isorians, but those took so long to come out.

I recently sold my Freeborn because every time I went to pick them up to paint, I lost interest.

It's a shame because there's definitely a good set of rules there (but it really, really needs a clean up), and I like the cleaner, high tech aesthetic of the setting. If the Isorians got plastic releases I'd be interested in getting them. Unfortunately it seems like all the plastic releases got funneled into Concord and Ghar.

I still think it'd do well if 2nd Edition was just a sci-fi version of Warlords of Erehwon: d10 based, order die activation, and open points architecture so players can design their own units. That gives you an avenue into 40k and Legion players (maybe even Warmachine/Hordes) who've maybe heard good things about Bolt Action but don't want to play WW2.

BtGoA is a lot of fun to play - we had a good gaming group for a while. There are some great mechanics that IMO make the game significantly more engaging than Bolt Action 2nd edition. The reaction system make it a very dynamic game.

The scenarios in the game were a huge weak point - hopefully 2nd edition fixes that.

Starter box was another issue, as some have identified, but once again that would have been easy to deal with for 2nd edition.

Too bad Warlord is abandoning it - I think it's a higher potential game than a lot of the games they churn out and abandon. Given that it already has a good miniature range, it would have been easy for Warlord to release a new edition with a new starter to give it a chance before cutting it loose.