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As someone who never had much interest in Age of Sigmar after classic Warhammer Fantasy was put to rest and who is eagerly awaiting the Old World I had the thought, how would I feel if they End Times'd 40k? I've just not enjoyed 40K in any capacity since the switch to 8th edition, I prefer my old crunchier games, but I also appreciate that other players prefer the sleeker new approach and it occurred to me, we could both be made happy.

We all know the Space Marines codex has spiraled out of control with its unit count and needs a trim badly. What if GW decided to do something major in the lore, maybe big Emps finally dies and wakes up a god in the warp or something, something major to push the narrative forward. We're far enough in the future that no new Firstborn are being created and they've all long since perished in battle. Cut the Marine codex down to Primaris only, do some daring new things with the lore, introduce new factions and characters, let Eldar finally die off and re-awaken Ynead and have the Ynnari come to the fore. Maybe finally find out why the Tyranids are here or found the Milky Way. Let their imaginations run wild not constrained by so much of the past.

Then at the same time release a Warhammer 40K classic done in Old World style. Release a rules system for old school players to play armies like back in the day with more classic rules and miniatures, this is where your classic Eldar and Firstborn can exist. You could even choose a particular point in the lore's past like Old World is doing, maybe set in the Age of Apostasy and really get to delve into the religion of the Imperium.

Would you enjoy that prospect? Let current 40K move off into bold new directions like AoS has done but leave something in place to please the legacy players or just gamers who enjoy a different sort of game type.

 Zeruel13 wrote:

Would you enjoy that prospect? Let current 40K move off into bold new directions like AoS has done but leave something in place to please the legacy players or just gamers who enjoy a different sort of game type.

I predict the general answer will be NO.

 Zeruel13 wrote:
As someone who never had much interest in Age of Sigmar after classic Warhammer Fantasy was put to rest and who is eagerly awaiting the Old World I had the thought, how would I feel if they End Times'd 40k? I've just not enjoyed 40K in any capacity since the switch to 8th edition, I prefer my old crunchier games, but I also appreciate that other players prefer the sleeker new approach and it occurred to me, we could both be made happy.

It sounds like you're proposing fluff changes to address your problems with the crunch. You could, presumably, just play a previous edition of 40k with those who of a similar mind. Massive fluff changes with a similar ruleset to the one we have now presumably wouldn't provide you with "crunchier" games. Adding an additional "old world" style system wouldn't accomplish anything that simply playing oldhammer or importing xenos rules into Horus Heresy doesn't accomplish already.

We all know the Space Marines codex has spiraled out of control with its unit count and needs a trim badly.

They've started getting a unit trim already. You don't need major fluff changes to make this happen. They just need to bite the bullet and finally say that primaris and firstborn marines are essentially the same thing and use a single profile to represent intercessors and tacticals, vanguard and assault intercessors, etc.

What if GW decided to do something major in the lore, maybe big Emps finally dies and wakes up a god in the warp or something, something major to push the narrative forward. We're far enough in the future that no new Firstborn are being created and they've all long since perished in battle. Cut the Marine codex down to Primaris only, do some daring new things with the lore, introduce new factions and characters, let Eldar finally die off and re-awaken Ynead and have the Ynnari come to the fore. Maybe finally find out why the Tyranids are here or found the Milky Way. Let their imaginations run wild not constrained by so much of the past.

The setting still has tons of space to explore and existing plothooks to advance. Blowing the setting up would throw all of that away. It's basically the opposite of what I want. The setting is also bloated with the number of factions and characters it has. GW has barely begun to actually utilize most the characters and factions it has. Blowing up what we already like just to replace an underexplored cast of characters with a new cast of underexplored characters (that we might not even like in the first place) seems silly.

Speaking as a marine player, I don't want all non-primaris units to suddenly vanish. I just want the redundant data sheets to get merged together; possibly including chapter-specific units where possible.

Speaking as a ynnari player, a big part of their appeal is that they're striving to help Ynnead be born. If they were ever to succeed, they wouldn't really be ynnari any more. They would no longer be desperately lashing out against their own destiny, burning twice as bright and half as long in pursuit of a faint hope for a slightly less horrible future.

Then at the same time release a Warhammer 40K classic done in Old World style. Release a rules system for old school players to play armies like back in the day with more classic rules and miniatures, this is where your classic Eldar and Firstborn can exist. You could even choose a particular point in the lore's past like Old World is doing, maybe set in the Age of Apostasy and really get to delve into the religion of the Imperium.

We already have Horus Heresy, and older editions of 40k still exist. Creating two additional versions of 40k seems like it would just split the fanbase and spread the release schedule even more thin.

Would you enjoy that prospect? Let current 40K move off into bold new directions like AoS has done but leave something in place to please the legacy players or just gamers who enjoy a different sort of game type.

Seems like a bad idea, personally. We haven't even see the returned loyalist primarchs in a room together yet. Yvraine hasn't had a proper on-screen chat with Yriel about the fact that he's wielding a crone sword. We've barely seen how Commorragh is doing in the wake of the disjunction that occurred when Yvraine died. There's way too much left to explore in the current setting to throw it all out the window.

Keep in mind, the point of the setting is more to be a setting for your games than to tell an overarching narrative. Over-focusing on a handful of named characters is one of the less popular aspects of recent lore decisions; not something to be doubled down on.

I'd love to see GW go the AoS route with 40K, at this point.

Have the rift currently cutting the galaxy in half expand, pulling the entire shebang into a quasi-Warp space where the designers can apply the same off-the-wall creativity that has gone into AoS to redesigning the 40K factions into something new and interesting.


There were rumours back when AoS was released that the original plan had been to shift both games to the same ruleset, Warmahordes style. That would be a handy way of making the game accessible to more players, and differentiating from a hypothetical 'Old Imperium' game.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Wyldhunt wrote:

Keep in mind, the point of the setting is more to be a setting for your games than to tell an overarching narrative. Over-focusing on a handful of named characters is one of the less popular aspects of recent lore decisions; not something to be doubled down on.

Thing is, that's precisely the problem that GW has made for themselves. They bowed to those who kept demanding to know what happened next, and so the setting moved forward and became something infinitely less interesting than how it was.

Returning to the concept of the game setting as a setting rather than a story, and moving the story forward through a completely separate ruleset would, IMO, be overall much better received. It would certainly be my preference... I'd much rather find out what happens to the setting when you push it forward several thousand years and introduce some major, actual change, than have a drip-feed of Primarchs and inconsequential (to the grand scheme of things) campaigns.

 insaniak wrote:

... redesigning the 40K factions into something new and interesting...

... became something infinitely less interesting than how it was...

... than have a drip-feed of Primarchs and inconsequential (to the grand scheme of things) campaigns...

So first of all: no matter what happens to 40k, I'm keeping all my 9th ed books until I find a version I like better... And I don't think I ever will- eliminating subfactions for everyone but marines set the game back a decade.

But personally, I would prefer they don't sunset 40k. Marines have a lot of units, but that's no reason to blow up the game. GW has started phasing out some of the firstborn units when Primaris duplicates are available, and they've gone a long way to blurring the line.

 Zeruel13 wrote:
let Eldar finally die off and re-awaken Ynead and have the Ynnari come to the fore.

I think this is a bit of a misunderstanding of the lore as established.

IF Ynead awakens, Slaanesh starves and dies and Eldar become MORE prolific, not less. It's the whole reason Yvraine and Eldrad want to awaken him.

If you want Eldar to die, that's far more likely to happen with the status quo than it is with a Ynead victory. With Emperor's Children on the way, there's no way Gw is sunsetting Slaanesh- doing so would spill over into virtually every game that GW produces, with the possible exceptions of Necromunda, BSF and Cursed City. You could argue that the Heresy Era would be unaffected, but because chaos gods are outside of time, others would disagree.

When Slaanesh was born, it became as if she had alwys existed; if she were to die, it would mean that she never lived. Now of course, GW can and would retcon that, but that would go over about as well as AoS 1.0.

PenitentJake wrote:

I think this is a bit of a misunderstanding of the lore as established.

IF Ynead awakens, Slaanesh starves and dies and Eldar become MORE prolific, not less. It's the whole reason Yvraine and Eldrad want to awaken him.

Sorta. Technically, the prophecy is that Ynnead will duke it out with Slaanesh and kill them off that way. The ynnari deny Slaanesh the satisfaction of eating their souls (for now) by essentially being a sort of living infinity circuit, but Slaanesh's defeat would be the result of a more direct conflict; not passive starvation. Depending on the fluff you focus on, this may or may not require the death or "death" of most of the living eldar to accomplish.

Following that, I'm not sure you'd see much of a population boom. Slaanesh presumably doesn't personally lower the life expectancy of the average eldar by *that much*, although not needing to worry about supplying baby craftworlders with waystones would be a factor. The big benefit of wiping out Slaanesh/Ynnead being present in the warp would be that eldar could start letting loose with their psychic powers again. So not necessarily "more" eldar than we have now, but the individual space elves might be a lot more scary. It's also suggested in a couple of places that the success of the ynnari might somehow restore the old pantheon. Which isn't necessarily a good thing for the eldar, but is worth mentioning.

When Slaanesh was born, it became as if she had alwys existed; if she were to die, it would mean that she never lived. Now of course, GW can and would retcon that, but that would go over about as well as AoS 1.0.

Well, we don't really know that, right? Slaanesh supposedly ate most of the eldar pantheon, but the eldar absolutely still know about them/seem to occassionally be able to find dregs of their power still in effect (see: what Asuryan is doing for the phoenix lords.)

When the ynnari were first introduced and it had been a long while since Slaanesh had received any love from GW, I thought maybe they'd shake up the status quo by having Ynnead beat them up. But that was before the big Slaaneshi range expansion and the introduction of several plot points that utilize Slaanesh. I'd be surprised if GW went through with killing off Slaanesh now.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Sincere question here. Not trying to be a jerk. Do you now/have you ever liked the 40k setting? For the most part, the factions in the setting still have most of the same traits they always have. Campaigns that ultimately don't matter much for the galaxy as a whole has always kind of been the case. (Which campaign in the past had a huge impact on the setting?) Whatever you liked about the setting in the past is probably still there. If you don't like some of the newer additions, you can probably just play in a corner of the galaxy where they never come up or even play a campaign set in M41 prior to the changes introduced when Guilliman woke up. It's all still there and a valid place for your games to take place in.

I get that you might not like some of the current lore/plotlines (and I'd be right there with you), and I get that a massive overhaul to the setting gives you more new lore to sink your teeth into than tidbits dolled out via campaigns. But if you dislike the current setting so much that you'd rather throw it out and start over... it kind of sounds like maybe what you really want is just a different game/setting entirely?

Again, not trying to be that guy. Just seems like you're throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Unless you just sincerely think that the new setting GW created to replace the current one would suddenly be significantly more interesting for some reason? Which would then beg the question, if you trust that they have such great fluff writing skills that they can improve on a franchise that has had people buying models for decades in a single attempt, why aren't they just using those same skills to write fluff that you'd enjoy in the current setting?

Which, respectfully, makes me wonder if you don't actually think the replacement setting would be great but are instead maybe just frustrated with the current setting and are writing from a place of frustration?

I played 40K from 2nd ed through to 6th (and am currently getting set up to start up again with 2nd ed all over again), and the setting was in no small part responsible both for me starting the game in the first place, and sticking with it for so long. But the longer it went on, and the more they fleshed out those things that were just vague hints in the early days, the less interesting it became overall. The Primarchs were far more interesting as legendary heroes of yore than as the literal-giant man-babies destroying the galaxy because Daddy didn't love them that GW revealed them to be. Bringing them back into 40K while not allowing that to actually have a significant impact (because the overall status-quo needs to be maintained for the setting to work) was thoroughly uninteresting as a result, and that aforementioned lack of any actual impact of the Primarchs being around made it all the more obvious that their reintroduction was nothing more than a sales tactic.

Maintaining the status quo is, I think, perhaps the biggest problem with advancing the story. When you have a setting that is fixed in place with the clock at 2 minutes to midnight, that's fine. You can flesh out extra bits of the setting, and nothing needs to change overall. But the further you advance the story in the name of bringing in fresh material, while simultaneously not actually changing anything significant, the more absurd it gets that nothing ever actually changes. And while you're updating existing pieces of the setting that people are attached to, you run the very real risk of alienating them if they don't like where the story goes.

That's what 'End Times'-ing the setting would let them fix. Lock the 40K setting in place and expand that universe as is... and save the advancement for a separate setting where the status quo can be completely different.

 Zeruel13 wrote:

Would you enjoy that prospect?

No, I don't particularly enjoy the idea of nerfing people/armies I don't like. I'm pretty much always on the side of more and more viable options so players have to make choices so not only do I disagree with your premise

We all know the Space Marines codex has spiraled out of control with its unit count and needs a trim badly.

The SM Codex doesn't need a trim, the rest of the codices need expansion.

"40k: The Old World" is very literally what 30k is.

Seriously. HH is that. Even down to not having all factions available, in the same vein with how we know TOW won't have all factions available. It's also an actual wargame, rather than a MTG wanna-be with hyper expensive tokens and significantly worse balance.

 Zeruel13 wrote:
Maybe finally find out why the Tyranids are here or found the Milky Way. .

Easy. Nom nom biomass. Consume. Produce more tyranids. Move in for next galaxy. Nom nom.

Personally, I don't really care any more what GW do with their property.

Them doing it doesn't give it any special legitimacy over what I might do myself, with my friends.

Like Insaniak I signed out of Official 40K some time around the start of 6e, and I'm not interested in what it has become and have moved on to making something I do like out of what used to be the setting.

I still read some stuff from the new storyline that interests me, Spears of the Emperor was good and I mostly enjoyed Siege of Terra and parts of the Horus Heresy, but my Heresy is pretty different and I'm not a big fan of primaris in background terms at all.

So I'm fine with them keeping doing what they're doing. I don't need them to blow up the setting to validate my POV, because I'd probably still disagree with their ideas if they did that, seeing as I disagree with their ideas now. AoS is to me a huge missed opportunity and not at all interesting to me, and I'm sad that they blew up the Old World and made a bunch of the models unavailable. The new stuff they're making doesn't appeal to me at all and is in a different scale to the old stuff, so now I've just moved on completely.

If I don't like stuff a company does, I just do it myself. I think it's a lot nicer for me that way, because I'm never frustrated at the company and I don't spend a lot of energy thinking about them.

40k End Times means one or more of the following happens:

- Chaos triumphs
- Nids eat everything
- Necrons all wake up
- Orks get on a really good WAAGGH
- Tau find the greatest good
- Something equally universe-changing occurs

I'm not sure I would want to play WH50k where this is the setting.

I wouldn't mind splitting the Grim Darkness Of The Far Future into 3 distinct splinters

30K - Imperium as depicted in HH

40K - Imperium as depicted in editions 1-6

50K - utterly primariokarted flanderized mess we have now and in the near future

My issue is the fact that I feel no strong belonging to current primaris era 40K nor to the current xenoless 30K. I am most at home with the way things were between Rogue Trader and whatever the time was when Primaris got announced.. and those times are becoming lost. I wouldnt give a toss what happened to the future timelines after such divides, I'd permanest myself into the 40K era and would keep yelling whippersnappers to get off my lawn

Why can't people just enjoy the setting as it is
Why must you move it forward? Do you think ww2 wargamers one day say to eachother, lets advance post ww2 and introduce weapons from the 80s? No, they would not. There are 1000s of battles and storys to create. Do a mission where you infiltrate a submarine base in norway, or desert warfare in tunisia. Change it up, but don't loose track of the setting.

Let people enjoy the wars on armageddon, the sieges of vraks or whatever. Those two are very well written warzones. Instead of waking up primarchs and replacing peoples collections, expand the setting! Introduce new battle zones.!New ways to play 40k. Not 41k or some other strange and unfamiliar gakshow.

There is nothing exiting with retconning peoples collections.

Yes to moving plot forward.
Hard no to doing it like Age of Sigmar.

I liked the fact 8th jumped forward 100 years and we got a "where are they now" run down for the factions. Even if a lot of it was whenever the Primaris are not on screen, all the other characters should be asking, "where's the Primaris?"

But GW clearly bottled it and now we have this weird "we've moved the clock forward about 10 minutes, and uh, a different set of issues are in suspended animation... but here are more Primarchs, enjoy".

40K in scale of the setting is so much bigger than WHFB.

In 40K, planets are destroyed really, really often. Even a catastrophe like Cadia losing a game of Conkers to a Blackstone Fortress only shifted the balance of power.

Because The Imperium is….vast. Its resources pretty near infinite as a result.

Yet the perils it face are also, necessarily, vast. The Hive Fleets for instance. If Terra falls, Chaos has a temporary win as The Imperium likely collapses, ending the greatest organised resistance to the Hive Fleets, who promptly start devouring en masse and become ever more potent a threat.

And without “everyone to Terra for a bit of Throne Tipping”, Chaos itself starts to lose cohesion.

Same with Orks. Without the Imperium’s crappy cohesion, Greenskins face less and less suitably organised resistance, and so they run out of control.


Necrons might simply figure “sod it, everyone back to bed, it’ll look better in the morning in another few million years, because frankly the Galaxy is a silly place right now”

Tyel wrote:
Yes to moving plot forward.
Hard no to doing it like Age of Sigmar.

I liked the fact 8th jumped forward 100 years and we got a "where are they now" run down for the factions. Even if a lot of it was whenever the Primaris are not on screen, all the other characters should be asking, "where's the Primaris?"

But GW clearly bottled it and now we have this weird "we've moved the clock forward about 10 minutes, and uh, a different set of issues are in suspended animation... but here are more Primarchs, enjoy".

I'm pretty sure they retconned the 100 year time skip down to 5 or 10 years, which I kind of hate.

The problem with moving the setting forward isn't the fact that it is happening at all, its the fact that it is not being done very well, and this was in part due to the fact that for whatever reason GW decided to pile like every major event possible in to 999m41 when they had a 10,000 year history to look into. I bet people would love seeing historical campaigns/rules/models based on events of the past, like Goge Vandire's jackassery or one of the many miniature civil wars in the Imperium. Heck, instead of a 5th 6th, or 7th sphere expansion, we can see some stories of the Damocles Gulf Crusade for example with releases for various Tau vassal races and some older style tech they used 'back in the day'. Instead its more moving the clock forwards a couple of years and jamming every possible major event possible into those years.

Personally I was fine with the 100 year jump but felt they failed to stick the landing, and should have kept that as the new status quo for a bit until they got everything settled, rather than changing how much time has passed, then moving time forwards again each edition, etc.

Gitdakka wrote:Why can't people just enjoy the setting as it is

People could say that about the current backlash to the setting as it currently is.

Let people enjoy the wars on armageddon, the sieges of vraks or whatever. Those two are very well written warzones. Instead of waking up primarchs and replacing peoples collections, expand the setting! Introduce new battle zones.!New ways to play 40k. Not 41k or some other strange and unfamiliar gakshow.

Why not both?

You can still play Vraks. You can still set your games on Armageddon. Primarchs existing doesn't change that you can still play games in "historical" battles. And you're not being "forced" to rebuy models. GW aren't going to break your door down and force you to add a Primarch into your army.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Sincere question here. Not trying to be a jerk. Do you now/have you ever liked the 40k setting? For the most part, the factions in the setting still have most of the same traits they always have. Campaigns that ultimately don't matter much for the galaxy as a whole has always kind of been the case. (Which campaign in the past had a huge impact on the setting?) Whatever you liked about the setting in the past is probably still there. If you don't like some of the newer additions, you can probably just play in a corner of the galaxy where they never come up or even play a campaign set in M41 prior to the changes introduced when Guilliman woke up. It's all still there and a valid place for your games to take place in.

Yeah, because if you like something, it means 100% of it is perfect and can't be improved

Maybe, just maybe, people who want change recognize what was good in the 80s could have become boring/stale/outmoded by now, and it could use some refresh? To take AoS example, Lumineth are not my cup of tea, but they are vastly more interesting and original faction than boring High Elves who are really just abridged, bland copy-paste from Tolkien. Or say AoS vampires, both kinds are massively better than old, tired Dracula cliche (down to town names) from FB. Or [insert hundred other examples].

Why we can't demand something fresh and interesting in 40K too? Why everything must be the same as it was in 30K? Do you have any idea how long a period 10K years is? CSM and 40K Marines should both be utterly alien and unrecognizable to 30K Great Crusade soldiers, even if they are ostensibly the same people, yet both are carbon copies of each other. Primaris are the very minimum that should have happened, and really, each great founding of SM chapters every millennium or so should come with its own Primaris change as the tactical and technological situation changes. The fact dumb HH writers ruined it by importing 40K tech and armor marks into 30K (even stuff that was supposed to be invented centuries if not millennia later!) was the worst thing that happened to the setting in last 15 years or so

Then you have the general tone of the setting. Namely, grimdumb. No, having each bolter shell be bathed in the blood of 50 infants (and this is only slightly exaggerated example) doesn't make the setting 'dark'. It makes it comically dumb. Have you read any proper grimdark French or Japanese works in last two decades or so? Because they make FB/40K look like a soft hippie tale, while making infinitely more sense internally and being just better stories overall. Which is just sad, because if anyone should be able to attract talent, it's a billion dollar company, and yet it's easily beaten by small independent authors.

And really, it's the people who want change and improvement are the ones who really like the setting, because they want it to grow and flourish. If the 'change nothing' brigade had its way, 40K would become completely irrelevant, dated, and frankly, now dead setting like hundreds of its competitors that refused to adapt.

 Gitdakka wrote:
Why can't people just enjoy the setting as it is
Why must you move it forward? Do you think ww2 wargamers one day say to eachother, lets advance post ww2 and introduce weapons from the 80s? No, they would not. There are 1000s of battles and storys to create. Do a mission where you infiltrate a submarine base in norway, or desert warfare in tunisia. Change it up, but don't loose track of the setting.

This is a really dumb take because if there is one setting that is fundamentally based on progress and is 99% progress at its very core, it's WW2. It's like complaining these dumb WW2 writers kept adding factions to the game, inventing Soviets and Muricans just to sell more minis, and it should have stayed ""pure"" sEttInG of European conflict ending with Nazi victory over France in 1940 because that's uh, grimdurk or something. Africa? Asia? Pacific? Why we need these dumb expansions? And what's that? Assault rifles? Jets? Main battle tanks? [insert all the idiotic anti-Primaris rants from other threads about developing new arms and vehicles here]. Everyone knows WW2 is just first 12 months of the conflict and wanting to move it forward is dumb, and especially screw you if you like Russians or American and you want to play as them, am I right?

Yeah, because if you like something, it means 100% of it is perfect and can't be improved

No need for sarcasm. My question was sincere. If you like something, wanting to throw it out seems like an unhelpful impulse.

If what you're looking for is the addition of new factions, we can do that without a massive time jump. Heck, LoV just came out.

If you want a shift in tone, again that can happen in the current setting. It has happened before.

If you want to see stories advance, that can happen in the current setting with smaller changes/time jumps or simply by focusing on characters without making them the center of the galaxy. They could release an awesome story about Yriel and what's he's been up to since the Fall of Biel-Tan that sees his character totally overhauled and dramatically changes Iyanden's situation tomorrow. Ahriman could finally snag some lore from the Black Library and start the hard work of uncursing rubricae one at a time through expensive rituals. Malys could finally launch her coup against Vect and take control of the Dark City, or she could spin off into a new storyline that explores her whole crystal heart thing. All of these plot threads can be explored without blowing up the setting.

 Gitdakka wrote:
Why can't people just enjoy the setting as it is
Why must you move it forward? Do you think ww2 wargamers one day say to eachother, lets advance post ww2 and introduce weapons from the 80s? No, they would not. There are 1000s of battles and storys to create. Do a mission where you infiltrate a submarine base in norway, or desert warfare in tunisia. Change it up, but don't loose track of the setting.

Let people enjoy the wars on armageddon, the sieges of vraks or whatever. Those two are very well written warzones. Instead of waking up primarchs and replacing peoples collections, expand the setting! Introduce new battle zones.!New ways to play 40k. Not 41k or some other strange and unfamiliar gakshow.

There is nothing exiting with retconning peoples collections.

People who enjoy historical games often do move on to other conflicts, so I think it’s an odd thing.

Battletech has a setting that’s continuously evolving, even if slowly and people still play in all the era to some degree.

GW just handled it very badly, the setting set at the final moments I think is actually a big excuse for how it was handled since I don’t think it was actually all that important to the setting itself.
When people want the setting to move, I think they just want more interesting moments to catch and more reason for some change.
The galaxy is huge, and honestly I think so many people just don’t get the size or the Time.
Especially bad at GW.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
It sounds like you're proposing fluff changes to address your problems with the crunch.

I think OP is more trying to assert a compromise between maintaining the 40K that they know and love, versus the continuing drive to add new units, new factions, new stories, new plot developments, new stuff. We can see right in this thread that there's a tension between people who want 40K to be a static setting where new releases explore the scope and history of that setting, and people who want 40K to be a dynamic setting with an overarching plot that moves forwards in time.

It's also worth noting that the plot advances OP suggests- Firstborn being gone, Eldar being subsumed into Ynnari, an AOS-ification of 40K- is, according to rumors, exactly what GW had intended for 8th Ed, until the utter disaster of AOS's launch convinced them to take a more conservative approach. And so we now have this uncomfortable tension between maintaining backwards compatibility (see: the utter insanity that is the Space Marine codex) and adding new content.

So while nobody needs GW's permission to play old editions, official rulesets tend to get more traction, and if GW were to officially recognize 'oldschool' 40K as its own thing it would allow them to be more liberal in their development of 'modern' 40K. They could trim bloat and take the lore and factions in new directions, without leaving people with classic armies out to dry. Will it actually ever happen? Doubtful. It's conceptually too similar to Horus Heresy, even if that game doesn't quite fulfill the niche OP is discussing.

Also, don't mind Irbis. I don't think I've ever seen them write a post that wasn't drive-by apoplectic rage about toy soldiers. Either needs therapy, or this is the outlet.

 Irbis wrote:
This is a really dumb take because if there is one setting that is fundamentally based on progress and is 99% progress at its very core, it's WW2. It's like complaining these dumb WW2 writers kept adding factions to the game, inventing Soviets and Muricans just to sell more minis, and it should have stayed ""pure"" sEttInG of European conflict ending with Nazi victory over France in 1940 because that's uh, grimdurk or something. Africa? Asia? Pacific? Why we need these dumb expansions? And what's that? Assault rifles? Jets? Main battle tanks? [insert all the idiotic anti-Primaris rants from other threads about developing new arms and vehicles here]. Everyone knows WW2 is just first 12 months of the conflict and wanting to move it forward is dumb, and especially screw you if you like Russians or American and you want to play as them, am I right?

I do kind of like this take.

 kurhanik wrote:
Personally I was fine with the 100 year jump but felt they failed to stick the landing, and should have kept that as the new status quo for a bit until they got everything settled, rather than changing how much time has passed, then moving time forwards again each edition, etc.

But yeah - this. Really I'd be happy with them doing anything with the fluff, so long as its good.
This is kind of how I felt about AoS. Instead they killed the old world so they could write some trash tier He-man fanfic. Its a bit better now - but at the time diabolical.

You read my post in a strange way. I said as explicitly as I could, expand the setting, don't retcon. Where gw fails is when they remove model lines and parts of peoples collections from the game.

That's not really the same as introducing the pacific to ww2. What would be the same if they stopped selling rules and models for the western theaters, while adding the pacific. Before calling someone dumb, maybe read their post properly.

Sure, add the new hot primaris if you like, but only if you dont remove regular marines.

 Sgt_Smudge wrote:

Gitdakka wrote:Why can't people just enjoy the setting as it is

People could say that about the current backlash to the setting as it currently is.

Let people enjoy the wars on armageddon, the sieges of vraks or whatever. Those two are very well written warzones. Instead of waking up primarchs and replacing peoples collections, expand the setting! Introduce new battle zones.!New ways to play 40k. Not 41k or some other strange and unfamiliar gakshow.

Why not both?

You can still play Vraks. You can still set your games on Armageddon. Primarchs existing doesn't change that you can still play games in "historical" battles. And you're not being "forced" to rebuy models. GW aren't going to break your door down and force you to add a Primarch into your army.

Well, GW are making one option harder, which is my personal biggest issue with the way Primaris have been introduced and Firstborn models phased out.

If I want to play Space Marines in a campaign set in the Badab War, or any of the Armageddon Wars, or the Fall of Cadia, or the Macharian Crusade, or the Siege of Vraks, or the Age of Apostasy, or the Reign of Blood, or the War of the Beast, or any of hundreds of other conflicts mentioned in a rich lore covering ten thousand years, I can now only buy models for the first few hundred years or the last 5-100 (depending on the timeline interpretation/retcon). Otherwise, the "correct" models are out-of-production. You can't buy MkVII Marines any more, outside of a few kits soon to be replaced.

GW's decision has made it much harder to play anything except their most recent narratives if you play Marines... which many people do. And those narratives... a lot of them are not GW's best works, lets put it that way. Even if they were, some of the older settings are brilliantly crafted too. The choices in model line narrow the scope of the setting much more than the lore choices "justifying" them.

Old World is to Fantasy as Horus Heresy is to 40K (this is GW’s stated aim) so we already have ‘40K Old World’.

We also had mini End Times in Gathering Storm or Psychic Awakening. But it never needed burning to the ground as 40K always sold orders of magnitude more than WHFB. So they retooled rather than reset. AOS was always a sales decision over a narrative one.

 JohnnyHell wrote:
Old World is to Fantasy as Horus Heresy is to 40K (this is GW’s stated aim) so we already have ‘40K Old World’.

We also had mini End Times in Gathering Storm or Psychic Awakening. But it never needed burning to the ground as 40K always sold orders of magnitude more than WHFB. So they retooled rather than reset. AOS was always a sales decision over a narrative one.

Bolded text is worth noting, I think. If you want to see the plot move forward with things being shaken up somewhat significantly, I think the fluff we got around the creation of the Cicatrix Maledictum, the return of primarchs, the creation of the ynnari, the return of the Silent King, etc... are pretty good examples of the direction a major time skip would move in. If they suddenly announced Warhammer 50k tomorrow, I'd expect to see something along the lines of all the primarchs having returned at some point, the eldar pantheon having been reborn following some Ynnead-related plot, the Silent King reuniting the 'crons, etc.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, if people don't like the recent major lore changes, what makes them think they'd like another round of the same taken further? Like, the possibility for an overall better setting/batch of lore exists, but is there a reason to think we'd get better lore and not just more awkward stuff like how Cawl and the primaris were handled?

GW is moving the story forward in entirely the wrong way.

Rather than moving to a new time and creating a new history etc, they've gone the myopic comic book protagonism angle.

They have decided that a narrative around a tiny cast of characters who apparently are now what the universe revolves around is the best way to create new story. No ork story can happen without Thraka, no imperial one without Guilliman or Dante, no eldar without Eldrad.

Instead of leaning into the unique quality 40k has as a pseudo historical setting that moves on galactic inertia, they've shrunk the scope down to the actions of a bunch of boring superheroes in a tiny time advancement.

Jump a 1000 years, reinvent all the factions, have new characters and new challenges.

treat the 41st millennium the way it treated the 31st, or the age of apostacy.

The profound and massive sense of 40k is entirely lost in the minutia of protagonists doing superhero crap and somehow that makes the galaxy turn.


I'll never not be angry at GW deciding that Abnett's writing is the best way to push 40k forward, rather than staying with the atmosphere and tone originally created by Priestley.

 Haighus wrote:
or the Age of Apostasy, or the Reign of Blood

With every fiber of my being I want this.

All six founding saints of the major Orders as primarch-style center-pieces and an Ecclesiarchy range of dual release Corrupted/ Loyal kits. Custodes for days.

And Goge Vandire and Cardinal Bucharis models that strike terror into the hearts of Imperial minions.