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 Fayric wrote:
The real problem is AoS not beeing able to convince people its basicly the same setting.
We got skaven, lizardmen, chaos warriors, nightgoblins, vampirecounts and lots of classic stuff, but in the end Its just random locations floating in a psychedelic timescape for most people.
Anything goes and nothing matter.

If they had focus on establishing a fantasy world for us to recognise instead of a desperate focus on making sigmarines feel like a cool concept, people could probably see the setting beeing similar in another way.

I completely agree with this. The biggest weakness of AoS has always been how ephemral the setting feels. It all seems like a fever dream instead of a place.

I folded and ordered the sigmarite dais. I decided it just added too much visual interest to my stormvault terrain set to pass up.

Felt pretty silly paying that much for it, but getting bent over a barrel is the GW customer experience.

 CragHack wrote:

 The Phazer wrote:
I do think to some extent it's unfair to compare to FW kits that don't have to worry about undercuts and being castable in steel injection moulds.

But I do think that quite a few bits of the new range have quite old fashioned looking soft musculature which used to characterise plastics fifteen - twenty years ago but don't so much any more, and I don't really know how that wasn't fixed for a big new launch line.

They just look goofy. GW can definitely put out amazing looking models in plastic, like the new 40k Raven Guard hq, but this is like a hiccup against all the other silly/goofy/just plain bad crap they keep churning out. I think it's more of a matter of sculptors, their expertise and tools being used to make those models, where in this case majority of them are interns and few pros who know their stuff

I think it's funny that you would offer the Raven Guard guy as an example of a good model right before complaining about other things being silly or goofy.

That RG model is the platonic ideal of "goofy" to me. He has every possible thing going on at all once (except for a smoke effect), in a weird pose, in a weird place.

Scottywan82 wrote:

I completely agree with this. The biggest weakness of AoS has always been how ephemral the setting feels. It all seems like a fever dream instead of a place.

I could never quite put my finger on it prior to this, but you've pretty much summed it up perfectly for me!

Gallahad wrote:I folded and ordered the sigmarite dais. I decided it just added too much visual interest to my stormvault terrain set to pass up.

Felt pretty silly paying that much for it, but getting bent over a barrel is the GW customer experience.

It really is an important part of the overall GW experience, isn't it?

Some lovely person on Reddit did their photoshop magic to show what the Helsmiths will look like in classic red and black and this is a big improvement.

Same idea, different execution; from user Xand0r.


https://www.reddit.com/r/WarhammerFantasy/comments/1m4t3lz/recolouring_and_digitally_kitbashing_the/

 Coenus Scaldingus wrote:
Same idea, different execution; from user Xand0r.


https://www.reddit.com/r/WarhammerFantasy/comments/1m4t3lz/recolouring_and_digitally_kitbashing_the/

That black Taurus (and the glossy red one in the previous pic) look like something I'd find in the LEGO aisle. They are not improvements upon the past.

I think I'll just be sticking with my vintage 4e(?) & FW stuff.

That Tauros is going to get hated on until someone paints the whole thing in really fancy non-metallic-metals.

 Scottywan82 wrote:

 Fayric wrote:
The real problem is AoS not beeing able to convince people its basicly the same setting.
We got skaven, lizardmen, chaos warriors, nightgoblins, vampirecounts and lots of classic stuff, but in the end Its just random locations floating in a psychedelic timescape for most people.
Anything goes and nothing matter.

If they had focus on establishing a fantasy world for us to recognise instead of a desperate focus on making sigmarines feel like a cool concept, people could probably see the setting beeing similar in another way.

I completely agree with this. The biggest weakness of AoS has always been how ephemral the setting feels. It all seems like a fever dream instead of a place.

That's one element, though I feel a proper artistic visionary could really lean into that and make something amazing out of it. There's bits of that here and there in some of the artwork but from my POV as a casual observer nothing that has really grabbed me.

But I also felt that for such a radical thing (blowing up the entire Old World) they really didn't do enough of a radical departure. The major players are mostly the same ones from the Old World in different guises, and I think that is EXTREMELY boring and lame. Any reference to the World That Was (blech) really makes me roll my eyes. Like you guys KILLED IT, you wrote a series of books blowing the ever living crap out of the setting, I though you were going to move on and show me something new, something really interesting and innovative. That's what I was interested in. But nah, it's still Archaon and Sigmar and Morathi and Ariel and the same old Chaos Gods and the Horned Rat and blah blah blah.

Warcry to me is the part of the game that did the most interesting stuff design wise - a post apocalyptic shattered reality wasteland populated by weird as hell chaos cults killing each other...yes! Holy crap!

But it seems like it didn't really go anywhere. Big sigh.

The strangest thing in the lore is that AoS is set thousands of years after the Mortal Realms were formed and near 500 years (I think it was around 400something) after the Age of Chaos during which most civilizations were smashed to bits.

The Old World should be such a distant thing to the peoples of the Mortal Realms that its basically like who invented fire for humanity today.



I think a big problem is that GW has focused on telling the AoS story through the GODS because they are from the Old World. The problem is when you couple gods to a lack of a dating system you get a story that feels hollowed out. You can't relate events very well besides if they happen near or around major disasters and even then you can't really tell how many years/months/decades/generations there are between them. So it can all feel like the story happens months apart; but then a quick quote will have someone recall that "ahh yes my great grandfather lived through the Necroquake" and suddenly you've got to rethink everything.


AoS's core problem is its got no leader. There's no big-wig in charge of the lore from a fundamental crafting and storytelling angle. At least that's how it feels. Yes they keep the lore on-point but no one is burning to tell a story.


Don't get me wrong I think the AoS setting itself is awesome in that "fever dream based on heavy metal album art" style. It's all there it just needs GW to have someone to really be the creative driving force behind it. Right now it feels too much managed by suits.

We gett little bits - Warcry - the Novella series - snippets of author's stories about characters that maybe spin into a mini series of stand alone. The talent is there but its bitty - fragmented over space and time that readers can't easily relate too in a way which lets them build a large narrative.

I agree with everything Overread said. They really need a chief editor to stitch and weave the various pieces of story together to make the setting feel more cohesive, and to direct the storytelling away from the gods and towards the mortals.

 Scottywan82 wrote:
Some lovely person on Reddit did their photoshop magic to show what the Helsmiths will look like in classic red and black and this is a big improvement.

The ps1 low poly armor model asthetic is a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see if it pays off for them...

Oh, who am I kidding? It will sell out regardless.

You have to remember its AoS. Most AoS launch boxes do *not* sell out.

 Overread wrote:
That Tauros is going to get hated on until someone paints the whole thing in really fancy non-metallic-metals.

And you know what? It'll still just look like some sort of LEGO kit - with a really cool paint job.

Not used to being the one who thinks new kits look incredible, while everyone else hates them. I feel like I'm usually way more negative, and I absolutely love these lmao.

any model can be made into something great when the right person is doing something with it

but this doesn't really change the initial problems of said model and if the initial design isn't good, or what people expected, the average player won't go for it

what kind of surprises me is that despite there being Contrast paints as the main thing to get models painted for the average buyer, we get models with a lot of flat surfaces and or soft details where said paints don't work well


and a lot of people in the past (at least in central Europe) used cheap toys for their Chaos Dwarf Taurus, simply because nothing else was available, and if the new original one cannot compete with that

Now the red taurus looks like a boiled lobster

 cole1114 wrote:
Not used to being the one who thinks new kits look incredible, while everyone else hates them. I feel like I'm usually way more negative, and I absolutely love these lmao.

I was there back in the days of the Ossiarch Bonereapers going live and now people generally like them and the only problem is that htey don't have enough - darn it GW I want to see a flying dragon or a roc or something monstrous and constructed. Also centaur cavalry and animal pack when?!

 cole1114 wrote:
Not used to being the one who thinks new kits look incredible, while everyone else hates them. I feel like I'm usually way more negative, and I absolutely love these lmao.

"Everyone" is a bit of an exaggeration i think. Looking at anywhere else other than here, the response has mostly been very positive.

Dakka is a hive of scorn and grumbling - you must be cautious!

I really wasn't sure on these guys until I did take a look at the recolouring being done over on the various Chaos Dwarf forums. Seems I was right, it was just the paint job.

Might actually pick up a box or two of the Foot troops. Might make a good Immortals unit out of them to go with the 3000pts of old Big hat guys I have.

 Da Boss wrote:

Warcry to me is the part of the game that did the most interesting stuff design wise - a post apocalyptic shattered reality wasteland populated by weird as hell chaos cults killing each other...yes! Holy crap!
But it seems like it didn't really go anywhere. Big sigh.

The very first lore of AOS 1st edition contained just that. Realm of Metal had metal animals, rivers of liquid silver and floating fortresses of magic etc...and everyone hated it and said its too weird and they can't relate, so they scaled back rather quickly and it went to being D&D but with skulls.

Not everyone, and that stuff is still there.

Angronsrosycheeks wrote:

 Da Boss wrote:

Warcry to me is the part of the game that did the most interesting stuff design wise - a post apocalyptic shattered reality wasteland populated by weird as hell chaos cults killing each other...yes! Holy crap!
But it seems like it didn't really go anywhere. Big sigh.

The very first lore of AOS 1st edition contained just that. Realm of Metal had metal animals, rivers of liquid silver and floating fortresses of magic etc...and everyone hated it and said its too weird and they can't relate, so they scaled back rather quickly and it went to being D&D but with skulls.

The only part I hated was the kind of "stormcast climb a mountain whilst under attack and then charge across a living volcano to have a fight and then invade a castle" kind of writing in the early Realmgates because they were just a touch too super-human.

Personally I loved the idea of metal beasts and such - however the problem GW has is that they threw that out there and then didn't throw out artwork showing that world to us. They didn't throw out stories based around farmers becoming warriors and heroes so we could see how society functions.

This is the problem with focusing on the gods as the core of the pushed narrative and on stories that tend to focus on mature warriors in war situations. We tend to get a skewed impression of the world where a lot of the function bits are left out. Now Old World could get away with that because it was based on super common fantasy tropes that were just twisted a bit here and there for flavour. Plus most of the world functions like the one we live in today - we can imagine serf farmers in Bretonnia without much hard work.

Mortal Realms side it becomes more tricky to imagine the common-man and how they just survive and thrive.



It's just a setting that needs someone in charge at the top with a burning passion and a good budget to really help it mature.

A lot of the novels focus on mortals, if that's what you want. The Dominion novel is all about common lowborn street urchins being thrust into positions of power and how they deal.

 Platuan4th wrote:
A lot of the novels focus on mortals, if that's what you want. The Dominion novel is all about common lowborn street urchins being thrust into positions of power and how they deal.

Yeah I've been through a few - the novella were great though right now I'm more in the vampire based ones.
But still I feel like there's gaps in the functionality of the world and how its conveyed to the reader.

I think it doesn't help that there's a good many stories set in places that we perhaps don't ever revisit again.

Really liking the new Chaos Dwarfs with the Old Chaos Dwarf paint jobs.

I do wish the new Taurus was more real beast vs. Mechanical Construct, but it is growing on me too...

It's a Metal animal. If the chorfs live on the plane of metal, is it even a construct, or just a wild "natural" animal they tamed?

 Inquisitor Gideon wrote:
Not everyone, and that stuff is still there.

I know not literally every person hated it, but it was hated enough they backtracked it pretty quickly after the initial Realmgate Wars series was done. Elements of it are still there, but now basically they stuck to "center of the realm is almost normal, things get weird and elemental the further rimward you go". At least they kind of left it in place with the lumineth land-magic and CoS blood of the faithful stabilizing the chaos-tainted landscapes.

 Overread wrote:

 Platuan4th wrote:
A lot of the novels focus on mortals, if that's what you want. The Dominion novel is all about common lowborn street urchins being thrust into positions of power and how they deal.

Yeah I've been through a few - the novella were great though right now I'm more in the vampire based ones.
But still I feel like there's gaps in the functionality of the world and how its conveyed to the reader.

I think it doesn't help that there's a good many stories set in places that we perhaps don't ever revisit again.

I think a big part of the problem is that the realms feel disconnected. We are rarely given a solid understanding about why or how events in Shyish might influents life in Ghyran, nor why someone who lives in Ghyran should care about them (or if they are even aware that Shyish exists). This is not the case with 40k, where we understand planets to be discrete finite entities that are connected to eachother in a more easily understood manner (both physically and societally) and what their importance and relevance to one another is.

With that also comes the issue that the lore only focuses on a small piece of any given realm. Like we have a map of the Great Parch and its environs, for example, but not for anything beyond that corner of the realm - and those maps aren't really political in nature. We dont understand really the disposition of forces or the different political structures that exist within them, we get some dots identifying a handful of cities from one faction or another and not much other context in between. It makes the maps meaningless and inconsequential as a storytelling aid and informing the reader how all the different parts of the narrative fit together and the geopolitical tissue that connects it all.

Its kind of like if you were telling a story set on earth to an alien that had never been there, and you give them a set of maps covering the american southwest, quebec, the amazon rainforest, the serengeti, scandinavia, and india, but nothing in between. You have no idea how these pieces of the puzzle fit together, what the relationships of these civilizations and polities are, how they interact (if at all) or even if they know eachother to exist, etc. You *could* tell that story, but its going to be one really confused alien.