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Personally i'm beginning to think Warhammer fantasy battle dying and coming back may actually be shockingly a better thing for the game. Look at 30k and Old World and they just feel better than current edition 40k imo. Maybe becoming more of a side game even is a good thing. I mean look at 40k: constant lore changes, a massive arms race, so many factions and units you can't keep track of anything (esp. in 9th), some factions get far preferential treatment, Primaris Marines in general and honestly 40k's themes have been changed significantly i feel. I'll admit i don't play AoS but i feel like to an extent warhammer fantasy would've been slightly or significantly AoS-ified had it survived and AoS never became a thing. Honestly we probably dodged a bullet with that one.

Anyway i'd prefer Old World as it is to the current state of 40k or AoS's weird goofiness. 40k currently has this weird feeling i got when seeing the New Star Trek movies or something. It's like very bad for long term older fans.

The only things i'm disliking in Old World is the magic lores are a bit odd and different but they are solid and, characters that ride monsters and high movement + swiftstride garbage (chariot spam mostly). Honestly i'd say it's mostly the characters on monsters that need to be toned down but maybe i'm just salty and hate myself since i play skaven in Old World.

What do you guys think? Perhaps this is a weird bunch of thoughts for me to have.

I never played Warhammer Fantasy Battles or the older editions, but with where I've researched about Warhammer Fantasy. I'm not sure if I completely boot was necessary, but definitely an update. I heard Warhammer Fancy Battle was very hard to get into and also quite expensive because it wasn't like digitized for a long time. I also heard that writing new lore for Warhammer Age of Sigmar is easier to Warhammer Fantasy battles because Aegis Sigma takes place in a multiverse while Warhammer fantasy it takes place on one planet.

So was killing Warhammer Fantasy necessary, probably not? but also not a mistake either.

I think the only way it worked out is that it forced GW to have a huge management and attitude change which was clearly needed for them to grow. Kirby did some great stuff for GW and established a lot of the foundation and working practice which has allowed GW to flourish, but by the time of AoS it was clear he'd run out of tricks and was running an upper management team that were too isolated from their actual customers to really grasp what the customer wanted or what drove sales.


It was a huge mess all told. There were a LOT of better ways GW could have handled it. Heck just the End Times campaign itself saw rising sales and interest. GW could have capitalised on that and kept growing the game and interest. Instead they stalled it for years until management and attitude changes sparked renewed growth.




So I'd say there's two sides to it.
On the one hand an event like that allowed GW to make big changes in their management which has allowed them to flourish and grow in ways that they simply weren't before. On that front it was 100% needed and has been a net gain for ALL of GW.
From fantasy to 40K to specialist games.


On the other you can argue that purely looking at fantasy and purely looking at what was done - it wasn't "needed". GW could have kept investing in updated models; pushing new narrative campaigns and restored a LOT of the sales and interest that Old World enjoys today. Don't forget almost no AoS faction is so unique that it couldn't have worked in Old World. A simple "End Times caused land masses to appear in the seas" and "many major factions were broken allowing new ones to rise up" could easily leave gaps. Many of the Khadoran machines are things the Dwarves in Old World Had; Daughters of Khaine are just a subfaction of Dark Elves magnified; Ossiarchs are just ground up bone and souls - Soulblight are Vampires who are not hiding in drafty old castle ruins etc...



So I'd say its complicated because on some fronts it wasn't needed and likely slowed the growth of fantasy for a good few years. On the other hand it was needed because its led us to where GW can now support two fantasy lines; multiple specialist games; two 40K lines (ok one is 30K) and more.

I think it's just some denial kink adjacent feelings of getting back something that was denied to you....


All the work they did on AoS could have been put into WFB instead - AoS didn't do anything unique that would have made money where WFB didn't.

The perception is simply that the game ended when the company was small and has returned when it is large. The resources they have now for it are much larger than then. That's the only difference.

40k existed throughout that period, getting continual build up until the company was large. WFB could have done the same thing.

the AoS setting got sales because it was the only option and they spent ALOT of money on producing it. In the first 5 years of AoS they spent more than they had on WFB in the previous 10 (cannot prove this, but the amount of products they committed to in AoS was huge and plastic compared to older WFB).

If GW had just sunk that money into the existing property and refreshed it along with the expanded advertising strategy, I don't think anything would have been worse off.


Most of AoS content is just WFB relabelled anyway, the 'unique' aspects aren't actually that unique. The Lizardmen and Skaven are identical to WFB. Chaos armies are unchanged designwise. They were all just expanded and modernised.

Even the cities of sigmar stuff isn't particularly far from the Empire aesthetic.


So, there is nothing distinctly AoS that sold the setting beyond what just investing all that money into WFB wouldn't have done.

But they killed WFB and shifted their production to AoS, so they couldn't walk that back.

All they've done is gone back to what they had before after 10 years of spending huge amounts of money on AoS



EDIT: What Overread said.

I think exaclty as overread.

So, there is nothing distinctly AoS that sold the setting beyond what just investing all that money into WFB wouldn't have done.

Maybe AoS has a lower model count/entry barrier but a revised version of WHFB could have that too.

And instead of blowing up the whole world and go hundreds of years into the future, it could have been less brutal: breaking apart the continents of WHFB (and create islands instead of realms) and go forward decades instead.

Also the gameplay could be modernised.

"Modernised gameplay" I think is always a bit of a false name. Esp when we are in an age where old style rules are proving to be very popular. I think its less "modernise" and more "change it up" for most people. Plus the general sprinkle of "GW can't settle on a rules system nor balance to save their lives"


But yeah the only thing AoS does that Old World didn't is round-base freeform movement and if anyone at GW ever played Confrontation Last Argument of Kings GW could have easily had both options in the box if they wished.

Otherwise there's nothing in the AoS setting model wise that couldn't have appeared in Old World. Heck almost the entire Death Grand Alliance is just the Vampire faction splintering into 3 distinct design styles that were present in Old World and expanding them out.

I don't know if it's because of the game's death or just us getting older (probably both) but our golden age of gaming has definitely been the past 5 years since getting back into the hobby. We returned to the edition we like the most and cherry pick the best from the rest.

GW's greedy claws are not a good thing.

Yes.

I know many people were very upset when WHFB got nuked. I know, I was one of them. However whenever people bring up these conversations the reality of the situation is always ignored in their assessments.

The truth is the plan to nuke WHFB started in 2012. The game was not selling, that was just the reality. New players were not joining and the ones who were around, while they were dedicated, didn't drop enough $$$ on the game to justify its continued existence.

The truth of the matter is, from all the leaks around the time last End Times book came out, GW had two choices.

1) New setting where they can start over from scratch with less restrictions than WHFB lore provided
2) No Fantasy setting at all

People always forget that it was AoS or NOTHING.

10 years in between the nuking of the game and its reintroduction caused the used model market to mostly dry up. That allowed GW to actually be able to sell models. Which was the whole reason the setting was nuked to begin with.

 Commodus Leitdorf wrote:

1) New setting where they can start over from scratch with less restrictions than WHFB lore provided
2) No Fantasy setting at all

People always forget that it was AoS or NOTHING.

10 years in between the nuking of the game and its reintroduction caused the used model market to mostly dry up. That allowed GW to actually be able to sell models. Which was the whole reason the setting was nuked to begin with.

And yet several of us have noted that you don't have to "End Times" Old World to add most of the factions that AoS generated.
The lore wasn't a problem, it wasn't a barrier. It didn't stop creativity; heck there's a whole bunch of factions that are untouched and that's before you End Times to shake things up. People didn't say "I'm not picking up old world because of the lore" it was a bunch of other problems. Many of which AoS didn't really resolve at all nor attempt to resolve. Heck the 2.0 (which really were 1.0) rules had larger infantry blocks than the game currently has right now.


There were problems, but it wasn't lore. GW also didn't have to "start over" in fact they didn't. The vast bulk of the AoS model line was Old World models. Even now there's still a good many of them around and where there aren't many of them are updates or additions to themes Old World already had and replacements for previous sculpts.



Did GW need a shake up - YES. But it wasn't at the game level it was at the management level that the shakeup was needed. That fed down to how games are managed, how GW approached fans and the market ( don't forget this was at the time when GW was anti-internet and sending CD/takedown letters to news websites reporting on rumours). That management shake-up which resulted from the disaster that was AoS launch prompted big changes which led us to the GW of today which is built on the foundations, but is WAY more engaged with their actual customers.

We have Underworld, Spearhead, Warcry, Killteam, etc... modes of games now to help facilitate newbies and people with limited time getting game time. We have a bunch of specialist games back on the market.
The fact that Old World has come back shows that the problem wasn't rank and file fantasy gaming; it was how GW managed their company and rank and file fantasy game.