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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.

You say that, but the playerbase was extremely adverse to having anything new added at the time. I remember the s-storm a fair size of the community kicked up when ogres were added.
I can't even imagine the sheer vitriol that would have spewed out if you added SCE, Ossiarchs and more.

And let's be honest, old world is still EXTREMELY anti-newbie friendly. It is very expensive and model heavy to get an army going compared to any other game they have. At the moment, it still coasts on nostalgia and the old brigade, i've noticed virtually no new starters for it in my area.

 Inquisitor Gideon wrote:
You say that, but the playerbase was extremely adverse to having anything new added at the time. I remember the s-storm a fair size of the community kicked up when ogres were added.
I can't even imagine the sheer vitriol that would have spewed out if you added SCE, Ossiarchs and more.

And let's be honest, old world is still EXTREMELY anti-newbie friendly. It is very expensive and model heavy to get an army going compared to any other game they have. At the moment, it still coasts on nostalgia and the old brigade, i've noticed virtually no new starters for it in my area.

Thing is a lot of that hate was fuelled by the fact that there were multiple factions with loads of old models that weren't updated. Old World went through slower sales; which lead to less investment and that cycle fed on itself. At the same time GW at the time was putting money into what worked - more marines. Same as how they only did one-shot specialist game runs.

So a lot of the "I hate new faction" was more "I hate that I didn't get new updated model" pressure

Also lets not forget some of the vitriol is purely online and not always reflected locally.


As for scale I agree Old World likely needs its own Spearhead/Warcry and Underworld formats to help ease people in. Army counts for it are no greater than 40K or large AoS armies; plus the army packs its got right now are honestly cheaper (for model count) than 40K ones. The main difference is the latter two have intro game formats to break-in new people with games that let them use their models and break past that building up phase.

I do agree Old World needs that and in time I'm sure it will get something like that to help encourage new people to take it up and get into the game.

Even if it was just a case of old models, if GW had turned the world upside down like that, you would have still had the exact same reaction. You would have had the AoS reaction, just stuck in a reworked warhammer world instead. So much of the community was adverse to change and still is.

Problem is, you're extremely limited in a rank and flank system to do small, alternative games. Something like Spearhead works because you can have half a dozen, small and loose formations and a character. How do you do that for a rank and flank? a unit of ten warriors, a character and a 5 cavalry? Doesn't make for a very interesting game or an easy way to start a force.

Warcry and Underworld both work very differently to core 40K. Nothing stops you using square based models in a more free-form style of movement


The key isn't simulating the same game, its just creating a fun engaging game that lets you play with one or two boxes of models; or a single battleforce of models. You tide people over with game A until they've got 1.5K of models and then they go try out the bigger rank and file game with all those rank and flank features that work at those larger sizes.




And yes shoe-horning Stormcast in at a time when multiple OW armies were running around with ancient sculpts would likely have had a hostile reaction - but nothing like as hostile as ending the entire setting; removing several armies; shattering almost all the rest into subfactions (some of which were 1 model large); throwing the entire rule system out the window and changing to round bases.

1 New Faction and some advance on the lore is really tiny compared to all that.

You're going off track, we weren't talking about free-form games, we're talking about easing people in. You don't play Warcry or Underworlds to get you into the main game. Something like that for old world would just be Mordheim again. We're talking about a game like Spearhead which is designed to pull you into the main game. I don't see an easy option for that in any rank and flank.

We're not talking about shoe-horning in something like SCE. We were talking about getting a number of the factions in, Ossiarchs, Idoneth and the like. It would be such a massive upheaval of the setting it would still have been the exact same reaction irregardless.

Warmachine does pretty good with very few models on the table and whilst its on round bases the concept of facings is basically what rank and file works on.

Same for Infinity where you might have 15models or so and, again, you've got facings.

For Old World its just facings on a square base instead of round. So you shift from commanding whole blocks of infantry to each one on their own just like the other smaller format games. You make a skirmish game.

The key isn't teaching people the same rules system; its getting them playing with their models whilst they are building up their collection. With the view that they'll pick up the odd new box here and there and eventually hit bigger numbers of models where they can then try out the bigger game. And if they don't move up to it - no loss they stick to the skirmish game and keep spending.




Also you make it sound like adding any new faction would be bound to fail for Old World and yet we have Cathay doing it right now at this very point in time and I've not seen people setting fire to their armies or leaving the game in droves.

In a sensible program you'd run End Times; not end the world; and then have the world and lore shaken up after that. Some factions like Vampires splintering into their trio of subfactions that we have now. Meanwhile you tease stories about Nagash escaping to some far flung corner of the world conducting dark experiments within his crippled Black Pyramid from the End Times and then BOOM he unleashes his construct army on the world later.

Idoneth are just elves under the sea - the sea being almost entirely un-explored so you can easily fit them in with some "oh and this Elvish city was felled into the ocean by a wave of Chaos power during the End Times then 100 years later soul-stealing elves appear.



OR you could do other ideas like Nippon, Araby and other factions from Old World.
Again the idea of adding new armies to Old World isn't impossible; it did it for 40 odd years. The issue wasn't that you couldn't add things; the issue was that you had a game with failing sales cycling into reduced investment which led to more failing sales. Add on top the lack of a skirmish intro game; add on top the big cost to get into it at the proper level; add on top the reducing playerbase and engagement etc....

Yeah, but again that's not the whole point. Say you do that and put in X models. How does that get expanded within an army? If it's too few, then there's little enthusiasm to grow it. If it's too many, it's no longer a skirmish. You've got to get a balance there that's much harder to get with a model heavy rank and flank game.

I'm not saying adding a new army would fail. I'm saying that adding all these new lines and shaking up the world to that degree would result in exactly the same reaction as the end times/AoS did. The vast majority are extremely resistant to change, especially sudden and shocking change. You see what you're suggesting is literally just AoS in the old world. So neither setting would exist as their own identiy if it went in that direction.

I agree there are limits in skirmish so I don't know what GW are going to do. They might even do nothing and view it as a niche enough game that they don't worry about external growth as they predict the pathway will be "AoS - Old World" for new people.

As for new armies I suggested both Old World factions that never got releases (technically araby got one in Warmaster) and AoS ones that have been released.

I never suggested you'd drop them all in one big go at once; and I also noted that a big part of resistance was old armies not having updates. If GW were to follow through on End Times then I'd have expected 1 new army arising from the End Times event (eg Stormcast); followed by them updating old model lines with new sculpts as they do regularly for their other games. Alongside new armies being added in steadily to that process.

Basically exactly what they normally do in all their main games and have done for the duration of GW's lifespan. There's nothing new in that at all; Old World many new armies added; some got retired; some got rolled into other armies; some stuck around.

Honestly I think you're overplaying the resistance to new factions card somewhat. Old World had a lot of options to add new forces; to update model lines and do loads of market growth without changing the game to round-base and without changing the lore as dramatically as the AoS shift.

Heck we already saw End Times itself spark interest in a positive way; which was another reason the sudden "its all over folks" was such a heavy blow to fans. End Times was in part what fans wanted - a big world-changing campaign coupled to new models; updated rosters and attention from GW at the time.

I think people are forgetting that even if WFB wasn't selling, AoS had zero sales or track record at all.

The idea that the only way to make more fantasy money was to roll out a new version of a setting and spend millions to build it with zero proof it would work is not a particularly sensible strategy.

There was no 'obvious' win here at all. The only data they had was WFB wasn't selling very well.

If you take the AoS of it all out of the equation, they 'fixed' their failed sales, by investing millions in the game for new models, new collateral and promotions.

ANY product you do that to is likely to succeed, whether it's a new product or an old one. And when you have an IP with a proven customer base, deleting it and making an an entirely new product means you can't even leverage that customer base. GW acted as though its customers were fans of the company, rather than the IP it owned and would buy whatever they made. The first 2 editions of AoS were not run away successes despite the ridiculous amount of money they pumped into it.

Spend money to make money is a truism for a reason. WFB suffered from Kirby's extremely conservative leadership, where GW was avoiding spending anything. 40k had a bigger player base, but even it wasn't getting a lot of money spent on it. The finecast cost saving exercise was an example of this.


It's taken 10 years for AoS to get where it is, and in that time it had money spent on it in a way WFB never had previously. If you control for these factors, the AoS IP is not the reason for its success.

As for the 'freedom' that blowing up WFB gave GW, if that were true, then their factions wouldn't just be modernised versions of WFB. As has been said, very little of AoS is actually unique to it.

If WFB was worthless and needed to die to allow them to make fantasy money, why does AoS rely almost entirely on the entire WFB IP to build its own identity? Lizardmen and Skaven haven't even been 'AoS-ified', they are literally unchanged ports.

The ossiarchs are about the most original concept in the Death alliance, and they're just an army of Ushabit from WFB.

For all the claims of freedom and breaking WFB's restrictions, AoS eagerly dove right back into the IP it claimed was worthless.


Which to me says the AoS experiment was at best a treading water exercise. Because if you applied all the business and money decisions AoS got to the existing WFB, you likely would have got at least as good a return, if not better due to the IP presence with customers.

 Hellebore wrote:


Which to me says the AoS experiment was at best a treading water exercise. Because if you applied all the business and money decisions AoS got to the existing WFB, you likely would have got at least as good a return, if not better due to the IP presence with customers.

Not to mention you wouldn't have had to woo a whole bunch of angry customers back that you'd burned because you
1) Took a single army they had before and fragmented it into tiny bits - and then removed some of those

2) Took entire armies away from them. Two vanished right at the very start and we lost several others. Heck even now 10 years later they took Beastmen away and Dark Elves have been sitting in a corner with no one having a clear idea what GW are going to do with them.

There is one more reason that Warhammer Fantasy died & Warhammer Agents. Sigma replaced it. And that is copyright. The original Warhammer Fantasy battle was more or less an unlicensed adaptation of Lord of the Rings into a tabletop war game, and it shows. Games Workshop is fiercely protective of its IP, but It can't really copyright and protect generic fantasy concepts like elves, dwarves, and orcs. That's why Games Workshop have replaced it with their own custom names that are pretty much the same thing: Aelves, the Fyreslayers, and the Orruks.

Not really

You don't have to throw a 30year product line away just to rename a few things. Sure people would have grumbled about "oh its stupid calling orks orruks" but GW could have done it a number of ways such as faction names replacing product names.

Eg just pick one of the many orc subfactions and go with "Ok now we rename all the orcs into "Orruks" in honor of Orruk the great chief who has arise to unite the orc clans in the greatest waaagh that they've ever known as a result of all the chaos caused around the End Times.


Or just pluck a few old names out of the old bits of the lore. Heck that's what they did with 40K and whilst everyone still calls the Imperial Guard the Imperial Guard, they technically have a protected IP name and GW didn't have to do anything to the product range beyond change the name on the next batch of boxes.

They did all the renaming in 40k without killing the system off

Tau became T'au, Eldar Aeldari etc. and it wasn't necessary to replace it with an Age of the Emperor follow up game set in 50.000

The managment of the time had a different mindset that was driven by large models sales
the story goes that one of the middle managment saw the profit margin of a Land Raider and that people used 3-4 of those to play the game, and wanted the very same for all armies in all games
That way Eldar got the possibility to have 3 Knights and Warhammer got the large Monsters
But while people bought into that in 40k, the large Monsterst were not really doing the same in WHFB which was leading into making it a 40k like skirmish game so people would buy more of those large models

the problem wasn't that WHFB wasn't selling, it just wasn't selling the right models and it wasn't selling in the USA which GW saw as their new growing market

For what happened, they could have kept WHFB and just made a post End-Times settings in the Old World and it would have still failed
The overall idea the managment had of their audiance was wrong and only the failure of AoS 1st Edition (on top of the declining interest of 40k 7th) brought the necessary changes that made everything more succesful afterwards

 Inquisitor Gideon wrote:

And let's be honest, old world is still EXTREMELY anti-newbie friendly. It is very expensive and model heavy to get an army going compared to any other game they have. At the moment, it still coasts on nostalgia and the old brigade, i've noticed virtually no new starters for it in my area.

ToW is actually cheaper to get into than AoS and 40k, both money per model and getting a 2000 point army on the table.

I would say the least newbie friendly aspect of tow is the rules. They are far more complex than any other game gw make.

They took the style of HH they created and applied it to the already complicated wfb 7thish. So its complexity on-top of complexity.

There's a lot of details that are probably not necessary.

Funnily enough i think most people didn't get my point of this thread is i actually prefer WHFB becoming more of a side game. I'm not sure if i want it to not be newbie friendly and i'll admit without DoW 1 i'd have never entered 40k but 40k and aos have become way too goofy and standard whereas 30k and Old World are for the older fans. In some ways everybody gets something. I don't imagine GW intended for this but it kinda worked out somehow.

Also it feels like too many new fans at once can kinda change what your game is all about and what people want to see in it. Perhaps steady growth is preferred to a massive spike of growth.

 Hellebore wrote:
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.

Counterpoint - those changes would have resulted in almost as much wailing and gnashing of teeth, as would the aesthetic changes to the various factions where they occurred. The look of the Cities of Sigmar range, for example, is divisive even amongst AoS fans, and theres many WHFB fans who think they look like trash. Likewise, one of the things that AoS did that enabled it to thrive was moving away from rank and flank and offering more of a fluid skirmish battle dynamic to the game - something that absolutely could not have been done without a huge player rebellion to WHFB, but a move which was likely a key driver to the success of AoS early on as it drove ease of adoption for new players vs the larger relative investment needed to get into WHFB.

Also, your comparative investment analysis, I think, is misleading. GW made some pretty significant range updates to WHFB through 7th and 8th into The End Times. I dont know if it was equivalent to the 5 year investment into AoS, but the difference could not have been big.

As for the argument that AoS isn't that aesthetically different - well, first: Disagreed. While theres certainly a certain part of the range in AoS that *could* have worked in WHFB, I also think theres a lot that couldn't. Kharadron are too far a departure from the established WHFB dwarf aesthetic and have been widely referred to as scifi. Idoneth Deepkin are too over the top. The nuChaos Dwarves are somewhat divisive in the same way that Cities of Sigmar, Lumineth Realm-lords, and Ossiarch Bonereapers are. Stormcast are widely derided as unnecessary fantasy space marines (not wrong, tbh). Seriously - some of y'all think nuKislev from TWW is too gonzo high fantasy, but you're arguing that Kharadron or Idoneth would be totally cool? Get real.

There might also be a reason for why some of the factions only look like a slight update to their WHFB stylings (Seraphon/Lizardmen, Soulblight/Vampire Counts, Skaven, etc.). I recently came across some info (some of it is now public, the rest is not and I'm not at liberty to share), which leads me to believe that the TOW Legacy faction/AoS split might not be as one-sided as some folks think. Theres been much whinging and wishful thinking about the exclusion of certain factions from TOW, and its been seen as the AoS team sticking it to WHFB, etc. but I dont think theres been much discussion about what TOW got in return nor on why there was a huge uptick in releases that looked like modernized WHFB fantasy plastics within +/- ~12-18 months (in both directions) of TOWs release.

As a general summary:

* We know that a number of factions in TOW were defined as Legacy and omitted from the game - Skaven, Dark Elves, Ogre Kingdoms, Daemons, Lizardmen, Vampire Counts, Chaos Dwarfs
* There has been speculation that these factions were being designed for full inclusion and then cut late in development, I don't have a lot to confirm this one way or another. What I do know implied me to think this wasn't the case, but lets speculate that it actually was instead - you would expect there to be a model range associated with some of these guys, right - because of how far in advance the design studio works in advance of rules releases?
* We know that a couple factions were publicly cut from AoS, with one of them re-appearing in AoS and the other having relevant TOW rules but no models - Bonesplitterz and Beasts of Chaos.
* We also now know, thanks to reliable rumormongers, that some stuff that was in the works for AoS was also cut/scrapped and model ranges shelved - the Dispossessed revamp, the Beastmen revamp, the Bonesplitterz revamp.
* I have previously shared (and apparently this is at least somewhat corroborated by posts others have made, including whitefang iirc) that I am aware of a planned Wraithfleet/Vampire Coast model range that was being worked on for AoS around 1st/2nd edition that was eventually shelved, with some of those designs being used as part of the Vampire Coast DLC for TWW

So, speculatively speaking - what I am understanding/partially assuming to have happened (again, i know a couple of things that I can't divulge, but which help me connect some dots here), is that as a result of TOW entering development there was a bit of a negotiated settlement that occurred between the two games to prevent/minimize overlap and internal competition, which may have been resolved relatively late in TOWs development cycle. What I believe transpired, roughly speaking, is AoS agreed to give up the following concepts/themes for use in TOW in exchange for the Legacy factions from TOW:

* Bonesplitterz
* Beasts of Chaos
* Dispossessed
* Wraithfleet/Vampire Coast (this one is highly speculative on my part)
* Individual specific models (ex - the rumored spider incarnate which we were shown a rumor engine for several years ago)
* Other stuff we aren't aware of

Hence why certain sculpts, designs, and kits (Skaven, Seraphon, Vampire Counts especially) appear to be direct recreations of their WHFB concepts, even so far as to being able to rank up without much trouble (hmmm.... what a weird coincidence), all of which landed within a very short timeframe of the TOW release, and why GW seemed to radically shift gears from going "out there" to having a whole slew of 1:1 recreations of the WHFB armies of old within a quick timeframe. These may have been sculpts that were being developed for TOW that were pushed over to AoS. We seem to be past that period and are moving back in the direction of more interesting concepts and designs again if Helsmiths of Hashut and some of the rumored updates for other factions are any indication. In return, TOW is receiving sculpts and kits that were being developed for AOS for the remaining non-legacy factions and other thus far unknown new faction concepts. We possibly have some indications of this already:

* Bonesplitterz were excised from AoS but have yet to reappear in TOW despite savage orcs still being a thing in TOW - these are probably pending the release of updated kits which seem to have been in the works for AoS.
* Beastmen received the Chieftain mini which was originally released for Age of Sigmar (though, realistically, was probably designed for WHFB originally). This is notable, as it makes it the only model in the TOW range that was originally released for AoS. We also know, courtesy of GW vets, that they pretty much never sculpt just one model for a faction at a time - if one model is being released, it means that theres a lot more that were sculpted with it, but they weren't put forward into production and release... yet. Its likely that the rest of the range intended for AoS (which we know to exist thanks to rumor mongers, but also that Beastmen were being hyped up in advance of a likely release thanks to the plot threads that GW was developing during AoS 3rd ed and then mysteriously seemed to drop) will be coming for TOW instead.
* The Dwarf Lord on Shieldbearer appears to have a crested helmet consistent with a common design motif found in Fyreslayers, and the "scale" cloak matches the style of scales sculpted onto the Auric Flamekeepers cloak. The style of the beard braiding and ornamentation is also closely aligned with that of the Fyreslayers, the Auric Flamekeeper and Runemaster especially - one of the shieldbearers also features a combination braided/unbraided beard similar to the Doomseeker model, which is not really common in the WHFB aesthetic. Rumors have been circulating that the Dispossessed were to be associated with the Fyreslayers in some way, which suggests that there was to be some sort of a shared aesthetic between them - these could be traces of that.