yakface Reviews the Digital Space Marines Codex

Introduction

In early June 2012 Games Workshop announced that they would finally start to release versions of their existing print rules in a digital format. It is no secret that GW in the past has done anything but embrace many of the potential advances provided by the digital age, so there are many, including myself that always wondered when, or even if, this day would come.

However, the route they have chosen to initially enter this realm has, in typical fashion, had some people cheering, some people booing and other people scratching their heads.

Being an iPad owner for a few years already and previously having used it to supplement my games of Warhammer 40,000, I was naturally very interested and intrigued to explore this new offering from GW, even though I don't own or play a Space Marine army (and the first digital release was the Space Marine codex).

Therefore, I purchased a copy and spent some time playing with it and I thought I'd share my thoughts about the format with you all, as naturally quite a few people don't have, or ever plan on buying an iPad and are simply basing their reactions to the product on partial or incorrect information. With this review, I will try to navigate through the hype and/or hate and give you a honest look about what works and doesn't work about the new digital format...so I hope you enjoy!

eBook vs. PDF

The first thing to know about the format GW has chosen is that it is not just a PDF copy of the existing print version. It is an Ebook created using Apple's iBook 2.0 standards and has been completely reformatted to include things like rules text that pops-up when you click on the name of the rule, images that can be changed via a swipe of the finger without actually changing the page (so multiple pictures embedded into the same space), many of those 360 degree images that GW now has up on their website, a full glossary of rules, etc. This format is very, very different than just a PDF scan, even though it is based off of the exact same print material (with a few exceptions).

I know a lot of people out there would love to just see a straight-up PDF released by GW for all of their rules and obviously there are a lot of reasons why this would be great for consumers, but it is important to know the limitations of a PDF vs. the iBook format that has been utilized here.

For a few years now, I have been using my iPad as a PDF reader and have gone through and created personal PDF scans of every single GW codex for my own personal use. I have even gone to the trouble of bookmarking each of these PDFs so that I can easily jump to the exact page I'm looking for. Even so, it takes a small amount of time to call up the bookmarks, find what I'm looking for and then a couple more nano-seconds to load the new page...and this is using the newest iPad (which is pretty speedy). I know that anyone using older versions of the device have a slightly longer delay when jumping from page to page.

Now, if you're playing a regular old friendly game, then this amount of time consumption is a drop in the bucket and means absolutely nothing, but if you're under intense time pressure, as is often the case in a tournament game, then futzing around with an iPad trying to jump to a specific page is definitely not as quick as simply busting out the good-old print codex and flipping to the needed page. For that reason, although I do bring my iPad with me to tournaments (mainly so I can look up any questions I have about my opponent's codex without bothering them on their turn), I also still bring the actual print codex and the main 40K rule-book with me as well so that in the heat of the moment I can get to a rules reference ASAP, when really needed.

So in short, using an iPad as a PDF reader for GW rules, works okay, but is not ideal. The best thing about it really has just been that you can carry around the entire collection of GW rules in one easy to carry place. This makes the iPad perfect for something like doing rules-judging at a tournament because you can literally carry around the tablet with you as the judge and have access to whatever rules you need. The small delay that you suffer finding the right book and the right page is still easier than bothering the players to see their copy of the codex.

After poking around with the new digital format GW has used for the conversion of Codex Space Marines, it does appear like they may have hit the nail on the head and have a format that really, really works in terms of making the iPad version just as easy, if not easier than using the print version of the codex. I won't know for sure until they release a codex for an army that I currently play and I get to test-drive it at an actual tournament, but I think this format might actually make me comfortable enough to leave the print versions of the codex and rulebook at home and just take my iPad to tournaments (which would be awesome).

The Price

The cost for this new Space Marine codex is currently $42 in the US ibooks store, which is essentially the same price as the print version of the codex (at $41.25) as of June 2nd, 2012.

GW setting the price the same as the physical version (which is really steep already) is certainly going to rub many people the wrong way, as does their normal practice of charging a premium price for all of their products. The common train of thought is always that the digital version of a book should cost less than its physical counterpart because you do not have to pay for all the costs involved with production and shipping.

While I agree with that general principle, I do also recognize that this isn't just some simple port of the print book. They have clearly had to spend some sort of time and money creating all the custom features for this ebook that do make it as cool as it is. Unfortunately, by setting the price of the digital version the same as the print version (and tying it to a single platform currently) it is pretty clear that this product is not aimed to be a supplement to owning a print copy of the rules...unless you're extremely price insensitive you're likely going to have to make the choice in the future as to whether you want to buy the print or the digital version, as having both for every single faction in the game (for those like me who like to do that) is simply not going to be feasible.

However, if the quality of their new digital downloads continues to improve on what they've shown with this release I do think someone who does own an iPad could easily stop collecting the print versions of GW's rules and start exclusively using the new digital versions and have a superior gaming experience.

So if, and its a big if, you're one of those people who is interested in essentially switching over completely to digital versions, then the price, while high, is still probably acceptable. For those who want to keep collecting the print versions of the books as well as the digital versions, then I think the price is simply too high to do this.

The Format

GW has chosen to use the Apple ibooks format to create the digital version of their rules, and as of now there seems to be no indication on GW's part that they are planning to release it on any other platform. Although given GW's proclivity for secrecy we would likely not know about this fact until they were actually ready to release a new format anyway.

For those who have no plans to own an iPad and/or hate Apple products for whatever reason, this choice has naturally left a bad taste in their mouths. However, there are a number of fairly important reasons why I believe GW chose to go this route (at least initially), which should be pointed out.

I'm not a programmer, so everything I'm saying about ebook formats is simply hearsay I've picked up from around the internet, but from what I've read, the apple iBook format makes it fairly easy to create books that have pretty cool features, at least compared to other ebook formats that have similar capabilities.

Say what you will about GW, but hit or miss they do at least try to create premium products worthy of their high price. I am sure that when they finally decided to go down the road of making a digital version of their rules, they liked the idea that the digital versions would hopefully offer a superior experience to the print version, so the Apple format was a natural candidate, especially when coupled with the fact that the iPad is currently pretty dominant in the tablet market.

While releasing official GW PDFs of their rules would certainly have been a huge crowd-pleaser, as I pointed out before, using PDFs even on something as fluid as an iPad still tends to be an inferior experience to the print book. Although I'm sure an official GW PDF would have improved the experience (featuring fully searchable text, etc), but after using the new format for a while, I do definitely think that this new experience is superior to anything they could have gotten away with had they just put out a PDF.

But the million dollar question is: will GW put this out onto other ebook formats so that it can be used by devices besides an iPad? Doing a bit of research, it does sound possible to convert many of the features found in an iBook 2.0 format over to other comparable ebook formats such as epub3, but this apparently does take quite a bit of work to do, and definitely isn't a simple task. Unfortunately, since the iPad is such a dominant force on the tablet market currently, it seems unlikely to me that GW would be willing to put their time and money into creating said alternate version, especially as that would make the file, much, much easier to pass around and/or pirate.

Anyone familiar with GW knows that they have been very reluctant to dip their toe into the digital realm and I'm sure part of their paranoia has been because of the potential for people to pirate or freely trade around their rules, thereby cutting into the profit they make off of their rules. I'm not going to go into the right or wrong of this argument now, as there are many cases to be made for either perspective, but my point simply is that I'm sure this was and is a concern for GW and is therefore probably another reason why they chose the iBooks format and are probably unlikely to commit to any other format in the near future. As the Apple iBook 2.0 format exclusively plays on the iPad (not even iPhones can play them currently) it makes it a very secure format.

With any software, I'm sure there are ways to circumvent this natural protection, but even so this is a much harder prospect than would be the case if GW released their products on a more open format such as epub.

Positives of the Format

So I said previously that the new format offers a superior experience to the print version of the codex, but exactly why?

Well, first off you should probably first watch the youtube example put out by GW to get an idea about what some of the cool features of the format look like.

As you can see in that video, there a bunch of nice presentation features, like having 360 degree model pics at your disposal, having multiple images embedded together in the same spot that you can swipe through by using your finger, etc.

But while those things do add to the overall package, what really stands out are the features that actually make the format easier to use than the print version:

Pop-Up Rules

The first benefit pictured above is the key because it means as a player during a game you can just sit in the army list section of the codex and you don't need to flip anywhere (for the most part) to find any necessary rules; instead you just click on the name of the special rule in the unit entry and up pops the necessary rules text!

This alone fixes that basic problem with PDFs, which is that you often need to switch pages and when you do to it is a bit cumbersome. But with this system, the information you need is always right there where it should be, which is a really great development and is really what sells the whole format to me over anything else.

Updated Rules

The fact that the rules are updated is really nice too. Besides having the new Stormtalon rules, you also have pretty much all the errata published by GW included in the rules as well as a few FAQ rulings worked in there too. Curiously, there are a few exceptions where a listed errata is not in there (like the Strength of a Hellfire shell is supposed to now be Strength '1' instead of 'X', but it isn't included).

So-Close Features

Unfortunately, there are a number of features that this format can naturally deliver that do not live up to their potential. My hope is that through feedback (like this review, perhaps) GW will learn from these early mistakes and both update this codex and improve all future releases coming out.

iBooks does have the functionality to allow publishers to update their published book files, so it would be possible for GW to correct small problems or issues with this SM Codex, but I'm worried that given GW's past track record for updating FAQs, etc, that any sort of fix may be a long time coming, if ever.

But regardless, here are the features that just miss their mark a bit (and why):

Pop-Ups Cannot Be Highlighted

As you can see from this picture, we're looking at one of the armory pages and there are literally no rules presented 'on the page', only 'fluff' descriptions for each weapon is present. In order to see the rules for a weapon or wargear, you have to click on the name of the object to bring up the rules for it (just as you do throughout the rest of the document).

While this may seem totally fine at first blush, there is a huge flaw: text in pop-ups cannot be highlighted.

The iBook format allows for text to be highlighted and what's cool about this feature is that then any highlighted text can be seen on a summary page (so you could see a rundown of all your highlighted material) and even put it onto the 'study cards' (if you wanted):

Now, I've never been one to highlight sections of rules for reference, but I've known plenty of people that do like to do exactly this. They highlight the sections of the rules they think are important or that regularly seem to be referenced during games and doing so makes it easier for them to find during the heat of a game.

The ability of this digital format to highlight text should therefore make it a breeze to do exactly this and even better you would then be able to jump to the reference page to quickly see all of the rules you need to remember conveniently listed together. However, since 99% of the rules text is found only as a 'glossary' pop-up, this means you can't highlight any of the rules in the entire book!

Yes, you can highlight all the fluff descriptions you want (or even sections of unit entries, as I did in the picture above), but not any of the rules, which is a giant bummer. I'd wager that rules text is precisely what 95% of the people who would ever bother to highlight at all would be looking to highlight. As the system stands now, I can't really imagine why anyone would actually want to bother using the highlight feature, which is a damn shame.

So how could this be fixed? Really simply (at least in any other codex files they put out in the future), all they'd have to do is include the rules text 'on the page' as well as in the glossary. So you'd still have the glossary pop-up version of the rule for anytime you click on the name of the rule in the army list, but you'd also have a version of that same text on the actual main page where it is normally found in the print codex.

Obviously to accommodate this extra text on the 'page' they would need to reduce the font size a bit, but I do think right now it is generously large, so honestly I believe it is a change they can (and should) make, because the highlighting feature really could be so cool if you could actually highlight rules text and not just fluff.

Pop-Ups Not Always Comprehensive

Another issue involving the glossary pop-up rules text is that sometimes a rules pop-up comes up that doesn't really contain the full rules but basically references you to another rule. Unfortunately, just as you can't highlight glossary pop-up text, you also cannot click on a keyword that is in a glossary pop-up and call up yet another pop-up...so when you run into these situations, you're basically at a dead-end.

A perfect example of this are the Sternguard that have the 'special issue ammunition' rule. When you click on this rule in their unit entry you get the pop-up shown above, which basically refers you to each individual ammo special rule. Unfortunately, those special rules can't be clicked on to bring them up (because you're already in a pop-up) and the individual ammo rule names are not found in the unit entry.

So at this point if you needed to find out what the 'Kraken Bolts' do, you'd have to manually bring up the glossary and find it yourself. Granted, this isn't that hard to do, but it ruins the super-convience provided by the pop-ups.

The solution to this type of problem is just for the digital artists to note where these situations occur and basically make sure to lump all the needed rules together into whatever rule pop-up is found in the unit's entry. So for example, the rules for all 3 ammo types should be included in the 'special issue ammunition' rule pop-up as well as being their own separate glossary pop-ups when needed.

No True Table of Contents

Another feature that kind of misses the mark is the 'table of contents'. This file format has two organizational quick-links, one to the glossary (which is just all the individual rules pop-ups) and the other to the 'table of contents'.

A table of contents needs to be a list of absolutely everything in the document, preferably on a single page. Sadly with this codex when you click on the 'table of contents' you're just taken back to the chapter table of contents page (which you could always get back to anyway simply by pinching the screen you're currently on).

I don't know if this is a limitation with the iBook format or just something the digital authors dropped the ball on. Yes, having all these different search options are awesome, but at the end of the day it would still be really helpful to have a single page with every section listed on it.

Missing Pop-Ups

The ability to click on the name of the rule and have the rules pop-up is the big selling point to me of this format. However, there are quite a few mistakes currently in the document which result in many rules names not properly linking to a pop-up when they should or in some extreme cases, linking to the wrong pop-up!

These kinds of mistakes are a real bummer and pull you out of what is normally a pretty intuitive system of finding the rules you need when you need them. I'm sure these kinds of things could be easily fixed, but ultimately it will require GW to put out an update to the document which we obviously have no idea if or when they will.

GW hasn't had the best track record in the past for supporting its digital initiatives, and that makes this purchase really troubling this early on, because you don't know what level of commitment you're actually going to get, but you're still having to pay a premium price to get the product.

Format Flaws

There are some flaws I believe to be inherent to the iBook format, which makes it unlikely that these ever could be addressed realistically. They are:

Landscape Mode Only

I think this is part of the iBook textbook creation protocol that was used to make the file, but basically you can only ever hold the iPad in landscape mode and browse this document.

I understand that these pages are perfectly formatted to work only in a specific orientation, but as a regular iPad user I'm also used to being able to browse pretty much anything in either landscape or portrait mode. While I don't think this is a deal-breaking issue by any means, I just think there will be some times when it will be a bit of a bummer.

Slowish Start-Up

This format is pretty 'rich' with lots of pretty graphics and the first time you launch or close the book it takes around 5+ seconds to either close or open. Unlike a PDF viewer which can have multiple PDFs open at once on different tabs, thereby allowing you to jump between books on the fly, this sort of functionality does not currently exist within iBooks. This means if you did need to jump between two different digital codexes, for example, it would be a bit of a wait (relatively speaking). And again, this is using the 3rd generation iPad, older versions will only take longer to open and close.

Ultimately this is something that only Apple can address, and they may at some point add tabbed browsing into iBooks, but again we have no idea if or when this might ever happen.

Yes, this is again a very minor gripe, after all we're talking about seconds here, but it is an issue that does need to at least be noted.

Page Numbers Won't Match

These digital codexes have had their pages re-numbered because they've basically split each print page into multiple digital pages. So the digital codex has 330+ pages when the print version has only 140+.

Within the digital document itself, this is not an issue, but as soon as you reference any other document, all of a sudden you have a problem. For example, GW's FAQs have page number references currently, but these all naturally don't match the page numbers in the digital codex.

Also, this codex sometimes references certain pages in the main rulebook. If GW ever produces a digital version of the rulebook, again this page number would now be incorrect.

Honestly, this can be a really annoying issue moving forward and I don't see any easy solution except for them to start including two different page numbers for each rules reference (one for print and another for digital). Unfortunately, this isn't the type of thing I imagine GW will start doing anytime soon, if ever.

Final Verdict

So what is my final verdict on this first digital codex?

Well, I think the format shows tremendous promise and has me very excited about its potential. The true flaws are pretty minor and the failures of the 'so-close' features are really more of a bummer in regards to how good the format could be, as opposed to actually taking away from the positives.

Really, the updated rules and the ability to get pop-ups exactly when needed 95% of the time makes this digital experience superior to the print version.

However, since this is produced by a very secretive company with a rather poor history of embracing and supporting technology, a lot of these fixes that could easily be corrected may end up never being addressed. That level of uncertainty makes the premium price of the format a real liability.

If we see good faith from GW by actually updating these digital files when necessary then my opinion of the format will be greatly improved. But until then, I see purchasing these files as a real luxury for those who already have an iPad and love being on the cutting edge.

GW have clearly positioned these files to be a premium product that is there for those with the means to be interested. This is not the easy or cheap digital revolution that most have been hoping for. Frankly I believe that GW is operating under the premise that for them to give away their codexes for free as a PDF would hurt their sales more than it would help (and therefore it isn't something I believe we'll ever see).

One final note: anyone hoping that somehow purchasing this ebook will mean that when a new version of the codex is released you will then be 'grandfathered' in to get the new version for free, I think this is highly, highly improbable given GW's track record.

It costs GW money to produce these codexes (the digital versions too) and they've continually shown that they expect to make that money back through the sales of the new iteration of each book. Just because they could provide us with a free digital update of a new version of the codex does not mean they will, and I think its foolish to believe this could even possibly happen until it actually does.

Categories: Warhammer 40,000 Reviews