My faction was always Wood Elves. I remember bein SOOOO upset when WFB ended because the wood elf book came out and less than 3 months later the game was completely dead. No warning that it was going to die. I dropped 600+ bucks on all the new models and rule books because i thought i would be able to use them in the game i loved for the foreseeable future. That was not the case. Then two things happened at the same time. 1. Betrayal: AoS was released, no list building, no balancing and all the parts of the game I loved gone. Seemingly overnight. Leading up through the end times Games Workshop never once mentioned how drastically different AoS was going to be. Never once mentioned that WFB was going to die. I believe very few people took ' The End Times' as the literal end of WFB. hindsight can be funny in that way. 2. Abandoned: My local Games Workshop. The place i would hang out and get pickup games decided to change locations. Only 2 store fronts away BUT it was small. I mean really small, they went from having 8 playable tables to none, they took out the paint bar, the only 'table' was being used for the Demo game. Just like that the community that was built up was gone. What's the point of buying miniatures for a game if you have no place to use them and socialize with others who are also interested in the game? Overall I felt betrayed and abandoned. It was a double whammy that shot my warhammer and war gaming hobby as a whole dead in its tracks. Even after all these years it still hurts to talk about. It was kind of therapeutic typing all that out. If you read through all that, sorry, and thanks.
Damn, you really got hit with the bad luck stick. Especially with the GW store moving to a WORSE location. Maybe it's just me but those stores just aren't really meant to be used as social game shops. I've been to a few GW stores, most of which were in England, and besides maybe one all were pretty damn small and not much room to actually play games in (or at least had set maps you couldn't modify a whole lot). And many have stated similar on the whole betrayal thing. I completely get it: losing a hobby you sank so much into for it to be gone and replaced sucks. Silver lining though is that if you still have you're Wood Elves, you'll absolutely be ready for matches when your rules start to come out for this.
I talked with the manager after it happened. He said GW was shifting its business model from play in store to play at home. All the stores near me ended up closed or moved to small shops. Even the 'Bunker' which had close to 30 tables and was used for tournaments closed that same year. I kept 1500 points of Wood Elves and 1k of both Goblins, and TK's. a drop in the bucket from the massive 9k (WE) and 4k (O&G, TK) armies. So i guess its a starting point IF i trust GW not to screw us over again.
@@Snow_Weaver I used to be a GW manager and I ran one of the largest stores, I left the company in 2004 and I feel just as betrayed as you do that the whole social scene we sweated blood and tears to build up was thrown away. But I got to be at the centre of that and it was an amazing time, games of 40K and Fantasy that were just so good the memories never fade. I know what Warhammer can be, and I think its a great force for good. But this isnt what GW values. GW stores these days are essentially useless, they are small store fronts to flog to parents who dont know any better and that is all. That dream of Warhammer as a mass hobby for everyone died with the battle bunkers, it become a far more elitist thing, even the rules are elitist these days and not something just anyone can succesfully run, as they now require so much mental load, the casual players are put off. Overall, it is heartbreaking, but im still playing 3rd edition 40K with my friends, in fact, big 3000 pointer Space Marines vs Nids later on today.
Very saddened to hear your story. I have fond memories of attending 110-120 player WFB tourneys in the 00s and early 10s. Hope this game does well and I can face one of your armies across the table some day.
When GW killed WFB it sort of felt like a lot of people tried to pretend that it was because the setting and the IP wasn't popular. But anybody who actually knows what they're talking about realizes it was because they ran the rules and the meta of the game into the ground, it was an absurdly bloated and fiddly ruleset, it asked you to build units of 40 and 50 soldiers when those soldiers were priced at $5 each, it made all the huge, new, expensive models severely OP so that you felt you couldn't win without them, and it quit being fun. Then Warhammer Total War comes out, and it's just the IP and huge battles for $60, and everyone is apparently shocked that it's a massive hit. And now GW is asking everyone to once again buy into a game that asks you to field giant infantry units, massive, overpriced diorama centerpiece figures, and buy three rulebooks to get started playing your faction. Not one lesson learned.
I don't really see that at all. The issue 8th ed had was in order to be steadfast (not insta break if you lost combat by a fair bit), you had to have more ranks then your opponents. This encouraged 50 men units with 10 ranks, just to survive. Meanwhile, in this ed, steadfast has been worked into the base rule set, and isn't tied to the amount of models your side has in combat at all. So there isn't that pressure of "bring tons of models in one unit, just to survive." Now, sure, there will still be a lot of models on the table, but the game isn't any different from 40k or Heresy in that regard. Infantry boxes are being sold in packs of 20. You have characters and mages who can eat up the points on your list quick, so you don't have to bring more models on the table. Especially compared to a game like Heresy, which is doing fine ATM, this game should be easier to get into, and require fewer models.
@@valeclaw1697 The setting being fine doesn't change that there were a lot of massive issues that could not simply be solved by "fixing" it. The fanbase, tbh, was as culpable in the destruction of WHFB.
@@stephenjenkins7971 yeah, some of the player base has a tendency towards elitism and gatekeeping.....I remember my very first whfb game in a store my opponent changed up his list to table me turn one before I even got to go.... it was super lame. but seriously it took me years to get my first army playable...the game was not at all easy to get started in.
I was playing WFB since the army lists were all printed in one booklet of about 20 pages so I've been doing this for a while. That being said, I cannot speak for other players when I list the reasons why I don't think that WFB failed, but rather was run into the ground: 1) GW published a new rulebook for WFB about every 5-6 years. In between the rulebooks, they published the Army Books. In many cases, your favorite army was last in line. So, while other players had new, sexy rules, better models, and more powerful magic items, you were stuck playing with the previous iteration's stuff. This made balance next to impossible. 2) Somewhere along 5th edition or so, they started to bloat the game with an excessive number of special rules for certain armies to try to bring some level of parity. For example; After placing terrain on the table, the Wood Elf player could place two additional clumps of trees anywhere on the table. Many of the forces in the WE army also gained bonuses from fighting in the trees. The problem is that the enemy force could simply avoid the trees and thus negate much of the bonus. 3) As an ongoing issue, each edition of WFB made a nasty habit of making certain models obsolete. Not just troops, who could be represented by models that looked close enough as to not matter, but large character models and chariots. I distinctly remember when my friend, who played the Empire, finished painting his beloved War Wagon, only to have it cut from the next edition. Thirty bucks to buy and about 6 hours to paint, up the stack. Nice, GW...really nice. 4) The final nail in the coffin for me, and many other players, based on the scathing reports on the Internet, was the often ridiculous rules for AoS when it was released. They had reduced a fantasy strategy game to something that simply couldn't be taken seriously. Some of the early rules included (and these are direct quotes) "Ancient Dignity: Dragons are ancient and prideful creatures and the Elves that ride them are no less haughty, but from such nobility and dignity stems an inner strength. If, during your entire hero phase, you can maintain a dignified (even arrogant) composure and not smile, smirk or laugh regardless of your opponent’s antics, you may re-roll all hit rolls of 1 made for models in a Dragon Host until your next hero phase." And " The Grail Vow: You can re-roll all failed hit rolls for this unit if, before rolling the dice, you hold aloft a grail or goblet and shout ‘For the Lady’ in a heroic voice." And "Bloodwrack Stare: When making a Bloodwrack Stare attack, pick a visible unit within range and roll a die for each model in that unit; for each roll of 6 or more that unit suffers a mortal wound as they foolishly meet the Medusa’s deadly gaze. You can add 1 to these dice rolls if, between the time you declare the target of the attack and the time you roll the dice, your opponent looks you directly in the eye." This was a game that we used in tournament play and they go and introduce this kind of crap. Yeah, I think you can understand why we got a bit salty. GW has one big thing working against it; The models it produces aren't perishable. Many of the models I still own were purchased 30 years ago when plastic boxed sets were affordable. Many more came from friends who got out of the hobby for one reason or another over the years and sold me their armies for pennies on the dollar. EBay has also been great for players who needed to build armies or even just hobbyists like myself (I liked painting and building the armies more than playing at times). However, GW never made a cent off of these after-market resales. I think that, at some point, they realized this, and rather than trying to bring in new players every few years, they simply tried selling the next new thing to their existing players. The problem with that is simple; People won't always like replacing stuff they spent time and money on. WFB didn't die...GW stuffed it in a room, refused to care for it, and eventually killed it to make room for something they thought would be better. They were wrong.
WHFB never died because people still had their rules and armies. But WHFB wasn't popular enough to be a main studio IP. AoS has been successful though and that's why it's a main studio IP. I think it's better for TOW to be a specialist game, it's a slow grow project with a lower revenue expectation. The core rules will be a turn off for most people.
The only problem is players. If you treat a GW game as a tournament game you are in for a wild ride. If you do narrative games it is a fun, nice and a great experience.
Mostly true, but 7th & 8th also suffered hugely from a certain Matt Ward who single handedly managed to destroy any semblance of game balance not once, but *twice*! I can tell you, trying to make even a 'soft' Daemons list in 7th was a herculean effort, to downright impossible vs. some match-ups. The book was absolutely that OP! Against the likes of O&G's or WE's or Bret's for example, I could bring a 'no magic' + 0 Flamers Tzeentch Daemon army and still ROFLstomp those armies with ease. 8th's army book balance turned out even worse after the Daemons + High Elves clusterfeth...
@@drunkenastarte5243 I played Vampire Counts which was also a power creep army. If I built a custom list to play against Daemon's it will still be an uphill battle. Once 8th came and it was just a shit show then I moved to Warmachine.
@@GVS86 From my fuzzy memories of those days, I recall both HE's with their army-wide Always Strikes First & Vamp's with their insane resurrection spam were the initial power creep, but then Daemons just blew up the entire edition, followed by WoC, DE's and their obnoxious 'Shadestar' build and finished off with Skaven shenanigans 8th started decently enough, as the initial books including Empire, O&G's, Dwarves were fairly middle of the road, while Ogre Kingdoms & Tomb Kings especially were kinda restrained. (TK's especially so, as their resurrection mechanics were definitely played 'too safe' and led to them being somewhat underpowered...) VC's I think hit a good sweet spot in 8th. Their res'ing abilities were reigned in, but not over-nerfed like the TK's, and you could build some decently challenging lists. But the Vampire Powers selection was amazing, and would allow to build some really cool & unique characters to fit any of the Bloodlines! ...and then Daemons happened. AGAIN! Only this time, their book was laughably unplayable overall, with rules that actively punished the Daemon player. The aptly coined 'Reign of Comedy' table, being the only army in the game with no access to any form of Dispel Scroll, no character customization + randomly generated 'Gifts', General/BSB rules being strictly God-locked in their effects... You could build some pretty unfriendly 'Tournament' level lists sure, but if anything, they became even gakkier & more obnoxious than their 7th ed rules! (the infamous Portalglyph shenanigans were the stuff of TFG legends!Lol) Then High Elves came along the very next month, and alongside keeping their army-wide ASF rules, they also gained army-wide 'fight in extra ranks', better ward saves than freaking Daemons, armour saves to rival Bretonnians/Dwarves, a busted as gak High Magic lore, AND, a magic banner that handed out 2+ ward saves vs. all 'Magical' damage. (...including 100% coverage vs. ALL damage a Daemon could inflict, outside of certain 'instant kill' spells like Pit of Shades, etc...) WoC and Dark Elves just continued the poop party, though ironically enough, Lizardmen were kinda 'meh' overall.
8th was cursed by a couple of things. It wasn't scalable, you needed at minimum, 2 battalion boxes to have a starter army, so the cost to entry was terrible. The armies weren't getting refreshed in any sort of consistent or complete fashion. Many armies had kits 10, 15, 20+ years old and with ever increasing prices. Even when an army was refreshed, i.e. Tomb Kings, not every model was release for the army! sigh. If they were able to have essentially levels of entry, Paths to glory, so start with warbands, then build to battalions, then to big army, it would've had a chance. Not mentioning many GW stores just pushed 40k over Fantasy anyway. It is most unfortunate. Warhammer Fantasy Battle (WHFB for short) was fun and it had tons of background. But many factors led to its failure.
I was a filthy little Red Shirt at my local GW at the time, and overall, the release cycle for the individual army books were no better/worse than the rate of the 40k codex release cycles... GW was still set on a monthly - bi-weekly release window back then, so releases overall where just snail's pace in general. Fantasy got a pretty heavy load of releases overall, but GW was being run by their WORST ever CEO at the time, (the infamous Tom Kirby), and Fantasy especially was getting murdered by the "new" kit design of 10-man boxes for higher & higher premium pricing. Empire Greatswords iirc, when they dropped in I want to say, 2008? Were 10 dudes for the new price bracket of $50(CAN). They then shot up soon after release to $60 after the yearly "pricing re-adjustment", earning them the nickname of 'Goldswords'. The worst offender eventually because the Witch Elves, which upon their release in 2010/2011? launched at a jaw-dropping $70(CAN) for 10 girls. Even GW staff members were abandoning Fantasy due to the cost for armies becoming beyond insane... Organised events weren't helping matters, as too many events began creeping the pts limits from 2k -> 2.4k -> 3k, further adding gasoline to the costly inferno. The game balance getting blown to absolute crap by a certain studio member yet AGAIN, (*coughWardcough), was just the final nail in the coffin for the game. Balance got so bad after the Daemons + High Elves flustercluck, and just continued the headlong dive into the preverbial shitter.
@@drunkenastarte5243 Yes, I was a black shirt back then for the launch of 8th as well as end times and launch of AoS. Wood Elves only came out at the end, way too late to be any good and Bretonnians never got anything. BTK, (Big Tom Kirby) was bad, it was good when we had Mark Wells (Wolflord Extraordinaire). But his time was too short. He was sorely missed. GWs price increases, which according to Tom Kirby "are to protect against inflation and costs" I heard him say that at a conference myself, never made any sense. In the plastic model business, i.e. Tamiya, Trumpeter, Airfix, Revell of Germany, et al., do not do this and maybe do it at the beginning of the year, and definitely not during the year. Model companies usually increase prices after a kit goes out of production and before it goes back into production when the factor in any new costs. Night and day compared to GW
I wish people would stop spreading the bullshit about how it wasn't popular anymore or it wasn't making money. GW started killing it off during 6th edition by their business practices. Raising the prices to keep shareholders happy, reducing the amount of models in each box, making models obsolete, introducing poorly written rules and then bringing out a new edition to fix said rules and in the process breaking other rules, neglecting factions etc etc. It was never the fault of the player base. The biggest reason GW is bringing out the Old World has nothing to do with the popularity of Total War: Warhammer but, has a lot to do with rival companies like Mantic who knew that large fantasy rank and flank games were popular so they brought out Kings of War and a lot of the Warhammer faithful flocked to it. GW have now realised their mistake and now what to get back a slice of the pie that they threw away.
GW started killing it off between 3d and 4th when they shifted primary focus to 40k. That said at least here in my corner of the US almost nobody played it anymore by 2014. It was all 40k, warmachine and other games. Yes there were players with armies on shelves, and private games, and events and conventions but it was clearly a dying game. This weird revisionist history amuses me. The player base for WHFB in 1994 or 2004 was WAY larger than 2014... I know I was a player. Maybe there were pockets of popularity but it wasn't even a top 5 mini game among anyone I knew including international friends and people across the US. Do I think they could have fixed it maybe. But I think any kind of "fix" would have had almost as much backlash as AoS did.
WHFB needs to work at regiment sizes of 12-20 models, maybe goblins and skavenslaves at 25 plus. Buying and painting units of 40 plus was a killer. Not many kids and young adults have the cash, time and patience for that, and we need them to keep the game alive. Better to keep units and armies smaller, which would encourage players to move into different armies. I have 400 painted Dwarves, but it took 6 years to get there and would rather have half that and a different army... My fear is that Old World will repeat this mistake.
Herohammer is the answer, half the points can be spent on characters. Some armies are better at low model counts than others, but Chaos for example will be under 20 models for 2000 points
@hraughr I know some enjoy that and still remember 5th Edition with fondness, but it doesn't appeal to me. I just think the combat system needs to be less lethal so model removal isn't done by the fistful.
Okay, I’ll add my memories of the WHFB end times. The game wasn’t selling new product. One of the big reasons was... the internet. In the 70’s and 80’s when someone left the hobby, their army would basically get binned. Given to a younger sibling or cousin who would take them out and play with them in the yard. Or you’d go off to college and your mother would clean out your room. Or you’d get married, have a job, and kids and have no time, money or space for the hobby. So you’d stuff your collection in the attic or chuck it in the trash. Why? Because it wasn’t really easy to sell the old collection for serious cash. Enter the internet. Now you could post the collection for sale, reach basically the entire world, easily find a buyer and get decent money for the old collection. So sales of new armies started dropping off, because used minis were available at more reasonable prices (not to mention already assembled and painted). So along comes 8th edition and GW’s solution to sell more new stuff was twofold. One - increase the necessary unit size from 16-20 models to 30, 40, 50+. And... power creep. Each new release being head and shoulders above the last. So your old faction would be less playable in competition and you’d need to invest in the latest OP army. I remember that when 8th edition dropped, the cash grab became so obvious that even pretty loyal customers were just turned off. I never bought the 8th edition rule book or another book after 8th came out, and we reverted to just playing with our 6th edition rules and army books.
The Lore aspect is silly. I took part in the End Times games and tourneys and they were fun... until you realized that they had planned to destroy everything regardless. The TWO biggest factors were copyright issues (we now have Seraphon, Aelves, Ogors, Troggoths, etc.). They destroyed all cavalry because they couldn't copyright men on horses! The other issue was sales (due to excessive prices). Costs were just over the top pricey and it took a long time to save up to buy things. I kept all of my armies. Painting up a third-party Dwarf army currently. I'm waiting to rebase my old models once the rules are out. GW has put out minimal effort on this project, so any money they make will be mostly profit. Good for them this time around. Just give us rules and the occasional update and this game will flourish! At least some of us old guys can afford it now!
I hope the game does well and makes a lot of veteran players happy to be playing it again. I'm way too committed with my 40k armies today to go back to playing the Old World, unfortunately.
40k is also im the downfall, it begun with the Primaris marines. Just a new cashgrab. The rules are writen so the newst army/ model wins. Just frustrating. Ex Guard 6k/ CSM 4k points player
The issue with any war game is that as the size of the forces on the table get bigger and bigger, the smaller the miniatures need to be. This is especially true of games where each individual has to be represented by a mini. I know with many historical games, a single mini represents 10, 20, or more actual soldiers and a leader mini is that plus their retinue and bodyguards. I mean, how else do you field realistically field multiple formations that each contain dozens or even hundreds of soldiers. In the past, the limitations of trying to sculpt minis by hand did tend to make larger minis more common, but these days there's not much reason for large scale games to use smaller scale minis as computer sculpting and 3d printing makes it vastly easier to make small, detailed minis. WFB was a game that was getting more and more expensive to field as the armies got bigger, which also lead to the tables getting really crowded as well. I was actually surprised that GW didn't try to screw old WFB players by doing TOW in a smaller scale that would make everyone have to buy everything from scratch. Even worse would be if they picked a scale that isn't commonly made by other companies.
WFB WAS NOT designed to be competitive. To run GTs in the USA, esp the US masters, we have hundreds of FAQs just to play. I disagree on hordes being how to win. At the top level it was more single models dominating 8th ed. Movement is always king and fast models that move 360 always beat ranked units.
3:50 The lore was progressing just fine through 6th and 7th edition until they retconned that all away for 8th edition. And there were plenty of factions/regions left on the globe to explore/revamp like they've done with Cathay for Total War: Warhammer III. And 40K has shifted to primarily using trademarkable faction names over generic ones just fine sans blowing up the world (after similarly retconning years of lore because reasons). In fact, the stupid copyright lawsuits were about 3rd-party bits for 40K, not Fantasy. The only thing hard to do would've been their supposed miracle cure to get modern 40K level sales numbers, i.e. fantasy Space Marines. And even that would've only needed a little bit of creativity, as they could've put Stormcast Eternals descendant from the heavens on flying fortresses patrolling the world, which would've changed the overall feel of the world, while preserving the feel of all the established factions beloved by fans. 8:50 All of that also applies to 40K. You can easily proxy pretty much everything. The only things really protected are the faction logos, and you can just freehand those or put official transfers on unofficial models. The official models will sell just by virtue of being official. 9:00 The only way you could label THH a flop is if you're insane enough to use 40K as a benchmark, which thankfully GW clearly don't. Being a top tier specialist game is a godsend, as it means lower sales expectations and being free of AoS's and 40K's breakneck 3-year edition cycle that does nothing but continuously screw customers over. 9:45 Most of Warhammer Fantasy Reddit of all places is totally friendly. There's at most half a dozen unappeasable nutjobs shitting on TOW, maybe twice that in RUclips comments. And there are also very few people just randomly shitting on AoS except for whenever a WarCom article mentions TET for no good reason.
Yes once Kevin Rountree brought back specialist games and put that under the Forgeworld umbrella and stopped putting 40k money expectations on it, specialist games had a chance again in the company. I remember at a managers conference this was discussed.
Your first but makes no sense. They tried to expand beyond the Old World with the Chaos Dwarfs and Tomb Kings. Both failed miserably. And any attempts to add more fantasy elements were met with stiff resistance by grogs who demanded that everything be Uber historical. Demigryphs were raged at, but layer became accepted. Any attempt to change the lore too much caused civil wars in its Fandom. So just acting like adding Stormcast Eternals for example, would do nothing except cause the fan base to explode. Let alone other ideas like the sea elves.
@@stephenjenkins7971 You're wildly misrepresenting Chaos Dwarfs and Tomb Kings. Both were half-assed by GW when they revisited them just before The End Times after years of neglect. People found them lackluster on the tabletop, not as concepts. Not to mention that Dark Elves and Lizardmen are situated much farther away. And of course, some would have raged at Sigmarines. I alluded to this by saying that it would've changed the feel of the setting. My point is that if they were dead-set on adding them, anyway, there was no need for them to take a giant dump on literally all of their existing customers. Also, while AoS sells fine now, Stormcast Eternals aren't anywhere near Space Marines in popularity, so making them the setting's obnoxious poster children hasn't paid off. The Idoneth on the other hand would have fit into the Known World of Warhammer Fantasy perfectly fine (with different backstory for how they came to be, obviously).
@@twincast2005 They were neglected to begin with because barely anybody played them. Also they did actually try to support the Tomb Kings in spite of that anyway. This is just a WHFB fanbase myth. It makes no sense that GW would just give up on WHFB like that. Dark Elves and Lizardmen actually sold well enough to justify getting models consistently. Chorfs fell on their face and Tomb Kings limped along. You brought up the Stormcast, not me. You used it as an example where GW could totally just add it onto WHFB as if the fanbase would ever accept it. You're misconstruing what the issue was; the issue was that *WHFB did NOT sell well*. The dumping on the fanbase was a financial decision because the setting was not selling. Stormcast would never have been a concept of WHFB sold well. GW didn't make Stormcast because it needed Fantasy marines to make money. They made AoS, a high fantasy game where a fanbase that wasn't anal about adding new stuff, which allowed for stuff like Stormcast and other high fantasy concepts. Stormcast didn't need to be as popular as Space Marines, they just needed to be the face of a setting where GW wasn't held back by a fanbase that tore itself apart when fantasy concepts were introduced. So from this vantage point? It was very much a good decision for GW to blow up WHFB. Whether that's of any comfort to its fans is a different question. obviously. "The Idoneth on the other hand would have fit into the Known World of Warhammer Fantasy perfectly fine" Lol. Lmao even. I can hear the screeching of WHFB forums across the space-time continuum if they were introduced. Crying about flying sharks and how it destroys the setting. The fanbase screeched with the inclusion of Demigryphs, and you think they will accept flying sharks?
Für mich ist das Glas immer halb voll und ich freue mich einfach das MEIN Lieblingsspiel wieder zurück kommt... und Leute wie du werden mir das nicht schlecht reden können.
I've seen some people saying old world is DoA which, honestly I hope isn't true. But im not confident in it because GW is spreading themselves waaaay to thin with their games and projects. Horus Heresy isn't super supported, they JUST released Horus Heresy Epic which nobody seems to care about, and now this which... I feel is going to be unsupported in like a year or so. Also the prices are comical. I would be willing to buy these boxes if they where around $200 bucks, tops. But I'm not spending nearly $300 dollars on 20+ year old sculpts, some of which are still metal. The price of entry is waay to high.
We really don't need Gw for this and haven't for many years. Their ' restrictions " mean nothingWe've always had the rules. Can get every single edition of the rules online for free and the same will be for the new version. We never stopped playing it actually. Printers have made the models [ usually better looking ] insanely inexpensive [ printed up 93 Tomb King models last week for a $16.99 bottle of resin [ including 6 chariots, 20 horsemen and 2 giant models ] and yes, you can can find many of the STLs for free also. Tournaments...... who cares ??? Been playing both warhammers for 30 years and have never meant a single person who went to a tournament , never met anyone who knew of anyone who ever went to a tournamant, get some family and friends
As an old Warhammer Fantasy player I can say that the time Fantasy has been dead, other games have filled the void. I am not playing Conquest, cause I went for A Song of Ice and Fire the Miniatures game. But even with two Fantasy Armies (which I use the Oathmark system for too play with) I rather play a newer game system like Conquest. Old World starts outdated to me.
Lord of the Rings had a big impact on Fantasy Battle sales. Imagine if a trilogy of REALLY good and popular new Star Wars films came out and GW got the rights to make a Star Wars battle game. And then they reduced the number of 40k releases to turn a good chunk of their resources to making Star Wars stuff. That'd have an impact on 40k. Warhammer was already losing ground and LoftheR delivered the death blow which lead to the death spiral that ended the setting(makes less money, gets less support, makes less money etc) .
I think its mostly for the nostalgic wargamers out there. Ive never played it, I'm only recently getting into the hobby, but I play Oathmark and it's infinitely cheaper than anything GW sells. I'm on a pretty tight budget, so I gravitate toward miniature agnostic games and without the nostalgia to lure me in, I don't see myself trying the Old World out anytime soon.
you should. im on a very tight budget, and i buy proxys, you can buy a dwarf army from mantic for 50 quid, then buy 25mm bases and movement trays and you have an army
Oathmark, Dragon Rampant, Kings War, One Page Rules Regiments (which is FREE!!) essentially anything is better than a GW game. The rules will not be playtested enough, there will always be FAQs and changes, and they will support it erratically. Smart move. Also, the other rulesets tend to be mostly miniatures agnostic, so you aren't tied to one company. Enjoy, have fun in the minature wargaming hobby and not the Games Workshop hobby.
While that is true, I have a feeling we’ll se a good amount of new players joining the system. Most aos armies can actually be used in old world pretty easily and while certainly some units like stormfiends won’t be part of the setting (sonce they didn’t exist back then) th free pdf and entry to a system where most of your aos models are playable might mske it interesting to tip ones toes in. Personally having played 8th edition and knowing what the flaws are, the previous we’ve so far seen do promise a lot of good things, although I don’t really know how it will be till the rules officially come out
I worked for GW during 7th. and as it was pointed out some factions were ignored. running on models that were old and in need of a refresh. I also noticed most employees on the west coast were 40k players and would push sales of 40k over fantasy. cost for large units did not help. and yes the power creep thing was horrible. i personally thought all army books/codexs should be ready for print with the release of the edition. so they are as close to balance as a game can be. i see old world as an opportunity to acquire old models i want to fill the ranks of those armies or in truthfulness warbands for mordheim that i am missing. yea i could 3d print. but sometimes its fun to have the models for the collection from the original source. i see this like all of the other gw games that is not 40k and aos. minimal support. and the friends i have that are excited, i simply remind them that the old world has been out here in whfb. and we could play any time.
GW will always be GW. I wish they were cheaper as much as anyone. I was always more into 40k but I was always waiting for more things to be made in plastic before jumping into fantasy. I won't be waiting this time. Though I hope we don't get burned with the wrong selection of new plastic releases.
I was never attracted to this old fantasy world, not twenty years ago, not now. The reasons are obvious: a generic setting (every second fantasy copy the map of Europe), one small planet (it’s impossible to add “My Dudes” like in 40k), a toxic community of elitist grognards and gatekeepers (it’s just unpleasant to communicate). But all Warhammer miniatures are great! I was glad when Age of Sigmar was born and allowed round bases to be used for old fantasy miniatures instead of square ones, which are much better for collecting, painting and display. Unfortunately, GW killed this idea and again drove the old models onto square bases, without an alternative. It's really a shame.
My first love in WFB was Bretonnia, right from the golden age of 5th edition, the Nigel Stillman army book with its chivalry and honour, Bretonnia as a shining beacon of light in a dark world. Tournaments were held that even Wood Elves attended to test their skills against the flower of Bretonnian chivalry, and every peasant knew that their leige lord had their welfare at heart, and held the secret dream that with an act of sufficient bravery, even they could become knights. Then came the atrocity of the 6th edition army book, and fair Bretonnia suddenly becoming grimdark. Although I loved, and still love, the 6th edition miniatures, I could never forgive Anthony Reynolds for turning my courageous paladins into vicious narcissistic bullies. Then 7th edition rolled around, and...nothing. No Bretonnian army book at all. Likewise 8th. Cavalry had been hit hard with the nerf bat, but the Bretonnian knights (the finest heavy cavalry in the Old World) had no rules to balance them, and Bretonnia lives and dies on the fortunes of its cavalry. The army was pretty much unplayable, no new miniatures had been released since 6th edition, and the Bretonnian army book was the oldest still in print. By the time WFB disappeared, the Bretonnian army book was almost ten years old, but they'd already been effectively Squatted. Now, finally, Bretonnia is at the forefront again, where they belong, and I couldn't be more excited. To be able to bring my heraldic heroes out from retirement and use them again, with a background that (fingers crossed) looks like it harks back to 5th edition and Stillmania...to finally have Foot Knights!...I am absolutely here for all of it.
Lets be honest the game of Warhammer Fantasy was a kick arse game and everyone loved it. The reason it went down hill was the prices just kept going up, up, up and up all the time. By the end the pricing was set for single adults who don't have families and have expendable cash or the rich. No normal person can afford to spend money on this hobby. They priced themselves out of an audience. The rules was not hard, I had it memorised. The lore being stale is BS because it is a whole world that you can do stuff in which is evident in Total War Warhammer 3 where they have introduced unknown factions like Cathay. By the looks of it the new Warhammer the Old World is doubling down on the overpriced products which 90% of people cannot afford. Lower the prices so that more people can buy the game!!! The fan base will grow if you do that.
It will be difficult to spend tons of money advertising/supporting for something you can’t control. I think this is a key issue here. If you dump a bunch of money into an IP but anyone can sell their own $10 bag of 100 fantasy orcs off Amazon it will be difficult to really give warhammer the continued support it needs. With 3d printing this is becoming even easier now but there is still a barrier to entry there. Over the next 10 years as quality and price of printing your own models becomes more advantageous it will be interesting to see how Games Workshop handles it
As someone who actually wants to play fantasy. I just started collecting gloomspite gitz since last year so i cant invest in old world due to money/ time. GW will probably say "see not many people interested". But they dont want to see they killed warhammer fantasy/ old world themselves. They halved playerbase into AOS and Old world, while having deterred old fantasy playerbase.
A really interesting video and great to stumble across your channel. I wound caveat that, from what I’ve heard from other creators, Horus heresy is GW’s second best selling game at the moment. Not that I found find anything with a quick scan of their financial report. Brilliant video . Will be subscribing !
Pointless video - and you get some things really wrong. E.g. people are sick of overloaded miniatures like AOS and Lost kindom. They are looking forward to getting their hands on the old stuff. So its the exact opposite of you you are saying.
i Dislike AOS because i just dont Like the Lore, and i Tried the Gotrek Books and i could not Follow them a bit, maby the German Version of the Book was just bad i dont know, but i could never follow what was going on, it just felt so Boring, OH we lost an entire City somewhere oh oh no, ok we got 100 other big citys Who cares, and then this Wierd Stargate stuff and Switching realms o dont know, i could never follow. 40k Always got a pass on the we just lost an entire Planet Meh who cares, after all the Imperium has a Million worlds and it is mutch easier to follow the lore. You are Right that Fantasy always is at a Status Quo, but the thing is when One City gets overrun it shakes up the Entire setting, and yes you are Right they realy should Have done more with the lore, it can get Boring, but i Loved the Felix and Gotrek books they Where so fun, and i Play fantasy on a more lets say Small scale with WHF 4ed the Roleplaying game, in a Small scale Fantasy is Greate it feel realy good, but the world does not Realy support Big army Clashes because every Clash of armies will Shake the setting. a more small scale Skirmish setting would Fit Fantasy mutch better, like you have in the TTRPG where a small horde attacks a Village and you need to hold it, and Skirmish battles are even more Realistic and Historical Correct because most Fights back then where mostly sieges and small minor battles with a handfull of units.
AoS suffers from the same problems as 40k... because it is fantasy 40k. Basically, the shared problem is one of scale and consequence - the excess of the former and the lack of the latter. It's almost impossible to care about or understand the stakes of much of anything because it's occuring on such an insane scale.
Cities fall all the time in Fantasy. But important ones basically never did. And AoS got those important cities too that never fall but would be devastating if they did. Just sounds like you're bitter than anything else.
@spnked9516 40k doesn't suffer from that. It's why people get so passionate about 40k. And AoS has many important locations that get It's fans hyped up too. Plenty of fictions with multiversal or galactic proportions have stakes, you just don't care to see it.😅
@@spnked9516 In 40k it makes somewhat sense because you have an entire Universe, sure one loss means nothing, as long no named important planets fall, But from what i got AOS is just the old World and Lustria some what Splittet up and divided in realms and i dont get it it is so Confusing AF, even worse then 40k. i love Fantasy because it is Easy to Follow and as an Hobby Historian i can just dip in and feel right at home because it looks like things you know and Can Relate to, because the Empire is just Germany with extras while Bretonia is France and Britain. because GW just pressed Copy paste A LOT XD the only thing i Dislike is that the new Tabletop plays During a time NO ONE CARES ABOUT People will get confused by, that Franz and other big names are not Part of the new edition
I will definitely say that AoS' lore and story are pretty shit. When 2E ended and had Be'lakor essentially take away the Stormcast's ability to resurrect, it almost had some major stakes going now...except they IMMEDIATELY gave an answer to it by saying "new armor" and thus new models. As to the Gotrek books (I'm assuming the new ones), I've only listened to the first two but yeah they were also hard to follow. One sentence you're in a battle with a random guy, next it's over and Gotrek apparently helped. It's all over the place. Fantasy the more I look at it does have that weight when something does happen. If you read that a chaos force from the wastes pushed X far to Altdorf or wherever, then shit is getting real for that to happen. Though I do think you're idea of smaller skirmishes is an interesting take. Large battles, especially ones with one major victor, would absolutely have a larger impact on the world if they were properly played out. Smaller skirmishes would also play better in game as maybe then you wouldn't need as many units and make the game more accessible to more people.
It might be a hard sell even though I love this game so much one of the biggest problems now is that most stores are small for games workshop so you can't even fit that many games in one day. Back when I was playing I was fortunate enough to be playing at the Battle bunker of LA or more so Westminster California and that shop fortunately was as big as six to eight shops as they are now it had maybe 16 maps that can be played on might be a few less or it might be even more it's been a bit but the community was there and people were always playing it and the shop had consistent and monthly rewards and player base because of the community
These issues are only issues if it's assumed GW is to be kept, which it shouldn't be. For me, they are a company that commissioned some really vibrant artwork forty years ago and cleverly popularised it into a product that I still use. But there was never any need for them to make a second edition, or continue existing post-1992. Like an 80s novelty fondue machine, I've got the product in a box and they've made their money so are fully entitled to sod off and live on Barbados. And I wish they would. Now in 2024 the market price for a 3d-printed ork is about £0.05, and a pdf of decent fantasy wargame rules is about £0.00. If a hobby shop asks me would I like to pay £5 for my ork, and rename it to an Orugubooboo for copyright purposes, I'll laugh them off and reduce my contribution to buying a few pots of 3rd-party acrylic paint a year. If someone thinks of it as "lore" and not the cheesy derivative fluff it always was, I'm laughing at them too. The issues with fantasy coming back are (1) it never went away or even arrived in any meaningful sense because GW were only ever its boxers and packagers (2) the pretence that anything is occurring when GW release a thing. It's like a tramp burping to get attention.
This was pretty enlightening and 100% true. The game probably would have been more sustainable with this mindset instead of "needing" GW. Can play whatever edition you want and create any of the models you need. This is kinda what Warmaster is at this point.
One of the reasons they dropped the original fantasy line is because it didn’t sell Space Marines. The Space Marine line of minis is by far the biggest money earner for GW. They simply reinvented the fantasy game built around a new range of gold Space Marines. Problem solved.
People are going to be surprised if they don't think TOW isn't going to be in demand. Even GW is already overwhelmed according to some reports. Some good points and some I don't fully agree with in the video since I was there. Maybe the circles I was in were different but I really don't think they were. Again, good video and be cautiously optimistic as I like to put it.
Cautiously optimistic I think is a good way to be looking at this. I do believe the game has demand, though it's probably by the old playerbase. It's really gonna be a newer crowd that is the deciding factor.
@@dscorpion7582 I get that and I'll say this. The older crowd has money. They will drop that money in a heartbeat for systems they love. TOW this month, done. GW announces Mordheim version, old crowd is going ballistic. Also note that the old crowd has kids... Anyone doubting this release is delusional and I think that includes decision makers at GW, unfortunately. That's what keeps me only cautiously optimistic. When my Dwarf and Goblin Journals drop, which appear to be next, I'm going to be happy.
It is worrisome on what the starter boxes may be setting. I do want Fantasy's return to be good but unless we get more clear details, my hopes are unfortunately gonna be hanging low.
It feels like they made no improvements. At first i had thought maybe it would compete with kings of war, but they are COMPLETELY different and KoW is just so much better at what KoW does. I was planning on playing ToW and KoW but the deeper i dig into ToW the less i want to play it now that the Nostalgia hit is wearing off. Will likely make an army, but dual purpose so i can use it in KoW too.
8th edition had a few good ideas going for it, but the emphasis on massive infantry blocks and indirect but heavy nerfs to cavalry were IMHO the two main barriers to both enjoyment and entry. 7th edition was really fun; I didn't play the previous editions but from what I understand after GW moved away from Herohammer the game became really fun to play with many different playstyles. GW has a habit of learning only the worst lessons from previous editions, just look at 40k. 10ed could've been great if they'd taken where the game was in 5th edition, made a few balance passes, slapped a new coat of paint on it and releasing that as the new edition, but they instead decided to build the game around pushing FOTW model kits.
There was nothing wrong with it. It had far less issues than 40K with its first turn bias. How that has never been solved is remarkable. 40K for the lore, Fantasy for the game.
aos is just 40k without the space aspect. warhammer fantasy, and also the old world is a totally diferrent beast. Rank and file warfare, its beautiful.
7th edition was superior to 8th in most ways. 8th made it more expensive, less fun, and also less complex at the same time. If they can go back to more fundamental dice rolling and better storytelling it will be fine.
I had fun with every edition, but I played for fun. Rarely did tournaments because it was as never as fun as casual games. Tournament players ruined the fun whether you won or lost.
As for the Fantasy playerbase, the majority of us are just happy to have the game back in some form. There’s a vocal minority of dickheads. Don’t let the Glupp Shittos on Twitter who ragebait for some weird consoomer war tarnish the wider community 😅 Great video, subscribed
I was there or at least as an observer of the whole thing with fantasy and there's a general misconception about the whole deal, so let me break it down. -the game wasn't selling well and wasn't popular: both are half true, it was selling and wasn't popular because they haven't released a codex in like two years before the end of times and I mean not for each army like a single codex in two years I believe there where even factions stuck on a preview edition, so yeah hard to compete if your game hasn't been regularly updated in 3-5 years, saying is my understanding the end of time sold really well and was the most sold product for a while. - Also may I remind you they started selling end of time (which were like 3 or 4 books) but by the second one GW was asked if it was in fact the end of the game and they actively deny it, telling people not to worry about it it was just the beginning of something else. At this point they also haven't reveled anything about AoS so the uncertainty of a game ending and if another edition was coming was making people really nervous. -When the game did in fact ended it made a lot of people mad cause they honestly felt like to and with good reason. -to cope with the loss GW released a half bake alpha rule test of what AoS became later I suppose we call no this a preview of the rules. They have datasheets for every unit but lack any sort of battalion or organized play rules for this alpha test, so many people clearly abused the rules since they were not prohibited to do this but GW official answer was "well if your a dick none is gonna play with you" which is true but is also true this rules where not properly tested before release, it was just a temporary band aid. - so amongst the downfall of a beloved game, the lies of GW, half baked rules being release, the promises of a new game but not really mentioned for a while it was a new system and a new lore, etc. Yeah I can see people getting upset, mind you this happened in the span of a year or so. So before calling people whiny (which I assure you there were plenty of and most overreacting) the majority was just sadden about how GW treat this whole thing. And also the first Ed of AoS had barely any lore attach to it, which mad ot fell more hollow and cash grabby than ever
It sounds like The End Times sold well because the fan base was so starved for content with no codex releases. But yeah, with it all taking place in roughly a year and with AoS essentially being rushed out the door, I do understand why so many were upset. I have slowly been looking into the setting more and more and if I was invested in the game WAY BACK in high school when I first found out about WH in general, I probably would be in the same crowd.
@@dscorpion7582 the End Times books they produced are objectively some of the nicest quality books they have ever released, and it was sort of exciting because we didn't know what was going to happen next - characters were dropping like flies, it was like Game of Thrones. We thought it might have been a soft reset to allow them to do new stuff moving forward, but to go from buying these premium campaign books to "thanks for playing your game is now dead" was a kick in the teeth.
Still salty, former WFB player here. I've never hated on those people who like AoS, but after everything GW has pulled I don't trust them with any specialist game at all, and let's be honest that's what The Old World is going to be. The guy who burned his Dark Elf army was pretty stupid IMO, but I completely understand his anger. Going from a complex rank-and-flank game to a 'beer and pretzels' skirmish game with silly rules (like singing, shouting or having a moustache) just screamed that GW didn't take the game seriously like the players did. Not to mention the fact that GW were the ones who ran it into the ground through their greed and ineptitude, when it could have been fixed they just threw up their hands and ditched it. It now seems obvious that they wanted to have a product that fit the 40k mould replete with a space marine proxy that's simple to paint and forgiving to play (making it ideal for beginners), that also gets the lion's share of releases for the game. Like with AoS I'm not going to hate on anyone looking forward to The Old World, but I'm not touching it with a barge pole.
Gay Workslop Ran Warhammer Fantasy Battles right into the ground some Armies didn’t have any updates or models for over 5 years Bretonnians and others they focused on 40k and started taking resources away from Fantasy and they wondered why no one was buying Fantasy models 😂😂😂 they GW betrayed tens of thousands of hobbyists who has sunk thousands of Dollars and hundreds of hours and people reacted accordingly 🔥 🔥 🔥
Hearing that the TK box is only about 1200 pts for 93 models is a bit concerning from an outsider's perspective. The absolute largest army in AoS for normal play at 2k pts is skaven at about 120 models or soulblight at about 100 models (zombie horde) on the high end. I bet a decent chunk of that 1200 pts in the TK box is the bone dragon so I'd expect that to get to 2k you'll need at least another 50 models minimum making it significantly larger (more expensive) than the avg huge horde army from AoS. So not only are the expenses high due to being a specialist game, it seems like there's still that large model count from late WHFB.
For the Tomb Kings box, grab a box of Tomb Guard, some constructs like the Warsphinx or Ushabti or even the Casket of Souls, another character or two and you'll be at 2000pts easy. These are a better starting point than the old fantasy Batallions ever were. EDIT: Just to explain that a bit, these boxes contains mostly core troops which are cheap in points. As you move into Special and Rare choices you pay more per model in points, so you need less to fill out the army.
new player here I know im a bit picky here but i prefer fantasy over scifi and out of the different factions the only one that really called to me is the skaven. Might play warcry but with all the shit i've heard about age of sigmar and since as far as i understand there will be no skaven in the old world then i guess im just going to spend hundreds of dollars on paint and minis for a 20 minute game
Only way GW can ''appease'' the fantasy fans they stabbed in the back is by murdering AOS and making Old World the main focus again. They wronged their core market base, they can't expect people to just ''trust'' them again like that. They need to admit their faults in the way WhFantasy was mishandled and retcon the whole AOS out of existence. (The only way they could make AOS succesfull anyway was to just ape 40k with sigmarines) Same goes for 30k. It was a good try but nobody is choosing to play exclusively 30k... the only people who will get into that are people who plateaud at their 40k armies and are looking for new minis to buy to keep their hobby going. Mark my word: IF FANTASY ASSIMILATE AOS AND BECOME AS BIG AS 40K then this whole renaissance is for nought. How is GW even keeping up with all these niche game systems anyway? They are not even half way through their attempt at a 40k range refresh (after spending 5 years aimlessly trying to replace classic marines with primaris and failing) and now they want to create ANOTHER game system ? not to mention the time and resources they wasted on trying to convince people to sign up to WH+ ''it's totally worth it guys we promisse'' What the fuck is wrong GW? Just cut your losses and focus on making the actual thing you are known for FUN. 30k is DOA, aos is going on but i garantee most people who bought into it are old warhammer fantasy fans that will drop it as a hot rock if Old World gains any traction. I'would do the same. I've been trying to build a SM army since 2017 and the ammount of bullshit and loops i had to jump through to get an army while navigating the pointless rule and bullshit about old marines not being able to get on new transports and viceversa has me RIPE for a game system that WON'T change. Playing a 15 year old system would suit me down to the ground. Thanks for coming to my TEDtalk
My concern is not trying to get people in as a fan of fantasy, that's GWs job. If someone can't bother read rules or understand things then they gatejept themselves. Also I do believe competition for fantasy like games is good as GW should t be monopolizing the scene. People who want them to treat this like a full blown mainstream product are asking them to treat it like 40k are people who need a rat race game. 40k also didn't pull the rug from you. They told you that the rules are free and indexes would be released until codecies got released. People who didn't read this are either delusional or don't want to admit that they didn't fully read into what they signed up for. I would rather they treat fantasy like the Horus Heresy. The constant products pushed for 40k is too much and cosues on the competitive sweats.
some 80% of people who buy GW stuff NEVER PLAY THE GAME. The constant stream of products are for that 80%: and THAT'S why 40K is a success. Doesn't excuse GW's behaviour of course.
Archaon is in the background giving GW the wink, “l’ll be back for world destruction 2.0 when you need me” In all seriousness if they was going 8mm or so for WFB I’d be all over it, true epic scale battles no pun 😂🤦🏻♂️ but it’s not so buying old gear, nahhh not for me. GW are spreading themselves very thin though, you have now Age of Sigmar Warcry Warhammer Fantasy Battle Warhammer 40K Warhammer 30k Kill team Legion Imperialis Then you’ve Blood Bowl Warhammer Quest stuff Warhammer Underworlds Necromunda Crazy amount but at least some will have minis that are interchangeable, fantasy battle going back with square bases makes that a bit awkward.
WFB had its problems (many rooted in GW greed), lack of expandability frankly was not one of them. They never really did anything for Ind, Cathay, Nippon, Albion... Kislev was neglected as were Tilea and Estalia. The Norse (humans and dwarfs) were dropped after 3rd edition I think.
@@mogwaiman6048That's not the excuse they gave for blowing everything up. The root problem was that the game just wasn't popular enough, not that they had painted themselves into a corner like they claimed.
They are setting the old world 🌍 up to fail old sculpts high cost old artwork some factions have been dropped completely which is complete BS it’s like they set it up to fail and tell everyone look we told you so 😂😂😂
I personally the game will fail as gw has learnt nothing. It's already excluding a lot models. The prices are silly, which is why my etsy shop is so busy
They are going to release a bunch of old stuff then squat it when the game gains momentum, some of you are going to look very dated keeping the old models thats why you probably should skip Kemri especially.
I got introduced to war hammer from total war warhammer 2 got the game and loved it. Even got some 40k models and held off on trying sigmar after i heard they were bringing back fantasy but since they are keeping the old models that some are medal and look a little dated. If they updated all the models to new better looking all plastic models i would have bought both boxes for fantasy but i think ill just try aos instead.
I’ve tried his system once, and it is incredible what he was capable of doing. The love that went into army project is personally amazing and while I’m not somebody who played a huge amount of games in that system, the first few games I had in it, where a lot of fun
At first, I was intrigued. I have never played FB before and wanted to give it a shot. Then I realized that all the “new “ boxes were just old models with couple of new heroes… for that price I am not going to pay so much money for overpriced models that look like trash. Like you said, 3D printing alternatives are so much better but given the fact I need to buy 3 books and run a horde of units, I think I will just pass and continue playing other games…. What a shame…
I didn't get into WFB until they killed it. I cant stand Sigmar. I collected all the previous starters and many of the oop battalion sets. I was looking forward to the Old World, but the business model with the books and price of many of the models has really killed it for me. Actually, I didn't even buy Legion Imperialis and I have been an Epic fan longer than any other game, for similar reasons. I think my days of diving into new GW games is over.
I played a lot of 7th. 8th sucked because cavalry was unusable. The game was about stubborn blocks of infantry trundling across the table. I could never find anyone to play with even at the GW stores near me. I had no trouble finding players in 7th. IMO 8th killed the game, it required too many models and nobody I knew liked to play it. TOW looks like it will be the same thing. The way morale works basically all units are stubborn all the time and they are going back to not striking first on the charge. Looks like a slightly polished version of 8th.
old minis (some even metal), cringe faction alliances, half of the iconic armies are missing with weak lore explanation, overpriced, the future of system is uncertain with such a disastrous release. I'm in love with tomb kings after total war games and wanted to collect them, but when i saw how little gw cares i stopped caring either.
Why does GW hate me? Was very excited about the Old World as I have large fully painted High Elf, Dark Elf, Orc and Night Goblin armies. Now I wish I sold them all in the last 6 months when all the excitement about the release of the Old World started because now I have over 2,000 miniatures to rebase! 😳So not only do I have to rebase if I want to play in tournaments but the resale value of my collection took a huge hit as they are now based “wrong”🙄😡 Did going to the new base size really make sense? Was it really required? For example my Night Goblins were on 20mm bases and my Orcs on 25mm bases and now the are going to be on 25mm and 30mm bases. Not a huge difference. The justification is that the larger base sizes will allow the models to rank up better and allow for new sculpts to be more articulated. While these are good things aren’t these anticipated benefits outweighed by the negatives of forcing your customers to rebase thousands of figures? You combine this with the negative feelings resulting from how they ended the Old World 8 years ago and the fact that I have a couple of hundred Space Marines that have gone to legends and are no longer usable for tournament play and that I have over a entire company of Firstborn Space Marines that now need to be rebased (by the time I do this they will probably go to legends also) and I have to ask myself why I want to continue to buy GW miniatures and play their games? I love the lore and the games but I feel stupid if I continue to spend money and time buying and painting figures only to be told they are no longer usable or need to be rebased to be used…… I have spent thousands on WW2 and Ancients figs since the End Times that I would have spent with GW but I do not feel buying GW figs is a good investment given this history……. am I wrong? If they had kept the previous basing I would still be very excited about the new rules and would be trying to promote them as much as possible locally, instead I am just frustrated. Apologize for the rant. Probably going to buy the Old Hammer books, not rebase and just play local games and no tournaments which I will miss participating in…….😕
Yeah, when whfb died it was because the rules were horrible and the model lines were poorly managed. But the lore was good, and the grimdark fantasy was good. Aos had much more accessible rules...but shitty lore and lack of depth. Looks like gw is making the same design errors all over again. Old world should have rules that allow both rank and flank and skirmish...i.e give bonuses for formations but allow units to break formation to move in terrain. And streamline the stats and combat...universal special rules and exception based rules are terribly hard to learn and execute....the rock paper scissors game of initiative scores and avoiding attacks back with rank overkill suuuuuucks....the new game is going to be slow and cumbersome just like whfb.... they didn't fix any of that shit...it's a pump and dump recycle with no game design work done... the old tournament people may like it, but since it won't be easy to get into it won't take off...
I absolutely agree AoS' lore has nothing on Fantasy. Granted, it's barely 1/3 the age of its predecessor but it never feels like it has weight to it. Fantasy from what I've been delving into is great and speaks volumes in comparison. The real issue though is still the gameplay. GW for the most part has been streamlining both their main flagship titles to appeal and grab a wider audience. Bringing back an old game with old rules and then trying to sell that to the newer crowd I don't think is going to be as successful as anticipated. Will it sell? More than likely, but it really depends on how many take to understanding the revival of this oldish rule set.
This guy clearly doesnt understand why people were upset. So dont go around blasting others and insulting them for what they did with their stuff. This guy is so out touch and creating conflict out of nothing.
For how long they kept hyping this, it's a huge letdown and nothing burger. Ancient ruleset with, seemingly, very little changed. 90% of boxes content are absolutely ANCIENT miniatures that look really crummy when compared to today standards (yeah yeah, some might like their Ancient Charm...) - and even if someone likes how they look paying full premium price for ancient, technically obsolete plastic feels extremely scummy and money-grubby on GW part. I was hyped for this until they showed it, and now I know I am not going to pick it up. In my LHGS the sentiment, in general, is the same.
It's a money grab pure and simple, and GW fan boys will lap it up and spend an absolute fortune on the same models from 20 years ago, with brettonians new box at 155 pounds when last time it was 100 pound cheaper, while all the time using the same moulds that have been paid for multiple times over Plastic Men at Arms and plastic horses DON'T cost £155.. WAKE UP AND SMELL THE BULLSH*T folks
The game is set up to fail. But then maybe from GW's point of view and the AoS factions who work there, "that's a good thing" ? WFB's failed for three primary reasons (put aside pet peeves and easily fixable stuff): [1] Overly large, unnecessarily complex, bloated RULESET (100 pages core rules give or take). [2] Too expensive - £25.50 for 10 Tomb Guard was just not affordable for most of us. [3] Lack of support (compared to 40K). GW have repeated the first two already. The game is dead on arrival - but why? Maybe GW have targeted that tiny % of hardcore fans who still play older editions / 9th Age (9th Age itself failed and died due to their refusal to streamline the rules). Maybe GW have done some maths magic and have worked out the exact % they can get from pumping and dumping this small niche of players via nostalgia. i.e. GW do not want "new players" to play Warhammer Fantasy - they want them playing AoS. After all, if you're one of the brass etc who insisted no one likes WFB's IP and AoS is the BEST, you're not gonna let them prove you wrong, are they? ...
My faction was always Wood Elves. I remember bein SOOOO upset when WFB ended because the wood elf book came out and less than 3 months later the game was completely dead. No warning that it was going to die. I dropped 600+ bucks on all the new models and rule books because i thought i would be able to use them in the game i loved for the foreseeable future. That was not the case. Then two things happened at the same time.
1. Betrayal: AoS was released, no list building, no balancing and all the parts of the game I loved gone. Seemingly overnight. Leading up through the end times Games Workshop never once mentioned how drastically different AoS was going to be. Never once mentioned that WFB was going to die. I believe very few people took ' The End Times' as the literal end of WFB. hindsight can be funny in that way.
2. Abandoned: My local Games Workshop. The place i would hang out and get pickup games decided to change locations. Only 2 store fronts away BUT it was small. I mean really small, they went from having 8 playable tables to none, they took out the paint bar, the only 'table' was being used for the Demo game. Just like that the community that was built up was gone. What's the point of buying miniatures for a game if you have no place to use them and socialize with others who are also interested in the game?
Overall I felt betrayed and abandoned. It was a double whammy that shot my warhammer and war gaming hobby as a whole dead in its tracks.
Even after all these years it still hurts to talk about. It was kind of therapeutic typing all that out. If you read through all that, sorry, and thanks.
Damn, you really got hit with the bad luck stick. Especially with the GW store moving to a WORSE location. Maybe it's just me but those stores just aren't really meant to be used as social game shops. I've been to a few GW stores, most of which were in England, and besides maybe one all were pretty damn small and not much room to actually play games in (or at least had set maps you couldn't modify a whole lot).
And many have stated similar on the whole betrayal thing. I completely get it: losing a hobby you sank so much into for it to be gone and replaced sucks. Silver lining though is that if you still have you're Wood Elves, you'll absolutely be ready for matches when your rules start to come out for this.
Fellow Wood Elves player. I could have written this post word for word. I see you! We waited so long for that update just to get robbed.
I talked with the manager after it happened. He said GW was shifting its business model from play in store to play at home. All the stores near me ended up closed or moved to small shops. Even the 'Bunker' which had close to 30 tables and was used for tournaments closed that same year.
I kept 1500 points of Wood Elves and 1k of both Goblins, and TK's. a drop in the bucket from the massive 9k (WE) and 4k (O&G, TK) armies. So i guess its a starting point IF i trust GW not to screw us over again.
@@Snow_Weaver I used to be a GW manager and I ran one of the largest stores, I left the company in 2004 and I feel just as betrayed as you do that the whole social scene we sweated blood and tears to build up was thrown away. But I got to be at the centre of that and it was an amazing time, games of 40K and Fantasy that were just so good the memories never fade. I know what Warhammer can be, and I think its a great force for good. But this isnt what GW values. GW stores these days are essentially useless, they are small store fronts to flog to parents who dont know any better and that is all. That dream of Warhammer as a mass hobby for everyone died with the battle bunkers, it become a far more elitist thing, even the rules are elitist these days and not something just anyone can succesfully run, as they now require so much mental load, the casual players are put off. Overall, it is heartbreaking, but im still playing 3rd edition 40K with my friends, in fact, big 3000 pointer Space Marines vs Nids later on today.
Very saddened to hear your story. I have fond memories of attending 110-120 player WFB tourneys in the 00s and early 10s. Hope this game does well and I can face one of your armies across the table some day.
When GW killed WFB it sort of felt like a lot of people tried to pretend that it was because the setting and the IP wasn't popular. But anybody who actually knows what they're talking about realizes it was because they ran the rules and the meta of the game into the ground, it was an absurdly bloated and fiddly ruleset, it asked you to build units of 40 and 50 soldiers when those soldiers were priced at $5 each, it made all the huge, new, expensive models severely OP so that you felt you couldn't win without them, and it quit being fun. Then Warhammer Total War comes out, and it's just the IP and huge battles for $60, and everyone is apparently shocked that it's a massive hit. And now GW is asking everyone to once again buy into a game that asks you to field giant infantry units, massive, overpriced diorama centerpiece figures, and buy three rulebooks to get started playing your faction. Not one lesson learned.
I don't really see that at all. The issue 8th ed had was in order to be steadfast (not insta break if you lost combat by a fair bit), you had to have more ranks then your opponents. This encouraged 50 men units with 10 ranks, just to survive.
Meanwhile, in this ed, steadfast has been worked into the base rule set, and isn't tied to the amount of models your side has in combat at all. So there isn't that pressure of "bring tons of models in one unit, just to survive."
Now, sure, there will still be a lot of models on the table, but the game isn't any different from 40k or Heresy in that regard. Infantry boxes are being sold in packs of 20. You have characters and mages who can eat up the points on your list quick, so you don't have to bring more models on the table. Especially compared to a game like Heresy, which is doing fine ATM, this game should be easier to get into, and require fewer models.
no it wasnt popular. it didnt make them any money.
@@nicholasray3749yeah for the reasons they mention... not the setting.
@@valeclaw1697 The setting being fine doesn't change that there were a lot of massive issues that could not simply be solved by "fixing" it. The fanbase, tbh, was as culpable in the destruction of WHFB.
@@stephenjenkins7971 yeah, some of the player base has a tendency towards elitism and gatekeeping.....I remember my very first whfb game in a store my opponent changed up his list to table me turn one before I even got to go.... it was super lame.
but seriously it took me years to get my first army playable...the game was not at all easy to get started in.
I was playing WFB since the army lists were all printed in one booklet of about 20 pages so I've been doing this for a while. That being said, I cannot speak for other players when I list the reasons why I don't think that WFB failed, but rather was run into the ground:
1) GW published a new rulebook for WFB about every 5-6 years. In between the rulebooks, they published the Army Books. In many cases, your favorite army was last in line. So, while other players had new, sexy rules, better models, and more powerful magic items, you were stuck playing with the previous iteration's stuff. This made balance next to impossible.
2) Somewhere along 5th edition or so, they started to bloat the game with an excessive number of special rules for certain armies to try to bring some level of parity. For example; After placing terrain on the table, the Wood Elf player could place two additional clumps of trees anywhere on the table. Many of the forces in the WE army also gained bonuses from fighting in the trees. The problem is that the enemy force could simply avoid the trees and thus negate much of the bonus.
3) As an ongoing issue, each edition of WFB made a nasty habit of making certain models obsolete. Not just troops, who could be represented by models that looked close enough as to not matter, but large character models and chariots. I distinctly remember when my friend, who played the Empire, finished painting his beloved War Wagon, only to have it cut from the next edition. Thirty bucks to buy and about 6 hours to paint, up the stack. Nice, GW...really nice.
4) The final nail in the coffin for me, and many other players, based on the scathing reports on the Internet, was the often ridiculous rules for AoS when it was released. They had reduced a fantasy strategy game to something that simply couldn't be taken seriously. Some of the early rules included (and these are direct quotes) "Ancient Dignity: Dragons are ancient and prideful creatures and the Elves that ride them are no less haughty, but from such nobility and dignity stems an inner strength. If, during your entire hero phase, you can maintain a dignified (even
arrogant) composure and not smile, smirk or laugh regardless of your opponent’s antics, you may re-roll all hit rolls of 1 made for models in a Dragon Host until your next hero phase."
And " The Grail Vow: You can re-roll all failed hit rolls for this unit if, before rolling the dice, you hold aloft a grail or goblet and shout ‘For the Lady’ in a heroic voice."
And "Bloodwrack Stare: When making a Bloodwrack Stare attack, pick a visible unit within range and roll a die for each model in that unit; for each roll of 6 or more that unit suffers a mortal wound as they foolishly meet the Medusa’s deadly gaze. You can add 1 to these dice rolls if, between the time you declare the target of the attack and the time you roll the dice, your opponent looks you directly in the eye."
This was a game that we used in tournament play and they go and introduce this kind of crap. Yeah, I think you can understand why we got a bit salty.
GW has one big thing working against it; The models it produces aren't perishable. Many of the models I still own were purchased 30 years ago when plastic boxed sets were affordable. Many more came from friends who got out of the hobby for one reason or another over the years and sold me their armies for pennies on the dollar. EBay has also been great for players who needed to build armies or even just hobbyists like myself (I liked painting and building the armies more than playing at times). However, GW never made a cent off of these after-market resales. I think that, at some point, they realized this, and rather than trying to bring in new players every few years, they simply tried selling the next new thing to their existing players. The problem with that is simple; People won't always like replacing stuff they spent time and money on.
WFB didn't die...GW stuffed it in a room, refused to care for it, and eventually killed it to make room for something they thought would be better. They were wrong.
An extremely interesting response that I read with much attention. Thank you for sharing your experience.
Yeah those wacky rules at the start of AoS were indefensible. There’s a reason why they were all gone by 2nd Ed
WHFB never died because people still had their rules and armies. But WHFB wasn't popular enough to be a main studio IP. AoS has been successful though and that's why it's a main studio IP. I think it's better for TOW to be a specialist game, it's a slow grow project with a lower revenue expectation. The core rules will be a turn off for most people.
The only problem is players. If you treat a GW game as a tournament game you are in for a wild ride. If you do narrative games it is a fun, nice and a great experience.
most real comments ,its always easy to blame gw for everything
Yeah, 100% true. I played 7th edition for fun. I played Warmachine for tournaments.
Mostly true, but 7th & 8th also suffered hugely from a certain Matt Ward who single handedly managed to destroy any semblance of game balance not once, but *twice*!
I can tell you, trying to make even a 'soft' Daemons list in 7th was a herculean effort, to downright impossible vs. some match-ups. The book was absolutely that OP! Against the likes of O&G's or WE's or Bret's for example, I could bring a 'no magic' + 0 Flamers Tzeentch Daemon army and still ROFLstomp those armies with ease.
8th's army book balance turned out even worse after the Daemons + High Elves clusterfeth...
@@drunkenastarte5243 I played Vampire Counts which was also a power creep army. If I built a custom list to play against Daemon's it will still be an uphill battle. Once 8th came and it was just a shit show then I moved to Warmachine.
@@GVS86 From my fuzzy memories of those days, I recall both HE's with their army-wide Always Strikes First & Vamp's with their insane resurrection spam were the initial power creep, but then Daemons just blew up the entire edition, followed by WoC, DE's and their obnoxious 'Shadestar' build and finished off with Skaven shenanigans
8th started decently enough, as the initial books including Empire, O&G's, Dwarves were fairly middle of the road, while Ogre Kingdoms & Tomb Kings especially were kinda restrained. (TK's especially so, as their resurrection mechanics were definitely played 'too safe' and led to them being somewhat underpowered...)
VC's I think hit a good sweet spot in 8th. Their res'ing abilities were reigned in, but not over-nerfed like the TK's, and you could build some decently challenging lists. But the Vampire Powers selection was amazing, and would allow to build some really cool & unique characters to fit any of the Bloodlines!
...and then Daemons happened. AGAIN! Only this time, their book was laughably unplayable overall, with rules that actively punished the Daemon player. The aptly coined 'Reign of Comedy' table, being the only army in the game with no access to any form of Dispel Scroll, no character customization + randomly generated 'Gifts', General/BSB rules being strictly God-locked in their effects... You could build some pretty unfriendly 'Tournament' level lists sure, but if anything, they became even gakkier & more obnoxious than their 7th ed rules! (the infamous Portalglyph shenanigans were the stuff of TFG legends!Lol)
Then High Elves came along the very next month, and alongside keeping their army-wide ASF rules, they also gained army-wide 'fight in extra ranks', better ward saves than freaking Daemons, armour saves to rival Bretonnians/Dwarves, a busted as gak High Magic lore, AND, a magic banner that handed out 2+ ward saves vs. all 'Magical' damage. (...including 100% coverage vs. ALL damage a Daemon could inflict, outside of certain 'instant kill' spells like Pit of Shades, etc...)
WoC and Dark Elves just continued the poop party, though ironically enough, Lizardmen were kinda 'meh' overall.
8th was cursed by a couple of things. It wasn't scalable, you needed at minimum, 2 battalion boxes to have a starter army, so the cost to entry was terrible. The armies weren't getting refreshed in any sort of consistent or complete fashion. Many armies had kits 10, 15, 20+ years old and with ever increasing prices. Even when an army was refreshed, i.e. Tomb Kings, not every model was release for the army! sigh. If they were able to have essentially levels of entry, Paths to glory, so start with warbands, then build to battalions, then to big army, it would've had a chance. Not mentioning many GW stores just pushed 40k over Fantasy anyway. It is most unfortunate. Warhammer Fantasy Battle (WHFB for short) was fun and it had tons of background. But many factors led to its failure.
I was a filthy little Red Shirt at my local GW at the time, and overall, the release cycle for the individual army books were no better/worse than the rate of the 40k codex release cycles... GW was still set on a monthly - bi-weekly release window back then, so releases overall where just snail's pace in general.
Fantasy got a pretty heavy load of releases overall, but GW was being run by their WORST ever CEO at the time, (the infamous Tom Kirby), and Fantasy especially was getting murdered by the "new" kit design of 10-man boxes for higher & higher premium pricing.
Empire Greatswords iirc, when they dropped in I want to say, 2008? Were 10 dudes for the new price bracket of $50(CAN). They then shot up soon after release to $60 after the yearly "pricing re-adjustment", earning them the nickname of 'Goldswords'. The worst offender eventually because the Witch Elves, which upon their release in 2010/2011? launched at a jaw-dropping $70(CAN) for 10 girls. Even GW staff members were abandoning Fantasy due to the cost for armies becoming beyond insane...
Organised events weren't helping matters, as too many events began creeping the pts limits from 2k -> 2.4k -> 3k, further adding gasoline to the costly inferno.
The game balance getting blown to absolute crap by a certain studio member yet AGAIN, (*coughWardcough), was just the final nail in the coffin for the game.
Balance got so bad after the Daemons + High Elves flustercluck, and just continued the headlong dive into the preverbial shitter.
@@drunkenastarte5243 Yes, I was a black shirt back then for the launch of 8th as well as end times and launch of AoS. Wood Elves only came out at the end, way too late to be any good and Bretonnians never got anything. BTK, (Big Tom Kirby) was bad, it was good when we had Mark Wells (Wolflord Extraordinaire). But his time was too short. He was sorely missed. GWs price increases, which according to Tom Kirby "are to protect against inflation and costs" I heard him say that at a conference myself, never made any sense. In the plastic model business, i.e. Tamiya, Trumpeter, Airfix, Revell of Germany, et al., do not do this and maybe do it at the beginning of the year, and definitely not during the year. Model companies usually increase prices after a kit goes out of production and before it goes back into production when the factor in any new costs. Night and day compared to GW
To be fair the army that was burned was Dark Elves so no-one really minds.
I wish people would stop spreading the bullshit about how it wasn't popular anymore or it wasn't making money. GW started killing it off during 6th edition by their business practices. Raising the prices to keep shareholders happy, reducing the amount of models in each box, making models obsolete, introducing poorly written rules and then bringing out a new edition to fix said rules and in the process breaking other rules, neglecting factions etc etc. It was never the fault of the player base.
The biggest reason GW is bringing out the Old World has nothing to do with the popularity of Total War: Warhammer but, has a lot to do with rival companies like Mantic who knew that large fantasy rank and flank games were popular so they brought out Kings of War and a lot of the Warhammer faithful flocked to it. GW have now realised their mistake and now what to get back a slice of the pie that they threw away.
lets not forget creating their own competition - Middle Earth Battle Game. This served the same niche audience and divided their support yet again.
@@davidcinna5770 so true. GW jumped on that IP band wagon for a quick buck.
GW wants ALL the 💰
GW started killing it off between 3d and 4th when they shifted primary focus to 40k.
That said at least here in my corner of the US almost nobody played it anymore by 2014. It was all 40k, warmachine and other games. Yes there were players with armies on shelves, and private games, and events and conventions but it was clearly a dying game. This weird revisionist history amuses me. The player base for WHFB in 1994 or 2004 was WAY larger than 2014... I know I was a player. Maybe there were pockets of popularity but it wasn't even a top 5 mini game among anyone I knew including international friends and people across the US.
Do I think they could have fixed it maybe. But I think any kind of "fix" would have had almost as much backlash as AoS did.
WHFB needs to work at regiment sizes of 12-20 models, maybe goblins and skavenslaves at 25 plus. Buying and painting units of 40 plus was a killer. Not many kids and young adults have the cash, time and patience for that, and we need them to keep the game alive. Better to keep units and armies smaller, which would encourage players to move into different armies. I have 400 painted Dwarves, but it took 6 years to get there and would rather have half that and a different army... My fear is that Old World will repeat this mistake.
Herohammer is the answer, half the points can be spent on characters.
Some armies are better at low model counts than others, but Chaos for example will be under 20 models for 2000 points
@hraughr I know some enjoy that and still remember 5th Edition with fondness, but it doesn't appeal to me. I just think the combat system needs to be less lethal so model removal isn't done by the fistful.
Okay, I’ll add my memories of the WHFB end times. The game wasn’t selling new product. One of the big reasons was... the internet. In the 70’s and 80’s when someone left the hobby, their army would basically get binned. Given to a younger sibling or cousin who would take them out and play with them in the yard. Or you’d go off to college and your mother would clean out your room. Or you’d get married, have a job, and kids and have no time, money or space for the hobby. So you’d stuff your collection in the attic or chuck it in the trash. Why? Because it wasn’t really easy to sell the old collection for serious cash. Enter the internet. Now you could post the collection for sale, reach basically the entire world, easily find a buyer and get decent money for the old collection. So sales of new armies started dropping off, because used minis were available at more reasonable prices (not to mention already assembled and painted). So along comes 8th edition and GW’s solution to sell more new stuff was twofold. One - increase the necessary unit size from 16-20 models to 30, 40, 50+. And... power creep. Each new release being head and shoulders above the last. So your old faction would be less playable in competition and you’d need to invest in the latest OP army. I remember that when 8th edition dropped, the cash grab became so obvious that even pretty loyal customers were just turned off. I never bought the 8th edition rule book or another book after 8th came out, and we reverted to just playing with our 6th edition rules and army books.
The Lore aspect is silly. I took part in the End Times games and tourneys and they were fun... until you realized that they had planned to destroy everything regardless. The TWO biggest factors were copyright issues (we now have Seraphon, Aelves, Ogors, Troggoths, etc.). They destroyed all cavalry because they couldn't copyright men on horses! The other issue was sales (due to excessive prices). Costs were just over the top pricey and it took a long time to save up to buy things.
I kept all of my armies. Painting up a third-party Dwarf army currently. I'm waiting to rebase my old models once the rules are out. GW has put out minimal effort on this project, so any money they make will be mostly profit. Good for them this time around. Just give us rules and the occasional update and this game will flourish! At least some of us old guys can afford it now!
Well, only time will tell. I hope that, at least, it brings more joy to the hobby.
I hope the game does well and makes a lot of veteran players happy to be playing it again. I'm way too committed with my 40k armies today to go back to playing the Old World, unfortunately.
40k is also im the downfall, it begun with the Primaris marines. Just a new cashgrab. The rules are writen so the newst army/ model wins. Just frustrating.
Ex Guard 6k/ CSM 4k points player
The issue with any war game is that as the size of the forces on the table get bigger and bigger, the smaller the miniatures need to be. This is especially true of games where each individual has to be represented by a mini. I know with many historical games, a single mini represents 10, 20, or more actual soldiers and a leader mini is that plus their retinue and bodyguards. I mean, how else do you field realistically field multiple formations that each contain dozens or even hundreds of soldiers.
In the past, the limitations of trying to sculpt minis by hand did tend to make larger minis more common, but these days there's not much reason for large scale games to use smaller scale minis as computer sculpting and 3d printing makes it vastly easier to make small, detailed minis.
WFB was a game that was getting more and more expensive to field as the armies got bigger, which also lead to the tables getting really crowded as well. I was actually surprised that GW didn't try to screw old WFB players by doing TOW in a smaller scale that would make everyone have to buy everything from scratch. Even worse would be if they picked a scale that isn't commonly made by other companies.
IDk, I kinda wish they actually did make the Old World in a smaller scale.
WFB WAS NOT designed to be competitive. To run GTs in the USA, esp the US masters, we have hundreds of FAQs just to play. I disagree on hordes being how to win. At the top level it was more single models dominating 8th ed. Movement is always king and fast models that move 360 always beat ranked units.
3:50 The lore was progressing just fine through 6th and 7th edition until they retconned that all away for 8th edition. And there were plenty of factions/regions left on the globe to explore/revamp like they've done with Cathay for Total War: Warhammer III. And 40K has shifted to primarily using trademarkable faction names over generic ones just fine sans blowing up the world (after similarly retconning years of lore because reasons). In fact, the stupid copyright lawsuits were about 3rd-party bits for 40K, not Fantasy. The only thing hard to do would've been their supposed miracle cure to get modern 40K level sales numbers, i.e. fantasy Space Marines. And even that would've only needed a little bit of creativity, as they could've put Stormcast Eternals descendant from the heavens on flying fortresses patrolling the world, which would've changed the overall feel of the world, while preserving the feel of all the established factions beloved by fans.
8:50 All of that also applies to 40K. You can easily proxy pretty much everything. The only things really protected are the faction logos, and you can just freehand those or put official transfers on unofficial models. The official models will sell just by virtue of being official.
9:00 The only way you could label THH a flop is if you're insane enough to use 40K as a benchmark, which thankfully GW clearly don't. Being a top tier specialist game is a godsend, as it means lower sales expectations and being free of AoS's and 40K's breakneck 3-year edition cycle that does nothing but continuously screw customers over.
9:45 Most of Warhammer Fantasy Reddit of all places is totally friendly. There's at most half a dozen unappeasable nutjobs shitting on TOW, maybe twice that in RUclips comments. And there are also very few people just randomly shitting on AoS except for whenever a WarCom article mentions TET for no good reason.
excellent comment, fully agree
Yes once Kevin Rountree brought back specialist games and put that under the Forgeworld umbrella and stopped putting 40k money expectations on it, specialist games had a chance again in the company. I remember at a managers conference this was discussed.
Your first but makes no sense. They tried to expand beyond the Old World with the Chaos Dwarfs and Tomb Kings. Both failed miserably. And any attempts to add more fantasy elements were met with stiff resistance by grogs who demanded that everything be Uber historical. Demigryphs were raged at, but layer became accepted. Any attempt to change the lore too much caused civil wars in its Fandom.
So just acting like adding Stormcast Eternals for example, would do nothing except cause the fan base to explode. Let alone other ideas like the sea elves.
@@stephenjenkins7971 You're wildly misrepresenting Chaos Dwarfs and Tomb Kings. Both were half-assed by GW when they revisited them just before The End Times after years of neglect. People found them lackluster on the tabletop, not as concepts. Not to mention that Dark Elves and Lizardmen are situated much farther away.
And of course, some would have raged at Sigmarines. I alluded to this by saying that it would've changed the feel of the setting. My point is that if they were dead-set on adding them, anyway, there was no need for them to take a giant dump on literally all of their existing customers. Also, while AoS sells fine now, Stormcast Eternals aren't anywhere near Space Marines in popularity, so making them the setting's obnoxious poster children hasn't paid off. The Idoneth on the other hand would have fit into the Known World of Warhammer Fantasy perfectly fine (with different backstory for how they came to be, obviously).
@@twincast2005 They were neglected to begin with because barely anybody played them. Also they did actually try to support the Tomb Kings in spite of that anyway. This is just a WHFB fanbase myth. It makes no sense that GW would just give up on WHFB like that.
Dark Elves and Lizardmen actually sold well enough to justify getting models consistently. Chorfs fell on their face and Tomb Kings limped along.
You brought up the Stormcast, not me. You used it as an example where GW could totally just add it onto WHFB as if the fanbase would ever accept it. You're misconstruing what the issue was; the issue was that *WHFB did NOT sell well*. The dumping on the fanbase was a financial decision because the setting was not selling. Stormcast would never have been a concept of WHFB sold well.
GW didn't make Stormcast because it needed Fantasy marines to make money. They made AoS, a high fantasy game where a fanbase that wasn't anal about adding new stuff, which allowed for stuff like Stormcast and other high fantasy concepts. Stormcast didn't need to be as popular as Space Marines, they just needed to be the face of a setting where GW wasn't held back by a fanbase that tore itself apart when fantasy concepts were introduced. So from this vantage point? It was very much a good decision for GW to blow up WHFB. Whether that's of any comfort to its fans is a different question. obviously.
"The Idoneth on the other hand would have fit into the Known World of Warhammer Fantasy perfectly fine"
Lol. Lmao even. I can hear the screeching of WHFB forums across the space-time continuum if they were introduced. Crying about flying sharks and how it destroys the setting. The fanbase screeched with the inclusion of Demigryphs, and you think they will accept flying sharks?
Für mich ist das Glas immer halb voll und ich freue mich einfach das MEIN Lieblingsspiel wieder zurück kommt... und Leute wie du werden mir das nicht schlecht reden können.
I like your enthusiasm. Have a heart.
Wünsch dir alles glück mein guter, nur nach all dem verzeih uns unseren Nihilismus
@@peroblaz1628 bin ich doch ganz bei euch und kann euch gut verstehen 😉
I went to Kings of war after 8Th, and i love the possibilty to make diorama out of my units. So i will stay with KoW.
I still have all my old miniatures... Just need to dust them off, finish painting them .
As an AoS player I’ve been dubious about old world content but this video was great! Solid and measured takes 🙌🏻
I've seen some people saying old world is DoA which, honestly I hope isn't true. But im not confident in it because GW is spreading themselves waaaay to thin with their games and projects. Horus Heresy isn't super supported, they JUST released Horus Heresy Epic which nobody seems to care about, and now this which... I feel is going to be unsupported in like a year or so.
Also the prices are comical. I would be willing to buy these boxes if they where around $200 bucks, tops. But I'm not spending nearly $300 dollars on 20+ year old sculpts, some of which are still metal. The price of entry is waay to high.
We really don't need Gw for this and haven't for many years. Their ' restrictions " mean nothingWe've always had the rules. Can get every single edition of the rules online for free and the same will be for the new version. We never stopped playing it actually. Printers have made the models [ usually better looking ] insanely inexpensive [ printed up 93 Tomb King models last week for a $16.99 bottle of resin [ including 6 chariots, 20 horsemen and 2 giant models ] and yes, you can can find many of the STLs for free also. Tournaments...... who cares ??? Been playing both warhammers for 30 years and have never meant a single person who went to a tournament , never met anyone who knew of anyone who ever went to a tournamant, get some family and friends
As an old Warhammer Fantasy player I can say that the time Fantasy has been dead, other games have filled the void. I am not playing Conquest, cause I went for A Song of Ice and Fire the Miniatures game. But even with two Fantasy Armies (which I use the Oathmark system for too play with) I rather play a newer game system like Conquest. Old World starts outdated to me.
Conquest is a great system. Hopped from 9th Age to Conquest. I'm in it for the foreseeable future. Great dev team, good community, amazing game.
Design-wise, WHFB was already a dinosaur in 7th ed.
The business idea behind Old World is nostalgia.
Lord of the Rings had a big impact on Fantasy Battle sales. Imagine if a trilogy of REALLY good and popular new Star Wars films came out and GW got the rights to make a Star Wars battle game. And then they reduced the number of 40k releases to turn a good chunk of their resources to making Star Wars stuff. That'd have an impact on 40k. Warhammer was already losing ground and LoftheR delivered the death blow which lead to the death spiral that ended the setting(makes less money, gets less support, makes less money etc) .
You do know star wars legion exists and it's based in the better star wars movies?
And better than warhammer
I think its mostly for the nostalgic wargamers out there. Ive never played it, I'm only recently getting into the hobby, but I play Oathmark and it's infinitely cheaper than anything GW sells.
I'm on a pretty tight budget, so I gravitate toward miniature agnostic games and without the nostalgia to lure me in, I don't see myself trying the Old World out anytime soon.
you should. im on a very tight budget, and i buy proxys, you can buy a dwarf army from mantic for 50 quid, then buy 25mm bases and movement trays and you have an army
Oathmark, Dragon Rampant, Kings War, One Page Rules Regiments (which is FREE!!) essentially anything is better than a GW game. The rules will not be playtested enough, there will always be FAQs and changes, and they will support it erratically. Smart move. Also, the other rulesets tend to be mostly miniatures agnostic, so you aren't tied to one company. Enjoy, have fun in the minature wargaming hobby and not the Games Workshop hobby.
i found those games very boring, but like the models for kings of war, but the others you mentioned i could shit out better models @@doshutokeshi3877
While that is true, I have a feeling we’ll se a good amount of new players joining the system.
Most aos armies can actually be used in old world pretty easily and while certainly some units like stormfiends won’t be part of the setting (sonce they didn’t exist back then) th free pdf and entry to a system where most of your aos models are playable might mske it interesting to tip ones toes in.
Personally having played 8th edition and knowing what the flaws are, the previous we’ve so far seen do promise a lot of good things, although I don’t really know how it will be till the rules officially come out
You won't be missed.
The saving grace for TOW is it gets to be a specialist game with a lower revenue expectation. It is a slow grow project.
I worked for GW during 7th. and as it was pointed out some factions were ignored. running on models that were old and in need of a refresh. I also noticed most employees on the west coast were 40k players and would push sales of 40k over fantasy. cost for large units did not help. and yes the power creep thing was horrible. i personally thought all army books/codexs should be ready for print with the release of the edition. so they are as close to balance as a game can be.
i see old world as an opportunity to acquire old models i want to fill the ranks of those armies or in truthfulness warbands for mordheim that i am missing. yea i could 3d print. but sometimes its fun to have the models for the collection from the original source. i see this like all of the other gw games that is not 40k and aos. minimal support. and the friends i have that are excited, i simply remind them that the old world has been out here in whfb. and we could play any time.
GW will always be GW. I wish they were cheaper as much as anyone. I was always more into 40k but I was always waiting for more things to be made in plastic before jumping into fantasy. I won't be waiting this time. Though I hope we don't get burned with the wrong selection of new plastic releases.
The old models being bought back to be combined with new models is just, "Eurghhh" to me, definitely a major consideration in passing on this one.
This is the only game that can bring me back to the hobby
I was never attracted to this old fantasy world, not twenty years ago, not now. The reasons are obvious: a generic setting (every second fantasy copy the map of Europe), one small planet (it’s impossible to add “My Dudes” like in 40k), a toxic community of elitist grognards and gatekeepers (it’s just unpleasant to communicate).
But all Warhammer miniatures are great!
I was glad when Age of Sigmar was born and allowed round bases to be used for old fantasy miniatures instead of square ones, which are much better for collecting, painting and display.
Unfortunately, GW killed this idea and again drove the old models onto square bases, without an alternative. It's really a shame.
My first love in WFB was Bretonnia, right from the golden age of 5th edition, the Nigel Stillman army book with its chivalry and honour, Bretonnia as a shining beacon of light in a dark world. Tournaments were held that even Wood Elves attended to test their skills against the flower of Bretonnian chivalry, and every peasant knew that their leige lord had their welfare at heart, and held the secret dream that with an act of sufficient bravery, even they could become knights.
Then came the atrocity of the 6th edition army book, and fair Bretonnia suddenly becoming grimdark. Although I loved, and still love, the 6th edition miniatures, I could never forgive Anthony Reynolds for turning my courageous paladins into vicious narcissistic bullies.
Then 7th edition rolled around, and...nothing. No Bretonnian army book at all. Likewise 8th. Cavalry had been hit hard with the nerf bat, but the Bretonnian knights (the finest heavy cavalry in the Old World) had no rules to balance them, and Bretonnia lives and dies on the fortunes of its cavalry. The army was pretty much unplayable, no new miniatures had been released since 6th edition, and the Bretonnian army book was the oldest still in print. By the time WFB disappeared, the Bretonnian army book was almost ten years old, but they'd already been effectively Squatted.
Now, finally, Bretonnia is at the forefront again, where they belong, and I couldn't be more excited. To be able to bring my heraldic heroes out from retirement and use them again, with a background that (fingers crossed) looks like it harks back to 5th edition and Stillmania...to finally have Foot Knights!...I am absolutely here for all of it.
They monetize your feelings Sir. Take care
Lets be honest the game of Warhammer Fantasy was a kick arse game and everyone loved it. The reason it went down hill was the prices just kept going up, up, up and up all the time. By the end the pricing was set for single adults who don't have families and have expendable cash or the rich. No normal person can afford to spend money on this hobby. They priced themselves out of an audience. The rules was not hard, I had it memorised.
The lore being stale is BS because it is a whole world that you can do stuff in which is evident in Total War Warhammer 3 where they have introduced unknown factions like Cathay. By the looks of it the new Warhammer the Old World is doubling down on the overpriced products which 90% of people cannot afford. Lower the prices so that more people can buy the game!!! The fan base will grow if you do that.
40k price also goes up and up... difference we now live in toxic positivity land
It will be difficult to spend tons of money advertising/supporting for something you can’t control. I think this is a key issue here. If you dump a bunch of money into an IP but anyone can sell their own $10 bag of 100 fantasy orcs off Amazon it will be difficult to really give warhammer the continued support it needs. With 3d printing this is becoming even easier now but there is still a barrier to entry there. Over the next 10 years as quality and price of printing your own models becomes more advantageous it will be interesting to see how Games Workshop handles it
Probably gonna play it in 10mm
As someone who actually wants to play fantasy. I just started collecting gloomspite gitz since last year so i cant invest in old world due to money/ time.
GW will probably say "see not many people interested". But they dont want to see they killed warhammer fantasy/ old world themselves. They halved playerbase into AOS and Old world, while having deterred old fantasy playerbase.
A really interesting video and great to stumble across your channel. I wound caveat that, from what I’ve heard from other creators, Horus heresy is GW’s second best selling game at the moment. Not that I found find anything with a quick scan of their financial report.
Brilliant video . Will be subscribing !
Thanks for the sub. As for HH, that is an interesting note if it's true.
3d printing should make the Games a lot more affortable i think.
Pointless video - and you get some things really wrong. E.g. people are sick of overloaded miniatures like AOS and Lost kindom. They are looking forward to getting their hands on the old stuff. So its the exact opposite of you you are saying.
i Dislike AOS because i just dont Like the Lore, and i Tried the Gotrek Books and i could not Follow them a bit, maby the German Version of the Book was just bad i dont know, but i could never follow what was going on, it just felt so Boring, OH we lost an entire City somewhere oh oh no, ok we got 100 other big citys Who cares, and then this Wierd Stargate stuff and Switching realms o dont know, i could never follow. 40k Always got a pass on the we just lost an entire Planet Meh who cares, after all the Imperium has a Million worlds and it is mutch easier to follow the lore. You are Right that Fantasy always is at a Status Quo, but the thing is when One City gets overrun it shakes up the Entire setting, and yes you are Right they realy should Have done more with the lore, it can get Boring, but i Loved the Felix and Gotrek books they Where so fun, and i Play fantasy on a more lets say Small scale with WHF 4ed the Roleplaying game, in a Small scale Fantasy is Greate it feel realy good, but the world does not Realy support Big army Clashes because every Clash of armies will Shake the setting. a more small scale Skirmish setting would Fit Fantasy mutch better, like you have in the TTRPG where a small horde attacks a Village and you need to hold it, and Skirmish battles are even more Realistic and Historical Correct because most Fights back then where mostly sieges and small minor battles with a handfull of units.
AoS suffers from the same problems as 40k... because it is fantasy 40k. Basically, the shared problem is one of scale and consequence - the excess of the former and the lack of the latter. It's almost impossible to care about or understand the stakes of much of anything because it's occuring on such an insane scale.
Cities fall all the time in Fantasy. But important ones basically never did. And AoS got those important cities too that never fall but would be devastating if they did. Just sounds like you're bitter than anything else.
@spnked9516 40k doesn't suffer from that. It's why people get so passionate about 40k. And AoS has many important locations that get It's fans hyped up too. Plenty of fictions with multiversal or galactic proportions have stakes, you just don't care to see it.😅
@@spnked9516 In 40k it makes somewhat sense because you have an entire Universe, sure one loss means nothing, as long no named important planets fall, But from what i got AOS is just the old World and Lustria some what Splittet up and divided in realms and i dont get it it is so Confusing AF, even worse then 40k. i love Fantasy because it is Easy to Follow and as an Hobby Historian i can just dip in and feel right at home because it looks like things you know and Can Relate to, because the Empire is just Germany with extras while Bretonia is France and Britain. because GW just pressed Copy paste A LOT XD the only thing i Dislike is that the new Tabletop plays During a time NO ONE CARES ABOUT People will get confused by, that Franz and other big names are not Part of the new edition
I will definitely say that AoS' lore and story are pretty shit. When 2E ended and had Be'lakor essentially take away the Stormcast's ability to resurrect, it almost had some major stakes going now...except they IMMEDIATELY gave an answer to it by saying "new armor" and thus new models. As to the Gotrek books (I'm assuming the new ones), I've only listened to the first two but yeah they were also hard to follow. One sentence you're in a battle with a random guy, next it's over and Gotrek apparently helped. It's all over the place.
Fantasy the more I look at it does have that weight when something does happen. If you read that a chaos force from the wastes pushed X far to Altdorf or wherever, then shit is getting real for that to happen. Though I do think you're idea of smaller skirmishes is an interesting take. Large battles, especially ones with one major victor, would absolutely have a larger impact on the world if they were properly played out. Smaller skirmishes would also play better in game as maybe then you wouldn't need as many units and make the game more accessible to more people.
the end time needed to be like 30 books not 10 or whatever
It might be a hard sell even though I love this game so much one of the biggest problems now is that most stores are small for games workshop so you can't even fit that many games in one day.
Back when I was playing I was fortunate enough to be playing at the Battle bunker of LA or more so Westminster California and that shop fortunately was as big as six to eight shops as they are now it had maybe 16 maps that can be played on might be a few less or it might be even more it's been a bit but the community was there and people were always playing it and the shop had consistent and monthly rewards and player base because of the community
One Page Rules with whatever old models
These issues are only issues if it's assumed GW is to be kept, which it shouldn't be. For me, they are a company that commissioned some really vibrant artwork forty years ago and cleverly popularised it into a product that I still use. But there was never any need for them to make a second edition, or continue existing post-1992. Like an 80s novelty fondue machine, I've got the product in a box and they've made their money so are fully entitled to sod off and live on Barbados. And I wish they would. Now in 2024 the market price for a 3d-printed ork is about £0.05, and a pdf of decent fantasy wargame rules is about £0.00. If a hobby shop asks me would I like to pay £5 for my ork, and rename it to an Orugubooboo for copyright purposes, I'll laugh them off and reduce my contribution to buying a few pots of 3rd-party acrylic paint a year. If someone thinks of it as "lore" and not the cheesy derivative fluff it always was, I'm laughing at them too. The issues with fantasy coming back are (1) it never went away or even arrived in any meaningful sense because GW were only ever its boxers and packagers (2) the pretence that anything is occurring when GW release a thing. It's like a tramp burping to get attention.
This was pretty enlightening and 100% true. The game probably would have been more sustainable with this mindset instead of "needing" GW. Can play whatever edition you want and create any of the models you need. This is kinda what Warmaster is at this point.
One of the reasons they dropped the original fantasy line is because it didn’t sell Space Marines. The Space Marine line of minis is by far the biggest money earner for GW. They simply reinvented the fantasy game built around a new range of gold Space Marines. Problem solved.
If hordes are a thing again I’m out
People are going to be surprised if they don't think TOW isn't going to be in demand. Even GW is already overwhelmed according to some reports. Some good points and some I don't fully agree with in the video since I was there. Maybe the circles I was in were different but I really don't think they were. Again, good video and be cautiously optimistic as I like to put it.
Cautiously optimistic I think is a good way to be looking at this. I do believe the game has demand, though it's probably by the old playerbase. It's really gonna be a newer crowd that is the deciding factor.
@@dscorpion7582 I get that and I'll say this. The older crowd has money. They will drop that money in a heartbeat for systems they love. TOW this month, done. GW announces Mordheim version, old crowd is going ballistic. Also note that the old crowd has kids... Anyone doubting this release is delusional and I think that includes decision makers at GW, unfortunately. That's what keeps me only cautiously optimistic. When my Dwarf and Goblin Journals drop, which appear to be next, I'm going to be happy.
GW is overwhelmed because they have 12 IP's to support.
I am optimistic but will agree that starting the game with boxes of massive numbers of troops isn't the Precedent i wanted
It is worrisome on what the starter boxes may be setting. I do want Fantasy's return to be good but unless we get more clear details, my hopes are unfortunately gonna be hanging low.
It feels like they made no improvements.
At first i had thought maybe it would compete with kings of war, but they are COMPLETELY different and KoW is just so much better at what KoW does.
I was planning on playing ToW and KoW but the deeper i dig into ToW the less i want to play it now that the Nostalgia hit is wearing off.
Will likely make an army, but dual purpose so i can use it in KoW too.
8th edition had a few good ideas going for it, but the emphasis on massive infantry blocks and indirect but heavy nerfs to cavalry were IMHO the two main barriers to both enjoyment and entry. 7th edition was really fun; I didn't play the previous editions but from what I understand after GW moved away from Herohammer the game became really fun to play with many different playstyles. GW has a habit of learning only the worst lessons from previous editions, just look at 40k. 10ed could've been great if they'd taken where the game was in 5th edition, made a few balance passes, slapped a new coat of paint on it and releasing that as the new edition, but they instead decided to build the game around pushing FOTW model kits.
Mostly old models, definitely old rules sets, in a new glitzy and pricier box. :P Top notch nostalgia marketing. :)
There was nothing wrong with it. It had far less issues than 40K with its first turn bias. How that has never been solved is remarkable.
40K for the lore, Fantasy for the game.
aos is just 40k without the space aspect. warhammer fantasy, and also the old world is a totally diferrent beast. Rank and file warfare, its beautiful.
I was a huge Skaven guy soooo... yeah
i didn’t realize there was elitism in fantasy warhammer
We'll give it a shot. If we like the rules, great, if not, it's back to house rules/W.A.P.
I have a huge prophetic worry
7th edition was superior to 8th in most ways. 8th made it more expensive, less fun, and also less complex at the same time. If they can go back to more fundamental dice rolling and better storytelling it will be fine.
And 6th was even better
I had fun with every edition, but I played for fun. Rarely did tournaments because it was as never as fun as casual games. Tournament players ruined the fun whether you won or lost.
As for the Fantasy playerbase, the majority of us are just happy to have the game back in some form. There’s a vocal minority of dickheads.
Don’t let the Glupp Shittos on Twitter who ragebait for some weird consoomer war tarnish the wider community 😅
Great video, subscribed
I can't listen to you and read your writing at the same time.This seems to be a thing now
I was there or at least as an observer of the whole thing with fantasy and there's a general misconception about the whole deal, so let me break it down.
-the game wasn't selling well and wasn't popular: both are half true, it was selling and wasn't popular because they haven't released a codex in like two years before the end of times and I mean not for each army like a single codex in two years I believe there where even factions stuck on a preview edition, so yeah hard to compete if your game hasn't been regularly updated in 3-5 years, saying is my understanding the end of time sold really well and was the most sold product for a while.
- Also may I remind you they started selling end of time (which were like 3 or 4 books) but by the second one GW was asked if it was in fact the end of the game and they actively deny it, telling people not to worry about it it was just the beginning of something else. At this point they also haven't reveled anything about AoS so the uncertainty of a game ending and if another edition was coming was making people really nervous.
-When the game did in fact ended it made a lot of people mad cause they honestly felt like to and with good reason.
-to cope with the loss GW released a half bake alpha rule test of what AoS became later I suppose we call no this a preview of the rules. They have datasheets for every unit but lack any sort of battalion or organized play rules for this alpha test, so many people clearly abused the rules since they were not prohibited to do this but GW official answer was "well if your a dick none is gonna play with you" which is true but is also true this rules where not properly tested before release, it was just a temporary band aid.
- so amongst the downfall of a beloved game, the lies of GW, half baked rules being release, the promises of a new game but not really mentioned for a while it was a new system and a new lore, etc. Yeah I can see people getting upset, mind you this happened in the span of a year or so.
So before calling people whiny (which I assure you there were plenty of and most overreacting) the majority was just sadden about how GW treat this whole thing.
And also the first Ed of AoS had barely any lore attach to it, which mad ot fell more hollow and cash grabby than ever
It sounds like The End Times sold well because the fan base was so starved for content with no codex releases. But yeah, with it all taking place in roughly a year and with AoS essentially being rushed out the door, I do understand why so many were upset. I have slowly been looking into the setting more and more and if I was invested in the game WAY BACK in high school when I first found out about WH in general, I probably would be in the same crowd.
@@dscorpion7582 the End Times books they produced are objectively some of the nicest quality books they have ever released, and it was sort of exciting because we didn't know what was going to happen next - characters were dropping like flies, it was like Game of Thrones. We thought it might have been a soft reset to allow them to do new stuff moving forward, but to go from buying these premium campaign books to "thanks for playing your game is now dead" was a kick in the teeth.
AoS is pretty awful, rules and lore.
Looking forward to playing Old World but I'm not convinced they'll do a good job with it.
Still salty, former WFB player here. I've never hated on those people who like AoS, but after everything GW has pulled I don't trust them with any specialist game at all, and let's be honest that's what The Old World is going to be.
The guy who burned his Dark Elf army was pretty stupid IMO, but I completely understand his anger. Going from a complex rank-and-flank game to a 'beer and pretzels' skirmish game with silly rules (like singing, shouting or having a moustache) just screamed that GW didn't take the game seriously like the players did. Not to mention the fact that GW were the ones who ran it into the ground through their greed and ineptitude, when it could have been fixed they just threw up their hands and ditched it. It now seems obvious that they wanted to have a product that fit the 40k mould replete with a space marine proxy that's simple to paint and forgiving to play (making it ideal for beginners), that also gets the lion's share of releases for the game.
Like with AoS I'm not going to hate on anyone looking forward to The Old World, but I'm not touching it with a barge pole.
Gay Workslop Ran Warhammer Fantasy Battles right into the ground some Armies didn’t have any updates or models for over 5 years Bretonnians and others they focused on 40k and started taking resources away from Fantasy and they wondered why no one was buying Fantasy models 😂😂😂 they GW betrayed tens of thousands of hobbyists who has sunk thousands of Dollars and hundreds of hours and people reacted accordingly 🔥 🔥 🔥
Hearing that the TK box is only about 1200 pts for 93 models is a bit concerning from an outsider's perspective. The absolute largest army in AoS for normal play at 2k pts is skaven at about 120 models or soulblight at about 100 models (zombie horde) on the high end. I bet a decent chunk of that 1200 pts in the TK box is the bone dragon so I'd expect that to get to 2k you'll need at least another 50 models minimum making it significantly larger (more expensive) than the avg huge horde army from AoS. So not only are the expenses high due to being a specialist game, it seems like there's still that large model count from late WHFB.
For the Tomb Kings box, grab a box of Tomb Guard, some constructs like the Warsphinx or Ushabti or even the Casket of Souls, another character or two and you'll be at 2000pts easy. These are a better starting point than the old fantasy Batallions ever were. EDIT: Just to explain that a bit, these boxes contains mostly core troops which are cheap in points. As you move into Special and Rare choices you pay more per model in points, so you need less to fill out the army.
new player here
I know im a bit picky here but i prefer fantasy over scifi and out of the different factions the only one that really called to me is the skaven.
Might play warcry but with all the shit i've heard about age of sigmar and since as far as i understand there will be no skaven in the old world then i guess im just going to spend hundreds of dollars on paint and minis for a 20 minute game
I don't like the idea of dropping 80$ on a sculpt that's as old or older than me just seems like nostalgia bait which sucks
Only way GW can ''appease'' the fantasy fans they stabbed in the back is by murdering AOS and making Old World the main focus again. They wronged their core market base, they can't expect people to just ''trust'' them again like that. They need to admit their faults in the way WhFantasy was mishandled and retcon the whole AOS out of existence.
(The only way they could make AOS succesfull anyway was to just ape 40k with sigmarines)
Same goes for 30k. It was a good try but nobody is choosing to play exclusively 30k... the only people who will get into that are people who plateaud at their 40k armies and are looking for new minis to buy to keep their hobby going.
Mark my word: IF FANTASY ASSIMILATE AOS AND BECOME AS BIG AS 40K then this whole renaissance is for nought.
How is GW even keeping up with all these niche game systems anyway? They are not even half way through their attempt at a 40k range refresh (after spending 5 years aimlessly trying to replace classic marines with primaris and failing) and now they want to create ANOTHER game system ? not to mention the time and resources they wasted on trying to convince people to sign up to WH+ ''it's totally worth it guys we promisse''
What the fuck is wrong GW? Just cut your losses and focus on making the actual thing you are known for FUN. 30k is DOA, aos is going on but i garantee most people who bought into it are old warhammer fantasy fans that will drop it as a hot rock if Old World gains any traction. I'would do the same. I've been trying to build a SM army since 2017 and the ammount of bullshit and loops i had to jump through to get an army while navigating the pointless rule and bullshit about old marines not being able to get on new transports and viceversa has me RIPE for a game system that WON'T change. Playing a 15 year old system would suit me down to the ground.
Thanks for coming to my TEDtalk
dont forget about oathmark
My concern is not trying to get people in as a fan of fantasy, that's GWs job. If someone can't bother read rules or understand things then they gatejept themselves. Also I do believe competition for fantasy like games is good as GW should t be monopolizing the scene.
People who want them to treat this like a full blown mainstream product are asking them to treat it like 40k are people who need a rat race game. 40k also didn't pull the rug from you. They told you that the rules are free and indexes would be released until codecies got released. People who didn't read this are either delusional or don't want to admit that they didn't fully read into what they signed up for. I would rather they treat fantasy like the Horus Heresy. The constant products pushed for 40k is too much and cosues on the competitive sweats.
some 80% of people who buy GW stuff NEVER PLAY THE GAME. The constant stream of products are for that 80%: and THAT'S why 40K is a success. Doesn't excuse GW's behaviour of course.
@@scepteredisleit doesn't. But I find the people who complain the hardest are also the people buy the most.
Archaon is in the background giving GW the wink, “l’ll be back for world destruction 2.0 when you need me”
In all seriousness if they was going 8mm or so for WFB I’d be all over it, true epic scale battles no pun 😂🤦🏻♂️ but it’s not so buying old gear, nahhh not for me.
GW are spreading themselves very thin though, you have now
Age of Sigmar
Warcry
Warhammer Fantasy Battle
Warhammer 40K
Warhammer 30k
Kill team
Legion Imperialis
Then you’ve
Blood Bowl
Warhammer Quest stuff
Warhammer Underworlds
Necromunda
Crazy amount but at least some will have minis that are interchangeable, fantasy battle going back with square bases makes that a bit awkward.
Hmm, and yet it's already sold out.
No, no. It will establish itself as a lasting offering from GW. Say MESBG level game. One that stays.
WFB had its problems (many rooted in GW greed), lack of expandability frankly was not one of them.
They never really did anything for Ind, Cathay, Nippon, Albion... Kislev was neglected as were Tilea and Estalia. The Norse (humans and dwarfs) were dropped after 3rd edition I think.
They couldn't expand something that didn't have the revenue to justify new armies.
@@mogwaiman6048That's not the excuse they gave for blowing everything up.
The root problem was that the game just wasn't popular enough, not that they had painted themselves into a corner like they claimed.
They are setting the old world 🌍 up to fail old sculpts high cost old artwork some factions have been dropped completely which is complete BS it’s like they set it up to fail and tell everyone look we told you so 😂😂😂
I personally the game will fail as gw has learnt nothing. It's already excluding a lot models. The prices are silly, which is why my etsy shop is so busy
A good nonbaised opinion. thanks
First time on your channel, those long paragraphs added as text when you are talking make it harder to get whole point you want to make
Warhammer army project. In the age of internet and 3d printers i really dont need GW
They are going to release a bunch of old stuff then squat it when the game gains momentum, some of you are going to look very dated keeping the old models thats why you probably should skip Kemri especially.
Power creep. It kills every GW product.
You lost me at "AoS is good".
I got introduced to war hammer from total war warhammer 2 got the game and loved it. Even got some 40k models and held off on trying sigmar after i heard they were bringing back fantasy but since they are keeping the old models that some are medal and look a little dated. If they updated all the models to new better looking all plastic models i would have bought both boxes for fantasy but i think ill just try aos instead.
I moved on to Warhammer Armies Project. Mathias single handedly saved WFB and I doubt they will top his take on the game.
I’ve tried his system once, and it is incredible what he was capable of doing.
The love that went into army project is personally amazing and while I’m not somebody who played a huge amount of games in that system, the first few games I had in it, where a lot of fun
I think I heard of this but don't know much about. Could you elaborate a bit on this?
At first, I was intrigued. I have never played FB before and wanted to give it a shot. Then I realized that all the “new “ boxes were just old models with couple of new heroes… for that price I am not going to pay so much money for overpriced models that look like trash. Like you said, 3D printing alternatives are so much better but given the fact I need to buy 3 books and run a horde of units, I think I will just pass and continue playing other games…. What a shame…
I didn't get into WFB until they killed it. I cant stand Sigmar. I collected all the previous starters and many of the oop battalion sets. I was looking forward to the Old World, but the business model with the books and price of many of the models has really killed it for me. Actually, I didn't even buy Legion Imperialis and I have been an Epic fan longer than any other game, for similar reasons. I think my days of diving into new GW games is over.
bro we get it you dont like the game ,get over it and stop hating
Releasing 26 yearold models in the starter box?
Hard Pass.
I played a lot of 7th. 8th sucked because cavalry was unusable. The game was about stubborn blocks of infantry trundling across the table. I could never find anyone to play with even at the GW stores near me. I had no trouble finding players in 7th. IMO 8th killed the game, it required too many models and nobody I knew liked to play it.
TOW looks like it will be the same thing. The way morale works basically all units are stubborn all the time and they are going back to not striking first on the charge. Looks like a slightly polished version of 8th.
old minis (some even metal), cringe faction alliances, half of the iconic armies are missing with weak lore explanation, overpriced, the future of system is uncertain with such a disastrous release.
I'm in love with tomb kings after total war games and wanted to collect them, but when i saw how little gw cares i stopped caring either.
Why does GW hate me?
Was very excited about the Old World as I have large fully painted High Elf, Dark Elf, Orc and Night Goblin armies. Now I wish I sold them all in the last 6 months when all the excitement about the release of the Old World started because now I have over 2,000 miniatures to rebase! 😳So not only do I have to rebase if I want to play in tournaments but the resale value of my collection took a huge hit as they are now based “wrong”🙄😡 Did going to the new base size really make sense? Was it really required? For example my Night Goblins were on 20mm bases and my Orcs on 25mm bases and now the are going to be on 25mm and 30mm bases. Not a huge difference. The justification is that the larger base sizes will allow the models to rank up better and allow for new sculpts to be more articulated. While these are good things aren’t these anticipated benefits outweighed by the negatives of forcing your customers to rebase thousands of figures? You combine this with the negative feelings resulting from how they ended the Old World 8 years ago and the fact that I have a couple of hundred Space Marines that have gone to legends and are no longer usable for tournament play and that I have over a entire company of Firstborn Space Marines that now need to be rebased (by the time I do this they will probably go to legends also) and I have to ask myself why I want to continue to buy GW miniatures and play their games? I love the lore and the games but I feel stupid if I continue to spend money and time buying and painting figures only to be told they are no longer usable or need to be rebased to be used……
I have spent thousands on WW2 and Ancients figs since the End Times that I would have spent with GW but I do not feel buying GW figs is a good investment given this history……. am I wrong?
If they had kept the previous basing I would still be very excited about the new rules and would be trying to promote them as much as possible locally, instead I am just frustrated.
Apologize for the rant. Probably going to buy the Old Hammer books, not rebase and just play local games and no tournaments which I will miss participating in…….😕
Feel your pain bro❤
GW only has one product worth your time, MESBG. Everything else is a profit driven dumpster fire!!
Yeah, its a terribly broken game. Conga line meta, universal steadfast makes leadership irrelevant, its a boring facial grindfest
Yeah, when whfb died it was because the rules were horrible and the model lines were poorly managed. But the lore was good, and the grimdark fantasy was good. Aos had much more accessible rules...but shitty lore and lack of depth. Looks like gw is making the same design errors all over again. Old world should have rules that allow both rank and flank and skirmish...i.e give bonuses for formations but allow units to break formation to move in terrain. And streamline the stats and combat...universal special rules and exception based rules are terribly hard to learn and execute....the rock paper scissors game of initiative scores and avoiding attacks back with rank overkill suuuuuucks....the new game is going to be slow and cumbersome just like whfb.... they didn't fix any of that shit...it's a pump and dump recycle with no game design work done... the old tournament people may like it, but since it won't be easy to get into it won't take off...
I absolutely agree AoS' lore has nothing on Fantasy. Granted, it's barely 1/3 the age of its predecessor but it never feels like it has weight to it. Fantasy from what I've been delving into is great and speaks volumes in comparison. The real issue though is still the gameplay.
GW for the most part has been streamlining both their main flagship titles to appeal and grab a wider audience. Bringing back an old game with old rules and then trying to sell that to the newer crowd I don't think is going to be as successful as anticipated. Will it sell? More than likely, but it really depends on how many take to understanding the revival of this oldish rule set.
This guy clearly doesnt understand why people were upset. So dont go around blasting others and insulting them for what they did with their stuff. This guy is so out touch and creating conflict out of nothing.
For how long they kept hyping this, it's a huge letdown and nothing burger. Ancient ruleset with, seemingly, very little changed. 90% of boxes content are absolutely ANCIENT miniatures that look really crummy when compared to today standards (yeah yeah, some might like their Ancient Charm...) - and even if someone likes how they look paying full premium price for ancient, technically obsolete plastic feels extremely scummy and money-grubby on GW part.
I was hyped for this until they showed it, and now I know I am not going to pick it up. In my LHGS the sentiment, in general, is the same.
It's a money grab pure and simple, and GW fan boys will lap it up and spend an absolute fortune on the same models from 20 years ago, with brettonians new box at 155 pounds when last time it was 100 pound cheaper, while all the time using the same moulds that have been paid for multiple times over
Plastic Men at Arms and plastic horses DON'T cost £155..
WAKE UP AND SMELL THE BULLSH*T folks
You made many good points but GW isn't concerned with your points only your dollars. WHFB Player (1986). GW is notoriously short sighted.
The game is set up to fail. But then maybe from GW's point of view and the AoS factions who work there, "that's a good thing" ?
WFB's failed for three primary reasons (put aside pet peeves and easily fixable stuff):
[1] Overly large, unnecessarily complex, bloated RULESET (100 pages core rules give or take).
[2] Too expensive - £25.50 for 10 Tomb Guard was just not affordable for most of us.
[3] Lack of support (compared to 40K).
GW have repeated the first two already. The game is dead on arrival - but why? Maybe GW have targeted that tiny % of hardcore fans who still play older editions / 9th Age (9th Age itself failed and died due to their refusal to streamline the rules). Maybe GW have done some maths magic and have worked out the exact % they can get from pumping and dumping this small niche of players via nostalgia. i.e. GW do not want "new players" to play Warhammer Fantasy - they want them playing AoS. After all, if you're one of the brass etc who insisted no one likes WFB's IP and AoS is the BEST, you're not gonna let them prove you wrong, are they? ...
30k is successful despite the same points. Fantasy will be successful now.