I remember reading the novel and it really paid more attention to the Tau viewpoint. I think it ended with Kais being put into an insane asylum after all he went through because he almost succumbed to Chaos. I think it was actually an accident that he won. Earlier he was shot in the head with a bolter shell that didnt detonate and was lodged in his helmet, he was fighting his way to the altars and the avatar came in after he had sabotaged 3 of them, when the avatar was brought in Kais went crazy and started beating the daemon physically with every weapon he had breaking them all and he was hit so hard his helmet went flying... into the last altar. The energies there detonated the bolter shell and took out the last altar banishing the daemon.
@@illuminatingdarkness3689Khorne literally nerfed Kais into losing the fight. Chaos doesnt boost jackshit it just makes you a jobber who cannot be killed permanently.
You're mostly correct. He fought the daemon till all his weapons broke and before the daemon was going to kill him, Kais threw his helmet with the unexploded bolt round at the last altar, the impact caused the bolt round to detonate banishing the last anchor to the materium and banishing the daemon. As the book progresses, Kais is portrayed as a nervous, self-loathing Firewarrior who is a disappointment to his father who is a decorated veteran to... Sly Marbo like character. When he encounters other Tau warriors when they're counter-boarding the Imperial battleship, they're extremely disturbed by him. He doesn't fight like they've been trained to fight. He throws an unprimed grenade into the cover being used by some Guardmen solely to displace them, allowing him to shoot them down and then retrieve his grenade because he didn't want to waste it on mere Guardsmen. When he's fighting the forces of Chaos, he's usually armed with a rail-rifle or hand-held burst cannon.
Wrong, Necrons Eldar and Orks all have various angles to explore. Rivalries, past deeds, plot hooks and so on. The Tau at the time they made this game didn't even had a named cast yet. The best thing they did fot the Tau is to get rid of their Mary Sue anti chaos gimmick.
@@livanbard They never had a Mary Sue anti chaos gimmick, what are you on about? And they definitely had the 4 main casts named and defined, again don't seem to know what you're talking about? As for the other xenos races potential interesting rivalries and histories...tell me what gets more attention and care, all that or the latest space marines power fantasy? Compared to that, it seems GW begrudgingly throws the xenos a bone...with ofcouse an equal attention cake for their poster boys i.e. the space marines because why ever focus on other things when they can just bust out another Primarch or two to cash in shamelessly.
So, in 24 hours, Kais took down dozens or hundreds of guardsmen, several techpriests, over a dozen ultramarines, several dozen chaos marines of various types, several chaos sorcerers, two greater possessed, a chaos spawn, two chaos dreadnaughts and an *Avatar of Tzeench*. He would be, what, a 1000 point unit?
I'm honestly surprised the Titan was really destroyed before activation. I can see Kais going toe to toe with it even with fully operational Void Shields and weapons. He's probably the real reason the Imperium doesn't start a full invasion of the T'au space: It's not because the Imperium has so many other tiny problems like Chaos, Orcs, Necrons and Tyranids, no. The Imperials just know that if they threatened the T'au enough they would send this one special Fire Warrior ... After seeing what he achieved during one day i'd say give him a week and a whole Imperial armada would vanish.
for the record, Kais is actually tau rambo, it is canon that despite being a fresh recruit he just for some unexplained reason is this god damn terrifying. In the book version of the games plot, characters regard him with fear and confusion
Considering that by the end of the novel he starts screaming about "blood for the blood god", there may be a little bit of an answer to his power level.
@@KobKobold To be even more fair. By the end end Kais learns to egnore those voices in his head and we even have a small time skip where he has seemingly recovered completely. Dude pulled a Farsight before Farsight was even a thing
When they encounter him, he doesn't fight like regular Tau and is usually soaked in blood. The Tau hate close combat and Kais, he looks to thrive in it. Relish it even.
A battle suit would have been a cool late-game upgrade for a tau FPS. You can take a beating, make powered jumps and wield the really big tau guns. That's the kind of thing that would equalize a tau soldier with some chaos buggery.
If not the crisis battlesuit, it would have been perfect for the X Stealth Suit. . . In my Heart, I do Hope someday we'll return to the tau gameplay with such weaponary.
@@mouthwide0pen Take a beating compared to other tau infantry. The best use of battlesuits is how mobile they are. It's not an imperial knight or dread or eldar wraithguard.
Speaking of old Warhammer games that seem to be forgotten, Have you ever played "Mark of Chaos"? The most hilarious thing about it that i remember is the final mission of the imperial campaign. A holdout against a Chaos army, i killed everything and then a demon prince appeared marching towards the gates. i Frantically scrambled my defenders but then noticed he hadn't reached the walls yet. Turned out he got stuck on a piece of wooden fence. As it turned out the Demon Prince dealt purely magical damage, and this wooden fence was completely invulnerable to magic damage. The AI was not able to walk around it for some reason (it was barely wider than the demon prince and had free space to both sides) and REALLY wanted to kill that wooden fence. So after every other chaos unit was dead, i moved every soldier who had a musket down from the walls, in front of the walls, formed a nice semi-circle around the Demon prince, who had been beating the wooden fence for a good 15 minutes by that point and sentenced him to death by firing squad. It was absolutely hilarous to see the Chosen Champion of Chaos be defeated by 5 pieces of wood nailed together.
I have that game on GoG and I've played it on CD when I was a young lad. It's quite a good game, like a proto Total Warhammer. Hell, Total Warhammer could learn a thing or two from Mark of Chaos like how the heroes can be attached to companies of units... Lovely game though, rather linear but jolly good fun when you're at it. Combat is tactical and you really need to consider how you use your troops (I've lost my units to a Skaven Warp Lightning Cannon when they bunch up...) Also, the cinematic trailer/intro to the game was amazing. Holds up even today.
The funny thing about the prison level is that you can turn the alarm OFF whenever you want. My older brother had this same problem wen doing his playthrough, but when I got there; I tried something drastic, different, and unheard of, I hit the Alarm Button a Second Time, and voila, Quiet. Not only does the noise stop, but fewer enemy's spawn as well(as they aren't on alert).
Honestly I think Halo's checkpoint system was a huge reason that people liked it so much. Your last checkpoint was the last time anyone wasn't shooting at you. It loads instantly and you are back in the fight usually within 5 seconds.
To me it sounds like they were about 70-80% of the way through making a space marine game, when the corporate overlords said that it needed to be about the Tau to coincide with the new set they were releasing for the tabletop game.
Considering Dawn of War Soulstorm was literally made to advertise SoBs, Dark Eldar, and flyers for 7e, you're probably spot-on. Geedubs, will be Geedubs.
I do think you are right about the part that it seems like they were making a Space Marine game with Tau and Chaos as the bad guys before randomly deciding to make the Tau the main playable faction instead. Had they just kept it as a Space Marine game then it would've sold better.
@@Mr.Mosquito89 What the fuck are you on about? Soulstorm was 2008, 7th Edition was 2014. Sisters of Battle didn't even have a codex in 7th edition. All of the flyers in Soulstorm were forgeworld models that existed for years at that point.
'Two factions (with a 95% chance on one of them being Space Marines - probably Ultramarines) fight until Chaos reveals itself, at which point an uneasy alliance may be formed to face the greater threat' has been pretty much the story of most 40k games. Ironically chaos turns out to be very predictable.
3/4 of the chaos gods are incredibly predictable since their universe and existence relies on it. The 4th can also be predicted but you need a galaxy brain IQ to understand.
I do miss how the Orks are initially set up as the villains and the Space Marines and their allies (Tau in this case) have to work together, until Chaos eventually reveals themselves to be the true enemy! Ironically, this game would be better with Orks.
Weird thing is, this was the cannon Tau meets Chaos moment in the lore and it even had a Black Library novel. It should be remembered for that at least. I loved it back in the day and I respect you for playing it now, it's aged like milk.
To be fair that Black Library novel was written during the days they made tie in video games novels that REALLY broke the canon, like the infamous CS Goto Dawn of War novels. It wasn't until a few years later did GW actually start taking the novelizations seriously, and made Black Library (mostly) consistent with the actual setting. With that said O'kais was actually back ported into the main canon, since he's part of the Tau Codex now (as a lore only character atm), and he shows up in a Black Library novel to slaughter a bunch of Dark Angels.
To be fair, doors probably are a mystery to most of the imperium. Those guardsmen were probably like "why does the machine spirit of this door vex us?! It knows the alien is behind it, why doesn't it stay open so we may deliver the emporers wrath?!?! Commissar: I don't know! I'm not a Tech-Priest!"
Not really an accident. After the fight where the grenade became lodged in his helmet he got an all new suit of armor and when they wanted to change his helmet he said that he wants to keep it. Almost as if he knew that carrying a grenade on his head that could go off at any moment would come in handy.
The knife actually did have one great use. If you run into the face of the chaos terminators they wont shoot you but try to walk away, however they are super slow so you just get in their face and stab.
"Imagine you're a Chaos space marine. You've been summoned onto an Imperial ship and you're expecting to fight other space marines, and then you turn around and see this tiny orange Tau with a gun half his size running at you screaming." Actual logical response for a Chaos space marine: "Finally, a worthy opponent! Our battle shall be legendary!"
To be fair this completely STUPID tactic of charging and blasting is unsurprising, stupidly very effective in the Warhammer 40k universe, stupid yes, but hey its *"rule of cool"* dumb so it's allowed.
One hilarious bit is that the "Psychic Barrage" mentioned at 38:34 is actually your combat data recorder running out of memory. Exactly the problem Josh was worried about when that was introduced.
Josh: "The AI in this game has been told that the Commissar will shoot it unless it does the dumbest thing possible at all times." Tech Priest:" The WHAT"
I followed the development of this through various playstation magazines, it was always intended as PR for the tau. Games workshop weren't confident of making many sales outside of it's established fandom, nor their newest race standing alone without any recognisable 40k to draw in the aforementioned fans. The story was actually written as intended for you to experience both fighting against, and with the iconic space marines, as a 3rd party faction for those reasons.
The level at 51:41 was made in to a wargaming table by the White Dwarf team when the game came out. Also had rules for running Kais with his Rail Rifle AND a full scenario where a handful of elite Fire Warriors battle against Raptors and Chaos Marines to reach the portal at the end. I remember playing it with a friend and it was a lot of fun!
@@viperblitz11 Well his name was spelled the same, but in this game his name was pronounced "Case", while in Dark Crusade it was "Kai-eese", so who knows?
Apparentlly that Shas'O Kais from Dark Crusade is the dude from Fire Warrior. Also Kais is the single follower of a very rare path. Like there are those standard ones like Mont’ka ("The Killing Blow") and Kauyon ("The Patient Hunter"), he follows Monat "The Lone Warrior", so basically he specializes to be a one men army.
Yeah I don't know about that - I think this is pure fanon. They share names but for Tau, 'Kais' is basically 'John Smith' - it's the most common name you can have
"The name 'Shas'la T'au Kais' was also featured in the first person shooter for the PC and Playstation 2, which was later adapted into a novel: Warhammer 40,000: Fire Warrior, the protagonist being a Tau warrior first fighting the Imperium, then the forces of Chaos. However, this Kais is unrelated to Shas'O Kais, as O'Kais was a student of Commander Puretide, who died before the Damocles Gulf Crusade, while La'Kais wouldn't even finish his basic training until 200 years after the Damocles Gulf Crusade"
Josh Strife 40k's. You just explain Warhammer and teach us about the lore and the stories and all the cool shit. I'm always so lost by Warhammer and try to get into it, but there is just so much.
When I was in uni, I tried to make a simple game, just for fun, and wanted to make basically from scratch. And I run into a problem with movement that matches what you said in video. Basically movement was 100% speed in cardinal directions, but slower in any other angle. I can't remember specifics now (it was years ago), but I, as a beginner, took the naive approach that assumed the speed in a given direction is changing linearly with an angle. Imagine a point in a grid, where player is. And all the places it can be after a second of movement at a given angle. It should be a circle, but in my approach (and, given your description, I believe in Fire Warrior as well) it's a rotated square with corners in cardinal directions. It's very easy to fix, once you figure out what's wrong, just use sin and cos functions.
Alternatively, add all the inputs from the keys together into a movement vector (e.g. (1,1) for "forward + right") and then normalize that, giving you a vector of length 1 which is the base speed you're going to move at, in any direction. Yet so many games get this wrong...
its the pythagorean theorem, scale and direction are not additive. What you want to do is have diagonal movement propel you in both directions at 0.72 times the normal speed when going in basic directions
Something to note about the opening of the game when the Tau Ethereal is kidnapped, from a lore perspective. Astartes (Space Marines) DO NOT take orders from planetary governors. Astartes far out-rank any civilian officials and are subordinate only to the Adeptus Terra. The Astartes would be the ones calling the shots here not the governor.
As with so many things in 40K lore, this varies depending on the edition, the era, and the author. Governors can request a Marine detachment if they have a reason for doing so, and some chapters are more likely to respond than others. Once there, the Marine Captain is under the nominal command of the governor or whoever else, since they represent Terra in that system. Severus likely had a reason that he gave the Chapter, then found a Captain or Sergeant with whom he could cut a deal (after all, not all Marines left are inherently good and loyal - he could find one on the brink of falling to Chaos and exploit that). Given the opening cutscene has a very limited number of Marines, he probably promised them some kind of power or authority or somesuch. Plus, he’s a priest of Tzeentch, and they do weird stuff just for everything to end up ‘just as planned’.
I think those might be Alpha Legion Chaos Space Marines (ones that masquerade as loyalists to do covert stuff)... they certainly seem to be the right colour. Could well be wrong though.
At best, depending on Chapter, Space Marines might comply with requests made by senior Imperial officials. Maybe. They might even show a little respect to senior Imperial officers from time to time. But most of the time they will ignore anyone who isn't in their direct chain of command - aka, their own Chapter. And that often applies to other Chapters too, there's regular tales of Space Marines coming to blows with each other over conflicting objectives or even having their own mini wars if the clash of interests is severe enough. And at worst a Space Marine might just kill you on the spot for getting in their way, since they see themselves (perhaps justifiably, sometimes) as being more important and getting in the path of their mission is effectively treason against the Emperor. Depending on the Chapter, of course. If I lived in that universe I'd probably be happy to see a Space Wolf, for example. Sure, they might be dangerous allies but they will go out of their way to help other Imperials when it suits them. And I'd run away as fast as possible if I saw a Black Templar, who are one step away from being renegades with how often they will purposely attack other Imperials who they deem unworthy (and how much the Inquisition as a whole seems to think they should be forcibly disbanded - not that I trust the Inquisition either).
@@andromidius The Chapter you really want to see is the Salamanders, because they’ll even keep the various Sons of Dorn (including the BTs) under control. Apparently having an immortal Primarch who doesn’t think flame is too unkind a death for a Marine makes other chapters sit down and listen.
The visuals of this made me want to see a Was it Good on Star Wars: Republic Commando. I don't know why, but the hud and graphics just made me think of that.
That would be because both are on the late Quake 3 engine. There were a bunch of games on that engine around that time, and they all kinda look similar.
I played Repubic commando on PC and I can safely say it is one of the ugliest FPS games and also was one of the worse I have ever played, on a level with N64 Dai katana. if you want to play Republic COmmando done right find a copy of Freedom Fighters on pS2. Its just better.
Fire Warrior actually has a lot of interesting intersections of culture and cultural iconography, for it's specific time; The Tau were a brand new race, so Games Workshop wanted to push them to the fanbase; their hallmarks are idealism, and a dun/yellow and dark colour-scheme, a bit like desert camo. Instead of employing human-wave attacks and WW1/2 icons, like The Imperium, they seem to make war in the modern style of fast, squad-based mobile infantry. Also, in 2001, the US (and allies) invaded Afghanistan, engaging in the first real ground-war since Vietnam. Our media was flooded with images of WHAT war and soldiers looked like now. We were watching movies like Black Hawk Down and Behind Enemy Lines. And the truth is; the original Tau look, not a little, like that. I did play Fire Warrior, and yeah - it wasn't great - but for all it's flaws, it let you get into the 40k universe in a first-person view. Today, there's loads of games that do that, but back then - there was just Fire Warrior.
You might be forgetting that probally because this one day he spent killing the Imperial forces and the chaos... he actually got promoted and became the master of diplomacy in dawn of war.
In fact lore wise Khais became so good that they have him frozen as one of the 3 most prominent Tau commanders under the instructions of Puretide I hope one day we see his model in the game
@@endymallorn Well I dont think that Khais would join the enclaves, he would be something between Shadowsun and Farsight morelike a neutral character and more focused in the Tau Empire and pragmatistic than Shadowsun
thinking on this, i feel the wonky aim could be useful if it didn't effect tau weapons. Tau are meant to be more accurate, and it would provide an incentive to use Tau weapons, instead of them being a burden.
Ah, yes. The tau... When I was still playing the 40k miniature game, my back then stupidly overpowered chaos space marines wiped the floor with every astartes faction except for the grey knights. Then I ran into the tau crisis and colossus suits and got constantly obliterated because all they had to do was move backwards and keep barraging me with their superior accuracy, range and firepower. Funny how inaccurately Firewarrior showcases what the tau actually were like back then. Little known fact: if you preordered the game on console back then, you got a very collectible actual miniature of Kais.
fun part of this game is that in the book he starts shouting blood for the blood god, this means that khorne disrupted T's plan by possessing a random fire warrior.
Josh being baffled at the Tau turret firing at you during the Ship Boarding makes all games where the AI can't cope with you hacking turrets surprisingly realistic
As someone who doesn't know pretty much anything about Warhammer or 40k, I still appreciate flexing your knowledge with all this tangents about how things does or does not work in the context of the universe. I may not get it, but I commend you for going the extra mile for those who does. Great video as always Josh.
I have a feeling this was either intended to be a Space Marine game, or an Imperial Guard game, and they swapped it late in the dev cycle for the Tau because they were the new hotness of 40K. It's either that, or the GW people were just so infatuated with the Imperium that they couldn't get out of their own way to tell a compelling story without making it about the Space Marines. That's a real shame, because this would have been an amazing moment to really showcase their new race, and build its lore in an interesting way with a new medium for them.
I think it was a changed story, like you initially suggested. The Tau army was released 2001, and Fire Warrior came out in 2003. This game likely changed into an advertisement by GW request.
I think it was a changed story, like you initially suggested. The Tau army was released 2001, and Fire Warrior came out in 2003. This game likely changed into an advertisement by GW request.
I wanna make a game called "Imperial Guard". It'll involve marching in formation for the first hour of the game and then 0.5 seconds of actual combat when something rips your head off.
I've been somewhat interested in playing Warhammer 40K games but it seems like practically every game has been centered around Space Marines, which is probably my least favorite faction in that universe... So just Dawn of War 1/2 for me.
Please, please keep making these long game reviews. You go into so much minor details on things, that it really adds up over the length of it and I almost feel like I've played the game myself by the end of the video.
If I remember correctly, the release date of the game was very close to the release of the actual first Tau army codex (at least in my country). May explained why the Tau might be somewhat shoehorned in.
I tolerate this game for exactly one reason: Atmosphere. The lore of this game is, you are the FNG stuck in the trenches. And that is exactly what it feels like, you are the FNG stuck in the trenches. Stuff's exploding, your guys are getting killed, their guys are getting killed, you're getting strafed by aircraft, they've got chainsaw swords that will mess you up (and in game mechanics that is exactly what happens if they get close). Later on you get sent up to a ship boarding incident and more stuff is exploding, it's actually well done. Like the shooting mechanics aren't very good, but the atmosphere of just this unlucky Tau trying to blast his way to tomorrow saw me through to the end
Speaking of supposed "Halo Killers", I'd love to see a video on either Killzone or Black. The level to which both of those games were hyped up was absolutely absurd.
To this day I never understood the "thing" about Black. I did hear every gun originally was meant to have unlimited ammo in a hollywood crazy kinda way but then the game came out and just seemed rather normal.
Black was amazing. Not a halo killer but damn did it set a standard for destructible environments back in the day, it even had a working system for ricochet rounds that could bounce of a surface and kill enemies with the deflected bullets. I still play it from time to time on my Xbox360. i think i have never played a game with more explosions per minute than Black. It was an absolute blast. The dude from that game was the most destructive Wheelchair-Bound Protagonist of all times!
@@LeeONardo I don't really see what you're getting at. it felt like almost everything could explode. Most guns had magazines 2-3x as large as real life and after beating the campaign on the normal difficulty you unlocked the silver guns which actually had unlimited ammo for replaying each level. Especially the unlimited ammo rocket launcher and magnum were great fun.
RedScotGaming did a real epic of a series retrospective for Killzone about a year ago, I highly recommend that video. Amusingly, I spent half of *this* video trying to remember where I'd heard Severus' voice--he's Hakha and Radec in Killzone 1 and 2, two of the more memorable characters in the series.
I actually just finished the novelization of this game (found it in mint condition at a secondhand shop) and it was pretty fun. It actually made me like the T'au more as a 40K faction. I'd really enjoy getting more xeno-focused warhammer media in the future.
If i recall correctly they explained in the book that the Firewarrior could manage to fight the Tzeench deamon because Korn blessed him with some spell protection cuz he thought it would be funny.
@@danielbricker7928 So mild spoiler warning for Fire Warrior... Kais, the main character, has this whole character journey trying to essentially find his place, since he's shocked to discover he is not only incredibly good at being a soldier, but he revels in the death and carnage. The main villain is being guided by a lord of change, and when Tzeentch demons start showing up, the warp tearing through allows Kais to be corrupted by Khorne, allowing him fight the other demons before ultimately rebuffing the demonic presence inside of him, and being sent to a T'au mental hospital for awhile
@@danielbricker7928 see, this is EXACTLY some shit Khorne would do, too. "Hey, this one particular alien thingy is REALLY good at killing, AND I get to fuck with Tzeench at the same time? FUCK YEAH I'M BLESSING THIS DUDE!" (said in the most Metal/Dudebro voice you can imagine)
OMG I'm so stoked to see that you covered this game!! I loved this game and it was one of my favorite fps and introduced me to wh40k before I even knew what it was. I would lilove a remastering of it personally
One thing I really appreciate in these videos is the comparison to other games from the same time period. I had pretty limited access to video games back when, and have no personal frame of reference for what was impressive or disappointing for earlier games and hardware - I like seeing these measured directly against their contemporaries.
@@morganrobinson8042 Aside from the ever so popular field of human reproduction. And yes, I know that's not what you meant it doesn't matter - I just have poor impulse control.
Sure, the Astartes are better in almost every way. They're better than any ten guardsmen. But I have a lot more guardsmen than ten to one, and I can make more of them a whole lot faster than you can make a single Battle Brother.
@@ObiWahnKnobi the original Astartes were literal Superman: they could do everything the Space Marines do, and use their cocks normally. This is what I call superior.
As a young impressionable 40k fan with this being the only game available, I played this game a lot. This was before Dawn of War had come out. It’s still a guilty pleasure for me.
@@Blisterdude123 Dawn of War still holds up. I’ll still have a go on Dark Crusade every now and again or hit UA for some shenanigans. Would love to see the series get the proper remaster it deserves though.
I remember playing this game when I was really little. I also remember I didn't make it past the first level. I also never could remember the name. So thanks for magically popping up in my feed and reminding me.
This is weirdly timed, I was just about to head to my Warhammer store but they were closed and come home to find this video about to premiere. Coincidence? Probably, but it did save me from spending a bunch of money on tiny plastic soldiers for a little while.
I was gonna ask: you have a dedicated Warhammer store in your city?? Then I remembered seeing a Games Workshop sign somewhere here years before I knew what GW actually is. Lo and behold, it still exists, I just looked it up. Though now there's only a giant WARHAMMER sign above the entrance, no more Games Workshop reference for some reason.
@@Nitidus Yeah mine is near Pittsburgh and it's just called Warhammer, the Local Friendly Game Shop near me doesn't play Warhammer and the actual Warhammer shop is like a 40 minute drive for me unfortunately.
It's interesting how advertising works, even if it's inadvertently. Maybe it was the recent Warhammer steam sale, the space marine 2 game trailer or something else entirely but there seems to be a high interest in the Warhammer franchise recently. I've been watching countless videos on the lore etc. It seems something sparked in Josh's mind too.
50:33 The perma stick point before check point. I feel your pain. Poor Ungulate Tau. Their hooves struggle with floors 😁 I admire your perseverance for our pleasure, Josh. Thank you.
My very first W40K game. In retrospect it's shocking the Tau had their own game when almost everything was (and still is) the Ultramarines poster boys.
Ultramarines are still basically the poster boys for 40k Space Marines but even with Guilliman back they have certainly toned it down. Imperial Fists and Sons of Horus are the current Horus Heresy poster boys and the Ultramarines haven't really been the focus of a video game since like Space Marine. Every faction has a "poster boy" they show on the box art but we've long since passed from the Ward era Ultrawank.
Yea it's weird how the ultramarines always get the games and stories. I love the Imperial Fists but they are always the marines that fail to get it done.
It's weird that they didn't just not make a Tau game, as they clearly didn't want to. Even if it was a matter of pushing the new product, which it probably had to be considering how much they favored the Imperium, It would have been orders of magnitude better to just make a Marine game first, and then a Tau spinoff or something.
In the novelization of the game Kais turns out to be a champion of Chaos He straight up screams blood for the blood god, this explains how he was able to shoot bolters and defeat chaos Dreadnoughts with ease
@@komiks42in the recent Arks of Omen it’s revealed that khorne wants farsight as one of his followers and try’s to corrupt him. It’s a really good book and I don’t want to spoil. Arks of Omen: Farsight is the boon
I really liked it after having gotten into EQ through the PS2 EQOAF, and had a blast. Shame i managed to somehow hard lock my first playthrough immediately after killing a boss. It either didnt drop something, or i missed something to pick up and i couldnt go to the next area.
@@KraftLawrence1 i only played Champions of Norath as a kid and on the *first* boss, i somehow softlocked it and never figured out why or how. maybe one day ill go back and figure out what i did wrong lmao
At 8:20 you can see a knockoff Marathon symbol as Josh pans the camera around and my brain just broke. No wonder he's gonna bring this back around to bungie and halo.
They actually explained why kovash wasn't transformed and why Ardias had to be the sacrifice. Severus said that the tau are useless to him since they aren't susceptible to psychic power. It's all cannon lore as well: "The Tau’s souls are so weak that they are immune to the warp, since they have no presence in the warp. This means that no Tau have been corrupted by chaos." So altho your points would have made for better story, it would have actually been not lore accurate, since tau cant be corrupted. No hate, just pointing that out. Great video
I do agree with the assestment, tho I also agrue that they could have made Ko'Vash's end more cinematic. Like having the player make a mad dash at the governor to free the Ethereal, only to be off by a split second and have to watch him die in a cinematic cutscene.
@@rocket_sensha4337 Kind of yeah. The farsight books give a book insight to it. So, if they had no presence it would make them blanks (like sisters of silence) and phychis powers wouldn't work on them. So they do have a pressence, its just supressed. It's sort of hinted at that possibly the ethereals know of choas and repress the other castes in order to prevent tau for been corrupted. But they can still be effected by choas, a tau gets possessed by a deamon. Tzeench was involved in the whole Farsight thing, was trying to cause a civilwar sort of thing, until Khorne turns up wanting to corrupt Farsight but plans fail etc etc. In short, Tau do have a pressence and can be corrupted buts its a lot harder.
I also don't remember Tau would be into destroying planets to cleans it. Of course i get he wanted to make Tau presence bigger, but these options just doesn't fit them all that well.
Tau Fire Warrior was my introduction to warhammer, and by introduction I mean i played the multiplayer with my friend and it was kinda silly and we had a lot of fun goofing about. Sadly, ive come to learn it was not the greatest game of all time. Luckily i own a game with a giant mod scene that has tau mods, so I can have the real firewarrior experience i never got from GW. I do wish we had more 40k games that weren't RTS and also weren't all from the imperial perspective.
@@princecamaro28 ravenfield. Its an single player sandbox FPS in the same style as battlefield. Massive mod community, has a whole warhammer mod pack featuring skins weapons maps and vehicles
Man this was a oldie. I remembered it fondly but got a emulated copy last year. Emulation issues notwithstanding I realized just how badly the game had aged and realized it might never have been good.
48:26 i had the same problem when i was making my FIRST unity game for fun. Fixed it in 5 minutes or so. This happens when you separate analog position into two axis instead of single normalized vector in 2d space.
It seems like this game was made to have a Space Marine protagonist, but wanted to showcase their new race and just shoehorned them in at the last minute. Other than that, I love this game so much! I played the hell out of this and the multiplayer was fun as hell with friends
Tbh at this point we need another shooter without the humans or Spess Mehreens as protagonist. I theorized that the Tau would fit well into a tactical shooter or something like that, given their fragile shooty nature and 'near future' aesthetics
Wow! I didn't realize this video was an hour and four minutes long until I was fifty-six minutes in! Great video! I know this would never happen but I think this is a great game for a remake/ re-imagining. Where the Tau truly become a separate story and you also play through the Space marine story as well. That way you could have the Tau sections be stealth and sabatoge based, then, get your power fantasy trip playing as a space marine.
had great fun watching this video. Thanks a lot! I boutght this game when it was released, it gave me many hours of solo playing. Have very good memories. I would rate the game a 7.5/10 for that time.
58:12 I think the two are similar on surface level, but thematically quite different: Noble 6's "survive" has a bitter irony to it, for he reverted to being the "lone wolf" due to the situation he was involved with and not out of choice, and there's no saving him. In Fire Warrior, you are rescued and honoured on the spot, whereas Noble 6's sacrifice is almost unknown to anyone: only Dr. Halsey, Cpt. Keyes and a handful of marines know about his story, and no one witnessed his last moments. Still, it could be that Bungie got some inspiration from it, if anyone at the studio ever played this game.
Yeah, I don’t know much about 40k, but everything I do hear is “Space Marines vs Chaos and maybe some aliens thrown in” so this game seems pretty par for the course to me.
What makes it weird is that most stories in 40k are told from Space Marines perspective. This is one of the only games that takes place from an alien's perspective exclusively.
Even a lot of Warhammer fans don't realise (or like to accept) that 40k is a tale of Mankind in space in the far future; Humanity is almost always the focus of the setting. Space Marines are the perfect mix of scarcity and power so naturally they are the focus of most material involving the Imperial war machine. Chaos are basically the best Humanity could offer gone bad/selfish/mad so also naturally they're the opposite of the main focus so they're cast as the antagonists a lot. Plus there's a lot of different aspects to Chaos so if sneaky underhand subversion is required then fine, if brutal skull collecting is needed then also fine, and I'm sure there's a myriad of ways to sort out anything in-between. Apologies if there's any mansplaining present; this reply was meant to be shorter!
@@Maulyr One thing people may initially miss at a glance is that 40k is unique in that Humans are alien. Every last human is part of a single cult that worships a man we've never met as the one true God and emperor of mankind. At the same time they are still human while they bury themselves in religious fanaticism or warfare deep down even Space Marines are still human and have a lot of human insecurities and weaknesses. Which is why Chaos is such a popular enemy in stories because they are those human insecurities and weaknesses given form or those who have fallen to such things. That balancing between overcoming ones own weaknesses without losing your humanity is the core of most 40k stories.
I know everyone talks about how difficult it is to run on PC, but I actually knowingly, purposely bought this train wreck on GOG a week or so ago and it ran right out of the box. The aiming controls feel terrible... I can't even describe it. This game is magical.
Thoroughly enjoyed this video, thank you. It's been so long since I'd played Fire Warrior so this was a blast, likewise, with a (mostly) adult head on. Signed up on Patreon on the strength of this, Baldur's Gate & Silent Hill vids. Keep up the good work! As a semi-grouchy 40k veteran of 30 years I offer a handful of observations: those Greater Possessed are Demon Princes as Greater Possessed are a relatively new unit. The avatar at the end is a Lord Of Change, which are awesome especially in the old Warhammer: Age Of Reckoning intro (which is just a great intro all round, even now). I believe that Fire Warrior is justified in ending as it did because it all boils down to the Tau, ironically. They are pretty much immune to Chaos corruption in a classic sense and Kais in particular being present may not have saved his Ethereal (which I'm sure will be some sort of eternal mark of shame) but did result in a Chaos incursion being thwarted as there's no guarantee that had Ardias rocked up instead the outcome would've been the same. The Tau themselves have absolutely no psychic presence in the warp what so ever and thus having an Ethereal mutate to the extent that they are "elevated" to spawndom is, AFAIK, nigh-on impossible as there's no warp presence for that individual for a Chaos god to get their hooks into and corrupt, which is then manifested in realspace, as it were. As a Captain, Ardias will be well over a hundred years old, with far more kills under his ceramite belt than Kais (which translates to "Skilled" in Tau; the Tau are named after their achievements) who by lore standards should've be killed several hundred times over by now. Regarding the exterminatus, the Tau don't really understand Chaos except maybe as a nebulous corrupting force that they should avoid contact with. As such, to my knowledge, the Tau are a refreshing mix of technological potency, unquenchable expansionism and almost arrogant naivety, making them the exact opposite of the Imperium of Man in almost every way. They have no ship-board weapons capable of annihilating an entire planet because they're too pragmatic to ever need to do so: they'd rather place beacons to cordon off that planet/system than waste resources by destroying a whole planet. Railguns, even scaled up on a Manta dropship or larger Custodian class ships with gravitic launchers (giant railguns) will struggle to destroy a planet, unless the latter is used en-mass. The Imperium, as we know, totally recognises the danger of Chaos taking hold in a star system and are very open to physically writing off that planet to stop the spread. Frankly, I'm baffled as to why GW haven't optioned a developer to do more of this game with modern tech! How damn good would be it to start off in a Fire Warrior strike team, then progressing on to being a Breacher, then Pathfinder. From there the option to become a Stealth or Crisis Suit pilot would be a thing, very much like the old Strike Force Centari game where you headed up a team of jet-packed power armoured dudes with multiple camera feeds showing their activity in the field. Hammerheads and Sky Rays would be an option in some missions, like a slower-paced Battle Zone (or faster if you're in a Piranha), as would Riptides, Ghostkeels (urg, that name!) & maybe even a Stormsurge for a few minutes. So much scope! Where is it!? 😢 Very much looking forward to seeing more of your stuff :D
The game would have been both more lore friendly, and more fun if your Tau weapon was superior to the other weapons you can get, but ammo for it was very scarce. It would reflect the idea that Tau guns are the best guns, and would add an element of strategy where you need to ration your good weapon, rather than using it for everything. It probably also would have been a good idea for the Tau weapon to occupy a third weapon slot, so you can have two normal guns.
I mean you are on an enemy world and the further you get in, the further from resupply you get, you are closer to a more modern army as the T'au and as such resupply is...kind of important and you will notice how your running out.
Wasn't the Tau first introduced around early 2000's? If it was it would make sense making a game about them to see if they can get people interested in them. Kinda like how Space Marine got me interested in the Ultramarines.
One thing I'll give the game, the cutscenes where you see the space ships, they're very accurate to the tabletop. You can clearly tell that the ship which boards the tau at ~25:00 is a Dictator-class cruiser by the hangar sections on the side and the anemic macrocannon battery towards the front of each side. It's uh, it's not a battle barge I'm afraid, that's a very different type of ship. I don't remember the name of it, but the Tau ship is a light cruiser and likewise recognizable, and the scale seems appropriate. As a Battlefleet Gothic fan, I appreciate the effort and attention to detail.
Years ago when I played 40k I played Tau and every event they would put me on Chaos cause there wasn't enough of them. So I just painted my army Chaos colors and gave them Chaos banners and made Chaos corrupted Tau.
I think the creators had a vision for the voicing of the characters. We've already established that the draw of the Warhammer series is how everything is so over the top that silly, right? Well, for the Space Marines, they chose very talented actors who could effectively convey an insufferable person of nobility. People who think they are beyond important. For the Tau, though, the creators had a vision for a group that sounds either Native American or Asian. Since Games Workshop is an English company, I suspect it was difficult *AT THE TIME* to find well known voice actors who had the correct accent, but also spoke English fluently.
Yeah, I think that they did in fact get the most expensive talent that they could for the Tau - with the proviso that they had to be Asian/Native American. In early 2000s UK, there just wasn't that huge a pool of talent available within those limits.
When you said that Event Horizon could possibly be a warhammer prequel my mind exploded. I just watched it the first time a few weeks ago and it was barreling in my mind the whole time!
50:00 Waaaidaminudde! Greater Possessed are from the fairly recent 8th edition CSM codex and didn't exist back then! That's a full-blown Demon Prince! How come that Demon Prince isn't some sort of climax boss given how highly they're usually ranked in the CSM hierarchy?
Ah yes, space marines vs chaos. We've never seen that before, and it certainly won't be a focus for their video games going forward. It's almost insulting to name the game "Fire Warrior" when the plot happens *around* the fire warrior, not *with* them. Kinda reminds me of Lost Ark's storyline, you play as a fireball spell only referenced when something needs smashing while all the other characters do cool plot things.
Dude Lost Ark's story infuriated me. Every single major event I'm doing the entirety of the work. Then the cutscene has some shitty one dimensional borderline mary sue character come in and claim victory. I loved the gameplay, but the story was so unrepentantly terrible.
I'm no 40K expert but side strafing a dreadnought seems like a legit strategy. They can only fire forwards right? And I can't imagine they can turn quickly.
Later games better showcase that Dreadnoughts can be terrifyingly agile for their size. For starters, their torso has a 360º range of movement, so while they can only fire directly forwards, they can quickly turn like a turret to aim in any direction.
Awesome vid, I would love to see a "Was it good" episode for the original Commandos game, which I have very fond memories of (even if I did only play the first two levels on demo lol)
Thank you for playing this game, so I don't have to. I remember getting it back in the day, but bugs made me only play about 10 min of it, and bad reviews killed any remaining interest of making it work. Now I truly know that I did not miss anything. I remember looking forward to a Tau story, and I have been wondering what I missed sins I never came back to that game. Seems like I did not miss anything important.
I just have to imagine a meeting in the middle of the development phase of this game. Boss: "We've had feedback from our marketing team. They say that Space Marines are selling incredibly well, so the story of this game should be more about the Empire and Space Marines than that T'au." Team: "But boss, the game is halfway done. We can't just change the whole story now." Boss: "I don't care how you do it. I. Want. Space Marines!" Team: "But we can't just shift the focus from one faction to another and then still promote the game with the T'au." Boss: "SPACE MARINES!"
OH GOD! I remember picking this up back in the day, knowing nothing about 40k, and absolutely hating it. I think i played half an hour tops before trading it in. lol
I got the general thrust of things when this video came out, but after spending even just a little bit of time nurturing a curiosity about Warhammer lore over the last week, the ridiculousness of some of these scenarios is *staggering*.
Nothing to add but the novelization of this game somehow manages to elevate the plot of the game to a new height. Fantastic T’au world building, nice story telling in which the different perspectives of many characters (most die in like 2 pages or less) are explored, even a camera drone. It also gives itself a question of “how will the sanity of a fresh recruit like Kais deteriorate after almost non-stop violence, carnage and otherworldly horror” and then answer the question wonderfully. I would say Fire Warrior is one of the finest T’au novel out there for T’au fans out there. It’s a fun book but not well received by some players of other factions tho because the novel cannot exist without giving Kais the same insane amount of plot armor he has in the game. Well, the author has tried his best...
Lol as a somewhat outsider to 40k just hearing people being salty about things being non lore accurate makes me laugh when every time I have ever interacted with 40k it honestly seems like the lore is contradictory nonsense anyways. It honestly seems like not one consistent lore even exists.
Tbh he made Kais winning against a space marine plausibly. Just the sheer amount of luck involved. Also it was nice to have the Kroot referenced in it.
Is it odd that I want a 'remake' of this game but based on the novelization? Because Simon Spurrier did a lot to make something more lore fitting and plausible out of this mess. Give me that game made with (say) a modern unreal engine, and you'd have something potentially good.
@@cegesh1459 Taking pages from the Armored Core or Front Mission games and making a solid battlesuit pilot game would definitely be a solid idea for a fun outing in the setting.
Something that just confused me heavily. I always had in my memory that Fire Warrior had an actual end scene where the Admiral escaped with his ship trying to fly it into the sun to create a planet system spanning black hole, plus you had a ultimate superweapon like thing that basically fired miniatured warp rifts that could kill you as easily as it did kill others... yet ... its not here, nor can i find the actual game with this scene in it.
Fun fact: the cover art of thid game is so good that it's displayed in Warhammer World's entrance alongside other iconic artworks.
Literally the only good thing about this game.
Never played it but I instantly recognized the cover art from scanning shelves as a kid
@@sboy1024 I
"Who needs Halo?" Kinda ruins the cover art.
@@TacoSallustThe voice acting seems good too though?
I remember reading the novel and it really paid more attention to the Tau viewpoint. I think it ended with Kais being put into an insane asylum after all he went through because he almost succumbed to Chaos. I think it was actually an accident that he won. Earlier he was shot in the head with a bolter shell that didnt detonate and was lodged in his helmet, he was fighting his way to the altars and the avatar came in after he had sabotaged 3 of them, when the avatar was brought in Kais went crazy and started beating the daemon physically with every weapon he had breaking them all and he was hit so hard his helmet went flying... into the last altar. The energies there detonated the bolter shell and took out the last altar banishing the daemon.
Very interesting.
to me the implication that Khorne boosted Kais is funnier
@@illuminatingdarkness3689Khorne literally nerfed Kais into losing the fight. Chaos doesnt boost jackshit it just makes you a jobber who cannot be killed permanently.
You're mostly correct. He fought the daemon till all his weapons broke and before the daemon was going to kill him, Kais threw his helmet with the unexploded bolt round at the last altar, the impact caused the bolt round to detonate banishing the last anchor to the materium and banishing the daemon.
As the book progresses, Kais is portrayed as a nervous, self-loathing Firewarrior who is a disappointment to his father who is a decorated veteran to... Sly Marbo like character. When he encounters other Tau warriors when they're counter-boarding the Imperial battleship, they're extremely disturbed by him. He doesn't fight like they've been trained to fight. He throws an unprimed grenade into the cover being used by some Guardmen solely to displace them, allowing him to shoot them down and then retrieve his grenade because he didn't want to waste it on mere Guardsmen. When he's fighting the forces of Chaos, he's usually armed with a rail-rifle or hand-held burst cannon.
So... the daemon killed himself, then?
"It's about the Imperium vs Chaos with some Tau added in" accurately sums up most xeno POV stories in 40k.
That's why I like the Necron books set during the War in Heaven.
@@scribeslendy595 There are no Necron books set in the War in Heaven.
Wrong, Necrons Eldar and Orks all have various angles to explore. Rivalries, past deeds, plot hooks and so on. The Tau at the time they made this game didn't even had a named cast yet. The best thing they did fot the Tau is to get rid of their Mary Sue anti chaos gimmick.
@@scribeslendy595why you making shit up?
@@livanbard
They never had a Mary Sue anti chaos gimmick, what are you on about? And they definitely had the 4 main casts named and defined, again don't seem to know what you're talking about?
As for the other xenos races potential interesting rivalries and histories...tell me what gets more attention and care, all that or the latest space marines power fantasy? Compared to that, it seems GW begrudgingly throws the xenos a bone...with ofcouse an equal attention cake for their poster boys i.e. the space marines because why ever focus on other things when they can just bust out another Primarch or two to cash in shamelessly.
So, in 24 hours, Kais took down dozens or hundreds of guardsmen, several techpriests, over a dozen ultramarines, several dozen chaos marines of various types, several chaos sorcerers, two greater possessed, a chaos spawn, two chaos dreadnaughts and an *Avatar of Tzeench*. He would be, what, a 1000 point unit?
two thousand point unit and 3+ saving invul throws vs chaos LOL
Kais just had very good luck at rolling the dice.
There were rules for kais in a white dwarf and a mail order model on sale. He was ridiculously overpowered and literally saw no play.
well in the novel he was screaming blood of the blood god, skulls for the skull throne while killing everything.
I'm honestly surprised the Titan was really destroyed before activation. I can see Kais going toe to toe with it even with fully operational Void Shields and weapons.
He's probably the real reason the Imperium doesn't start a full invasion of the T'au space:
It's not because the Imperium has so many other tiny problems like Chaos, Orcs, Necrons and Tyranids, no. The Imperials just know that if they threatened the T'au enough they would send this one special Fire Warrior ...
After seeing what he achieved during one day i'd say give him a week and a whole Imperial armada would vanish.
for the record, Kais is actually tau rambo, it is canon that despite being a fresh recruit he just for some unexplained reason is this god damn terrifying. In the book version of the games plot, characters regard him with fear and confusion
Considering that by the end of the novel he starts screaming about "blood for the blood god", there may be a little bit of an answer to his power level.
@@KobKobold To be even more fair. By the end end Kais learns to egnore those voices in his head and we even have a small time skip where he has seemingly recovered completely. Dude pulled a Farsight before Farsight was even a thing
When they encounter him, he doesn't fight like regular Tau and is usually soaked in blood. The Tau hate close combat and Kais, he looks to thrive in it. Relish it even.
The Kais in the book and the Kais in this game are not the same character.
We found Rae's Dad!
A battle suit would have been a cool late-game upgrade for a tau FPS. You can take a beating, make powered jumps and wield the really big tau guns. That's the kind of thing that would equalize a tau soldier with some chaos buggery.
If not the crisis battlesuit, it would have been perfect for the X Stealth Suit. . . In my Heart, I do Hope someday we'll return to the tau gameplay with such weaponary.
Take a beating is the overstatement of the century, they're made of glass or some shit
@@mouthwide0pen Take a beating compared to other tau infantry. The best use of battlesuits is how mobile they are. It's not an imperial knight or dread or eldar wraithguard.
The scale of the game is perfect for a stealth suit.
@@SusCalvinfunny you say that because Tau knight sized suits have better defenses than both imperial knights and the wraith knights.
Speaking of old Warhammer games that seem to be forgotten, Have you ever played "Mark of Chaos"? The most hilarious thing about it that i remember is the final mission of the imperial campaign. A holdout against a Chaos army, i killed everything and then a demon prince appeared marching towards the gates. i Frantically scrambled my defenders but then noticed he hadn't reached the walls yet. Turned out he got stuck on a piece of wooden fence. As it turned out the Demon Prince dealt purely magical damage, and this wooden fence was completely invulnerable to magic damage. The AI was not able to walk around it for some reason (it was barely wider than the demon prince and had free space to both sides) and REALLY wanted to kill that wooden fence. So after every other chaos unit was dead, i moved every soldier who had a musket down from the walls, in front of the walls, formed a nice semi-circle around the Demon prince, who had been beating the wooden fence for a good 15 minutes by that point and sentenced him to death by firing squad. It was absolutely hilarous to see the Chosen Champion of Chaos be defeated by 5 pieces of wood nailed together.
I remember loving that game, the only major downside was you needed to set a weekend aside to load it up.
Should have been how the "End Times" actually ended ...
I have that game on GoG and I've played it on CD when I was a young lad. It's quite a good game, like a proto Total Warhammer. Hell, Total Warhammer could learn a thing or two from Mark of Chaos like how the heroes can be attached to companies of units...
Lovely game though, rather linear but jolly good fun when you're at it. Combat is tactical and you really need to consider how you use your troops (I've lost my units to a Skaven Warp Lightning Cannon when they bunch up...)
Also, the cinematic trailer/intro to the game was amazing. Holds up even today.
Taal himself blessed that fence
I got that game for my birthday and it was okay but I couldn't get over the part where an empire guy had a chaos symbol on his face.
The funny thing about the prison level is that you can turn the alarm OFF whenever you want.
My older brother had this same problem wen doing his playthrough, but when I got there; I tried something drastic, different, and unheard of, I hit the Alarm Button a Second Time, and voila, Quiet. Not only does the noise stop, but fewer enemy's spawn as well(as they aren't on alert).
🙃
I hope you turned to your brother when you did that and said "It's quiet."
@@Starweardo "TOO quiet..."
This sounds exactly like what my little sister would do to me...
alot of josh's complaints are easily solvable. XD
Honestly I think Halo's checkpoint system was a huge reason that people liked it so much. Your last checkpoint was the last time anyone wasn't shooting at you. It loads instantly and you are back in the fight usually within 5 seconds.
It certainly wasn't for the shooting mechanics and gameplay that was over a decade old at that point.
@@renatocorvaro6924twin stick aiming and halos aim assist was not 10 years old
@@renatocorvaro6924 Halo is still more fun than most games released today, wtf you talking about
@@renatocorvaro6924how old are you lmao, because halo was groundbreaking when it came out
Halo was too slow for me tbh. It felt really sluggish if you had played Quake and Team Fortress 2 etc.
To me it sounds like they were about 70-80% of the way through making a space marine game, when the corporate overlords said that it needed to be about the Tau to coincide with the new set they were releasing for the tabletop game.
Considering Dawn of War Soulstorm was literally made to advertise SoBs, Dark Eldar, and flyers for 7e, you're probably spot-on. Geedubs, will be Geedubs.
Soul storm was released in 2008, 40k 7th edition was released in 2012.
No, it was just supposed to be a halo killer. Everything else was just slapped on with duct tape.
I do think you are right about the part that it seems like they were making a Space Marine game with Tau and Chaos as the bad guys before randomly deciding to make the Tau the main playable faction instead. Had they just kept it as a Space Marine game then it would've sold better.
@@Mr.Mosquito89 What the fuck are you on about? Soulstorm was 2008, 7th Edition was 2014. Sisters of Battle didn't even have a codex in 7th edition. All of the flyers in Soulstorm were forgeworld models that existed for years at that point.
'Two factions (with a 95% chance on one of them being Space Marines - probably Ultramarines) fight until Chaos reveals itself, at which point an uneasy alliance may be formed to face the greater threat' has been pretty much the story of most 40k games.
Ironically chaos turns out to be very predictable.
That narrative laziness is another thing WarCraft copied from WarHammer XD
3/4 of the chaos gods are incredibly predictable since their universe and existence relies on it. The 4th can also be predicted but you need a galaxy brain IQ to understand.
@@misanthropicservitorofmars2116 True, being an embodied concept kind of limits ones range of action :p
@@misanthropicservitorofmars2116 That or be good at a children’s card game.
I do miss how the Orks are initially set up as the villains and the Space Marines and their allies (Tau in this case) have to work together, until Chaos eventually reveals themselves to be the true enemy!
Ironically, this game would be better with Orks.
*Guardsman flails incomprehensibly with chainsword*
"Its quiet..."
"its quiet" over and over as you see an african warlord on his meds starts playing marv screams
Weird thing is, this was the cannon Tau meets Chaos moment in the lore and it even had a Black Library novel. It should be remembered for that at least. I loved it back in the day and I respect you for playing it now, it's aged like milk.
To be fair that Black Library novel was written during the days they made tie in video games novels that REALLY broke the canon, like the infamous CS Goto Dawn of War novels. It wasn't until a few years later did GW actually start taking the novelizations seriously, and made Black Library (mostly) consistent with the actual setting. With that said O'kais was actually back ported into the main canon, since he's part of the Tau Codex now (as a lore only character atm), and he shows up in a Black Library novel to slaughter a bunch of Dark Angels.
Yeah, it aged like milk. On the positive, it made for a heck of a cheese. On the negative, it's not a very good cheese, either.
@@hollow8136 Kais also shows up as the commander of the Tau in Dark Crusade.
But yeah, Black Library was a fucking mess back in the day.
Not only that, IIRC Tau Orca was originally made for this game and from this game's designs, Forgeworld made a model.
@@hollow8136 I'm pretty sure I read a really old space marine book about S&M loving Imperial Fists armed with Shuriken Catapults.
To be fair, doors probably are a mystery to most of the imperium. Those guardsmen were probably like "why does the machine spirit of this door vex us?! It knows the alien is behind it, why doesn't it stay open so we may deliver the emporers wrath?!?!
Commissar: I don't know! I'm not a Tech-Priest!"
Lol
Not really an accident. After the fight where the grenade became lodged in his helmet he got an all new suit of armor and when they wanted to change his helmet he said that he wants to keep it.
Almost as if he knew that carrying a grenade on his head that could go off at any moment would come in handy.
The knife actually did have one great use. If you run into the face of the chaos terminators they wont shoot you but try to walk away, however they are super slow so you just get in their face and stab.
"Imagine you're a Chaos space marine. You've been summoned onto an Imperial ship and you're expecting to fight other space marines, and then you turn around and see this tiny orange Tau with a gun half his size running at you screaming."
Actual logical response for a Chaos space marine: "Finally, a worthy opponent! Our battle shall be legendary!"
True! 😂
Well in game mechanics that would be more like
"Finally, a worthy opponent! Our battle shall be ...." *Chaos Marine ded*
To be fair this completely STUPID tactic of charging and blasting is unsurprising, stupidly very effective in the Warhammer 40k universe, stupid yes, but hey its *"rule of cool"* dumb so it's allowed.
@@navilluscire2567 It's more like whoever has the most plot armor wins the battles.
@@altechelghanforever9906 isn't that the fundamental concept that lets Orks do... basically everything they do?
One hilarious bit is that the "Psychic Barrage" mentioned at 38:34 is actually your combat data recorder running out of memory. Exactly the problem Josh was worried about when that was introduced.
Josh: "The AI in this game has been told that the Commissar will shoot it unless it does the dumbest thing possible at all times."
Tech Priest:" The WHAT"
MECHANICAL HERESY !!!
AI the ultimate heresy for a tech priest
There we have it. The lore reason all the NPCs in this game are dumb as bricks.
AI is heresy.
I'm only just getting into 40k Lore........
But how is it Heresy when they use machine spirits on multiple occasions and frequently religious settings
@@johntorreto4485 Don't question the groupthink and stale humor of the 40k fandom. Eventually you'll get used to it and join them.
I followed the development of this through various playstation magazines, it was always intended as PR for the tau. Games workshop weren't confident of making many sales outside of it's established fandom, nor their newest race standing alone without any recognisable 40k to draw in the aforementioned fans. The story was actually written as intended for you to experience both fighting against, and with the iconic space marines, as a 3rd party faction for those reasons.
Prelude to tryna sell the Railcannon
The level at 51:41 was made in to a wargaming table by the White Dwarf team when the game came out. Also had rules for running Kais with his Rail Rifle AND a full scenario where a handful of elite Fire Warriors battle against Raptors and Chaos Marines to reach the portal at the end. I remember playing it with a friend and it was a lot of fun!
I had that issue, the board was very cool and I think they even did a battle report of the scenario.
"You sent four techpriests and a boatload of imperial guard to stop one fire warrior, as a diversion?!"
Imperial Commander:
"Perfectly reasonable"
Actual response: " It's quiet. "
And you wanna know the worst ? It might be his actual answer, and most imperial guard commander would do the same.
"We had less than 90% casualty rate. The mission was a huge success!"
There HAS TO be lore about this random Tau warrior who on their first day took chaos on his knee and spanked chaos until they liked it.
I believe he's the Tau commander in Dawn of War. May be wrong.
@@viperblitz11 Yes! Kais is the XV22 Tau Commander in DOW Dark Crusade :)
@@Rexxnarlol is this a mod or something?
@@KingLich451 no, an Expansion
@@viperblitz11 Well his name was spelled the same, but in this game his name was pronounced "Case", while in Dark Crusade it was "Kai-eese", so who knows?
The turret on the ceiling was hacked by a techpriest. Its no coincidence the first time you see one is the same level your own defenses turn on you.
Apparentlly that Shas'O Kais from Dark Crusade is the dude from Fire Warrior. Also Kais is the single follower of a very rare path. Like there are those standard ones like Mont’ka ("The Killing Blow") and Kauyon ("The Patient Hunter"), he follows Monat "The Lone Warrior", so basically he specializes to be a one men army.
so, basically, this dude soloed a Guard regiment, several Marines, and a Chaos warband and said "screw teamwork, my boot is big enough for every ass'"
Yeah I don't know about that - I think this is pure fanon. They share names but for Tau, 'Kais' is basically 'John Smith' - it's the most common name you can have
They're different, this games. kais goes mad after the events of the game, sad but true
@@ExValeFor he appears in the Farsight books so he is canon
"The name 'Shas'la T'au Kais' was also featured in the first person shooter for the PC and Playstation 2, which was later adapted into a novel: Warhammer 40,000: Fire Warrior, the protagonist being a Tau warrior first fighting the Imperium, then the forces of Chaos. However, this Kais is unrelated to Shas'O Kais, as O'Kais was a student of Commander Puretide, who died before the Damocles Gulf Crusade, while La'Kais wouldn't even finish his basic training until 200 years after the Damocles Gulf Crusade"
Josh Strife 40k's. You just explain Warhammer and teach us about the lore and the stories and all the cool shit. I'm always so lost by Warhammer and try to get into it, but there is just so much.
Same.
When I was in uni, I tried to make a simple game, just for fun, and wanted to make basically from scratch. And I run into a problem with movement that matches what you said in video. Basically movement was 100% speed in cardinal directions, but slower in any other angle. I can't remember specifics now (it was years ago), but I, as a beginner, took the naive approach that assumed the speed in a given direction is changing linearly with an angle. Imagine a point in a grid, where player is. And all the places it can be after a second of movement at a given angle. It should be a circle, but in my approach (and, given your description, I believe in Fire Warrior as well) it's a rotated square with corners in cardinal directions. It's very easy to fix, once you figure out what's wrong, just use sin and cos functions.
Alternatively, add all the inputs from the keys together into a movement vector (e.g. (1,1) for "forward + right") and then normalize that, giving you a vector of length 1 which is the base speed you're going to move at, in any direction. Yet so many games get this wrong...
its the pythagorean theorem, scale and direction are not additive. What you want to do is have diagonal movement propel you in both directions at 0.72 times the normal speed when going in basic directions
correction: more like 0.71
Who the fuck cares
Apply to become a game workshop game developer
Something to note about the opening of the game when the Tau Ethereal is kidnapped, from a lore perspective. Astartes (Space Marines) DO NOT take orders from planetary governors. Astartes far out-rank any civilian officials and are subordinate only to the Adeptus Terra. The Astartes would be the ones calling the shots here not the governor.
As with so many things in 40K lore, this varies depending on the edition, the era, and the author. Governors can request a Marine detachment if they have a reason for doing so, and some chapters are more likely to respond than others. Once there, the Marine Captain is under the nominal command of the governor or whoever else, since they represent Terra in that system. Severus likely had a reason that he gave the Chapter, then found a Captain or Sergeant with whom he could cut a deal (after all, not all Marines left are inherently good and loyal - he could find one on the brink of falling to Chaos and exploit that). Given the opening cutscene has a very limited number of Marines, he probably promised them some kind of power or authority or somesuch. Plus, he’s a priest of Tzeentch, and they do weird stuff just for everything to end up ‘just as planned’.
I think those might be Alpha Legion Chaos Space Marines (ones that masquerade as loyalists to do covert stuff)... they certainly seem to be the right colour. Could well be wrong though.
@@Senbei01 don't you mean the alpha legion loyalist marines that masquerade as chaos to do covert stuff?
At best, depending on Chapter, Space Marines might comply with requests made by senior Imperial officials. Maybe. They might even show a little respect to senior Imperial officers from time to time. But most of the time they will ignore anyone who isn't in their direct chain of command - aka, their own Chapter. And that often applies to other Chapters too, there's regular tales of Space Marines coming to blows with each other over conflicting objectives or even having their own mini wars if the clash of interests is severe enough. And at worst a Space Marine might just kill you on the spot for getting in their way, since they see themselves (perhaps justifiably, sometimes) as being more important and getting in the path of their mission is effectively treason against the Emperor. Depending on the Chapter, of course.
If I lived in that universe I'd probably be happy to see a Space Wolf, for example. Sure, they might be dangerous allies but they will go out of their way to help other Imperials when it suits them. And I'd run away as fast as possible if I saw a Black Templar, who are one step away from being renegades with how often they will purposely attack other Imperials who they deem unworthy (and how much the Inquisition as a whole seems to think they should be forcibly disbanded - not that I trust the Inquisition either).
@@andromidius The Chapter you really want to see is the Salamanders, because they’ll even keep the various Sons of Dorn (including the BTs) under control. Apparently having an immortal Primarch who doesn’t think flame is too unkind a death for a Marine makes other chapters sit down and listen.
The visuals of this made me want to see a Was it Good on Star Wars: Republic Commando. I don't know why, but the hud and graphics just made me think of that.
That would be because both are on the late Quake 3 engine. There were a bunch of games on that engine around that time, and they all kinda look similar.
We don’t need a was it good
We know it was great
We also all know Symphony of the night was great, yet we still got an episode
I played Repubic commando on PC and I can safely say it is one of the ugliest FPS games and also was one of the worse I have ever played, on a level with N64 Dai katana.
if you want to play Republic COmmando done right find a copy of Freedom Fighters on pS2. Its just better.
RC absolutely holds up just as poorly as this. I tried playing it a year back or so and yiiiikes
Fire Warrior actually has a lot of interesting intersections of culture and cultural iconography, for it's specific time; The Tau were a brand new race, so Games Workshop wanted to push them to the fanbase; their hallmarks are idealism, and a dun/yellow and dark colour-scheme, a bit like desert camo.
Instead of employing human-wave attacks and WW1/2 icons, like The Imperium, they seem to make war in the modern style of fast, squad-based mobile infantry.
Also, in 2001, the US (and allies) invaded Afghanistan, engaging in the first real ground-war since Vietnam. Our media was flooded with images of WHAT war and soldiers looked like now. We were watching movies like Black Hawk Down and Behind Enemy Lines. And the truth is; the original Tau look, not a little, like that.
I did play Fire Warrior, and yeah - it wasn't great - but for all it's flaws, it let you get into the 40k universe in a first-person view. Today, there's loads of games that do that, but back then - there was just Fire Warrior.
What do you mean first real ground war since Vietnam?
This game introduced me to the 40k universe as a child I have a soft spot for it.
This
this
This
That
Sadist... Thankfully I'd been involved in 40k for a long time before this lol
You might be forgetting that probally because this one day he spent killing the Imperial forces and the chaos... he actually got promoted and became the master of diplomacy in dawn of war.
In fact lore wise Khais became so good that they have him frozen as one of the 3 most prominent Tau commanders under the instructions of Puretide I hope one day we see his model in the game
@@Trauson I would love to see him as a special character in a Farsight Enclave army.
@@endymallorn Well I dont think that Khais would join the enclaves, he would be something between Shadowsun and Farsight morelike a neutral character and more focused in the Tau Empire and pragmatistic than Shadowsun
No matter how many times I read this comment, it just does not make any sense to me. What are you saying?
@@Randy.Bobandy If you ever Played Dawn of War Dark Crusade the Tau commander that you are playing in the Campaign is Kais from this game
thinking on this, i feel the wonky aim could be useful if it didn't effect tau weapons. Tau are meant to be more accurate, and it would provide an incentive to use Tau weapons, instead of them being a burden.
Another reason to think this may not have been intended as a Tau game until later in the dev cycle.
I did think it was funny yet appropriate that the Bolter was pretty much the rocket launcher of the game
Actually, since no fucker is firing Markerlights, the Tau are rightfully fucking awful at aiming XD
If i remember don't Tau get less accurate the closer they get to a target? and it has something to do with the eyes?
Ah, yes. The tau... When I was still playing the 40k miniature game, my back then stupidly overpowered chaos space marines wiped the floor with every astartes faction except for the grey knights. Then I ran into the tau crisis and colossus suits and got constantly obliterated because all they had to do was move backwards and keep barraging me with their superior accuracy, range and firepower.
Funny how inaccurately Firewarrior showcases what the tau actually were like back then.
Little known fact: if you preordered the game on console back then, you got a very collectible actual miniature of Kais.
Man, wish I would have got that!
I played Tau and two of my mates played chaos… good times!
fun part of this game is that in the book he starts shouting blood for the blood god, this means that khorne disrupted T's plan by possessing a random fire warrior.
Ah, Tau. Perfect slaves for my dark eldar raiders. Wyches will mess up a squad of fire warriors with terrifying efficiency, for the record.
@@nicholasvogel9783 would explain why he just plows through everything.....but dam Khorne using a Tau is kinda desperate for him xD
Josh being baffled at the Tau turret firing at you during the Ship Boarding makes all games where the AI can't cope with you hacking turrets surprisingly realistic
As someone who doesn't know pretty much anything about Warhammer or 40k, I still appreciate flexing your knowledge with all this tangents about how things does or does not work in the context of the universe. I may not get it, but I commend you for going the extra mile for those who does. Great video as always Josh.
I T S Q U I E T
I strongly recommend MandaloreGaming review of this messy masterpiece
I have a feeling this was either intended to be a Space Marine game, or an Imperial Guard game, and they swapped it late in the dev cycle for the Tau because they were the new hotness of 40K. It's either that, or the GW people were just so infatuated with the Imperium that they couldn't get out of their own way to tell a compelling story without making it about the Space Marines. That's a real shame, because this would have been an amazing moment to really showcase their new race, and build its lore in an interesting way with a new medium for them.
I think it was a changed story, like you initially suggested. The Tau army was released 2001, and Fire Warrior came out in 2003. This game likely changed into an advertisement by GW request.
I think it was a changed story, like you initially suggested. The Tau army was released 2001, and Fire Warrior came out in 2003. This game likely changed into an advertisement by GW request.
I don't think much has changed from then we still get primarily space marine story's in terms of video games
I wanna make a game called "Imperial Guard". It'll involve marching in formation for the first hour of the game and then 0.5 seconds of actual combat when something rips your head off.
I've been somewhat interested in playing Warhammer 40K games but it seems like practically every game has been centered around Space Marines, which is probably my least favorite faction in that universe... So just Dawn of War 1/2 for me.
Please, please keep making these long game reviews. You go into so much minor details on things, that it really adds up over the length of it and I almost feel like I've played the game myself by the end of the video.
If I remember correctly, the release date of the game was very close to the release of the actual first Tau army codex (at least in my country). May explained why the Tau might be somewhat shoehorned in.
Yes. This was an advert for the new race that GW had created.
How to fix the turret issue Josh had in one second.
"Tech Priests have sabotaged the turrets."
Why couldn't they put that on the radio?
I tolerate this game for exactly one reason:
Atmosphere.
The lore of this game is, you are the FNG stuck in the trenches. And that is exactly what it feels like, you are the FNG stuck in the trenches. Stuff's exploding, your guys are getting killed, their guys are getting killed, you're getting strafed by aircraft, they've got chainsaw swords that will mess you up (and in game mechanics that is exactly what happens if they get close). Later on you get sent up to a ship boarding incident and more stuff is exploding, it's actually well done. Like the shooting mechanics aren't very good, but the atmosphere of just this unlucky Tau trying to blast his way to tomorrow saw me through to the end
It's kinda ruined when all you hear is "IT'S QUIET"
Speaking of supposed "Halo Killers", I'd love to see a video on either Killzone or Black. The level to which both of those games were hyped up was absolutely absurd.
To this day I never understood the "thing" about Black. I did hear every gun originally was meant to have unlimited ammo in a hollywood crazy kinda way but then the game came out and just seemed rather normal.
Black was amazing. Not a halo killer but damn did it set a standard for destructible environments back in the day, it even had a working system for ricochet rounds that could bounce of a surface and kill enemies with the deflected bullets. I still play it from time to time on my Xbox360. i think i have never played a game with more explosions per minute than Black. It was an absolute blast. The dude from that game was the most destructive Wheelchair-Bound Protagonist of all times!
@@LeeONardo I don't really see what you're getting at. it felt like almost everything could explode. Most guns had magazines 2-3x as large as real life and after beating the campaign on the normal difficulty you unlocked the silver guns which actually had unlimited ammo for replaying each level. Especially the unlimited ammo rocket launcher and magnum were great fun.
RedScotGaming did a real epic of a series retrospective for Killzone about a year ago, I highly recommend that video. Amusingly, I spent half of *this* video trying to remember where I'd heard Severus' voice--he's Hakha and Radec in Killzone 1 and 2, two of the more memorable characters in the series.
I loved both those games lmao
I actually just finished the novelization of this game (found it in mint condition at a secondhand shop) and it was pretty fun.
It actually made me like the T'au more as a 40K faction. I'd really enjoy getting more xeno-focused warhammer media in the future.
If i recall correctly they explained in the book that the Firewarrior could manage to fight the Tzeench deamon because Korn blessed him with some spell protection cuz he thought it would be funny.
@@danielbricker7928 Certainly sounds like something chaos would do.
@@danielbricker7928 So mild spoiler warning for Fire Warrior...
Kais, the main character, has this whole character journey trying to essentially find his place, since he's shocked to discover he is not only incredibly good at being a soldier, but he revels in the death and carnage.
The main villain is being guided by a lord of change, and when Tzeentch demons start showing up, the warp tearing through allows Kais to be corrupted by Khorne, allowing him fight the other demons before ultimately rebuffing the demonic presence inside of him, and being sent to a T'au mental hospital for awhile
Any visual media AT ALL to focus on Eldar would be nice.
@@danielbricker7928 see, this is EXACTLY some shit Khorne would do, too. "Hey, this one particular alien thingy is REALLY good at killing, AND I get to fuck with Tzeench at the same time? FUCK YEAH I'M BLESSING THIS DUDE!" (said in the most Metal/Dudebro voice you can imagine)
The one thing I remember about this game is how I kept waiting for the chance to get in a Crisis Suit, would love a Titanfall style Tau game
OMG I'm so stoked to see that you covered this game!! I loved this game and it was one of my favorite fps and introduced me to wh40k before I even knew what it was. I would lilove a remastering of it personally
One thing I really appreciate in these videos is the comparison to other games from the same time period.
I had pretty limited access to video games back when, and have no personal frame of reference for what was impressive or disappointing for earlier games and hardware - I like seeing these measured directly against their contemporaries.
"Damn Astartes, they think they are better than us." "They are, don't you ever forget It." I think the game is trying to say something.
It is objectively true. On any metric you could name the Astartes are better than a normal human. Except for stuff the retcon out later.
@@morganrobinson8042 Aside from the ever so popular field of human reproduction.
And yes, I know that's not what you meant it doesn't matter - I just have poor impulse control.
Sure, the Astartes are better in almost every way. They're better than any ten guardsmen. But I have a lot more guardsmen than ten to one, and I can make more of them a whole lot faster than you can make a single Battle Brother.
@@ObiWahnKnobi the original Astartes were literal Superman: they could do everything the Space Marines do, and use their cocks normally. This is what I call superior.
@@Spark_Chaser A single astrates is more like a solid hundred or two hundred to one.
As a young impressionable 40k fan with this being the only game available, I played this game a lot. This was before Dawn of War had come out. It’s still a guilty pleasure for me.
Same. I lamented not having a PC at the time because Dawn of War and most 40K games were out of reach for me.
Like Josh mentions, there were other games. They were just much more niche and harder to come by.
Dawn of War was, to my mind, one of still only a handful of instances where Warhammer translated into a videogame well.
@@Blisterdude123 Space Marine is pretty solid, too. I'm hyped for the sequel.
@@Blisterdude123 Dawn of War still holds up. I’ll still have a go on Dark Crusade every now and again or hit UA for some shenanigans. Would love to see the series get the proper remaster it deserves though.
I remember playing this game when I was really little. I also remember I didn't make it past the first level. I also never could remember the name. So thanks for magically popping up in my feed and reminding me.
Loving your videos so far, working my way through the archives, great new channel to discover
This is weirdly timed, I was just about to head to my Warhammer store but they were closed and come home to find this video about to premiere. Coincidence? Probably, but it did save me from spending a bunch of money on tiny plastic soldiers for a little while.
I was gonna ask: you have a dedicated Warhammer store in your city?? Then I remembered seeing a Games Workshop sign somewhere here years before I knew what GW actually is. Lo and behold, it still exists, I just looked it up. Though now there's only a giant WARHAMMER sign above the entrance, no more Games Workshop reference for some reason.
@@Nitidus Yeah mine is near Pittsburgh and it's just called Warhammer, the Local Friendly Game Shop near me doesn't play Warhammer and the actual Warhammer shop is like a 40 minute drive for me unfortunately.
It's interesting how advertising works, even if it's inadvertently. Maybe it was the recent Warhammer steam sale, the space marine 2 game trailer or something else entirely but there seems to be a high interest in the Warhammer franchise recently. I've been watching countless videos on the lore etc. It seems something sparked in Josh's mind too.
GW should be boicotted at this point. And I mean it 100%.
Warhammer fans are weird
The fact that dying enemies still absorb shots is actually nice though.
Now THIS this is main monitor content. Keep up the Good Work!
man of culture
Amazing timing on that Rail Gun shot. It went "K-" then an ad played
50:33 The perma stick point before check point. I feel your pain. Poor Ungulate Tau. Their hooves struggle with floors 😁
I admire your perseverance for our pleasure, Josh. Thank you.
My very first W40K game.
In retrospect it's shocking the Tau had their own game when almost everything was (and still is) the Ultramarines poster boys.
Ultramarines are still basically the poster boys for 40k Space Marines but even with Guilliman back they have certainly toned it down.
Imperial Fists and Sons of Horus are the current Horus Heresy poster boys and the Ultramarines haven't really been the focus of a video game since like Space Marine. Every faction has a "poster boy" they show on the box art but we've long since passed from the Ward era Ultrawank.
No it wasn't. Tau was new, GW wanted to push Tau sales.
Gabriel Angelos would like to have a word with you about our Lord and Avior Dawn of War.
And fook those Blueberries!
Yea it's weird how the ultramarines always get the games and stories. I love the Imperial Fists but they are always the marines that fail to get it done.
It's weird that they didn't just not make a Tau game, as they clearly didn't want to. Even if it was a matter of pushing the new product, which it probably had to be considering how much they favored the Imperium, It would have been orders of magnitude better to just make a Marine game first, and then a Tau spinoff or something.
In the novelization of the game Kais turns out to be a champion of Chaos
He straight up screams blood for the blood god, this explains how he was able to shoot bolters and defeat chaos Dreadnoughts with ease
Thats.. would be first and only Tau Khorn worshipers in wh40k
@@komiks42 ….UNTIL RECENTLY
@@tomgeytenbeek2207 Did i miss something?
@@komiks42in the recent Arks of Omen it’s revealed that khorne wants farsight as one of his followers and try’s to corrupt him. It’s a really good book and I don’t want to spoil.
Arks of Omen: Farsight is the boon
@@huellbadman3529 but i thought... that the tau... have so weak souls... that they are invisible to chaos?
"you're sending me to singlehandedly destroy artillery on board an enemy ship. It's 7:00 pm."
This line out of context is something special
Feels like every 40k game with a plot has the twist traitor who summons chaos half-way through the game.
I know it's bugs messing the AI up but I love the idea that the tau enter every room walking backwards just because they want too
I'd love a Was it Good - Champion's of Norrath video. My uncultured teenager brain loved that stupidly messy story and Everquest setting
It was obviously good and Champions Return to Arms was eveb better
I really liked it after having gotten into EQ through the PS2 EQOAF, and had a blast. Shame i managed to somehow hard lock my first playthrough immediately after killing a boss. It either didnt drop something, or i missed something to pick up and i couldnt go to the next area.
@@KraftLawrence1 i only played Champions of Norath as a kid and on the *first* boss, i somehow softlocked it and never figured out why or how. maybe one day ill go back and figure out what i did wrong lmao
The obvious answer is yes, it was good.
yes and Dark Alliance 1 and 2 also kicked major ass back then
This channel becomes more and more a second Mandalore Gaming channel, which is a good thing.
It's Quiet...
DOes it mean we will get another Sseth as well? God help us all.
bro don't say that - they both have distinctive styles and both are entertaining
@@wahlex841 check out Max0r, he's pretty much that
It's quiet
At 8:20 you can see a knockoff Marathon symbol as Josh pans the camera around and my brain just broke. No wonder he's gonna bring this back around to bungie and halo.
Couple of fun mechanics in the prison level: the alarm can be turned off, and you can free tau prisoner by shooting the light above the doors
They actually explained why kovash wasn't transformed and why Ardias had to be the sacrifice. Severus said that the tau are useless to him since they aren't susceptible to psychic power.
It's all cannon lore as well: "The Tau’s souls are so weak that they are immune to the warp, since they have no presence in the warp. This means that no Tau have been corrupted by chaos."
So altho your points would have made for better story, it would have actually been not lore accurate, since tau cant be corrupted.
No hate, just pointing that out. Great video
Tau can be corrupted. there is an incident of a Tau possibly falling to Khorn
I do agree with the assestment, tho I also agrue that they could have made Ko'Vash's end more cinematic.
Like having the player make a mad dash at the governor to free the Ethereal, only to be off by a split second and have to watch him die in a cinematic cutscene.
@@omegagarry8192 wasnt it that they are deaf to the chaos influence but not directly inmune to direct contact with it?
@@rocket_sensha4337 Kind of yeah. The farsight books give a book insight to it. So, if they had no presence it would make them blanks (like sisters of silence) and phychis powers wouldn't work on them. So they do have a pressence, its just supressed. It's sort of hinted at that possibly the ethereals know of choas and repress the other castes in order to prevent tau for been corrupted. But they can still be effected by choas, a tau gets possessed by a deamon. Tzeench was involved in the whole Farsight thing, was trying to cause a civilwar sort of thing, until Khorne turns up wanting to corrupt Farsight but plans fail etc etc. In short, Tau do have a pressence and can be corrupted buts its a lot harder.
I also don't remember Tau would be into destroying planets to cleans it. Of course i get he wanted to make Tau presence bigger, but these options just doesn't fit them all that well.
Tau Fire Warrior was my introduction to warhammer, and by introduction I mean i played the multiplayer with my friend and it was kinda silly and we had a lot of fun goofing about.
Sadly, ive come to learn it was not the greatest game of all time.
Luckily i own a game with a giant mod scene that has tau mods, so I can have the real firewarrior experience i never got from GW. I do wish we had more 40k games that weren't RTS and also weren't all from the imperial perspective.
And what game are we speaking of that has these Tau mods?
@@princecamaro28 ravenfield. Its an single player sandbox FPS in the same style as battlefield. Massive mod community, has a whole warhammer mod pack featuring skins weapons maps and vehicles
Man this was a oldie. I remembered it fondly but got a emulated copy last year.
Emulation issues notwithstanding I realized just how badly the game had aged and realized it might never have been good.
you also play as the Tau. so nope
Love your work bro. its nick picks like this that Drive the Industry forward
48:26 i had the same problem when i was making my FIRST unity game for fun. Fixed it in 5 minutes or so. This happens when you separate analog position into two axis instead of single normalized vector in 2d space.
I was always curious about this game until MandaloreGaming's review
IT'S QUIET
It seems like this game was made to have a Space Marine protagonist, but wanted to showcase their new race and just shoehorned them in at the last minute. Other than that, I love this game so much! I played the hell out of this and the multiplayer was fun as hell with friends
The tau were not a new race by this point they had been out for over 8 years.
Tbh at this point we need another shooter without the humans or Spess Mehreens as protagonist. I theorized that the Tau would fit well into a tactical shooter or something like that, given their fragile shooty nature and 'near future' aesthetics
We need more wh40k games about ANYONE ELSE than spess mehreens in general.
@@Feuerhamster nah, you just like xenos you heretic. Plus if you're making a space marine, it does need some ugly blue creatures to shoot.
@@DiploRaptor They where introduced in 2001, this game came out in 2003
Wow! I didn't realize this video was an hour and four minutes long until I was fifty-six minutes in! Great video! I know this would never happen but I think this is a great game for a remake/ re-imagining. Where the Tau truly become a separate story and you also play through the Space marine story as well. That way you could have the Tau sections be stealth and sabatoge based, then, get your power fantasy trip playing as a space marine.
had great fun watching this video. Thanks a lot!
I boutght this game when it was released, it gave me many hours of solo playing. Have very good memories. I would rate the game a 7.5/10 for that time.
58:12 I think the two are similar on surface level, but thematically quite different: Noble 6's "survive" has a bitter irony to it, for he reverted to being the "lone wolf" due to the situation he was involved with and not out of choice, and there's no saving him. In Fire Warrior, you are rescued and honoured on the spot, whereas Noble 6's sacrifice is almost unknown to anyone: only Dr. Halsey, Cpt. Keyes and a handful of marines know about his story, and no one witnessed his last moments.
Still, it could be that Bungie got some inspiration from it, if anyone at the studio ever played this game.
Yeah, I don’t know much about 40k, but everything I do hear is “Space Marines vs Chaos and maybe some aliens thrown in” so this game seems pretty par for the course to me.
What makes it weird is that most stories in 40k are told from Space Marines perspective. This is one of the only games that takes place from an alien's perspective exclusively.
Even a lot of Warhammer fans don't realise (or like to accept) that 40k is a tale of Mankind in space in the far future; Humanity is almost always the focus of the setting. Space Marines are the perfect mix of scarcity and power so naturally they are the focus of most material involving the Imperial war machine. Chaos are basically the best Humanity could offer gone bad/selfish/mad so also naturally they're the opposite of the main focus so they're cast as the antagonists a lot. Plus there's a lot of different aspects to Chaos so if sneaky underhand subversion is required then fine, if brutal skull collecting is needed then also fine, and I'm sure there's a myriad of ways to sort out anything in-between.
Apologies if there's any mansplaining present; this reply was meant to be shorter!
@@Maulyr One thing people may initially miss at a glance is that 40k is unique in that Humans are alien. Every last human is part of a single cult that worships a man we've never met as the one true God and emperor of mankind. At the same time they are still human while they bury themselves in religious fanaticism or warfare deep down even Space Marines are still human and have a lot of human insecurities and weaknesses. Which is why Chaos is such a popular enemy in stories because they are those human insecurities and weaknesses given form or those who have fallen to such things. That balancing between overcoming ones own weaknesses without losing your humanity is the core of most 40k stories.
@@zenoblues7787 Good shot! :]
The Unexpectables have an Orc based tabletop campaign on their channel if you want to learn a little about the best race in every fantasy setting
I know everyone talks about how difficult it is to run on PC, but I actually knowingly, purposely bought this train wreck on GOG a week or so ago and it ran right out of the box. The aiming controls feel terrible... I can't even describe it. This game is magical.
I've never had a problem running old Windows games... on Linux 😅
this game was my childhood and introduction to the 40k universe believe it or not. This game - how crappy it may be- has a special space in my heart
Thoroughly enjoyed this video, thank you. It's been so long since I'd played Fire Warrior so this was a blast, likewise, with a (mostly) adult head on. Signed up on Patreon on the strength of this, Baldur's Gate & Silent Hill vids. Keep up the good work!
As a semi-grouchy 40k veteran of 30 years I offer a handful of observations: those Greater Possessed are Demon Princes as Greater Possessed are a relatively new unit. The avatar at the end is a Lord Of Change, which are awesome especially in the old Warhammer: Age Of Reckoning intro (which is just a great intro all round, even now). I believe that Fire Warrior is justified in ending as it did because it all boils down to the Tau, ironically. They are pretty much immune to Chaos corruption in a classic sense and Kais in particular being present may not have saved his Ethereal (which I'm sure will be some sort of eternal mark of shame) but did result in a Chaos incursion being thwarted as there's no guarantee that had Ardias rocked up instead the outcome would've been the same. The Tau themselves have absolutely no psychic presence in the warp what so ever and thus having an Ethereal mutate to the extent that they are "elevated" to spawndom is, AFAIK, nigh-on impossible as there's no warp presence for that individual for a Chaos god to get their hooks into and corrupt, which is then manifested in realspace, as it were. As a Captain, Ardias will be well over a hundred years old, with far more kills under his ceramite belt than Kais (which translates to "Skilled" in Tau; the Tau are named after their achievements) who by lore standards should've be killed several hundred times over by now. Regarding the exterminatus, the Tau don't really understand Chaos except maybe as a nebulous corrupting force that they should avoid contact with. As such, to my knowledge, the Tau are a refreshing mix of technological potency, unquenchable expansionism and almost arrogant naivety, making them the exact opposite of the Imperium of Man in almost every way. They have no ship-board weapons capable of annihilating an entire planet because they're too pragmatic to ever need to do so: they'd rather place beacons to cordon off that planet/system than waste resources by destroying a whole planet. Railguns, even scaled up on a Manta dropship or larger Custodian class ships with gravitic launchers (giant railguns) will struggle to destroy a planet, unless the latter is used en-mass. The Imperium, as we know, totally recognises the danger of Chaos taking hold in a star system and are very open to physically writing off that planet to stop the spread.
Frankly, I'm baffled as to why GW haven't optioned a developer to do more of this game with modern tech! How damn good would be it to start off in a Fire Warrior strike team, then progressing on to being a Breacher, then Pathfinder. From there the option to become a Stealth or Crisis Suit pilot would be a thing, very much like the old Strike Force Centari game where you headed up a team of jet-packed power armoured dudes with multiple camera feeds showing their activity in the field. Hammerheads and Sky Rays would be an option in some missions, like a slower-paced Battle Zone (or faster if you're in a Piranha), as would Riptides, Ghostkeels (urg, that name!) & maybe even a Stormsurge for a few minutes. So much scope! Where is it!? 😢
Very much looking forward to seeing more of your stuff :D
Technically, lasers have range, mainly within an atmosphere, since the focused light bounces around and scatters.
The game would have been both more lore friendly, and more fun if your Tau weapon was superior to the other weapons you can get, but ammo for it was very scarce. It would reflect the idea that Tau guns are the best guns, and would add an element of strategy where you need to ration your good weapon, rather than using it for everything.
It probably also would have been a good idea for the Tau weapon to occupy a third weapon slot, so you can have two normal guns.
I mean you are on an enemy world and the further you get in, the further from resupply you get, you are closer to a more modern army as the T'au and as such resupply is...kind of important and you will notice how your running out.
Wasn't the Tau first introduced around early 2000's? If it was it would make sense making a game about them to see if they can get people interested in them. Kinda like how Space Marine got me interested in the Ultramarines.
One thing I'll give the game, the cutscenes where you see the space ships, they're very accurate to the tabletop. You can clearly tell that the ship which boards the tau at ~25:00 is a Dictator-class cruiser by the hangar sections on the side and the anemic macrocannon battery towards the front of each side. It's uh, it's not a battle barge I'm afraid, that's a very different type of ship. I don't remember the name of it, but the Tau ship is a light cruiser and likewise recognizable, and the scale seems appropriate. As a Battlefleet Gothic fan, I appreciate the effort and attention to detail.
Years ago when I played 40k I played Tau and every event they would put me on Chaos cause there wasn't enough of them. So I just painted my army Chaos colors and gave them Chaos banners and made Chaos corrupted Tau.
I think the creators had a vision for the voicing of the characters. We've already established that the draw of the Warhammer series is how everything is so over the top that silly, right? Well, for the Space Marines, they chose very talented actors who could effectively convey an insufferable person of nobility. People who think they are beyond important. For the Tau, though, the creators had a vision for a group that sounds either Native American or Asian. Since Games Workshop is an English company, I suspect it was difficult *AT THE TIME* to find well known voice actors who had the correct accent, but also spoke English fluently.
Yeah, I think that they did in fact get the most expensive talent that they could for the Tau - with the proviso that they had to be Asian/Native American. In early 2000s UK, there just wasn't that huge a pool of talent available within those limits.
The fact the Patreon section no longer has a title to make room for the names is killing me.
When you said that Event Horizon could possibly be a warhammer prequel my mind exploded. I just watched it the first time a few weeks ago and it was barreling in my mind the whole time!
Oooh, Rites of War. Fantastic artstyle, great music, good narration. First time I ever seen anyone mentioning it.
I remember playing it, it was actually a pretty good game.
50:00
Waaaidaminudde! Greater Possessed are from the fairly recent 8th edition CSM codex and didn't exist back then! That's a full-blown Demon Prince! How come that Demon Prince isn't some sort of climax boss given how highly they're usually ranked in the CSM hierarchy?
I was thinking the same thing. "That greater possessed looks strangely similar to the old demon prince metal model."
Still great vid!
Ah yes, space marines vs chaos. We've never seen that before, and it certainly won't be a focus for their video games going forward. It's almost insulting to name the game "Fire Warrior" when the plot happens *around* the fire warrior, not *with* them.
Kinda reminds me of Lost Ark's storyline, you play as a fireball spell only referenced when something needs smashing while all the other characters do cool plot things.
Dude Lost Ark's story infuriated me. Every single major event I'm doing the entirety of the work. Then the cutscene has some shitty one dimensional borderline mary sue character come in and claim victory. I loved the gameplay, but the story was so unrepentantly terrible.
And then in Space Marine - "Space marines vs orks? Well at least it is not space marines vs cha... nvm..."
I'm no 40K expert but side strafing a dreadnought seems like a legit strategy. They can only fire forwards right? And I can't imagine they can turn quickly.
Later games better showcase that Dreadnoughts can be terrifyingly agile for their size. For starters, their torso has a 360º range of movement, so while they can only fire directly forwards, they can quickly turn like a turret to aim in any direction.
They can turn pretty fucking fast
@@CteCrassus the space marines piloting them probably did backflips in terminator armor before being place in the dreadnoughts
Hey, Josh. Love your videos! Can you make a longform explaining the ins and outs of Warhammer 40k? Thanks!
Awesome vid, I would love to see a "Was it good" episode for the original Commandos game, which I have very fond memories of (even if I did only play the first two levels on demo lol)
Thank you for playing this game, so I don't have to. I remember getting it back in the day, but bugs made me only play about 10 min of it, and bad reviews killed any remaining interest of making it work. Now I truly know that I did not miss anything. I remember looking forward to a Tau story, and I have been wondering what I missed sins I never came back to that game. Seems like I did not miss anything important.
I just have to imagine a meeting in the middle of the development phase of this game.
Boss: "We've had feedback from our marketing team. They say that Space Marines are selling incredibly well, so the story of this game should be more about the Empire and Space Marines than that T'au."
Team: "But boss, the game is halfway done. We can't just change the whole story now."
Boss: "I don't care how you do it. I. Want. Space Marines!"
Team: "But we can't just shift the focus from one faction to another and then still promote the game with the T'au."
Boss: "SPACE MARINES!"
OH GOD! I remember picking this up back in the day, knowing nothing about 40k, and absolutely hating it. I think i played half an hour tops before trading it in. lol
Ah the old days of gaming, where you couldn’t just go on RUclips and figure out wether or not you’d like a game before buying it lol.
@@Purriah You had blockbuster to do that
I bought it sight unseen. Barely managed to finish. Same week I decided to have sex with a cactus. Barely managed to finish
@@Thanatos2k or forums, or friends
@@EnwardSnowman what
I got the general thrust of things when this video came out, but after spending even just a little bit of time nurturing a curiosity about Warhammer lore over the last week, the ridiculousness of some of these scenarios is *staggering*.
LOVING all the 40k jokes and lore you put into this
Nothing to add but the novelization of this game somehow manages to elevate the plot of the game to a new height. Fantastic T’au world building, nice story telling in which the different perspectives of many characters (most die in like 2 pages or less) are explored, even a camera drone. It also gives itself a question of “how will the sanity of a fresh recruit like Kais deteriorate after almost non-stop violence, carnage and otherworldly horror” and then answer the question wonderfully.
I would say Fire Warrior is one of the finest T’au novel out there for T’au fans out there. It’s a fun book but not well received by some players of other factions tho because the novel cannot exist without giving Kais the same insane amount of plot armor he has in the game. Well, the author has tried his best...
He actually makes an appearance in a Dark Angels novel (on with Primaris Marines)
Lol as a somewhat outsider to 40k just hearing people being salty about things being non lore accurate makes me laugh when every time I have ever interacted with 40k it honestly seems like the lore is contradictory nonsense anyways. It honestly seems like not one consistent lore even exists.
Tbh he made Kais winning against a space marine plausibly. Just the sheer amount of luck involved.
Also it was nice to have the Kroot referenced in it.
Is it odd that I want a 'remake' of this game but based on the novelization? Because Simon Spurrier did a lot to make something more lore fitting and plausible out of this mess. Give me that game made with (say) a modern unreal engine, and you'd have something potentially good.
I want a second game, or even a battle suit pilot game.
@@cegesh1459 Taking pages from the Armored Core or Front Mission games and making a solid battlesuit pilot game would definitely be a solid idea for a fun outing in the setting.
Something that just confused me heavily. I always had in my memory that Fire Warrior had an actual end scene where the Admiral escaped with his ship trying to fly it into the sun to create a planet system spanning black hole, plus you had a ultimate superweapon like thing that basically fired miniatured warp rifts that could kill you as easily as it did kill others... yet ... its not here, nor can i find the actual game with this scene in it.
That Sounds Vaguely Like The Ending To Unreal 2
yea thats Unreal 2