Old World is a prequel to Fantasy and thus prequel to End Times Be prepared to lose your favorite faction all over again. Even reworked ones like Kislev and Cathay Not me since Chaos is my favorite faction
@@christiandauz3742 I'm mainly talking about how they nuked the fan animators in order to push WH+. I'm also worried about them rewriting alot of old lore for one reason or another. It seems like that's what they're doing with Kislev, but I'm withholding judgment till oldworld actually releases. I'm also kinda sceptical about Cathay, but again I'll wait till the proper release.
@@salihnu Its exactly how they killed WFB an their working on 40k making marines 5 to a box. The real reason everyone plays marines is their the cheapest (relatively speaking) army to play. Plus RTB01 but also that's because of the v as blue it represented
I was just able to get back to it about 8 months ago after 12 years away due to cost. I had tons of disposable income in my mid 20s, took a new job and got some adult responsibilities and couldn't afford it. Just now at 40 was I able to afford again and it was almost 300 out of the gate for paints, brushes and 15 models. My Christmas presents are about 175 dollars and I'm gonna go spend about 130 on paint after Christmas for a new scheme. It's absurd how expensive it is.
pretty much this. Back in the glory days of Herohammer, a typical starting army would be 1000 points, and a "normal" battle would be 1500-2000 points. 2500-3000 points would be a large battle, that you would only play in special events, but most games would be in that 1500-2000 point range, with some quick 1000-1250 point games as well. Then, the newer editions started pushing 2000 points as the new, "medium size" game, with pressure to play up to 3000 points more often. But that's not all. The more insidious change was the point costs dropping. in 4/5e Dark Elf corsairs were 13 with 2 hand weapons, and you could give them crossbows for +3 points. Then 6th edition comes around, and corsairs are down to 10 points apiece, can no longer have crossbows. So your unit of 15 corsairs with 2 hand weapons, crossbows, standard bearer with standard of shielding, and musician went down from costing 297 points, to costing 165-215 points (depending on the cost of magic banner). And that happened across the board, so if you had a 2000 point army in 4th/5th edition, when 6th came out, your army was suddenly worth ~1600 points, AND you are pressured to start playing 3000 point games.
I think they need a multi-tiered system... a skirmish scale, unit-maneuvering scale, and epic/armageddon-scale ruleset so people can collect into it instead of needing to drop $700+ to play their first game.
6th edition says hi. The core game had rules for normal, 2000-4000 pt battles, but in time, they also added (for free!) rules for skirmishes, warbands, and Mordheim, which was loosely based on 6th.
I agree with OP. Initial starting cost high. Also models were old and rules unbalabced. Bretonia went a decade without a update. Also bolter go boom. 40k models werw just better looking
They also need to make the figs compatible with AoS so that the people who invest in the WFB figs gets to have to use it in a more common current game and not just wait to find new WFB players in the community (who should be in majority, at least in the first years of launching of the game, old dudes that knew the game back then). They should probably implement a rule in AoS, a sort of "Summoning of the spirit of the spirits of the ancestral past" rule, where you could get to invoke the physical presence of wizards and warriors of the world of before the End of Time in Aos who would leave you once their duty is done (by the end of the battle, or they would just be on the battlefield for a limited number of turns);
@@piotrgrochowski483 and there's part of your problem. Thinking of 2000-4000 point battles as "normal". Back when I started playing (4e/5e), your "basic" army was 1000 points, and most games were 1500-2000, with games up to 3000 being "large battles". Then GW started pushing 3k points as the norm, on top of reducing the point cost of units, so you needed more units to field a 2000 point army in 6e, than you did in 5e. Granted, 6e significantly reduced the importance of hero units as being super-powerful (hence 4/5e is known as "herohammer").
End Times = Our marketing department sad that space marines is our hot seller so we are going to make Warhammer Fantasy into Warhamer 40,000 but with Dragons!
Trust me they supported the game. A LOT. They spent a lot of money on new sculpts and books but no one played the game, it wasnt bringing them profit. The people rn that complain a lot about the entry price of warhammer rn have no idea how expensive and complicated starting a warhammer fantasy army was
They also need to not be screwy with the fanbase on pricing. I remember one of my friends who played complain that they changed combat width between 2 editions (I don't remember which) and didn't update many factions boxes for units not having enough models to form a line. So you would have to buy more boxes to complete your units and end up with spare models you didn't need.
GW not screwing fan base on pricing !? You live in another world to me Sir! Why I just stick to my Skirmish/Board games I probably do spend a lot on bits for customisation mind
One of the most damaging things was the horde rule in 8th. Now suddenly you needed a big block of 40+ models 10-wide just to be competitive. Then look at the prices of the models, in terms of dollars, and then the cost of the models, in terms of points. You had to spend $30 just for 10 Empire Halberdiers, and then had to get them up to at least 40, preferably 50 or 60 so you could absorb casualties, meaning you spent at least $150 just for 50 Halberdiers, but they only cost 380 points, so you hadn’t even met the Core requirement yet. And of course, some other units were just horrendously expensive. Greatswords are $45 for 10, and those 10 guys would only be about 150 points. 5 Blood Knights were $99. 5 Questing Knights were $99. 5 Grail Knights were $99. And in the latter two cases, the size cap was 12, which means that you had to spend $300 to buy 15 Grail Knights, three of which you couldn’t actually use, because the unit could only have 12. Not to mention that those units were Finecast garbage, not plastic. It was ridiculous.
Even if they got rid of the horde rule there still would have been Steadfast to deal with which also massively encouraged large, cumbersome and expensive units.
FORGET ABOUT THE FUCKING ENTRANCE FEE, U DONT HAVE THE ENERGY OR TIME TO RELOCATE TO FIND PPL TO WAIT ON THEM OHH NOO THEY CANT BE THERE OH WELL G FUCKING G, play online TOTAL WAR WARHAMMER 3 where u can SAVE and you play!!, u cant paint but no1 said you had to stop doing that on your spare time...lol with the covid ness its not safe either
You don't have to buy a full army all at once to start playing. You can even hang out at a LGS and spectate; maybe someone could let you play a round or two. People Are friendlier than you think. A full army being approx. $300 off ebay is pretty hefty though, I admit.
Two things I suffered during the age of whfb: the crazy pricing of products, compared with the game requirements and the lack of support to whole armies for years. You can't set a game where large troops are required (especially in 8t edition), and 40-50 minis per unit were almost the standard size for core troops, and then ask me to pay 35/40€ for 10 minis. It's commercial madness, and it contributed a lot to avoid that new hobbyists/gamers joined the game. Moreover, it was a bit frustrating to see many armies abandoned for years, and other ones receiving updates each 3 years. I was a huge dwarfs collector, and I had to wait for 9 years (!!) to see new minis for my faction, and a new armybook. Ironically, after having paid a lot of cash for the 8th edition armybook of Dwarfs and the new units (10 longbeards=40€), less than a year after the whole game was nuked by GW, to welcome Age of Sigmar .___. The fun fact was that those armies were not supported because "people prefer other armies", but it was mostly due to the fact that..they were not supported! Of course people preferred to buy High Elves, than Bretonnia, because HE were constantly updated with rules and minis, Bretonnia didn't, and didn't receive a single armybook in 7th nor 8th editions! I remember that when bretonnia was updated in 6th edition, many and many people collected them, because of strong rules and an impressive range of minis. Obviously, if you leave a product to die without support, casuals or new customers hardly will buy it...only hardcore fan of that army will keep collecting it. GW had a little gem, with whfb: a solid and interesting lore full of potentials, iconic armies and characters to explore for years and years and above all a big and highly fidelized community. They managed to ruin everything for the sake of IP and trying to replicate the success of Space Marines in fantasy (and we all agree that Stormcast completely missed the target..), giving all the blame to whfb itself because "it was unactractive and people nowadays love a different style of fantasy". I hope that they learn from their mistakes with TOW, but I've not high hopes for that.
Fantasy had too many factions, they simply couldn't keep all of the up to date. I think it's a smart move to concentrate their efforts on a limited set of factions for the Old World. 40k probably works as well as it does (financially) because 2/3 of the minis sold are some variation of space marine. If GW brings out some new space marines, most players of the game can potentially buy and use them.
To be honest the core unit requirements was one of the things that got me excited about Fanatasy when I started playing in the early 90s after playing 40k since the 80s. On paper the idea of having large blocks of core troops was very thematic and fit the lore more so than 40k armies tend to be. The issue though is that the price point of core units was prohibitive. If they would have kept the big blocks of troops the main focus but offered them at reduced prices it would have mitigated that cost of entry. I liked Fantasy because it was a nice blend of fantastical settings with historical gameplay i.e. flanks and the movement phase was very important. It elevated the gameplay to be far more tactical and strategic when compared to 40k. It was a more mature game, if that can be said about pushing toy soldiers around a table. I think there was a combination of price and strategic thinking required that acted as a barrier of entry for some people. It was a great game for a niche market (which I loved) but it did have an issue with catering more toward an older more mature crowd, which had a lot of upsides but also hurt its growth with the younger players.
They probably need to consolidate the game into a smaller range. Have 6 races only or something like that. High Elves, Orc and Goblin, Dwarf, Undead, Human, Chaos. 3 baddies, 3 goodies. Just focus on these 6 and get a good range of models out for them. If the game does well then they could look to add Slann and Skaven. 8 would probably be a good amount for a game so long as each race had a good range of units and models. It would be sad for people that loved the myriad of other races available back in the old fant days but that's what they should do in my opinion. Otherwise you end up with an Age of Sigmar problem where certain races are barely supported at all.
I was working for an online wargaming web store in 2013-2014 and I remember we had GW reps show up once and when the topic of WFB came up the newer rep started to spout a speech about how good WFB was doing, but her partner just gave us a look that said every thing. Paints and tools were out selling WFB at the time.
@Patrick Swan yeah AoS's setting holds no appeal to me whatsoever. But I absolutely love the Old World. I never had the money to get into the table top sadly.
I don't really see what the pull is. It's just a map of Earth with Atlantis for the high elves. Sure, there was a ton of lore written into it, but the basis isn't that interesting.
@@mycatistypingthis5450 Well it's the 40 years of accumulated lore that makes it interesting. It's had a huge impact on other settings, just consider green Orcs - in the mid 80s somebody at Citadel thought it'd be fun to paint an Orc green, Alan Merret liked it, so he made it canon and sure enough there are green Orcs in Warcraft and on Magic cards, and...
That GW players did not unite in protest of the death of our game says everything you need to know about GW customers. They are in an abusive relationship with their master.
All right, this will be long, please bear with me. I'm what can be referred to as one of the old guard for warhammer fantasy. I started collecting Vampire Counts back during 4th edition. I was just a kid then and due to the cost of minis, it took a year of saving and begging for gifts of minis to be able to feild an army. Over the years I added to my army, but after years I'd finally got a half decent build, but very few new units or models were being made. After a while, with rules getting changed for VC and little new on the horizon, I thought it time to look for change and a new army. I was older now and earning so I was able to buy minis but I'm not made of cash so I wanted to steer away from another horde faction. Ogre Kingdoms had just been launched as a new race at that point (6th edition I think) and I was more than excited to build an army from the beginning, no old models, everything was new. I thought that this would be great, it fitted the bill perfectly. Well they changed the colour scheme on me (and to be consistent all my Ogres are still grey/green) but as time went on more units were added and new minis made. I was realy enjoying this, and I was aware VC had got some updates, new units and updated minis for some units. But mostly it was just new lords and legendary Lords. These were fine and I did buy them. However Lords did not makeup that much of an army so although I may have had a few knew knew individual characters for vampire counts the bulk of the army was still about 15 years old. Hence why I was really enjoying ogre Kingdoms as majority of the stuff was very new. Then it stopped, in the lead up to and during 8th, and there was nothing new. I was aware that some of my friends (one who played Skaven and another Wood Elves) had very little to no new minis or rules for even longer. Then GW blew it up. Under claims that no one was buying it. I am firmly of the opinion that the reason sales dropped off is because Games Workshop stopping supporting the hobby. They were not making new units updating old ones so people were buying what didn't exist. I have enough different vampire count lords and heroes to field a full unit of just them. But once I had a full 3 different 60 units skeletons , and 2 of zombies whome I needed for core. Why buy more. I rarely played over 2000pt games, as no one else had that much and time was a bit of a constraint at bigger games. Not only did I not need more core but they were almost always older minis anyway still on sale from when I was a kid. So again why buy them? The other potential issue is over production. To have so many unit boxes made and in each store everywhere is expensive. Then when people buy what they need there will be tones of leftover stock. Annoying as this may be, but I would suggest only having minimal stock on hand in stores, and using online sales and order in systems for in store. That cuts down on over production of these things which was probably a significant issue last time. Kids can't afford to buy large army's quickly. And adults are often time poor so won't commit to more than 1 or 2 army's. Reduce the point requirement for units, reduce their costs, and most importantly don't stop innovating and creating. Some things won't work, others will. You just can't let the game stagnate again.
I'm curious: would you have bought more skeletons and zombies at the time if GW had come out with new sculpts? Like, if they looked even half as good as the ones from Cursed City that have replaced the old ones? (Yes, if I have it right, they STILL hadn't seen fit to update them until well into 2nd Edition Age of Sigmar).
Thats the issue with GW, they have a Long and Consistent History of shoothing themselfs in both feets, legs, arms and hands... They take shitty decisions based on greed and money grubbing, then act all surprised when the playerbase doesn't follow along( well the part of the playerbase that are not bootlickers, happy to taste the "greatness at the source" by sucking off GW's cock in the morning) and they lose money, forcing them to take even more drastic measure to "try" to "save" the game... When they basicaly did the same with 40k, that they did with WHB, i quited, i realised that for 24 years i was in an Abusive relationship, been patient, thinking that GW would change and be better, but nope... Ain't gonna happen. So after 24years of collecting, building and playing NOTHING but World Eaters and Khorne deamons, i said fuck you imma get out of this joint. Best decision i made for my sanity...
@@Mugthraka I heard rumors that they were planning a end times for 40k too. But that it went so badly for them on fantasy that they changed their mind.
GW sells army-scale games for skirmish scale prices. It's still the case now, but it was especially true for WHFB 8th edition. The cost of entry for that game was unbelievable.
I think a problem in WHFB, aside from Matt Ward being allowed to write army books, was that if you're army book was weak, you could be waiting YEARS for any kind of update. I played with that terrible 6th edition High Elf book for 6 years until we got our update! At least do yearly points rebalancing like AoS does.
Now its easier to update stuff to be honest. Pdfs and such. Back in the day you just had few extra books with faqs and any meaningfull change would be made with the next edition. Do you remember the mess they made with dark elves?
It's so nice to hear criticism with antagonism. I've had to stop following some GW content creators because thry stopped actually covering GW material and had become purely bash and rant channels.
Core units boxes should have low selling prices (less than $45 AUD a box), come with large number of models per boxes (+30 models a box) and have all the weapon options you wanted or need.
My greatest concern is the timeframe. It seems terribly limiting that we can’t move past the year 2528 IC. I wish they would just create an alternate timeline where the storm of chaos scenario is canon instead of the end times. Basically just have Archaon‘d campaign just be another great chaos invasion that is averted. I am not sure how storm of chaos ended, apparently the greenskins did really well compared to the other factions while chaos too a big L. So if there have to be some changes to make it more balanced then fine. I don’t mind them restarting around 2200 IC but they really should at least give us the confirmation that the Warhammer world continues beyond 2528. Otherwise I don’t see the point in getting invested if all it can ever be is a prequel setting.
I agree. Have it where Storm of Chaos or something similar averts End Times, have it an alternate universe so we can have Warhammer Fantasy continue in "the modern age" with the iconic characters we love like Karl Franz, Thorgrim, etc
It didnt fail as such, it lasted over 30 years and was killed. The problem fantasy had was simple everyone who played it already had 20000 points worth of figures so never bought any.
I imagine it didn't help that for many armies, there were no new models to buy. It was just the same models they already had. If the models had been updated, they probably would have sold. But GW wasn't willing to invest the money to do that. (And then they started Age of Sigmar, and its success was buoyed by the creation of whole model ranges, like the Stormcast Eternals.)
"The problem fantasy had was simple everyone who played it already had 20000 points worth of figures so never bought any. " That's the symptom. The REAL problem it had was that it wasn't drawing in new players. Without new players, sure, it's no surprise that everyone still playing would be a veteran collector.
@@ramonserna8089 Exactly, it more or less ran its course. It's a great retrogame but it had a lot of cruft that built up over the years and it needed a bit a cleaning of house. The unit size problem basically made it impossible to recommend the game to anyone who wasn't comfortable with Ebay hunting. That made it terrible for getting new players on board which is what kills a game.
In all honesty, the company has been doing GREAT with AoS. In fact, it produced FAR more than Fantasy ever did. Look up the numbers, don’t talk about what you believe.
@@thenobleplatyous101 That's because King's of War players love GW models and use Age of Sigmar models so the numbers are basically a lie on the game itself. I've never seen anybody play AoS locally. Even at a convention where they were supposed to be having a AoS tournament nobody literally nobody showed up.
First, nowhere it is said it's a complete failure. Second, it's relative and can be considered regarding it's potential. See the success of Total War Warhammer. You're comment is logically wrong.
No they didn't. It's clear they didn't, they absolutely failed to optimize sales, and were going as if 8th wasn't the final ed in all their posts etc. They now are putting on this front of "oh we knew, and ou AoS is so much better" because they have to. Because AoS's support is as real as the numbers Marvel uses to tell people their current salew are good.
I agree that what they did to the lore was reprehensible, though I do like a few things about the new rules. Still miss a lot of stuff from Fantasy though.
My thoughts of why Fantasy failed: 1 - Rulebook was really badly written - rules for one phase were scattered across whole book, needlessly bloated explanations, etc, as a newcomer it was really intimidating looking at around 100 pages of rules 2 - not updating armies - as it was mentioned, e.g. Bretonia, Beastmen had outdated Army Books 3 - after initial release, armies were left alone - no new models, no new updated, faq, nothing, so after initial boost in sales, they were left on their own with sales dimming slowly 4 - during whole 8th edition run, there were only few campaings/additions, ex. Storm of Magic, Triumph and Treachery, meanwhile 40K and AoS get something new every few months As I see it GW makes all the right marketing moves for all the wrong system. Had they shown the same support for Fantasy as they are now showing AoS, it would not fail. Just release new models/units for already existing armies, some campaigns or something similar here and there and it will be much much better.
I remember trying to get Warhammer back during 6e Fantasy. That barrier to entry is just nasty. The Battalion Box had one major flaw, it didn't include any hero units, you had to buy those separately. I still have my Wood Elf Battalion box, and I still haven't finished putting together the models. There was a lot that went wrong with fantasy, but it was two big issues Rules Bloat and Cost. The setting was never the issue. AoS has some things that are great, but as a whole I liked the Old World content better. Mostly the lore behind the Stormcast is absolutely amazing, and it also proves how imperfect the gods are.
They turned big monsters into crap. I play vampire counts (but it applies to other factions too) and can almost never bring cool stuff like mortis engine or zombie dragon, because some cannon for 1/5 of its cost can basically one-shot them. Without big monsters or war machines it has lost much of its charm to me.
I watched people at my local games store, and as much as I was interested what always stopped me was unit size. As editions went on, it seemed like you needed more and more minis. Which equals more money, more time building and painting, more storage space, and more difficulty transporting. I played a 1000 AoS game yesterday where I has 12 models total. I can spend hours painting each figure and not feel bad that this guy is beautiful, but he’s 1% of my army!
We wanted plot progression, new minis, updates for older armies, and maybe a couple of new armies. Instead GW blew it up and gave us an entirely new game we didn't want with some of the same characters and copyright friendly names.
I disagree with the plot progression point. Warhammer is a brilliant sandbox world and there was no need to start pushing the lore forwards (case and point the end times). The appeal in the warhammer world was that it was an easy playground with the freedom to create your own backstory for your army. They needed just to make more and more balanced game and to support the armies better. People want to play a good system, where all those cool models can be viable. Now they kept slapping op rules on the new bigger and bigger models just to sell the new stuff.
@@cmxpiipl i was going to reply just that. old WH (and old 40K at that) was frozen in one ominous, shit's-about-to-happen moment in history which set the perfect tone for the whole thing.
WHFB doesn't need plot progression, it needs added detail. Lustria, Araby and all the other not old world places were really underdeveloped, you could add whatever you want to those places as a writer.
I'll have to semi-disagree on the Tomb Kings here, as they ran into a similar problem as what you mentioned with Skaven. As cool as the new models they released with the last Armybook were, they also really highlighted just how old some of the other models, especially the core skeleton warriors, were. They were also missing models for some of the newer units and characters. Personally, I couldn't really motivate myself for them, even though they actually are my favorite faction, and put them aside in the hope that their next update would bring better skeletons so the majority of the army doesn't stand out with bad proportions. Luckily, the timeline we basically have confirmed for The Old World roughly matches one of the biggest campaigns the Tomb Kings started northward to reclaim their stuff, so there's a chance they'll eventually show up once more.
Support it, dont try to overhaul it, expand niche units and lore. Keep whats made the fantasy feel unique. Keep the core the rule as it helped limit the cheese, not by alot but maybe change some standards of what is core and what is elite.
@@Archon3960 sfo is ultimately the perfect mod for warhammer fantasy and it oddly feels like a fluid tabletop. I hate seeing the 4 diget health bars of the new game, makes me cringe to see vanilla wahammer stats.
From my understanding Age of Sigmar is about 40% of GW revenue and Fantasy was I think 20%. So, I do think they would pay attention more to AOS because of that.
I get that people might want to play their named characters, but I actually kind of liked the lack of named characters in fantasy games. I hope they find a balance where they are not auto includes, but still usuable for less competative games. Ideally they could scale so hero models could be bad for 2000 points but for larger games they could work. That way u dont have primarchs or archaeon in a 2000 point game, which is really just a skirmish.
When it comes to cost, I remember being able to field something like 4 units of Dwarf Warrriors, 2 sets of 10 Thunderers, A unit of Ironbreakers, a unit of Longbeards, 2 Cannons, a Runesmith, and a Lord for about $250/$300 back in 05'/06. Then again, my game store was literally right next to my high school, and I was able to make a few price deals with the owner so he could make the rent on his building.
What killed warhammer fantasy was the drastic change of 8th edition, and to a lesser extent the power creep at the end half of 7th edition. Changes that seemed to have been manifested more by marketing quarters and stock price machinations than actual games development reasons. Plenty of people that had been playing for more than a decade at that point quit or stayed playing the older editions they liked. That is important because those older players were usually the ones that introduced the game (and the hobby as a whole) to the new players, and once they stopped marketing the game for free, fewer new players started, and the sales dwindled.
My predictions for The Old World: 1. the art will be good (but not great, since many of the old masters no longer illustrate the books), 2. the miniatures will probably be overly fragile and needlessly detailed, but of reasonably high quality otherwise, 3. the lore will be solid, 4. the rules will be middling at best, and 5. the business practices surrounding, infesting, and altering the whole enterprise will be abominable. The first 4 predictions may be off and/or debatable, but the last one is an absolute inevitability.
Warhammer Fantasy Battle was a victim of the corporate nature of Games Workshop's internal politics. Basically, GW didn't view it profitable anymore, barely any of the model ranges moved; The only people passionate about it were the store staff, the gen X and gen Y friends of the store staff and some of the creative team at GW HQ who still made content for, wrote content for and developed rules for Warhammer Fantasy. Fantasy had been "stuck in" End Times mode since 7th edition and it was never executed well or did they even bother progressing it much since Archon was introduced back at the start of it; 10 years of very little progression and 8th edition was pretty poorly handled in general. The *only* reason "Old World" is a thing again is because of the popularity of the Total War Warhammer titles. GW hopes the popularity will translate into model sales; What they don't realise is that the game needs good rules and comprehensive promotion first to make it an interest item for table top gamers; In reality, those who play the video game are only interested in buying a few of their favourite characters as models to display and in most cases are unwilling to go to the effort to put them together and paint them themselves, fewer still will go from the video game into the table top game even then. Only a small section of the fanbase intersect, most who buy the video games have no interest at all collecting the models.
I am very excited to see the old world come back in some form, they did say square bases will be the norm with it as well as classic races like orcs and goblins. Hopefully we also get new Britonnia and Tomb King models, I was always up in the air about picking up their battleforce box sets and I wish I did now.
6th edition points costs (at least for chaos) were waaay more manageable. An elite list could be fielded for 250 dollars for a 2000 pt list. two blobs of chaos warriors, 5 chaos knights, and some really beefed-up characters. Then marauder horsemen and a block of 20 marauders. It wasn't competitive but this was before hyper-competitive tournaments. 8th's hordes made collecting armies insanely expensive.
Is it true that in WHFB 8th ed, they basically halved the points cost of models across the board? That's just what I heard, being a person relatively new to Warhammer.
Don't get your hope up. The Old World is supposed to be like the Horus Heresy of 40k, which don't feature any of the non-major race of the event (the Xeno and such) and is not as big in scale as 40k. Having seen the map, and being called literally the "Old World", for the Tomb Kings to make an apparition I think it's a stretch. But Damn that would be cool xD
I'd love to see some TK, I didn't get into AoS but I feel like they should have been in somehow in the side of order facing off against Nagash, with Setra in charge.
"All you needed was the rulebook and your army book" Until the (very popular) Endtimes, when new rules came out for the base armies. This is what Broken Realms, Psychic Awakening, etc are imitating. So Fantasy did have this! There's a strong argument that it's actually Fantasy's fault we have those books these days haha. And it's proving such a success that we'll likely see it for The Old World too.
I absolutely think that The Old World will follow the same business model that GW are using now for AoS and 40K. Rules supplements released regularly to keep customers forking over cash. We have no reason to believe otherwise.
ya I know its kinda of a dumb premise to accuse the material and the license itself failing. Versus the Company literally nose diving its setting to death. Most people are aware GW destroyed the prospect of warhammer fantasy not the other way around.
And then 8th came along and told you “Oh, and by the way, if you want to succeed at this game, you need to own at least 40 of those guys who are only 5 points each.”
Aside from commanders and characters, the price per model isn't really that bad and only slightly more than any other mini manufacturer, and usually GW has higher fidelity in their models than other companies. The bullshit GW part is where they have you buy new rules every month and insist that you need 20-30 models of one unit to be viable, and other shady stuff to keep the money machine going
The Tomb Kings 6th edition book is IMO the most balanced army book GW has ever released. It wasn't broken in any respect but was a ton of fun and the army was beautiful. Now we come to the 8th edition army book and we see what happens when the author has no idea of how to balance the rules of the book with the edition. If it had been in the 7th edition it would have been amazing! Gw needs to make armies that aren't so big that people can't get into them but large and customizable enough that people will keep investing in wither their army or others. Can they do it? I hope so.
Warhammer fantasy was *always* my favorite. But it was an "Agony and Ecstasy" situation: extremely expensive, impossible to transport, took hours to set up and take down. You'd finally get your army together, you go to the game store, get ABSOLUTELY TABLED then hear "you know what you need? This, this and this, then your army will be killer". When it ended, I was really let down. Then I was relieved, because I was ignoring the millstone around my neck. Years later, I finally bonded with 40k. I've got three armies I enjoy much more as a game. Now I hear that Old World is coming out. My reaction? "I can't, man. I just can't". It was just too much and my army, Vampire Counts, was just too hard to use. I don't care if I never see another unit of 40 skeleton spearmen. Fuck that! I'm not casting Van Hel's Dance Macabre just do they can move up the board to get smashed to pieces!
Honestly, I just want a Bretonnian Army. I didn't get into their lore until the last two or three years. Before Age of Sigmar, my interest in Fantasy was in the Dark Elves and the Greenskins. So I missed out on ever owning a Bretonnia army back in the day.
Agreed. It would also be nice if those new Bretonnian models could be used in Age of Sigmar as well. I'd be happy if they just added their warscrolls to Cities of Sigmar.
Absolutely, we could have something like Louen's trad Royal faction, a Fay Enchantress/Grail Knight build, the Herrimault (Bertand the Brigand style faction), an anti-monster (Bohemond the Beastlayer style) build, and rules for making a Mousillon Undead/Bretonnia fusion 👍
The problem with the Hierophant blowing himself up on turn 2 wasn't a problem with the Tomb Kings army but was a problem with magic 8th edition. It was too powerful compared with older editions, which meant to balance it they had to ramp up the consequences of a miscast. Personally I really liked crumble mechanic.
I would like to see a starter around $50 but chocked full of lower quality minis. A Battle masters style box. A Chapter approved once yearly updated rule book would be fantastic. Named characters were the worst. They broke the game in alot of cases. We still play 8th and I see the named Dwarf Lords all the time
I doubt they'll have a cheap entry point for Old World. I think it's going to exactly follow the Horus Heresy models where it's more of a luxury brand for hardcore, rich fans. That's just the reality of how GW operates.
My guess is that they’ll do something similar to how they handled Adeptus Titanicus. They’ll have a rules/tokens only release for north of 50 bucks, and then a full Cadillac release for 200-300 bucks. From there a supplemental book will come out every 8 months or so with some new models alongside.
@@changer_of_ways_999 they've already said that you can use your old armies to play it, I don't see a y reason why you couldn't buy Sigmar minis and use them, I'm already building an 8th edition chaos army in this manner.
Well it lasted for almost 35 years so I'm not sure if that constitutes failing. The sort of game Warhammer started as (a narrative heavy fantasy wargame with roleplay elements) cannot survive GWs business model, and its transition to a 'competitive' game never really worked (I dont think 40k does either, the game systems don't lend themselves to a balanced game, which is fine unless you push it as one). Mantic have shown, with KoW, how to do a competition friendly rank and flank mass battle game. The Old World is a potentially good start and I'd love it if they explored the Old World setting more (maybe an Old World themed Quest game) but I can't see it happening. The non trademarked races etc just aren't in their MO.
@@jtowensbyiii6018 damn, that sucks. well hopefully they get more people into it with warhammer 3. i am sure they will do more tabletop if thats the case
1) As the video says, it's a pain in the butt getting into WHAT Fantasy and build an acceptable army. 2) 40,000 has a more appealing setting/lore at first glance. A gritty space opera with religious themes and a 2000AD Comic-like atmosphere has always been more attractive to young players than Fantasy which was pretty much Dungeons & Dragons meets British humor.
GW needs to shift to an auto update /faq format for core army books. Give someone a coupon code for their digital copy when they purchase the print book, and have that digital book auto update when a change happens. Insane and a massive barrier to entry for people to get in and stay in the hobby otherwise.
I completely agree with this video! I think backwards compatibility will really help AOS players to be able to play both games! I also think that if they adopted the 4th edition army list composition will really help out with the cost of entry: 50% Characters - 25% Lords and 25% Heroes 25% Regiments (This means all units: Core, Special, and Rare) 25% Monsters, Warmachines, Allies, etc. Granted, it would mean a return to the Hero Hammer Days, but it would really help out with costs. You could go heavy with your Characters and still not have to buy too much with your units. I just hope they really commit this time; I got the feeling towards the end they just gave up and abandoned it.
@@sertonetix rule book chaos space mariene supplant for chaos knights book for single chaos knight then the supplement book for them so I guess it was only 5 book unless I forgot one I haven’t played sence around that game of 8th I’ve moved to fantasy
@@BaileyBecca Ah is see thx ! As a necron player who spend all of 8th with 1 book + the main rule one, I was like : "6 ! how ?" xD Maybe the Deamon codex or a Imperial Armour one is the missing 6th ?
I remember trying to get into WFB again after Uni, about three times. Each time it was the same problems over and over again. The cost of building a useable army. The stodgy rules system (...movement trays.....) that had us spending more time looking up the rules for how a unit was supposed to move and turn etc than actually playing the game. The lore was good, the game system and such dragged it down. Honestly I was so disillusioned with it that when AOS was announced I didn't care much...I saw the minis and thought "Oh, they look pretty cool" but I had no interest in Warhammer Fantasy so I didn't pay much attention until I got a chance to read the rules. And a clumsy and experimental a lot of AOS 1st ed was, it was actually FUN to play, and now I think 3rd is bloody brilliant and I adore the High Fantasy craziness of the lore.
Verminetide 1 & 2, Total War Warhammer, Mordheim, Warhammer RPG, point to the Warhammer Fantasy being a popular setting, it's just GW places most of its attention on physical tabletop, which, like you said, has a high cost of entry and a resulting lack of local players. Virtual games are excellent to branch out into, they and CA could do great things together. Warhammer 40k is ripe for a TWW attempt, even if it will be a pain in the arse to get right.
Its had its day. Everyone of importance from its early days has long since left to pursue their own goals where they can flex a bit more creative muscle. Now its just a hollow corporate shell run by penny pinchers. I know there are still very talented people working on there but they do not have any sway in business decisions. Kind of a shame as despite being rough in some places its earlier days were very exciting and colourful. I recently managed to get some of the 1st-3rd edition books I was missing and they are full of character despite being quite brief especially in regard to 1st edition stuff. 4th edition with the first independent army books like Undead and Chaos (well technically chaos had the slaves to darkness and lost and the damned books in third which are absolutely amazing) was also interesting and so was 5th with the return of Lizardmen but 6th onwards it really started to fall apart for me culminating in me eventually leaving altogether in 8th I believe.
I and several friends still play Warhammer 8th edition Fantasy. After literally sinking over $1,000 into an army (and I have 4) we were disinclined to chuck all of that and start investing anew. Add to the financial cost the time commitment. It takes a lot of effort to paint up a respectable army. Relative to your discourse, my observation brings up three points: 1) You are right. Cost of entry is a big put-off to new players 2) You are wrong. Your desire for updated models might appeal to the "I-must-have-everything-new" crowd, but it certainly does not appeal to me or to the majority of my Fantasy-playing friends. Don't get me wrong. We love cool models. However, we do not love being forced to put out more money and more time just to stay in the game. Upgrading for pleasure is not the same as upgrading from necessity. 3) Fluff games. What a pejorative term. We play for fun. Tournaments? Only if self-run. We have done things like "Blood in the Badlands." Even if official tournaments were available, we wouldn't be packing up our models and flying to distant destinations for the experience. We are not totally into "optimizing" armies by playing every trick in the rules; that route is a joy killer. Some of us like to bring in less capable units just for the "color." As for official tournaments, we have better uses for our time and money. You missed a couple of mistakes: 1) The end of 8th edition Fantasy was very instructive. We were abandoned. Okay... they stopped making models for it. Their company, their product, their call. There is always eBay if you want to expand or add a new unit type. However, they pulled all the FAQ's. If you hadn't been foresightful and download them before the end, you were left scrambling to locate unofficial sources. Fortunately, there are some (which Games Workshop seems intent on squelching). Additionally, no further game questions are "officially" answered. What does this say of the future? Will you trust Games Workshop to honor your past commitment of money and time? That would be naïve on you part. 2) The rules are there to sell armies (even they have said they are a miniatures company, not a rules company). Proof?. Hoard armies. Proof? The very expensive figures that you lamented. If you want them in the game, you had better build a 3,000 point army to escort them onto the field. Thus, the rules will continue to be skewed to promote model sales, as will product line additions and terminations. Consequently, difficulties with the rules are unlikely to be addressed if they do not affect sales. Games Workshop needs to seriously examine their business model with special attention to the validity of their assumptions about present and potential players. "Ignore sunk cost," might be prudent advice when making a business decision; however, that mantra carries no weight when your wife is pointing to your boxes of toy soldiers and wondering when the old couch will be replaced (we're not all single losers living in our parent's basement). 3) You might be familiar with what I call, "The D&D Problem:" Each edition has ever-bigger monsters, ever-stronger spells, ever-tougher armor, and ever-more-deadly weapons. The role playing gets submerged in the arms race. Games Workshop had a similar problem with Fantasy. Each new unit type had ever-better statistics. Soon the core of the newer armies was better than the special of the older armies. If you were playing to win, you had to buy the new armies. This push to the new was helped along by army book editions. Older units got "Nerfed." Units which in older editions had high success, were degraded to also-ran status with later editions (Dwarfs are a good army example. The Lizardmen's Slann is a prime unit example). A big problem here is that the point value of a unit has no linkage to its field performance. Equally pointed armies are commonly badly mismatched. The mismatch goes beyond player generalship and luck of the roll. When the game can be called before the first unit moves there is little fun in playing (example: 2,000 points of Lizardmen vs. 2,000 points of Chaos Warriors. Most experienced player selected and played the Lizards. Much less experienced player selected and played--for the first time--the Chaos Warriors. The Lizards were tabled. The Chaos Warriors lost one unit). When staying competitive means abandoning you past financial outlay and time commitment, there is little reason to continue supporting the game. Games Workshop will love the "deep pockets and infinite time" crowd that complies with their wishes, but those fish are a small subset of reality. GW risks running out of dedicated fans. The slow apparent crumble of GW is unfortunate in that they have produced some interesting models and I've had fun playing 8th edition Fantasy. Fortunately, many other good model sources have arisen. Also, there are some decent alternative rules sets as well. Some rules even invite "outside" models (usually limited to a percentage of total army). The rise of 3D printing adds an exciting new dimension. For table-top war gamers, the future looks good.
Fantasy was killed by GW. My armies and my friends armies were completely removed from the game. After spending thousands on shitty plastic, they kick us in the nuts and slap us in the face. Then tell us it's ok, buy sigmar. WTF. All while releasing total war fantasy, where all races are playable. Worst company in every possible way. I bought a 3d printer and I will never give GW another penny. They lost lifetime customers overnight, and then tried to say it was failing... They killed it. You won't catch me in a GW store ever again. And I own four 2000+ point armies.
Plenty of minis out there in 10-15mm. Even more in 20mm and 1/72. Build two armies and you’ll never be short of opponents. Terrain is also smaller and cheaper.
Whatever Geedubs may cook up and call it "Old World" it will never reach the original. To me, it is stick-puppeting the rotting carcass of what they had decades ago to draw in old fans on the promises of nostalgia, nothing more.
- Balance the game, many people I knew stopped because it became hilariously imbalanced from around 7th's end. - Reasonably priced core units and starter sets (the twin army packs to let friends share cost were amazing.) - Stop naming things VernNoun NounVerb. It's so cringy. They're Vampires, not "Soulblight Gravelords" - Promote it as a big game, have it in all GW stores alongside 40k. It won't ever go big if it's hidden in some specialist catalogue. - Full model compatibility with AoS's equivalent units (ie - base inclusion in packs) - Ensure all races are playable on launch with rules for ALL their existing units. - This includes all units and characters from the original setting timeline. - See Old World as an addition to WHF, not a remake. - Do not shy away from using the characters that AoS also uses, their origins are far more iconic and important anyway. - Use Total War Warhammer's hype that it's built! That game saved the whole setting, they would be fools to not exploit the new fans it's brought in by sharing content.
Prices wasn't the killer of WHFB 8th edition was. You went from a maneuver heavy race to get a devastating charge off to a random dice rolling grind-slog. All the grand tournament players like me who would drop between 500-1500 dollars a year to make that years army stopped playing because they took a decent rules set and ruined it. Taking any skill from the game and filling it with random dice rolls killed it. We would bypass miniature cost by creative fillers in units, a mausoleum in the middle of a ghoul unit a supply wagon in the middle of some halberdiers it was an amazing time to play the game.
Vermintide and total war, brought him back to life fantasy and even they given a new fan base, personally its too expensive to me but maybe i will buy some of my favorite units if they have new models
I'm norwegian and I work full time (basic work still has fairly decent pay). Alas...Warhammer tabletop gaming is a hobby I simply can't afford. Cost of entry is just way too high.
As someone who played WHFB at right upto end times, there was plenty of new releases. Was there some out dated armies ? sure but look at tyranids and elder in 40k. The real issue is the rule set created a barrier to entry with how you ended up needing to run everything as 10 wide a and atleast 4 deep units which sometimes meant buying 4 boxes of the same miniatures to make it a viable unit. Thats my 2 cents anyway but im someone who got over end times and moved on to to AOS after 2nd ed, Its much better than 7/8th ed fantasy ever was.
One of the reason of the demise of Warhammer fantasy i've been told about by a Games Workshop seller (around 2018), was due to the complexity of the rules compared to the 40K rules. I stared at him quite puzzled, and told him that the lastest rules were far more easy to apprehend compared to what they used to be in the 90's when I started playing the game. He answered me "probably, but the generations of kids we have now are not the same as the kids that belongs to your generation: they get distracted, confused very quickly and can be easily deconcentrated if the things gets too dense. I tried to hook many of them during some free plays in the store, and I quickly lost many of them as soon as some rules started to stack up, especially the one involving the movements of the units; they really prefered a more direct approach of the rules such as in 40K or AoS" I don't know if he was talking about the kids in my country (I'm from France) or if this is a general feature that touches all the kids around the world, but I found this explanation pretty sad, especially for the kids and how to considerate them... The other explanation of why Warhammer Fantasy sunk, is partly due to the Lord of the Ring film based game: many kids in the 2000s went for the game of their favorite movie back then, and once they had their entire army done and painted after a year or 2, wondered to which army they should switch in another game in order to diversify. Since both Lord of the Rings and Warhammer Fantasy were Medieval Fantasy based game, and W40K was a futuristic Sci Fi game, they all went for a 40K army as a second choice that would diverge radicaly from LotR, and therefore completely neglected Fantasy. The same seller who was a 12 years old kid when the Lord of the Ring movies came out told me that this was the exact pathway he followed during the entire 2000 decade and that he only started to learn about the rules of Warhammer Fantasy (he already knew about some of the lore before) when he wanted to candidate as a GW seller in the early 2010s.
I still have my old Tomb Kings models waiting for an opportunity to play. Also, back when I played with them I lost almost all my matches, but I never gave up. Though, I hope they get a buff in the Old World game. 😋
In our scene special characters were usually banned outright. Not because of point costs but because they were so ridiculously over powered. HeroHammer was real. From 3rd-7th when I played and I assume 8th also. The prevalence of special characters is what has kept me away from AoS, it seems they’re mandatory in that game.
Probably controversial opinion but I think they should change the models scale, whatever direction. - Either make models bigger and reduce the number of models to paint per army since it really was a chore to paint all those models, especially the basic infantry blocks. I know it's a meme but the painting burnout was real. But that would kinda change the whole huge armies battles feel of WFB. - Or make models smaller so they are easier to paint, surely not as small as warmaster 10mm scale, but somewhere in between. That way you still get that huge fantasy battle scale but can be painted easier and still look great. I really feel the scale is one of the root cause that led to WFB downfall. I feel it was in an awkward place. Too detailed and too numerous at the same time, getting the best but also worst of both worlds. I bet simpler rulebooks would also naturally follow with either scale change. At the end of the day people couldn't get into a hobby that took so much time to get into and cost so much. All the talks about updating models and army books are nice, but this is all superficial.
Old world will be a lot like Adeptus Titanicus. First release will be $250+ big box with two small armies, rulebook, terrain, and necessary markers, templates, etc. Alongside that will be a rules box release with rules and templates, only. GW said they want you to play with your old models, so initial rules will have a full index for all armies. “Battle books” will come out later, along with a drip of new models and rules for the forces in the book. Initial release will probably be Kislev vs Daemons (kislev teaser plus Warhammer 3 hype). First battle book will be orcs vs Bretonnia. 3rd will be empire civil war. From there, I don’t think they have anything roadmapped, but could see skaven vs tilea/estallia/dogs of war kinda thing
I played FB back in the early 1990's, along with Epic 40k and 40k, only dug out the boxes earlier this year when cleaning the loft out, filled 12!!! 60ltr plastic boxes full of miniatures, books and box sets, some of the blister packets were not even opened (and priced at £2.50), but that was work getting in the way back then. May have to start painting again, will keep me occupied for quite some time (though I think ive only got the 4rh edition books...).
During 6th or 7th edition I remember there being a higher number of potential books. Core rules, main army, army supplement, warlord rules, ally rule book, and ally rule book supplement. Like the sheer number of books you could bring to the table was insane.
Not sure what you were playing, but it wasn't Fantasy. You needed the rulebook, army book and maybe a supplement like Storm of Chaos if you were playing a very niche army. 40k 6th edition kick started GWs love of spamming books and it went downhill from there. Just look at how many AoS or 40k need now.
@@TheGreatBookofGrudges Isn't this the problem now though? I had my interest cut in AoS and 40K after being out for years anyway when I saw just how many rules books you need...that and the AoS showcase and gutting of those tribal looking forest elves. Legit made me feel bad for picking up Sylvaneth on seeing them, forgot about the showcase and the hobby again due to cash issues. When things were looking better like a year later and I went back to check on how things were going those elf models just *didn't exist* so I thought ok then, kept my money.
I don't think cost was really an issue - Fantasy had more models per army than 40K on average but tended to be cheaper since it had fewer larger models like vehicles - I spent less on my 4000 point Skaven army than I did buying a 2000 point Dark Eldar army for 3rd edition 40K, but then the only large models in that Skaven army were the Vermin Lord and Doomwheel, whereas the DE were packing two Raiders, a Ravager and a Talos. The big drop I saw in Fantasy came with sixth edition. The shift in tone and rules saw many of the existing fanbase start drifting away, with few new players coming in to replace them. I don't think it was an issue with barriers to entry for Warhammer though - one thing we tend to forget these days is that GW were heavily pushing their Lord of the Rings game at the same time, and back in the early 2000s any fresh faced youngsters looking to get into fantasy gaming were probably far more interested in Hobbits than they were Halflings.
Thanks for the video. Fantasy is my favourite setting, too! I really hope it's NOT a forgeworld game, not only because of price, but because of the lack of plastic kits. There is a thriving community of collectors/players of the older editions, so there is definitely a market there for this game, but they really need to keep their promises regarding use of older models etc, as well as staying true to the lore. Not going to comment on current GW marketing practices - we all know how that's likely to go. Here's to hoping the game system and new model releases are good enough to draw in the oldhammer crowd as well as the new Total War fans, for the sake of the setting! :)
Yes this was fun with so pointy characters. Remember Lord Kroak in 6th. He was more than 1000 Points or so. Totally agree with you, there is a lot which has to change if Orld world should be success for them.
What really hurt Warhammer, IMHO, was the scalping of the fan base combined with massive power creep and ever increasing army size. Most of the problems that GW had were of their own creating. I admit to having hated 8th ed as so much of the game had been lost at this point. Massive blocks of monstrous infantry/cavalry were in. People were six dicing their most powerful spells all over the place. Immune to psychology was all over the place and most armies could get a leadership ten with a re-roll 'bubble' to roll around under. I always said that the best way forward was for GW to move the Warhammer world on by a decade or two and have a bit of a re-focus. My suggestion was to limit the game to the Old World (still release rules for the other races) but to maybe focus on seven races to start off with; Empire, Dwarves, Wood Elves, Orcs & Goblins, Undead, Skaven and Beastmen. I'd also thought that a shift in tone might help as well. My idea was to replace Chaos with Undeath as the main antagonist with the resurrection of Nagash leading to a massive shift in the winds of magic with the Lore of Death becoming the dominant lore. This would hopefully give each faction a new look and theme without damaging what had come before. With the 'new' edition you would get army boxes dedicated towards each race with general, magic user/Runesmith, infantry unit, missile unit, cavalry unit and 'special' unit or two. These boxes would be reasonably priced and would contain a small 'get you by' rule book and army book. This would give you everything you need to get into the game in one simple box and each army would be reasonably balanced against the others in the range. From there you cold get 'battalion' boxes to add to the core army (again balanced against other battalion boxes) then followed by individual unit and character boxes.
I liked the self-destructive nature of the Skaven, nothing like lobbing poison wind globes or firing off a ratling gun or warpfire thrower at a enemy unit in hand to hand and really liked the fluff of the Beastmen (yes they sucked but had fun in a siege battle where I had a beastlord with the black mace that was great at breaking a gate and pulping a couple enemy heroes).
And yet GW is still staunchly pretending like the Skaven don't exist. I think they just neglected the army for so long that several third party options popped up such as Punga, and so now that those options exist GW is ignoring the army out of sheer petty spite.
I heard a rumor from some gw employees that the skaven are being re done right now And they're going to release a bunch of new things for them in 2022 They recently made a bunch of retail stores and back all of their skaven stuff
@@silver9809 GW employees are notorious for talking completely out of their butts. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see it, but historically "a GW employee told me" is about as accurate as "Spikey Bits said".
@@Ankhtowe yeah I get it, hopefully there's someone truth, since he did say they recently made alot of retail places send all of their skaven stuff back to the warehouses, although that might be too try and sell it as online only
It died because it was a dated game system and there were so many models available on the secondary Market there was no way for them to make any more money off his system
Don’t worry, I’m building my cross for the ensuing Crucifixion. I do kind of like having named characters functionally only working in larger point armies. Like a company captain wouldn’t/shouldn’t (depending on chapter or head cannon if it’s homebrew) accompany just a few squads for a missions. This isn’t the Ultramarines movie. At least for me, yeah, 3k points up to truly Apocalypse matches should warrant the use of named characters because fluff wise it just makes sense.
Honestly, I liked the thing with the named characters. For me Warhammer always was about carving your own corner of the universe and building YOUR force, not pre-made character XY. So I prefer named guys to be underpowered over the opposite. If there's a meta (which there has to be) it should be generic chars. Ofc the ways it was in Fantasy might have been a bit much (still better than current 40k were named chars are taking over) but in an ideal world they would be very specialized, being competetive only under specific curcumstances/with very special army comps.
Let me sum this up: GW makes really nice looking models and completing lore. GW makes absolutely shit games. You can disagree, but an unbalanced competitive game with power creep and factions that get forgotten about is not a good game.
In general, I agree. They have made two of my favourite games of all time though, Blood Bowl and Space Hulk. I never got into the larger army based games, as I have always liked diversity and can't possibly justify the cost of more than one army, or even one army for that matter.
@@crypsisjim see I would love to own multiple, but 40k for example: it's expensive to buy armies, paint, and the rule book - then you find out your army hasn't been updated in years (necrons) and you're basically screwed in the modern meta.. I love their lore, just wish they would update their shit. I hear newer games by them are better though.
@@Dead_Heir I get you completely. I love games, but I can't dedicate that much investment to one faction of one game. To do that and then find your faction is unplayable must be devastating.
@@Dead_Heir not to start an argument but Necrons have been updated. New basic warrior sculpt, several new HQs, a terrain piece of their own, new codex for the current edition, and a few completely new units. I'm not sure why you believe they haven't been updated.
@@TheChaoticEntertainment last time I looked at them was 2019, so I must have missed it. Still, going years without an update to make then competitive isn't good game design. Don't get me wrong, I love Warhammer, I just wish GW would get their shit together.
A friend of mine played Chaos before the split. After the split, most of his core was in one army book, while most of his elite/heroes was in the other. Another one played Chaos Dwarves. Do you think they ever bought another mini, after their investment of hundreds of Euros was invalidated by pure WG incompetence?
I thought that it was just that loads of people had armies already, they had reached saturation point where they didn't want or need to buy more miniatures so GW sales were down for WHFB and so GW decided to scrap the entire game.
GW probably could have changed this by investing in new models. People won't buy more models if they're just the same dated ones from ten, twenty years ago. But if they come out with new sculpts, that look much better than the ones they have, players might be compelled to buy them. If you provide a product that people want, they'll be interested, even if they have a similar version already. The mistake GW made was being complacent, and thinking they could just coast on existing models forever. Then being confused as to why players weren't buying them. It's the same problem in 40K with Craftworld Eldar. Players don't invest in Craftworld armies because they aren't interested in Craftworlds, they just get put off by the aging sculpts. Whereas GW lavishes the Space Marines with attention, which in turn makes people want to buy them. Making a product sell is a matter of meeting the customer in the middle. You cannot blame the customer for not wanting a product, when you aren't willing to do the work and spend the money to make it _worth_ buying.
@@davedogge2280 ork player here, was a long time. Very long. But I've noticed a lot of my fellow Ork players who have 90 to 120 boys have no intention of buying new Boyz kits when the full multi-part kit is released. So it's a bit of a catch 22 in that regard.
@@TheChaoticEntertainment for ork players with existing ork boys the new mono-build ork boyz are just a big luxury for variations in their armies' asthetics.
@@davedogge2280 no, I was referring to when the full multi-pose version they announced will be released as a stand alone. A lot of us aren't buying them because we simply don't need them. They're nice, but we just don't need them.
I really hope the “Old World” isnt a cash grab for all the new Total War Warhammer fans. Can you imagine how much money they’d be making if OG fantasy was still alive? TWW1 got me into Warhammer as a whole. Imagine my disappointment when I discovered that Fantasy was fucking murdered lol
Do you know how many people have gotten excited about Tomb Kings due to that game! With no tabletop or models around to buy! I already have a ton but would love 30 or so more archers but not at the current prices.
Go back in time. 2002 Warhammer 6th ed, 40k 3rd ed. Warhammer was a much better game, both in terms of balance, variety of factions (50% of 40k armies are Imperium offshoots) No poster boy army, so they all get a fair run on army books. By 2006, WHFB had every single army with a new book for that edition, 2 Global Campaign books, and 3 Annuals with a wealth of additional units for friendly games. 40k 3rd ed had completely different rules for an entire phase of the game in a WD issue, the first half of army books were stripped down, with less than a page of wargear per army, then later ones were bursting at the seams with content. Yet somehow 10 years later, one of these games would no longer exist and the other would be the powerhouse of the company's IP. Why? Because you can sell a Space marine starter box to a 12 year old more easily. GW stopped caring about long term customers years ago, it's whole business model is geared towards buying the shiny new starter box, game design doesn't matter. I couldn't care less about what they do with WHFB The Old world because 6th Ed has had a huge resurgence in my area, I don't ever have to worry about GW stepping in to mess up a good thing, because we already have all of the rules. The only thing I wish they would do is a made to order run on OOP WHFB units. I don't want their shitty, 50% too big, expensive new models, I definitely don't want their increasingly awful rules, written by people who had nothing to do with the heyday of the hobby.
40k 4th edition was a big improvement which really helped boost it in my community. Early 7th edition Fantasy (with all the 6th edition army books) and 4th edition 40k was GW at it's best IMO.
Gamesworkshop before the endtimes/age of shitmar: How old is Brettonian codex and model? Like 16 years? Why is noone playing brettonia? We need to raise prices to recoup our losses.
The skaven isle of blood units are on the same sprue as the high elves from the set, and gw has never bothered fo put them on a new sprue so here we sit. Got myself 3 isle of blood Rogre's on ebay looking for a 4th
"Hmmm yeah we could lower the barrier to entry, so that more people would play and the value of our product would go up... but you know what we really need? sloppy, low budget animations... yeah like a Netflix or Disney plus, all we need to do is kill off the fanimations. That's what the players want. Ow eh did I say players? sorry Investors... Investors want that." -Some empty GW suit
I think I wanna say that, Warhammer Fantasy never “failed”. GW just chose to evolve their IP to Age of Sigmar after the End Times. With this, it heralded in new rules, better models, and more straightforward base game rules with a more free form game thanks to circle bases. It never failed though, that’s why you can go on Reddit and see thousands of people still playing fantasy, because it’s still good, it’s just not as refined, which should be obvious since AoS came out after, when they had more experience with writing games and stuff to build on.
They used all of that experience to bring out AoS 1st edition, which didn't have a points system and was an absolute shambles. Until they retconned it with General's Handbook AoS was sinking without trace. IMO AoS is still a shambles where double turn = win and there is huge imbalance between factions and within factions.
@@tyrannosaurus696 hey, I never said it was perfect, but it sure as hell didn’t fail, seeing as it spawned their second most popular IP, a slew of fan favourite characters and iconic races and factions and an overall enjoyable game. 3.0 just released as well and fixed a handful of issues with the imbalance as well.
Honestly I would be all for it as I am getting into Skaven for AoS and I also have what I need to play 8th edition of Fantasy(minus the templets at the moment). But they need to do a few things. For the gameplay, I don't mind complex rules but just from reading the 8th edition book it really needs to be toned down a little and middle ground needs to be found between Fantasy's system and Age of Sigmar's to where it isn't confusing and you can't get lost. But a point/money ratio really is the biggest problem, if they want formations they need to give a lot more then what is currently on offer, what I mean is they would really need to give higher model count for a lower price otherwise this game will be dead in the water out the gate. I mean if a starter army could be made that only costs around $80 to $100 for each faction it would give more incentive to stick with the game and build from, keep in mind I am not talking about a terrible start collecting box, I'm talking about an army that is a couple of hq's, some core units with some specialist stuff that ranges around the 1000 point mark. Matter of fact my Skaven is going to start off being 3rd party models as that is way more efficient then going to GW.
@Jarrod Kindred I think you’re absolutely correct. Then you could really push units and formations and affordably field a large army. At 10mm scale a smallish kitchen table can become an epic battlefield. It becomes more about the game than the hobbying.
In regards to named characters: back when I played during the 2000s A lot of the clubs and players i gamed with band the use of Named characters. Even in pickup games if your brought a named character no one would play with you.
Yea here it was the same and I didnt mind it one bit. Its cool to have named characters to sell the lore and set a bit of a powerlevel. But for me it was much more enjoyable to create my own characters and lore for them. They weren't needed for tournament games nor did we play them much in our local games either
We banned them from casual play unless you could really sell them. If there was a campaign or high point game that was written by us and self balanced then you're fine.
The purpose of this video is so GW does not make the same mistake again. We need to stay vocal and they need to be reminded.
They have to go and fix Beastmen and bretonia than we can talk.
Old World is a prequel to Fantasy and thus prequel to End Times
Be prepared to lose your favorite faction all over again. Even reworked ones like Kislev and Cathay
Not me since Chaos is my favorite faction
First they need to learn to not screw their own fanbase like they did with 40k. If they can manage that then we'll talk.
@@thomas777803
Like how Gav Thrope screws the Eldar?
Gav should just focus on the Imperium, Orks and Chaos
@@christiandauz3742 I'm mainly talking about how they nuked the fan animators in order to push WH+. I'm also worried about them rewriting alot of old lore for one reason or another. It seems like that's what they're doing with Kislev, but I'm withholding judgment till oldworld actually releases. I'm also kinda sceptical about Cathay, but again I'll wait till the proper release.
Pretty easy, ever increasing unit size and cost plus ever decreasing models in box equals zero growth rate of playerbase
Yeah I moved to mantic kings of war. Cheap, easy to learn, fun and Skav... I mean space rats yes, yes!
I want to upvote you, but at this point I am afraid that GW don't get out sarcasm and would you our "endorsement" as a sign to do exactly that.
@@salihnu Its exactly how they killed WFB an their working on 40k making marines 5 to a box. The real reason everyone plays marines is their the cheapest (relatively speaking) army to play. Plus RTB01 but also that's because of the v as blue it represented
I was just able to get back to it about 8 months ago after 12 years away due to cost. I had tons of disposable income in my mid 20s, took a new job and got some adult responsibilities and couldn't afford it.
Just now at 40 was I able to afford again and it was almost 300 out of the gate for paints, brushes and 15 models. My Christmas presents are about 175 dollars and I'm gonna go spend about 130 on paint after Christmas for a new scheme. It's absurd how expensive it is.
pretty much this. Back in the glory days of Herohammer, a typical starting army would be 1000 points, and a "normal" battle would be 1500-2000 points. 2500-3000 points would be a large battle, that you would only play in special events, but most games would be in that 1500-2000 point range, with some quick 1000-1250 point games as well.
Then, the newer editions started pushing 2000 points as the new, "medium size" game, with pressure to play up to 3000 points more often.
But that's not all. The more insidious change was the point costs dropping. in 4/5e Dark Elf corsairs were 13 with 2 hand weapons, and you could give them crossbows for +3 points. Then 6th edition comes around, and corsairs are down to 10 points apiece, can no longer have crossbows. So your unit of 15 corsairs with 2 hand weapons, crossbows, standard bearer with standard of shielding, and musician went down from costing 297 points, to costing 165-215 points (depending on the cost of magic banner). And that happened across the board, so if you had a 2000 point army in 4th/5th edition, when 6th came out, your army was suddenly worth ~1600 points, AND you are pressured to start playing 3000 point games.
I think they need a multi-tiered system... a skirmish scale, unit-maneuvering scale, and epic/armageddon-scale ruleset so people can collect into it instead of needing to drop $700+ to play their first game.
6th edition says hi. The core game had rules for normal, 2000-4000 pt battles, but in time, they also added (for free!) rules for skirmishes, warbands, and Mordheim, which was loosely based on 6th.
I agree with OP. Initial starting cost high. Also models were old and rules unbalabced. Bretonia went a decade without a update. Also bolter go boom. 40k models werw just better looking
They also need to make the figs compatible with AoS so that the people who invest in the WFB figs gets to have to use it in a more common current game and not just wait to find new WFB players in the community (who should be in majority, at least in the first years of launching of the game, old dudes that knew the game back then).
They should probably implement a rule in AoS, a sort of "Summoning of the spirit of the spirits of the ancestral past" rule, where you could get to invoke the physical presence of wizards and warriors of the world of before the End of Time in Aos who would leave you once their duty is done (by the end of the battle, or they would just be on the battlefield for a limited number of turns);
I never played aos . When then axed wfb i was disgusted with games workshop. The sugar show the end of times was a joke
@@piotrgrochowski483 and there's part of your problem. Thinking of 2000-4000 point battles as "normal". Back when I started playing (4e/5e), your "basic" army was 1000 points, and most games were 1500-2000, with games up to 3000 being "large battles". Then GW started pushing 3k points as the norm, on top of reducing the point cost of units, so you needed more units to field a 2000 point army in 6e, than you did in 5e. Granted, 6e significantly reduced the importance of hero units as being super-powerful (hence 4/5e is known as "herohammer").
Short answer is that they need to actually support it and not nuke the setting.
end times was horrid XD
End Times = Our marketing department sad that space marines is our hot seller so we are going to make Warhammer Fantasy into Warhamer 40,000 but with Dragons!
@@Marinealver and rats cough cough
Never again!!
Trust me they supported the game. A LOT. They spent a lot of money on new sculpts and books but no one played the game, it wasnt bringing them profit. The people rn that complain a lot about the entry price of warhammer rn have no idea how expensive and complicated starting a warhammer fantasy army was
They also need to not be screwy with the fanbase on pricing. I remember one of my friends who played complain that they changed combat width between 2 editions (I don't remember which) and didn't update many factions boxes for units not having enough models to form a line. So you would have to buy more boxes to complete your units and end up with spare models you didn't need.
That was the change from 6th to 7th edition making ranks 5 wide minimum.
Dick move, almost as changing card backs in underworlds.
100 Dollars for 5 Blood Knights
GW not screwing fan base on pricing !? You live in another world to me Sir! Why I just stick to my Skirmish/Board games I probably do spend a lot on bits for customisation mind
Used.to able to gain rank bonuses with 4 wide ranks they made it 5 in the 6th edition I think
One of the most damaging things was the horde rule in 8th. Now suddenly you needed a big block of 40+ models 10-wide just to be competitive. Then look at the prices of the models, in terms of dollars, and then the cost of the models, in terms of points. You had to spend $30 just for 10 Empire Halberdiers, and then had to get them up to at least 40, preferably 50 or 60 so you could absorb casualties, meaning you spent at least $150 just for 50 Halberdiers, but they only cost 380 points, so you hadn’t even met the Core requirement yet.
And of course, some other units were just horrendously expensive. Greatswords are $45 for 10, and those 10 guys would only be about 150 points. 5 Blood Knights were $99. 5 Questing Knights were $99. 5 Grail Knights were $99. And in the latter two cases, the size cap was 12, which means that you had to spend $300 to buy 15 Grail Knights, three of which you couldn’t actually use, because the unit could only have 12. Not to mention that those units were Finecast garbage, not plastic. It was ridiculous.
The extra three knights are to replace the three that break because they're made of shitty resin...
@@lukehawksbee 😂🤣😂
Even if they got rid of the horde rule there still would have been Steadfast to deal with which also massively encouraged large, cumbersome and expensive units.
These are good prices by 40k standards. Horrifying
@@Artavios today you would add a third of that price. Inflation has gone up since
As an adult who works full time, pays insurance, rent/mortgage- I dont play tabletop because of the entry price.
America Moment🇺🇸🦅
FORGET ABOUT THE FUCKING ENTRANCE FEE, U DONT HAVE THE ENERGY OR TIME TO RELOCATE TO FIND PPL TO WAIT ON THEM OHH NOO THEY CANT BE THERE OH WELL G FUCKING G, play online TOTAL WAR WARHAMMER 3 where u can SAVE and you play!!, u cant paint but no1 said you had to stop doing that on your spare time...lol with the covid ness its not safe either
Play it on Table Top Simulator
You don't have to buy a full army all at once to start playing. You can even hang out at a LGS and spectate; maybe someone could let you play a round or two. People Are friendlier than you think.
A full army being approx. $300 off ebay is pretty hefty though, I admit.
@@knightaaron7 warhammer 3 is pretty much the definitive way to play lol.
Two things I suffered during the age of whfb: the crazy pricing of products, compared with the game requirements and the lack of support to whole armies for years. You can't set a game where large troops are required (especially in 8t edition), and 40-50 minis per unit were almost the standard size for core troops, and then ask me to pay 35/40€ for 10 minis.
It's commercial madness, and it contributed a lot to avoid that new hobbyists/gamers joined the game.
Moreover, it was a bit frustrating to see many armies abandoned for years, and other ones receiving updates each 3 years. I was a huge dwarfs collector, and I had to wait for 9 years (!!) to see new minis for my faction, and a new armybook. Ironically, after having paid a lot of cash for the 8th edition armybook of Dwarfs and the new units (10 longbeards=40€), less than a year after the whole game was nuked by GW, to welcome Age of Sigmar .___.
The fun fact was that those armies were not supported because "people prefer other armies", but it was mostly due to the fact that..they were not supported! Of course people preferred to buy High Elves, than Bretonnia, because HE were constantly updated with rules and minis, Bretonnia didn't, and didn't receive a single armybook in 7th nor 8th editions! I remember that when bretonnia was updated in 6th edition, many and many people collected them, because of strong rules and an impressive range of minis. Obviously, if you leave a product to die without support, casuals or new customers hardly will buy it...only hardcore fan of that army will keep collecting it.
GW had a little gem, with whfb: a solid and interesting lore full of potentials, iconic armies and characters to explore for years and years and above all a big and highly fidelized community. They managed to ruin everything for the sake of IP and trying to replicate the success of Space Marines in fantasy (and we all agree that Stormcast completely missed the target..), giving all the blame to whfb itself because "it was unactractive and people nowadays love a different style of fantasy".
I hope that they learn from their mistakes with TOW, but I've not high hopes for that.
Fantasy had too many factions, they simply couldn't keep all of the up to date. I think it's a smart move to concentrate their efforts on a limited set of factions for the Old World.
40k probably works as well as it does (financially) because 2/3 of the minis sold are some variation of space marine. If GW brings out some new space marines, most players of the game can potentially buy and use them.
To be honest the core unit requirements was one of the things that got me excited about Fanatasy when I started playing in the early 90s after playing 40k since the 80s. On paper the idea of having large blocks of core troops was very thematic and fit the lore more so than 40k armies tend to be. The issue though is that the price point of core units was prohibitive. If they would have kept the big blocks of troops the main focus but offered them at reduced prices it would have mitigated that cost of entry.
I liked Fantasy because it was a nice blend of fantastical settings with historical gameplay i.e. flanks and the movement phase was very important. It elevated the gameplay to be far more tactical and strategic when compared to 40k. It was a more mature game, if that can be said about pushing toy soldiers around a table. I think there was a combination of price and strategic thinking required that acted as a barrier of entry for some people. It was a great game for a niche market (which I loved) but it did have an issue with catering more toward an older more mature crowd, which had a lot of upsides but also hurt its growth with the younger players.
I totally agree with the fantasy + historical battle tactics was a cool combo from what I remember
They probably need to consolidate the game into a smaller range.
Have 6 races only or something like that.
High Elves, Orc and Goblin, Dwarf, Undead, Human, Chaos.
3 baddies, 3 goodies.
Just focus on these 6 and get a good range of models out for them.
If the game does well then they could look to add Slann and Skaven.
8 would probably be a good amount for a game so long as each race had a good range of units and models.
It would be sad for people that loved the myriad of other races available back in the old fant days but that's what they should do in my opinion.
Otherwise you end up with an Age of Sigmar problem where certain races are barely supported at all.
It's also super boring to paint 60 models that are essentially the same..
I think they have the real threat of 3D printing nipping at their heals. Drop the rules and we are out.
I was working for an online wargaming web store in 2013-2014 and I remember we had GW reps show up once and when the topic of WFB came up the newer rep started to spout a speech about how good WFB was doing, but her partner just gave us a look that said every thing. Paints and tools were out selling WFB at the time.
WHFB is the only fantasy setting I ever got into. Was really sad when I first knew it was already gone… So much diversity and cool lore.
@Patrick Swan yeah AoS's setting holds no appeal to me whatsoever. But I absolutely love the Old World. I never had the money to get into the table top sadly.
I don't really see what the pull is. It's just a map of Earth with Atlantis for the high elves. Sure, there was a ton of lore written into it, but the basis isn't that interesting.
@@mycatistypingthis5450 Such an ignorant statement.
@@mycatistypingthis5450 Well it's the 40 years of accumulated lore that makes it interesting. It's had a huge impact on other settings, just consider green Orcs - in the mid 80s somebody at Citadel thought it'd be fun to paint an Orc green, Alan Merret liked it, so he made it canon and sure enough there are green Orcs in Warcraft and on Magic cards, and...
That GW players did not unite in protest of the death of our game says everything you need to know about GW customers. They are in an abusive relationship with their master.
All right, this will be long, please bear with me.
I'm what can be referred to as one of the old guard for warhammer fantasy.
I started collecting Vampire Counts back during 4th edition. I was just a kid then and due to the cost of minis, it took a year of saving and begging for gifts of minis to be able to feild an army.
Over the years I added to my army, but after years I'd finally got a half decent build, but very few new units or models were being made. After a while, with rules getting changed for VC and little new on the horizon, I thought it time to look for change and a new army. I was older now and earning so I was able to buy minis but I'm not made of cash so I wanted to steer away from another horde faction.
Ogre Kingdoms had just been launched as a new race at that point (6th edition I think) and I was more than excited to build an army from the beginning, no old models, everything was new. I thought that this would be great, it fitted the bill perfectly.
Well they changed the colour scheme on me (and to be consistent all my Ogres are still grey/green) but as time went on more units were added and new minis made. I was realy enjoying this, and I was aware VC had got some updates, new units and updated minis for some units. But mostly it was just new lords and legendary Lords. These were fine and I did buy them. However Lords did not makeup that much of an army so although I may have had a few knew knew individual characters for vampire counts the bulk of the army was still about 15 years old. Hence why I was really enjoying ogre Kingdoms as majority of the stuff was very new.
Then it stopped, in the lead up to and during 8th, and there was nothing new. I was aware that some of my friends (one who played Skaven and another Wood Elves) had very little to no new minis or rules for even longer. Then GW blew it up. Under claims that no one was buying it.
I am firmly of the opinion that the reason sales dropped off is because Games Workshop stopping supporting the hobby. They were not making new units updating old ones so people were buying what didn't exist. I have enough different vampire count lords and heroes to field a full unit of just them. But once I had a full 3 different 60 units skeletons , and 2 of zombies whome I needed for core. Why buy more. I rarely played over 2000pt games, as no one else had that much and time was a bit of a constraint at bigger games. Not only did I not need more core but they were almost always older minis anyway still on sale from when I was a kid. So again why buy them?
The other potential issue is over production. To have so many unit boxes made and in each store everywhere is expensive. Then when people buy what they need there will be tones of leftover stock.
Annoying as this may be, but I would suggest only having minimal stock on hand in stores, and using online sales and order in systems for in store. That cuts down on over production of these things which was probably a significant issue last time.
Kids can't afford to buy large army's quickly. And adults are often time poor so won't commit to more than 1 or 2 army's. Reduce the point requirement for units, reduce their costs, and most importantly don't stop innovating and creating. Some things won't work, others will. You just can't let the game stagnate again.
I'm curious: would you have bought more skeletons and zombies at the time if GW had come out with new sculpts? Like, if they looked even half as good as the ones from Cursed City that have replaced the old ones? (Yes, if I have it right, they STILL hadn't seen fit to update them until well into 2nd Edition Age of Sigmar).
Thats the issue with GW, they have a Long and Consistent History of shoothing themselfs in both feets, legs, arms and hands...
They take shitty decisions based on greed and money grubbing, then act all surprised when the playerbase doesn't follow along( well the part of the playerbase that are not bootlickers, happy to taste the "greatness at the source" by sucking off GW's cock in the morning) and they lose money, forcing them to take even more drastic measure to "try" to "save" the game...
When they basicaly did the same with 40k, that they did with WHB, i quited, i realised that for 24 years i was in an Abusive relationship, been patient, thinking that GW would change and be better, but nope...
Ain't gonna happen.
So after 24years of collecting, building and playing NOTHING but World Eaters and Khorne deamons, i said fuck you imma get out of this joint.
Best decision i made for my sanity...
@@Bluecho4 there was a new zombie and skeleton unit that came out near the end. And I did buy 1 of each, but I didn't buy more than one.
@@Mugthraka I heard rumors that they were planning a end times for 40k too. But that it went so badly for them on fantasy that they changed their mind.
When. I was a kid I stole every army I had from the LG's and he didn't care because he was getting retail price from his insurance company 🤣🤣
GW sells army-scale games for skirmish scale prices. It's still the case now, but it was especially true for WHFB 8th edition. The cost of entry for that game was unbelievable.
Probably why things like vermintide and Total Warhammer did as well as they do because you don’t need to drop this months rent to play the game
Whatever reason WF failed, it was not because Araby and Cathay were not playable.
It was because we can't play as Border Princes
It was because we couldn't play as Space Marines
Or Nippon.
Or that they squatted my beloved Dogs of War!
Wait, Araby and who? x)
I think a problem in WHFB, aside from Matt Ward being allowed to write army books, was that if you're army book was weak, you could be waiting YEARS for any kind of update. I played with that terrible 6th edition High Elf book for 6 years until we got our update! At least do yearly points rebalancing like AoS does.
Ah the Arch Heretic, never forget the trickster Robin Cruddace in that sentence. A curse apon his 8th edition Tomb Kings book!
Now its easier to update stuff to be honest. Pdfs and such. Back in the day you just had few extra books with faqs and any meaningfull change would be made with the next edition.
Do you remember the mess they made with dark elves?
@@AndreaFasani Yes, and Demons.
@@wulfbak Never forget!
It's so nice to hear criticism with antagonism. I've had to stop following some GW content creators because thry stopped actually covering GW material and had become purely bash and rant channels.
Core units boxes should have low selling prices (less than $45 AUD a box), come with large number of models per boxes (+30 models a box) and have all the weapon options you wanted or need.
Definitely, paying $95 CAD for 20 mkvi space marines and then $53 CAD for special and heavy weapons is just too much
My greatest concern is the timeframe. It seems terribly limiting that we can’t move past the year 2528 IC.
I wish they would just create an alternate timeline where the storm of chaos scenario is canon instead of the end times.
Basically just have Archaon‘d campaign just be another great chaos invasion that is averted.
I am not sure how storm of chaos ended, apparently the greenskins did really well compared to the other factions while chaos too a big L. So if there have to be some changes to make it more balanced then fine.
I don’t mind them restarting around 2200 IC but they really should at least give us the confirmation that the Warhammer world continues beyond 2528.
Otherwise I don’t see the point in getting invested if all it can ever be is a prequel setting.
I agree. Have it where Storm of Chaos or something similar averts End Times, have it an alternate universe so we can have Warhammer Fantasy continue in "the modern age" with the iconic characters we love like Karl Franz, Thorgrim, etc
It didnt fail as such, it lasted over 30 years and was killed.
The problem fantasy had was simple everyone who played it already had 20000 points worth of figures so never bought any.
Yep - Hit the nail right on the head.
I imagine it didn't help that for many armies, there were no new models to buy. It was just the same models they already had. If the models had been updated, they probably would have sold. But GW wasn't willing to invest the money to do that.
(And then they started Age of Sigmar, and its success was buoyed by the creation of whole model ranges, like the Stormcast Eternals.)
"The problem fantasy had was simple everyone who played it already had 20000 points worth of figures so never bought any.
"
That's the symptom. The REAL problem it had was that it wasn't drawing in new players. Without new players, sure, it's no surprise that everyone still playing would be a veteran collector.
Yeah I wouldnt call a 30 year run a failure
@@ramonserna8089 Exactly, it more or less ran its course. It's a great retrogame but it had a lot of cruft that built up over the years and it needed a bit a cleaning of house.
The unit size problem basically made it impossible to recommend the game to anyone who wasn't comfortable with Ebay hunting. That made it terrible for getting new players on board which is what kills a game.
33 years, 8 editions, and dozens of video games and spin-offs. Strange world we live in where that's considered a failure.
there's a difference between failing and being a failure my man
In all honesty, the company has been doing GREAT with AoS. In fact, it produced FAR more than Fantasy ever did. Look up the numbers, don’t talk about what you believe.
@@thenobleplatyous101 That's because King's of War players love GW models and use Age of Sigmar models so the numbers are basically a lie on the game itself. I've never seen anybody play AoS locally. Even at a convention where they were supposed to be having a AoS tournament nobody literally nobody showed up.
First, nowhere it is said it's a complete failure. Second, it's relative and can be considered regarding it's potential. See the success of Total War Warhammer. You're comment is logically wrong.
The tabletop game, the most important facet of warhammer fantasy, sucked fat dick it was AWFUL
Remember, GW knew that 8th edition was the last edition of fantasy and the rules and models/boxes were made with this in mind.
No they didn't. It's clear they didn't, they absolutely failed to optimize sales, and were going as if 8th wasn't the final ed in all their posts etc. They now are putting on this front of "oh we knew, and ou AoS is so much better" because they have to. Because AoS's support is as real as the numbers Marvel uses to tell people their current salew are good.
The Endtimes was basically a failed Endgame, in both lore and in real life
No and no.
I agree that what they did to the lore was reprehensible, though I do like a few things about the new rules. Still miss a lot of stuff from Fantasy though.
More like a failed Infinity War, considering that's the one where the villain wins.
My thoughts of why Fantasy failed:
1 - Rulebook was really badly written - rules for one phase were scattered across whole book, needlessly bloated explanations, etc, as a newcomer it was really intimidating looking at around 100 pages of rules
2 - not updating armies - as it was mentioned, e.g. Bretonia, Beastmen had outdated Army Books
3 - after initial release, armies were left alone - no new models, no new updated, faq, nothing, so after initial boost in sales, they were left on their own with sales dimming slowly
4 - during whole 8th edition run, there were only few campaings/additions, ex. Storm of Magic, Triumph and Treachery, meanwhile 40K and AoS get something new every few months
As I see it GW makes all the right marketing moves for all the wrong system. Had they shown the same support for Fantasy as they are now showing AoS, it would not fail. Just release new models/units for already existing armies, some campaigns or something similar here and there and it will be much much better.
The speed at which the first End Times books sold demonstrates that people were basically sitting there waiting for something, anything, to do.
@@tyranitararmaldo ours usually sold out day one.
5- 40k had the more appealing setting at first glance.
I remember trying to get Warhammer back during 6e Fantasy. That barrier to entry is just nasty. The Battalion Box had one major flaw, it didn't include any hero units, you had to buy those separately. I still have my Wood Elf Battalion box, and I still haven't finished putting together the models. There was a lot that went wrong with fantasy, but it was two big issues Rules Bloat and Cost. The setting was never the issue. AoS has some things that are great, but as a whole I liked the Old World content better. Mostly the lore behind the Stormcast is absolutely amazing, and it also proves how imperfect the gods are.
But back then heroes were £4 or £5 each. You could buy them with pocket money. Can't do that now.
They turned big monsters into crap. I play vampire counts (but it applies to other factions too) and can almost never bring cool stuff like mortis engine or zombie dragon, because some cannon for 1/5 of its cost can basically one-shot them. Without big monsters or war machines it has lost much of its charm to me.
Welcome to the fun of why my big stuff stayed home.
I watched people at my local games store, and as much as I was interested what always stopped me was unit size.
As editions went on, it seemed like you needed more and more minis. Which equals more money, more time building and painting, more storage space, and more difficulty transporting.
I played a 1000 AoS game yesterday where I has 12 models total. I can spend hours painting each figure and not feel bad that this guy is beautiful, but he’s 1% of my army!
We wanted plot progression, new minis, updates for older armies, and maybe a couple of new armies. Instead GW blew it up and gave us an entirely new game we didn't want with some of the same characters and copyright friendly names.
@Patrick Swan I was using the space Wolves Wolves instead or dire Wolves, look much better, don’t even get me started on fell bats and bat swarms.
I disagree with the plot progression point. Warhammer is a brilliant sandbox world and there was no need to start pushing the lore forwards (case and point the end times). The appeal in the warhammer world was that it was an easy playground with the freedom to create your own backstory for your army.
They needed just to make more and more balanced game and to support the armies better. People want to play a good system, where all those cool models can be viable. Now they kept slapping op rules on the new bigger and bigger models just to sell the new stuff.
With a great new story and some of the best models they have ever done.
@@cmxpiipl i was going to reply just that. old WH (and old 40K at that) was frozen in one ominous, shit's-about-to-happen moment in history which set the perfect tone for the whole thing.
WHFB doesn't need plot progression, it needs added detail. Lustria, Araby and all the other not old world places were really underdeveloped, you could add whatever you want to those places as a writer.
I'll have to semi-disagree on the Tomb Kings here, as they ran into a similar problem as what you mentioned with Skaven.
As cool as the new models they released with the last Armybook were, they also really highlighted just how old some of the other models, especially the core skeleton warriors, were.
They were also missing models for some of the newer units and characters.
Personally, I couldn't really motivate myself for them, even though they actually are my favorite faction, and put them aside in the hope that their next update would bring better skeletons so the majority of the army doesn't stand out with bad proportions.
Luckily, the timeline we basically have confirmed for The Old World roughly matches one of the biggest campaigns the Tomb Kings started northward to reclaim their stuff, so there's a chance they'll eventually show up once more.
We're seeing similar issues with the old and new Stormcast in AoS. The old ones look absolutely rubbish next to the new minis.
Support it, dont try to overhaul it, expand niche units and lore. Keep whats made the fantasy feel unique. Keep the core the rule as it helped limit the cheese, not by alot but maybe change some standards of what is core and what is elite.
Can we still make overhauls for TWW at least? X)
@@Archon3960 sfo is ultimately the perfect mod for warhammer fantasy and it oddly feels like a fluid tabletop. I hate seeing the 4 diget health bars of the new game, makes me cringe to see vanilla wahammer stats.
From my understanding Age of Sigmar is about 40% of GW revenue and Fantasy was I think 20%. So, I do think they would pay attention more to AOS because of that.
I get that people might want to play their named characters, but I actually kind of liked the lack of named characters in fantasy games. I hope they find a balance where they are not auto includes, but still usuable for less competative games. Ideally they could scale so hero models could be bad for 2000 points but for larger games they could work. That way u dont have primarchs or archaeon in a 2000 point game, which is really just a skirmish.
When it comes to cost, I remember being able to field something like 4 units of Dwarf Warrriors, 2 sets of 10 Thunderers, A unit of Ironbreakers, a unit of Longbeards, 2 Cannons, a Runesmith, and a Lord for about $250/$300 back in 05'/06. Then again, my game store was literally right next to my high school, and I was able to make a few price deals with the owner so he could make the rent on his building.
What killed warhammer fantasy was the drastic change of 8th edition, and to a lesser extent the power creep at the end half of 7th edition. Changes that seemed to have been manifested more by marketing quarters and stock price machinations than actual games development reasons. Plenty of people that had been playing for more than a decade at that point quit or stayed playing the older editions they liked. That is important because those older players were usually the ones that introduced the game (and the hobby as a whole) to the new players, and once they stopped marketing the game for free, fewer new players started, and the sales dwindled.
My predictions for The Old World: 1. the art will be good (but not great, since many of the old masters no longer illustrate the books), 2. the miniatures will probably be overly fragile and needlessly detailed, but of reasonably high quality otherwise, 3. the lore will be solid, 4. the rules will be middling at best, and 5. the business practices surrounding, infesting, and altering the whole enterprise will be abominable. The first 4 predictions may be off and/or debatable, but the last one is an absolute inevitability.
I hate how true this will probably be. I just hope the novels are good since that's what I've always cared about.
Warhammer Fantasy Battle was a victim of the corporate nature of Games Workshop's internal politics. Basically, GW didn't view it profitable anymore, barely any of the model ranges moved; The only people passionate about it were the store staff, the gen X and gen Y friends of the store staff and some of the creative team at GW HQ who still made content for, wrote content for and developed rules for Warhammer Fantasy. Fantasy had been "stuck in" End Times mode since 7th edition and it was never executed well or did they even bother progressing it much since Archon was introduced back at the start of it; 10 years of very little progression and 8th edition was pretty poorly handled in general. The *only* reason "Old World" is a thing again is because of the popularity of the Total War Warhammer titles. GW hopes the popularity will translate into model sales; What they don't realise is that the game needs good rules and comprehensive promotion first to make it an interest item for table top gamers; In reality, those who play the video game are only interested in buying a few of their favourite characters as models to display and in most cases are unwilling to go to the effort to put them together and paint them themselves, fewer still will go from the video game into the table top game even then. Only a small section of the fanbase intersect, most who buy the video games have no interest at all collecting the models.
I am very excited to see the old world come back in some form, they did say square bases will be the norm with it as well as classic races like orcs and goblins.
Hopefully we also get new Britonnia and Tomb King models, I was always up in the air about picking up their battleforce box sets and I wish I did now.
The prices. Bandai can make imperial knight sized models, fully posable, no glue needed, molded in colored plastic, for only 30-50$
6th edition points costs (at least for chaos) were waaay more manageable. An elite list could be fielded for 250 dollars for a 2000 pt list. two blobs of chaos warriors, 5 chaos knights, and some really beefed-up characters. Then marauder horsemen and a block of 20 marauders. It wasn't competitive but this was before hyper-competitive tournaments. 8th's hordes made collecting armies insanely expensive.
Is it true that in WHFB 8th ed, they basically halved the points cost of models across the board? That's just what I heard, being a person relatively new to Warhammer.
@@Bluecho4 Example:
1996 Dwarf warriors 11 points, Longbeards 15 points
2000 Dwarf warriors 7 points, Longbeards 14 points
2005 Dwarf warriors 8 points, Longbeards now +3 point upgrade, no longer special unit.
Horde and power creep.
Would love to see the Tomb Kings in a strong position when they appear in Old World.
Nope. TK were game over the moment Nagash took over, which was before Sigmar was even born.
Don't get your hope up. The Old World is supposed to be like the Horus Heresy of 40k, which don't feature any of the non-major race of the event (the Xeno and such) and is not as big in scale as 40k. Having seen the map, and being called literally the "Old World", for the Tomb Kings to make an apparition I think it's a stretch.
But Damn that would be cool xD
As the army that got me into fantasy I hope so. I doubt it but I'd love to be wrong on this.
At least Bretonnia will be back in the Old World.
I'd love to see some TK, I didn't get into AoS but I feel like they should have been in somehow in the side of order facing off against Nagash, with Setra in charge.
"All you needed was the rulebook and your army book"
Until the (very popular) Endtimes, when new rules came out for the base armies. This is what Broken Realms, Psychic Awakening, etc are imitating. So Fantasy did have this! There's a strong argument that it's actually Fantasy's fault we have those books these days haha. And it's proving such a success that we'll likely see it for The Old World too.
I absolutely think that The Old World will follow the same business model that GW are using now for AoS and 40K. Rules supplements released regularly to keep customers forking over cash. We have no reason to believe otherwise.
I wouldn't say Warhammer failed,
I would say GARBAGE WRECKSHOP failed!
ya I know its kinda of a dumb premise to accuse the material and the license itself failing. Versus the Company literally nose diving its setting to death. Most people are aware GW destroyed the prospect of warhammer fantasy not the other way around.
GW PRICES are insane, easy as that!
And then 8th came along and told you “Oh, and by the way, if you want to succeed at this game, you need to own at least 40 of those guys who are only 5 points each.”
Aside from commanders and characters, the price per model isn't really that bad and only slightly more than any other mini manufacturer, and usually GW has higher fidelity in their models than other companies. The bullshit GW part is where they have you buy new rules every month and insist that you need 20-30 models of one unit to be viable, and other shady stuff to keep the money machine going
@@MrSquare holy words
That would apply to all GW games though, but AoS and 40k are both doing fine
@@MrSquare As I always say, too, never forget they're made in England by people paid a living wage, not in a sweatshop in China
The Tomb Kings 6th edition book is IMO the most balanced army book GW has ever released. It wasn't broken in any respect but was a ton of fun and the army was beautiful. Now we come to the 8th edition army book and we see what happens when the author has no idea of how to balance the rules of the book with the edition. If it had been in the 7th edition it would have been amazing! Gw needs to make armies that aren't so big that people can't get into them but large and customizable enough that people will keep investing in wither their army or others. Can they do it? I hope so.
Warhammer fantasy was *always* my favorite. But it was an "Agony and Ecstasy" situation: extremely expensive, impossible to transport, took hours to set up and take down. You'd finally get your army together, you go to the game store, get ABSOLUTELY TABLED then hear "you know what you need? This, this and this, then your army will be killer". When it ended, I was really let down. Then I was relieved, because I was ignoring the millstone around my neck. Years later, I finally bonded with 40k. I've got three armies I enjoy much more as a game. Now I hear that Old World is coming out. My reaction? "I can't, man. I just can't". It was just too much and my army, Vampire Counts, was just too hard to use. I don't care if I never see another unit of 40 skeleton spearmen. Fuck that! I'm not casting Van Hel's Dance Macabre just do they can move up the board to get smashed to pieces!
Honestly, I just want a Bretonnian Army. I didn't get into their lore until the last two or three years. Before Age of Sigmar, my interest in Fantasy was in the Dark Elves and the Greenskins. So I missed out on ever owning a Bretonnia army back in the day.
Agreed. It would also be nice if those new Bretonnian models could be used in Age of Sigmar as well. I'd be happy if they just added their warscrolls to Cities of Sigmar.
@@Bluecho4 True enough
I don't care for the grimderp version of Bretonnia from 6th edition to be honest. I like the 5th edition version more.
Absolutely, we could have something like Louen's trad Royal faction, a Fay Enchantress/Grail Knight build, the Herrimault (Bertand the Brigand style faction), an anti-monster (Bohemond the Beastlayer style) build, and rules for making a Mousillon Undead/Bretonnia fusion 👍
The problem with the Hierophant blowing himself up on turn 2 wasn't a problem with the Tomb Kings army but was a problem with magic 8th edition. It was too powerful compared with older editions, which meant to balance it they had to ramp up the consequences of a miscast. Personally I really liked crumble mechanic.
I would like to see a starter around $50 but chocked full of lower quality minis. A Battle masters style box. A Chapter approved once yearly updated rule book would be fantastic. Named characters were the worst. They broke the game in alot of cases. We still play 8th and I see the named Dwarf Lords all the time
I doubt they'll have a cheap entry point for Old World. I think it's going to exactly follow the Horus Heresy models where it's more of a luxury brand for hardcore, rich fans. That's just the reality of how GW operates.
@@changer_of_ways_999 unfortunately, I have to agree
My guess is that they’ll do something similar to how they handled Adeptus Titanicus. They’ll have a rules/tokens only release for north of 50 bucks, and then a full Cadillac release for 200-300 bucks.
From there a supplemental book will come out every 8 months or so with some new models alongside.
@@changer_of_ways_999 they've already said that you can use your old armies to play it, I don't see a y reason why you couldn't buy Sigmar minis and use them, I'm already building an 8th edition chaos army in this manner.
Well it lasted for almost 35 years so I'm not sure if that constitutes failing. The sort of game Warhammer started as (a narrative heavy fantasy wargame with roleplay elements) cannot survive GWs business model, and its transition to a 'competitive' game never really worked (I dont think 40k does either, the game systems don't lend themselves to a balanced game, which is fine unless you push it as one). Mantic have shown, with KoW, how to do a competition friendly rank and flank mass battle game.
The Old World is a potentially good start and I'd love it if they explored the Old World setting more (maybe an Old World themed Quest game) but I can't see it happening. The non trademarked races etc just aren't in their MO.
wait it failed? its literally the only Warhammer content i know and i am deeply in love with it T_T
The Table top failed at least
Well yes, the setting is dead for a reason, they are trying to ressurrect it, but we will see.
It was by far their biggest loss of money, there's a reason aos was created, the game was dead
@@jtowensbyiii6018 damn, that sucks. well hopefully they get more people into it with warhammer 3. i am sure they will do more tabletop if thats the case
1) As the video says, it's a pain in the butt getting into WHAT Fantasy and build an acceptable army.
2) 40,000 has a more appealing setting/lore at first glance. A gritty space opera with religious themes and a 2000AD Comic-like atmosphere has always been more attractive to young players than Fantasy which was pretty much Dungeons & Dragons meets British humor.
GW needs to shift to an auto update /faq format for core army books. Give someone a coupon code for their digital copy when they purchase the print book, and have that digital book auto update when a change happens. Insane and a massive barrier to entry for people to get in and stay in the hobby otherwise.
I completely agree with this video! I think backwards compatibility will really help AOS players to be able to play both games! I also think that if they adopted the 4th edition army list composition will really help out with the cost of entry:
50% Characters - 25% Lords and 25% Heroes
25% Regiments (This means all units: Core, Special, and Rare)
25% Monsters, Warmachines, Allies, etc.
Granted, it would mean a return to the Hero Hammer Days, but it would really help out with costs. You could go heavy with your Characters and still not have to buy too much with your units.
I just hope they really commit this time; I got the feeling towards the end they just gave up and abandoned it.
In 8th ed 40k I needed like 6 books for one army and I wasn’t playing soup
Holy crap
1st - base rule book
2nd- base codex
3nd- supplement chapter space marine i presume ?
4th - psychic awakening
5th - ?
6th - ?
@@sertonetix rule book chaos space mariene supplant for chaos knights book for single chaos knight then the supplement book for them so I guess it was only 5 book unless I forgot one I haven’t played sence around that game of 8th I’ve moved to fantasy
@@BaileyBecca Ah is see thx ! As a necron player who spend all of 8th with 1 book + the main rule one, I was like : "6 ! how ?" xD
Maybe the Deamon codex or a Imperial Armour one is the missing 6th ?
I remember trying to get into WFB again after Uni, about three times. Each time it was the same problems over and over again.
The cost of building a useable army.
The stodgy rules system (...movement trays.....) that had us spending more time looking up the rules for how a unit was supposed to move and turn etc than actually playing the game.
The lore was good, the game system and such dragged it down.
Honestly I was so disillusioned with it that when AOS was announced I didn't care much...I saw the minis and thought "Oh, they look pretty cool" but I had no interest in Warhammer Fantasy so I didn't pay much attention until I got a chance to read the rules. And a clumsy and experimental a lot of AOS 1st ed was, it was actually FUN to play, and now I think 3rd is bloody brilliant and I adore the High Fantasy craziness of the lore.
Verminetide 1 & 2, Total War Warhammer, Mordheim, Warhammer RPG, point to the Warhammer Fantasy being a popular setting, it's just GW places most of its attention on physical tabletop, which, like you said, has a high cost of entry and a resulting lack of local players. Virtual games are excellent to branch out into, they and CA could do great things together. Warhammer 40k is ripe for a TWW attempt, even if it will be a pain in the arse to get right.
Its had its day. Everyone of importance from its early days has long since left to pursue their own goals where they can flex a bit more creative muscle. Now its just a hollow corporate shell run by penny pinchers. I know there are still very talented people working on there but they do not have any sway in business decisions.
Kind of a shame as despite being rough in some places its earlier days were very exciting and colourful. I recently managed to get some of the 1st-3rd edition books I was missing and they are full of character despite being quite brief especially in regard to 1st edition stuff. 4th edition with the first independent army books like Undead and Chaos (well technically chaos had the slaves to darkness and lost and the damned books in third which are absolutely amazing) was also interesting and so was 5th with the return of Lizardmen but 6th onwards it really started to fall apart for me culminating in me eventually leaving altogether in 8th I believe.
I loved the colorful and cartoony look of 4th-5th edition Warhammer.
Don't care for the grimderp approach they went with in 6th edition.
I and several friends still play Warhammer 8th edition Fantasy. After literally sinking over $1,000 into an army (and I have 4) we were disinclined to chuck all of that and start investing anew. Add to the financial cost the time commitment. It takes a lot of effort to paint up a respectable army. Relative to your discourse, my observation brings up three points:
1) You are right. Cost of entry is a big put-off to new players
2) You are wrong. Your desire for updated models might appeal to the "I-must-have-everything-new" crowd, but it certainly does not appeal to me or to the majority of my Fantasy-playing friends. Don't get me wrong. We love cool models. However, we do not love being forced to put out more money and more time just to stay in the game. Upgrading for pleasure is not the same as upgrading from necessity.
3) Fluff games. What a pejorative term. We play for fun. Tournaments? Only if self-run. We have done things like "Blood in the Badlands." Even if official tournaments were available, we wouldn't be packing up our models and flying to distant destinations for the experience. We are not totally into "optimizing" armies by playing every trick in the rules; that route is a joy killer. Some of us like to bring in less capable units just for the "color." As for official tournaments, we have better uses for our time and money.
You missed a couple of mistakes:
1) The end of 8th edition Fantasy was very instructive. We were abandoned. Okay... they stopped making models for it. Their company, their product, their call. There is always eBay if you want to expand or add a new unit type. However, they pulled all the FAQ's. If you hadn't been foresightful and download them before the end, you were left scrambling to locate unofficial sources. Fortunately, there are some (which Games Workshop seems intent on squelching). Additionally, no further game questions are "officially" answered. What does this say of the future? Will you trust Games Workshop to honor your past commitment of money and time? That would be naïve on you part.
2) The rules are there to sell armies (even they have said they are a miniatures company, not a rules company). Proof?. Hoard armies. Proof? The very expensive figures that you lamented. If you want them in the game, you had better build a 3,000 point army to escort them onto the field. Thus, the rules will continue to be skewed to promote model sales, as will product line additions and terminations. Consequently, difficulties with the rules are unlikely to be addressed if they do not affect sales. Games Workshop needs to seriously examine their business model with special attention to the validity of their assumptions about present and potential players. "Ignore sunk cost," might be prudent advice when making a business decision; however, that mantra carries no weight when your wife is pointing to your boxes of toy soldiers and wondering when the old couch will be replaced (we're not all single losers living in our parent's basement).
3) You might be familiar with what I call, "The D&D Problem:" Each edition has ever-bigger monsters, ever-stronger spells, ever-tougher armor, and ever-more-deadly weapons. The role playing gets submerged in the arms race. Games Workshop had a similar problem with Fantasy. Each new unit type had ever-better statistics. Soon the core of the newer armies was better than the special of the older armies. If you were playing to win, you had to buy the new armies. This push to the new was helped along by army book editions. Older units got "Nerfed." Units which in older editions had high success, were degraded to also-ran status with later editions (Dwarfs are a good army example. The Lizardmen's Slann is a prime unit example). A big problem here is that the point value of a unit has no linkage to its field performance. Equally pointed armies are commonly badly mismatched. The mismatch goes beyond player generalship and luck of the roll. When the game can be called before the first unit moves there is little fun in playing (example: 2,000 points of Lizardmen vs. 2,000 points of Chaos Warriors. Most experienced player selected and played the Lizards. Much less experienced player selected and played--for the first time--the Chaos Warriors. The Lizards were tabled. The Chaos Warriors lost one unit). When staying competitive means abandoning you past financial outlay and time commitment, there is little reason to continue supporting the game. Games Workshop will love the "deep pockets and infinite time" crowd that complies with their wishes, but those fish are a small subset of reality. GW risks running out of dedicated fans.
The slow apparent crumble of GW is unfortunate in that they have produced some interesting models and I've had fun playing 8th edition Fantasy. Fortunately, many other good model sources have arisen. Also, there are some decent alternative rules sets as well. Some rules even invite "outside" models (usually limited to a percentage of total army). The rise of 3D printing adds an exciting new dimension. For table-top war gamers, the future looks good.
"The first reason Warhammer failed is the pricing."
Why does that sound so familiar?
Fantasy was killed by GW. My armies and my friends armies were completely removed from the game. After spending thousands on shitty plastic, they kick us in the nuts and slap us in the face. Then tell us it's ok, buy sigmar. WTF. All while releasing total war fantasy, where all races are playable. Worst company in every possible way. I bought a 3d printer and I will never give GW another penny. They lost lifetime customers overnight, and then tried to say it was failing... They killed it. You won't catch me in a GW store ever again. And I own four 2000+ point armies.
Warhammer fantasy/the old world should be a 10 or 15mm scale, 28mm is way to big for the large expansive rank-and-file battles it wants to convey
Plenty of minis out there in 10-15mm. Even more in 20mm and 1/72. Build two armies and you’ll never be short of opponents. Terrain is also smaller and cheaper.
Whatever Geedubs may cook up and call it "Old World" it will never reach the original. To me, it is stick-puppeting the rotting carcass of what they had decades ago to draw in old fans on the promises of nostalgia, nothing more.
- Balance the game, many people I knew stopped because it became hilariously imbalanced from around 7th's end.
- Reasonably priced core units and starter sets (the twin army packs to let friends share cost were amazing.)
- Stop naming things VernNoun NounVerb. It's so cringy. They're Vampires, not "Soulblight Gravelords"
- Promote it as a big game, have it in all GW stores alongside 40k. It won't ever go big if it's hidden in some specialist catalogue.
- Full model compatibility with AoS's equivalent units (ie - base inclusion in packs)
- Ensure all races are playable on launch with rules for ALL their existing units.
- This includes all units and characters from the original setting timeline.
- See Old World as an addition to WHF, not a remake.
- Do not shy away from using the characters that AoS also uses, their origins are far more iconic and important anyway.
- Use Total War Warhammer's hype that it's built! That game saved the whole setting, they would be fools to not exploit the new fans it's brought in by sharing content.
Prices wasn't the killer of WHFB 8th edition was. You went from a maneuver heavy race to get a devastating charge off to a random dice rolling grind-slog. All the grand tournament players like me who would drop between 500-1500 dollars a year to make that years army stopped playing because they took a decent rules set and ruined it. Taking any skill from the game and filling it with random dice rolls killed it. We would bypass miniature cost by creative fillers in units, a mausoleum in the middle of a ghoul unit a supply wagon in the middle of some halberdiers it was an amazing time to play the game.
Prices doubled, box contents halved and games required more models making it stupidly expensive
Meh, I've moved on to other systems and I don't think the old world is going to give me any reason to trust GW again.
Same. There's far better written game systems out there for your time and money. Hell, I don't even care about the warhammer background anymore.
Vermintide and total war, brought him back to life fantasy and even they given a new fan base, personally its too expensive to me but maybe i will buy some of my favorite units if they have new models
I'm norwegian and I work full time (basic work still has fairly decent pay). Alas...Warhammer tabletop gaming is a hobby I simply can't afford.
Cost of entry is just way too high.
As someone who played WHFB at right upto end times, there was plenty of new releases. Was there some out dated armies ? sure but look at tyranids and elder in 40k. The real issue is the rule set created a barrier to entry with how you ended up needing to run everything as 10 wide a and atleast 4 deep units which sometimes meant buying 4 boxes of the same miniatures to make it a viable unit. Thats my 2 cents anyway but im someone who got over end times and moved on to to AOS after 2nd ed, Its much better than 7/8th ed fantasy ever was.
One of the reason of the demise of Warhammer fantasy i've been told about by a Games Workshop seller (around 2018), was due to the complexity of the rules compared to the 40K rules.
I stared at him quite puzzled, and told him that the lastest rules were far more easy to apprehend compared to what they used to be in the 90's when I started playing the game.
He answered me "probably, but the generations of kids we have now are not the same as the kids that belongs to your generation: they get distracted, confused very quickly and can be easily deconcentrated if the things gets too dense. I tried to hook many of them during some free plays in the store, and I quickly lost many of them as soon as some rules started to stack up, especially the one involving the movements of the units; they really prefered a more direct approach of the rules such as in 40K or AoS"
I don't know if he was talking about the kids in my country (I'm from France) or if this is a general feature that touches all the kids around the world, but I found this explanation pretty sad, especially for the kids and how to considerate them...
The other explanation of why Warhammer Fantasy sunk, is partly due to the Lord of the Ring film based game: many kids in the 2000s went for the game of their favorite movie back then, and once they had their entire army done and painted after a year or 2, wondered to which army they should switch in another game in order to diversify.
Since both Lord of the Rings and Warhammer Fantasy were Medieval Fantasy based game, and W40K was a futuristic Sci Fi game, they all went for a 40K army as a second choice that would diverge radicaly from LotR, and therefore completely neglected Fantasy.
The same seller who was a 12 years old kid when the Lord of the Ring movies came out told me that this was the exact pathway he followed during the entire 2000 decade and that he only started to learn about the rules of Warhammer Fantasy (he already knew about some of the lore before) when he wanted to candidate as a GW seller in the early 2010s.
I play Kings of War with GW figures and, in my head at least, I’m still battling in the Old World.
I still have my old Tomb Kings models waiting for an opportunity to play.
Also, back when I played with them I lost almost all my matches, but I never gave up. Though, I hope they get a buff in the Old World game. 😋
ironic someone called the great book of grudges isn't holding a grudge against gw after the whole , well everything that happened.
In our scene special characters were usually banned outright. Not because of point costs but because they were so ridiculously over powered. HeroHammer was real. From 3rd-7th when I played and I assume 8th also. The prevalence of special characters is what has kept me away from AoS, it seems they’re mandatory in that game.
Probably controversial opinion but I think they should change the models scale, whatever direction.
- Either make models bigger and reduce the number of models to paint per army since it really was a chore to paint all those models, especially the basic infantry blocks. I know it's a meme but the painting burnout was real. But that would kinda change the whole huge armies battles feel of WFB.
- Or make models smaller so they are easier to paint, surely not as small as warmaster 10mm scale, but somewhere in between. That way you still get that huge fantasy battle scale but can be painted easier and still look great.
I really feel the scale is one of the root cause that led to WFB downfall. I feel it was in an awkward place. Too detailed and too numerous at the same time, getting the best but also worst of both worlds. I bet simpler rulebooks would also naturally follow with either scale change. At the end of the day people couldn't get into a hobby that took so much time to get into and cost so much. All the talks about updating models and army books are nice, but this is all superficial.
Old world will be a lot like Adeptus Titanicus. First release will be $250+ big box with two small armies, rulebook, terrain, and necessary markers, templates, etc. Alongside that will be a rules box release with rules and templates, only. GW said they want you to play with your old models, so initial rules will have a full index for all armies.
“Battle books” will come out later, along with a drip of new models and rules for the forces in the book. Initial release will probably be Kislev vs Daemons (kislev teaser plus Warhammer 3 hype). First battle book will be orcs vs Bretonnia. 3rd will be empire civil war. From there, I don’t think they have anything roadmapped, but could see skaven vs tilea/estallia/dogs of war kinda thing
I played FB back in the early 1990's, along with Epic 40k and 40k, only dug out the boxes earlier this year when cleaning the loft out, filled 12!!! 60ltr plastic boxes full of miniatures, books and box sets, some of the blister packets were not even opened (and priced at £2.50), but that was work getting in the way back then. May have to start painting again, will keep me occupied for quite some time (though I think ive only got the 4rh edition books...).
During 6th or 7th edition I remember there being a higher number of potential books. Core rules, main army, army supplement, warlord rules, ally rule book, and ally rule book supplement. Like the sheer number of books you could bring to the table was insane.
7th was a massive shitshow I remember it well someone in charge of some army books fucked it for everyone it was pretty unplayable for a time
Not sure what you were playing, but it wasn't Fantasy. You needed the rulebook, army book and maybe a supplement like Storm of Chaos if you were playing a very niche army. 40k 6th edition kick started GWs love of spamming books and it went downhill from there. Just look at how many AoS or 40k need now.
@@TheGreatBookofGrudges Isn't this the problem now though? I had my interest cut in AoS and 40K after being out for years anyway when I saw just how many rules books you need...that and the AoS showcase and gutting of those tribal looking forest elves. Legit made me feel bad for picking up Sylvaneth on seeing them, forgot about the showcase and the hobby again due to cash issues. When things were looking better like a year later and I went back to check on how things were going those elf models just *didn't exist* so I thought ok then, kept my money.
I don't think cost was really an issue - Fantasy had more models per army than 40K on average but tended to be cheaper since it had fewer larger models like vehicles - I spent less on my 4000 point Skaven army than I did buying a 2000 point Dark Eldar army for 3rd edition 40K, but then the only large models in that Skaven army were the Vermin Lord and Doomwheel, whereas the DE were packing two Raiders, a Ravager and a Talos.
The big drop I saw in Fantasy came with sixth edition. The shift in tone and rules saw many of the existing fanbase start drifting away, with few new players coming in to replace them. I don't think it was an issue with barriers to entry for Warhammer though - one thing we tend to forget these days is that GW were heavily pushing their Lord of the Rings game at the same time, and back in the early 2000s any fresh faced youngsters looking to get into fantasy gaming were probably far more interested in Hobbits than they were Halflings.
“I love Warhammer, I hate Games Workshop.”
Thanks for the video. Fantasy is my favourite setting, too! I really hope it's NOT a forgeworld game, not only because of price, but because of the lack of plastic kits. There is a thriving community of collectors/players of the older editions, so there is definitely a market there for this game, but they really need to keep their promises regarding use of older models etc, as well as staying true to the lore. Not going to comment on current GW marketing practices - we all know how that's likely to go. Here's to hoping the game system and new model releases are good enough to draw in the oldhammer crowd as well as the new Total War fans, for the sake of the setting! :)
Yes this was fun with so pointy characters. Remember Lord Kroak in 6th. He was more than 1000 Points or so. Totally agree with you, there is a lot which has to change if Orld world should be success for them.
What really hurt Warhammer, IMHO, was the scalping of the fan base combined with massive power creep and ever increasing army size. Most of the problems that GW had were of their own creating. I admit to having hated 8th ed as so much of the game had been lost at this point. Massive blocks of monstrous infantry/cavalry were in. People were six dicing their most powerful spells all over the place. Immune to psychology was all over the place and most armies could get a leadership ten with a re-roll 'bubble' to roll around under.
I always said that the best way forward was for GW to move the Warhammer world on by a decade or two and have a bit of a re-focus. My suggestion was to limit the game to the Old World (still release rules for the other races) but to maybe focus on seven races to start off with; Empire, Dwarves, Wood Elves, Orcs & Goblins, Undead, Skaven and Beastmen. I'd also thought that a shift in tone might help as well. My idea was to replace Chaos with Undeath as the main antagonist with the resurrection of Nagash leading to a massive shift in the winds of magic with the Lore of Death becoming the dominant lore. This would hopefully give each faction a new look and theme without damaging what had come before.
With the 'new' edition you would get army boxes dedicated towards each race with general, magic user/Runesmith, infantry unit, missile unit, cavalry unit and 'special' unit or two. These boxes would be reasonably priced and would contain a small 'get you by' rule book and army book. This would give you everything you need to get into the game in one simple box and each army would be reasonably balanced against the others in the range. From there you cold get 'battalion' boxes to add to the core army (again balanced against other battalion boxes) then followed by individual unit and character boxes.
I would have made new armybooks for Cathay, Araby and Vampire Coast.
I liked the self-destructive nature of the Skaven, nothing like lobbing poison wind globes or firing off a ratling gun or warpfire thrower at a enemy unit in hand to hand and really liked the fluff of the Beastmen (yes they sucked but had fun in a siege battle where I had a beastlord with the black mace that was great at breaking a gate and pulping a couple enemy heroes).
And yet GW is still staunchly pretending like the Skaven don't exist. I think they just neglected the army for so long that several third party options popped up such as Punga, and so now that those options exist GW is ignoring the army out of sheer petty spite.
I heard a rumor from some gw employees that the skaven are being re done right now
And they're going to release a bunch of new things for them in 2022
They recently made a bunch of retail stores and back all of their skaven stuff
@@silver9809 GW employees are notorious for talking completely out of their butts. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see it, but historically "a GW employee told me" is about as accurate as "Spikey Bits said".
@@Ankhtowe yeah I get it, hopefully there's someone truth, since he did say they recently made alot of retail places send all of their skaven stuff back to the warehouses, although that might be too try and sell it as online only
It died because it was a dated game system and there were so many models available on the secondary Market there was no way for them to make any more money off his system
Don’t worry, I’m building my cross for the ensuing Crucifixion.
I do kind of like having named characters functionally only working in larger point armies. Like a company captain wouldn’t/shouldn’t (depending on chapter or head cannon if it’s homebrew) accompany just a few squads for a missions. This isn’t the Ultramarines movie. At least for me, yeah, 3k points up to truly Apocalypse matches should warrant the use of named characters because fluff wise it just makes sense.
Honestly, I liked the thing with the named characters. For me Warhammer always was about carving your own corner of the universe and building YOUR force, not pre-made character XY. So I prefer named guys to be underpowered over the opposite. If there's a meta (which there has to be) it should be generic chars. Ofc the ways it was in Fantasy might have been a bit much (still better than current 40k were named chars are taking over) but in an ideal world they would be very specialized, being competetive only under specific curcumstances/with very special army comps.
Let me sum this up:
GW makes really nice looking models and completing lore.
GW makes absolutely shit games. You can disagree, but an unbalanced competitive game with power creep and factions that get forgotten about is not a good game.
In general, I agree. They have made two of my favourite games of all time though, Blood Bowl and Space Hulk.
I never got into the larger army based games, as I have always liked diversity and can't possibly justify the cost of more than one army, or even one army for that matter.
@@crypsisjim see I would love to own multiple, but 40k for example: it's expensive to buy armies, paint, and the rule book - then you find out your army hasn't been updated in years (necrons) and you're basically screwed in the modern meta.. I love their lore, just wish they would update their shit. I hear newer games by them are better though.
@@Dead_Heir I get you completely. I love games, but I can't dedicate that much investment to one faction of one game.
To do that and then find your faction is unplayable must be devastating.
@@Dead_Heir not to start an argument but Necrons have been updated. New basic warrior sculpt, several new HQs, a terrain piece of their own, new codex for the current edition, and a few completely new units.
I'm not sure why you believe they haven't been updated.
@@TheChaoticEntertainment last time I looked at them was 2019, so I must have missed it. Still, going years without an update to make then competitive isn't good game design. Don't get me wrong, I love Warhammer, I just wish GW would get their shit together.
A friend of mine played Chaos before the split. After the split, most of his core was in one army book, while most of his elite/heroes was in the other.
Another one played Chaos Dwarves.
Do you think they ever bought another mini, after their investment of hundreds of Euros was invalidated by pure WG incompetence?
As long as I get to paint a small army of Bretonnian Knights in a riot of color schemes and heraldries again, I'll be happy.
i hope they bring back blocks of infantry, i love me a huge block zombies shambling forward with a necrarch vamp in the back just summoning more
I thought that it was just that loads of people had armies already, they had reached saturation point where they didn't want or need to buy more miniatures so GW sales were down for WHFB and so GW decided to scrap the entire game.
GW probably could have changed this by investing in new models. People won't buy more models if they're just the same dated ones from ten, twenty years ago. But if they come out with new sculpts, that look much better than the ones they have, players might be compelled to buy them. If you provide a product that people want, they'll be interested, even if they have a similar version already.
The mistake GW made was being complacent, and thinking they could just coast on existing models forever. Then being confused as to why players weren't buying them. It's the same problem in 40K with Craftworld Eldar. Players don't invest in Craftworld armies because they aren't interested in Craftworlds, they just get put off by the aging sculpts. Whereas GW lavishes the Space Marines with attention, which in turn makes people want to buy them.
Making a product sell is a matter of meeting the customer in the middle. You cannot blame the customer for not wanting a product, when you aren't willing to do the work and spend the money to make it _worth_ buying.
@@Bluecho4 the new sculpts turn around for armies, particularly Xenos is particularly long, was it 19 years for the ork kits ?
@@davedogge2280 ork player here, was a long time. Very long. But I've noticed a lot of my fellow Ork players who have 90 to 120 boys have no intention of buying new Boyz kits when the full multi-part kit is released. So it's a bit of a catch 22 in that regard.
@@TheChaoticEntertainment for ork players with existing ork boys the new mono-build ork boyz are just a big luxury for variations in their armies' asthetics.
@@davedogge2280 no, I was referring to when the full multi-pose version they announced will be released as a stand alone. A lot of us aren't buying them because we simply don't need them. They're nice, but we just don't need them.
I really hope the “Old World” isnt a cash grab for all the new Total War Warhammer fans. Can you imagine how much money they’d be making if OG fantasy was still alive? TWW1 got me into Warhammer as a whole.
Imagine my disappointment when I discovered that Fantasy was fucking murdered lol
Do you know how many people have gotten excited about Tomb Kings due to that game! With no tabletop or models around to buy! I already have a ton but would love 30 or so more archers but not at the current prices.
Go back in time. 2002 Warhammer 6th ed, 40k 3rd ed.
Warhammer was a much better game, both in terms of balance, variety of factions (50% of 40k armies are Imperium offshoots) No poster boy army, so they all get a fair run on army books.
By 2006, WHFB had every single army with a new book for that edition, 2 Global Campaign books, and 3 Annuals with a wealth of additional units for friendly games. 40k 3rd ed had completely different rules for an entire phase of the game in a WD issue, the first half of army books were stripped down, with less than a page of wargear per army, then later ones were bursting at the seams with content. Yet somehow 10 years later, one of these games would no longer exist and the other would be the powerhouse of the company's IP. Why? Because you can sell a Space marine starter box to a 12 year old more easily. GW stopped caring about long term customers years ago, it's whole business model is geared towards buying the shiny new starter box, game design doesn't matter.
I couldn't care less about what they do with WHFB The Old world because 6th Ed has had a huge resurgence in my area, I don't ever have to worry about GW stepping in to mess up a good thing, because we already have all of the rules. The only thing I wish they would do is a made to order run on OOP WHFB units. I don't want their shitty, 50% too big, expensive new models, I definitely don't want their increasingly awful rules, written by people who had nothing to do with the heyday of the hobby.
40k 4th edition was a big improvement which really helped boost it in my community. Early 7th edition Fantasy (with all the 6th edition army books) and 4th edition 40k was GW at it's best IMO.
Gamesworkshop before the endtimes/age of shitmar: How old is Brettonian codex and model? Like 16 years? Why is noone playing brettonia? We need to raise prices to recoup our losses.
The skaven isle of blood units are on the same sprue as the high elves from the set, and gw has never bothered fo put them on a new sprue so here we sit.
Got myself 3 isle of blood Rogre's on ebay looking for a 4th
It's really too bad, the Rat Ogres and Warpfire Thrower were way better than what we have now.
"Hmmm yeah we could lower the barrier to entry, so that more people would play and the value of our product would go up... but you know what we really need? sloppy, low budget animations... yeah like a Netflix or Disney plus, all we need to do is kill off the fanimations. That's what the players want. Ow eh did I say players? sorry Investors... Investors want that."
-Some empty GW suit
And let's make every 2 player starter box include Space Marines or Stormcast because who needs variety.
I think I wanna say that, Warhammer Fantasy never “failed”. GW just chose to evolve their IP to Age of Sigmar after the End Times. With this, it heralded in new rules, better models, and more straightforward base game rules with a more free form game thanks to circle bases. It never failed though, that’s why you can go on Reddit and see thousands of people still playing fantasy, because it’s still good, it’s just not as refined, which should be obvious since AoS came out after, when they had more experience with writing games and stuff to build on.
Also they basically went IP-mad after losing the Chapterhouse Studios lawsuit. "CAN'T IP PROTECT THE WORDS ELF AND DWARF!? KILL IT! KILL IT!"
They used all of that experience to bring out AoS 1st edition, which didn't have a points system and was an absolute shambles. Until they retconned it with General's Handbook AoS was sinking without trace. IMO AoS is still a shambles where double turn = win and there is huge imbalance between factions and within factions.
@@tyrannosaurus696 hey, I never said it was perfect, but it sure as hell didn’t fail, seeing as it spawned their second most popular IP, a slew of fan favourite characters and iconic races and factions and an overall enjoyable game. 3.0 just released as well and fixed a handful of issues with the imbalance as well.
Honestly I would be all for it as I am getting into Skaven for AoS and I also have what I need to play 8th edition of Fantasy(minus the templets at the moment). But they need to do a few things. For the gameplay, I don't mind complex rules but just from reading the 8th edition book it really needs to be toned down a little and middle ground needs to be found between Fantasy's system and Age of Sigmar's to where it isn't confusing and you can't get lost. But a point/money ratio really is the biggest problem, if they want formations they need to give a lot more then what is currently on offer, what I mean is they would really need to give higher model count for a lower price otherwise this game will be dead in the water out the gate. I mean if a starter army could be made that only costs around $80 to $100 for each faction it would give more incentive to stick with the game and build from, keep in mind I am not talking about a terrible start collecting box, I'm talking about an army that is a couple of hq's, some core units with some specialist stuff that ranges around the 1000 point mark. Matter of fact my Skaven is going to start off being 3rd party models as that is way more efficient then going to GW.
Should just go to 10 or 15mm scale for this game.
It makes a lot more sense for it to be in one of those two scales. Makes you feel like an actual commander, too.
@Jarrod Kindred I think you’re absolutely correct. Then you could really push units and formations and affordably field a large army. At 10mm scale a smallish kitchen table can become an epic battlefield. It becomes more about the game than the hobbying.
In regards to named characters: back when I played during the 2000s A lot of the clubs and players i gamed with band the use of Named characters. Even in pickup games if your brought a named character no one would play with you.
Yea here it was the same and I didnt mind it one bit. Its cool to have named characters to sell the lore and set a bit of a powerlevel. But for me it was much more enjoyable to create my own characters and lore for them. They weren't needed for tournament games nor did we play them much in our local games either
We banned them from casual play unless you could really sell them. If there was a campaign or high point game that was written by us and self balanced then you're fine.