I mention in my corporate thinking points that "a scale change won't be enough on its own to sell" and I think people missed the second half of that sentence. Remember, this is marketing thinking, they want to do EVERYTHING in their power to sell to you, a scale change, aesthetic change, rules change etc. on their own will have appeal, but all of them at once is designed to have the broadest appeal, that's why it's done.
And as a result of doing something with "the broadest appeal", I and many others are actively disgusted and repelled by these practices. May the company and individuals involved in damaging the setting like this suffer. I have zero desire to continue putting any money at all towards them.
@@Thalanox For many of the reasons touched on in this video my Dark Angels stopped expanding with the release of primaris. I was working towards trying to pretty much build the entire chapter, but I will never include a primaris model. Now what is the point in continuing if 1st born are simply inferior in every way? This leaves them in the predicament of existing in a game of factions balanced vs the new and pretty much universally better in every way, for basically the same points, super space marines and so will be forever now be at massive disadvantage in any game. So they sit gathering dust probably never to be expanded upon again and only rarely played as every time I look at them it feels like a massive kick in the teeth.
Does anyone remember that old flashgitz animation from about 10 years about GW in their evil lair? They jokingly talked about the brilliant idea of selling a “super space marines” for half the models worth twice the points and twice the price. Absolutely prophetic.
Hah, yeah. IIRC, that was a direct response to Centurions, which came out at roughly the same time. But in hindsight, those were probably an early tester for the current "bigger and better Space Marines" thing we've got going on with Primaris.
The fact that their creation is a slap in the face to fans of the franchise everywhere? The lore behind them goes against everything we've been told? Maybe because they want to phase out regular space marines for these corporate trash nobody but the normies want? I stopped playing this garbage years ago and now I'm glad I sold everything. Not only did I make a chunk of change, I freed myself from ever playing a GW money trap again. If you're dumb enough to play a game made by a company that obviously could care less about it's fanbase like WH40K, slap yourself.
I thought that was about the Grey Knights. They were the original army / faction that was extremely well known for being extremely expensive, points-wise. I was literally reading poetry and haikus that were written on the subject.
I think my biggest gripe was it took us like 6 years to get a lieutenant kit that only just barely manages to get some multi-part options for customisation. GW have yet to top the old space marine commander kit for customisation/spare bits/unique things to combine together to really make it not just 'a' captain, but 'your' captain. None of the Primaris kits have even come close. Not a single one.
The squads are cookie-cutter or ETB monopose, and the characters are just monopose. As has been said, this strips the individuality that made Firstborn such a popular range. I'm of the opinion that current GW want to make people work hard for their kitbashes, which involves people having to buy full boxes of almost proprietary parts just for a fancy head, as one example. Beyond the limited chapter packs for PriMarySue, there is functionally nothing to offer personal creativity in this range.
yep, it's the same concept as the "4 scout-like marine units" - Reivers, Incursors, Infiltritors, eliminators should have all been a single unit with multi-options, instead it's multiple kits forcing more buying
@@darko-man8549 right. Like those should just have been a plastic box of primaris scouts that could use either bolt carbines, optional scoped sniper bolters, or pistols and knives. And then optional sniper rifles too.
The answer to the title could be resumed to 2 very short answers, one for the lore and look, one for the product : 1) Primaris totally missed the point of space marines and 40k as a whole, turning the astartes from monk warrior using long lost tech weapons considered as relic to defend a crumbling imperium in often glorious mele combat to generic masse produced space soldier (with literlaly not a single cosmetic variant in their gear, not even the chest aquila) using brand new tech that literally didn't have any single mele troupe at release. 2) A product clearly designed to force the mass of marines players to throw their old army and buy a new one. The simple fact that half of the original primaris release was about the phobos armor, a weirdly out of play tacticool spec ops marine line, kinda replacing scoot but not really, some wearing a skull mask because CoD made it a cool thing a decade before, while the other half was almost shot for shot a copy pasta of Starcraft 2 designs should be enough to tell you how badly off the mark GW was on that one.
"Chaos marines have become guys for the good guys to beat to show how tough they are." - Macca "First time?" - Me, an Eldar player, looking at the Avatar...
Chaos marine: i am a veteran of the great crusade, Horus Heresy and the legion wars. I have fought against and alongside daemons. I have the blessings of my patron god and I even get to use all the old crusade era stuff that’s now been mixed with warp sorcery and forbidden archeotech. What are you? Primaris: im the author’s pet *kills the chaos marine in one hit*
8:01 Sadly primaris explode if they use or enter anything not made by Cawl in canon. Many a Primaris lutennat died because a grot switched the sighs on the vehicles and tricked him into entering a landraider
_"Fantastic! Now all the people who want to integrate a few of these models in their army have to buy all new transport truck models, too, if they want to move them around quickly!"_
Never liked the shoehorning, a few people i know would have prefered the old Thunder Warriors to be reactivated as an emergency stop gap by Crawl and Gurlyman. Get more troops to the frounts of poorer quality but in quantity, sometimes you don't need a precision strike just a really, really, REALLY violent club
Yeah that would make more sense. Cawl couldn't top the Emperor's work of the Marines, so he made a cheaper, alternative. One could make them just as nutballs as the Thunder Warriors, causing tension. Or have them more loved by the Guard for their closer nature to humans (and cheaper price). Eating away the prestige of the Marines. Lots of conflict to work with either way.
It would have been cool if Cawl just helped streamline the process of making regular astartes and girlyman retconned his no legions rule. Instead girlyman is hiding behind bread boxes and cawl is a heretic ungrateful for the emprahs gifts.
That line of thinking 'more troops to the line but of poorer quality' was how I always thought of SM vs CSM when I first started in the mid-90's. I remember reading somewhere that the pre-heresy marines were more tailor made, were larger and in every way better than what came after. That is what made CSM so terrifying and potent, they were legions of these pre-heresy marines (with thousands of years of experience AND powers of the warp/dark gods) who were better than what the Imperium was capable of churning out to combat them. The Imperium was on the back foot always and the run of the mill SM's were essentailly power armoured cannon fodder which is why their heroes were so impactful/special. But now that everyone is special none of them are. Having said all of that I am glad the marines are actually larger than the models they are supposed to tower over, that bugged me to no end.
There's an old Flashgitz animation they did like 10 years ago, after they had all their old Warhammer skits nuked by GW legal, called 'Inside GW' . In it the evil GW CEO comes up with a new model range to revitalise the IP, 'Space Marine - Space Marines, a Space Marine inside a Space Marine'. Since they came out I've been unable to take the Primaris range in anyway seriously as to me they're literally just the Space Marine - Space Marines with extra Space and Marine that Flash managed to predict a good four or so years before they came out.
Yeah I just listened to devastation of Baal and it was amazing listening to how the blood angels struggle against their gene seed flaws. Then in the last chapter the primary sues show up and just don’t have the black rage at all and are immune to it. Even one of the chapter masters calls it out that they will just all become ultra Smurf’s in red plate.
Back in 2nd edition, they improved the marines statlines (Adding +1 Toughness and increasing Power Armour to 3+ Sv) with the designers notes at the back of the rulebook stating it was to represent the marines' elite status within the lore. Marine players had been excited with the idea of 'truescale' marines as far back as I remember. So they could have just said 'Hey, new truescale marines! We increased some stats as well. Enjoy.' In the manner of what they did in 2nd ed. Even head off detractors by stating that it's been done before. New toys and gadgets for the marines could have just been that Cawl lead an expedition where he recovered an STC and he's been working on interpreting some of the readouts under internal AdMech and Inquisitorial suspicion mitigated by Rowboat vouching for him. So they can even have their Fix-It-All Cawl as well. STCs are a huge thing so it shouldn't break lore. Replacing characters with Primaris versions? Same thing: 'New sculpt, bigger scale. Enjoy.' The real reason I think is probably the spectre of Chapterhouse once again. Copyright. 'Space Marine Tactical Squad' probably isn't as copyrightable as 'Primaris Intercessor Squad'. The 'tacticool' look is likely just to appeal to a broader audience - I think GW has been wanting to become more of an IP Factory in the future and toning down a lot of the Neo-Gothic look might fit in with that strategy. I stick to 2nd and 3rd ed. 40k these days. 8th and 9th edition were a bit bloated for me. Liked the video. Cheers.
"Superkrak" and "Superfrag" :D And I don't like how GW turned the Space Marines into the Craftworld Eldar with the Primaris Aspect Warriors and Primaris Grav Tanks.
Primaris Marines should have just been regular marines in upgraded armour. MkX could have been a new improved design, based on a recently-discovered STC template.
Or Cawl doing millennia of research to produce not only a next-gen armour, but build the infrastructure to deploy it en masse. Either way, there was no reason to tinker with the geneseed!
To be fair, the Primaris aren't the start of terrible looking vehicles and infantry. The planes from 5th and Centurions from 6th were already extremely dumb.
Planes filled out a slot we really needed....centurions, well they were pushing it, but still within parameters...I hate the primaris with a burning passion though.
@@helgi1921 The planes didn't make sense (how are they flying so slow?), threw the entire game balance out of whack and in the case of Space Marines looked stupid.
@@Warpwaffel never said they made sense. But we needes something other that thunderhawks that could fly.....and we got ...stuff. But I agree they look kinda derpy
The primaris looking like StarCraft marines makes sense when you consider how the tyranids have become increasingly similar to the Zerg design wise. I’m honestly just waiting for them to start turning the eldar into protoss Edit: also the NASA primaris actually look like they’d make for a pretty good home brew chapter especially with the NASA logo in place of the Aquila
@@calebbarnhouse496 At risk of sounding like I’m on GW’s side here, didn’t they like, *just* drop a bunch of new and updated Eldar less than a year ago?
@@CrusadiaIX Guardians, Warlocks, Rangres (plus the new ranger jetbikes), Autarch, Avatar of Khaine, Shining Spears, Dark Reapers, and Maugan Ra. There _are_ some models they still desperately need to get around to updating and I'm not a fan of the new Maugan Ra, but I felt overall the it a very well done, very faithful update to some classic models. The same with the Chaos Marines and the new Chaos Warriors. it's like Space Marines is the only faction GW _can't_ faithfully update.
@Son of Balder they did do some, but they still have no shortages of models older then the people they are trying to market it to, dawn of war has tons of models that you can't buy anymore, but I would be surprised if one model of the eldar line in that was refreshed before that wave
Luckily aos proved elves are popular enough to keep making. That said I know eldar players who complained that the updated eldar are too similar to fantasy elves now. Although I think this is silly, they were always space elves.
I despise the lore behind primaris and I've begun souring on the models as well. A space marine is already, by design, the biggest, baddest, most overpowered super soldier possible. Making them biggerer and badderer just cheapens it. There never should have been a distinction between real and primaris marines. It should have just been the IRL name of the true scale model line. Hell, if they had said Cawl had been busy inventing and stockpiling new weapons and vehicles, but he had to hide them until Guilliman came around and gave him the all clear would have been a hell of a lot better than saying he improved the miracles created by GOD. But these days the Emperor must be torn down in every way so we couldn't do that.
Honestly what's even the point of the Emperor at this point? If Imperium Nihilis can run without him and Cawl can create his own Marines then fck it, might as well flush the Emperor down the toilet. Honestly I hate the Primaris, I hate the Imperium wank, and I hate the Ultramarines being positioned as these bland good guys.
Yep. Primeass marines broke me. You could even say it's a better version of power Armour if you need to redesign the truscale but the lore violation made me stop caring about anything past their inception. I'm not even against the return of the primarchs but the lore for that sucks as well.
I get that GW had to do *something* to revitalize the Imperium. By the end of the 41st millennium they'd written themselves into a corner of certain doom as everything was unravelling, and enemies were swarming over them everywhere. But as soon as I heard about the Primaris marine concept, I knew it was written in as an excuse to sell a new range of models, and as you very eloquently explained: it's also introduced a whole series of contrivances that over-rode so much of the existing lore.
The whole point was always that the Imperium is dying. Instead of saving it they should have let it fracture. Imagine all the new factions and conflicts we could have gotten.
I love how TOC lists literally EVERY bad name apart from 'Hellblasters' 🤣 oh well, I guess at least you can tell what they do from their name... even if it sounds absolutely cringe. Does the Imperium even still believe in the christian concept of "hell" considering they routinely travel through the warp, a literal hell dimension???
"You can't rerelease the same models at a new scale, people will have no incentive to buy them" I'd correct this, people would have less incentive to buy them not no incentive to buy them, going forward you'd have better marine sales overall. (Was GW afraid of no sales bump or longer term increased sales from the new CSM or Imperial Guard kits?) What they did with the Primaris was to get greedy and do something they wouldn't do to another army line because the potential additional sales wouldn't be anything like what they got in the big bang of early Primaris sales to existing SM whales who'd finished their armies by making a totally new army inside an army. No doubt the upscaled Marines would have sold a bucketload too and probably been one of the best selling kits of all time. (Given how the sales of 40k spiked so much since 2017, though granted they had no way of anticipating the spike) The fallout is obvious though, short term you get a bonus but long term you have a problem of supporting all the kits in the Marine codex (When was the last time GW squatted a marine codex choice? They do it all the time with other armies but never with marines, the market is just too big with any dissent being a PR and sales issue) and you have this model line that is inferior in terms of variety, (Despite highlighting it all the time on their website, GW has seemingly gone to war against kitbashing with their monopose infantry since 2017. Special mention to the idiots who actually believe it would be literally impossible to have slightly longer or just upright legs or torsos and also have them be separate pieces, they show up in every comments section complaining about this) aesthetics (Again, people love Intercessors, even with their monopose, clone trooper ethos but has anyone ever called Inceptors or Aggressors cool? Even uber-fanboy Valrak is excited about a CSM style slightly bigger Terminator kit) intuitive simplicity (All the vague Latin names for trademark purposes and general messiness of Parimaris army structure. Tactical, Devastator, Assault, Terminator, it just made sense and was clear) and thematic conflict. (40k is all about grimdark Space Marines as warrior monks but your flagship model line has 1 unit, Bladeguard Veterans, which embraces that, the tactical suit ruined dreadnoughts) What's annoying is that GW has done all this at the time it has become autisticly dedicated to having the models match the fluff and for the fluff to be un-retconnable, what a time to start to go down that road. Thus GW can't, for instance, resolve whether the Black Templars who are very popular, are Primaris or not. They are Primaris scale now but, yeah, maybe they are Primaris now, maybe they aren't. They can't make the core of their valuable IP make sense anymore. In my opinion GW have been feeding off pre-2017 background and people being familiar with it, but as times goes on, the post 2017 background is going to be more and more what people will remember and will it really make sense or capture anyone's passion? They've made a mess out of their flagship model line for a little bump of sales from the whales they'd mostly have gotten anyway. (The Valraks of the world would have bought a whole new upscaled army, let's be real and you could have added some OP weapon options to the new kits for the other whales, lunatic guys who buy whole armies for a meta cycle of competitive 40k) Going forward this will be a problem, Primaris aren't cool and don't embody the ethos of 40k that has made GW so much money. Since 2017 they've been living off the pre-2017 40k Space Marines and just ignoring how the Primaris aesthetically don't fit into that. As more time passes this contradiction will become more prominent since fewer and fewer people will have their impressions shaped by what was but rather what is. 40k is defined, is unique and interesting for it's 'grimdark' a combination of the ideas from the Foundation novels and Dune (A declining, technologically stagnant somewhat feudalistic civilization, hell GW recently made a lot of cash from releasing a Mechanicus army with their background now being very well known and popular with their STC dogmas and monopoly on technology) with the 80s British cyberpunk of 2000AD along with heavy metal fantasy topped off with the gothic aesthetic best defined by John Blanche. The Primaris break and defy so much of that simultaneously it's amazing. It's notable, for example, that the new Space Marine 2 game has given Assault jet packs to Parimaris marines (Because the old protagonist must now be Primaris, you aren't allowed to feature non-Primaris marines in your licenced products) because the Primaris line is so broken and lost so much like the assault jet packs. As for the setting being 'stagnant', it's a setting not a narrative, by default it has to be stagnant. What GW and FW used to do, focus on campaigns on previously unknown worlds that expand the setting horizontally rather than push the broader timeline forward (And even created narratives with beginnings, middles and ends without broadly impacting the timeline) was the correct way to add to the setting to keep it from being stagnant without ruining it by resolving and ending things. (Like how the Primaris have resolved the gene seed faults to the detriment of the hobby setting) We can see the issues this has caused Star Wars in that the sequels (Due to the influence of the RLM critiques about lots of boring talking and world building in the prequels, necessary since the prequels were a new addition into an existing world and we needed to know what was different as opposed to the original films which just built the setting frame by frame) failed to establish a new setting set 30 years later. So scared were they of losing the Imperial architecture and stormtrooper aesthetic that actually glued together the otherwise quite disparate setting of Star Wars, that they broke the setting by just keeping the Imperials around and failing to explain anything about the state of the sequel universe. Thus new Star Wars is now being set during the rough era of the original films and a little after as a setting, we know how it ends and so it is stagnant but they keep making new media set during that time rather than continue to try to move the timeline forward since they botched that by not really creating a new setting with the new films. (Seriously we see maybe 3 or 4 planets and have no idea how anything works in the sequel films because they mistook the fact that the original films were the original films and thus didn't need a great of exposition with the sequels 30 years later which do require exposition about what is happening to set the scene because the prequels also had to do this.)
And I'd add that the Bladeguards are all copy pasted and they have no lore. Literally. There's no explanation as to what is their lore and where did primaris veterans came from or if they are primarified veteran marines.
Yeah Primaris are just culturally neutered and bland. I liked the height increase, but the armour is dull (it hasn't a spot on prior armour marks that I could mix and match), their tanks are now boring (grav tanks just feel lazy and don't fit the Imperium generally). The contradictions in both GW recent products, like the sudden increase in height for the IG and the major contradictions lore wise (lets be fair, there were always contradictions in the wider lore/history, but tis understandable), just puts me off buying.
I know you touched on it, but I was also very disappointed by the design decisions in Primaris Marines. Appearance notwithstanding, it's hard to get anything remotely like the old Dark Angels Veterans. Also, it bothers me that there is no equivalent to the Space Marine Commander kit, where all of those options existed to make a unique Captain. I have to conclude that this decision is absolutely deliberate, and it doesn't sit right with me. And in general, there's a lot of that kind of hostile design in GW these days. I remember when a huge amount of 40k was about telling your own stories, and converting your own models, but it really feels as if everything from rules, to the way they design the connection points, arms and shoulders on models, seem to disincentivise that. Maybe it's just me being a grognard, but I miss those things. Also I used to love the imagery of a proper drop pod assault, and I would love to recapture it someday. I'd hoped that Heresy would let me do that, but it appears that's easier said than done.
What i find weirdest is the random mixes between Grimdark and Tacticool, most notably in the Assault Intercessors, the Vambrace and Pauldron trim is cool and all but now i can't have a guy with a Chainsword in the other hand? Why do they have weird Smart Watches on the other, they got trig homework? I wish they allowed you to 'spec into' grimdark or tacticool, not shove them both in.
I cannot help but consider the Rubicon Primaris to be a freudian slip on a corporate scale. As in if they can get away with this, they can get away with the full conversion of their model range. And the funniest thing is that whoever named it likely just knew it was a famous river crossing and meant the name to just refer to crossing from Oldmarine to Primarysue.
Lol why do you think that. The idea of a Rubicon as a point of no return is by far the most will known use of the word - many people who use it wouldn't even know that it's a river, or how the idiom came about from historical events. They absolutely meant it in that sense - a marine becomes primaris irrevocably, therefore you cross that Rubicon. It's very obvious and very straightforward.
Someone also had a video on the primaris as well that made me think that primaris are a Further set for Space Marines to go away from their human roots. As they seems to get themselves killed alot either by Self Sacrifice or because they are Green and decided to argue with a Bunch of Custodes that ended up with their chapter and them dying.
I am an Chaos Marine player since late second edition 40k. I completely stopped playing after nearly the end of 8th edition. I never stopped Collecting since then too. I think you are absolutely correct with your video, again. Gathering Storm and its aftermath broke my heart, but Gw's decisions what to push, marketing and ignorance broke my soul.
I was buying the Gathering Storm throw-away books as fast I could, still could not get a hold of Book 3... always sold out. Turns out, all these sloppy, poorly written rushed books where in the *guise* of a nice Hardcover Forgeworld book, but where just a bullsh*t cash grab. At $60 CAD each
Your take is bang on. I started an SM army after Primaris were released, mostly down to liking the aesthetic of the first Mk X, and there have been some hits for me that I added (Indomitus worked for me, Sword-and-board + tabards, Outriders, the knightly aesthetic, especially as I play Dark Angels). The Redemptor also slaps. Buuuuuut that's about it. Lorewise I hate that they're apparently "immune" to Chaos, or more resistant to it, and I've done everything I can to keep a knightly aesthetic for them. So many kits they've received have been misses it's untrue, and my biggest pet peeve is giving them such easy access to certain tech. How is plasma special for DA when any chapter can take entire units of it ? How is antigrav fun for Tau (which I play) and other Xenos when the Imperium also gets it ? How the hell did they bring back volkite under a new name ? And the way they've replaced Devastators is just embarrassing. If they want Bobby G to bring back the idea of heavy support squads all having the same loadout, cool, but just make it the one kit with all weapon options in there. Why are there separate units for all these weapons and why are you releasing them over the span of YEARS, just milking an entire unit out of each loadout ?
"This is what happens when you inherit someone else's universe, and you didn't earn the privilege to write in it, but instead are just handed it on a plate" ... feeling sudden and constant dejavu
Shoutout to Chris Wraight for having four banger white scars books, Path of Heaven, Scars, Jaghatai Khan book, Warhawk. The white scars models have the most character in forgeworld and the white scars actually came out of the Horus Heresy novels better for it, not worse. Feels like white scars are the only thing worth collecting anymore.
Primaris split the space marine range in two, along with creating a massive plot cancer (cawl) that continues to fester and grow. Yeah, some of the new models are nice on their own, but the Primaris range is so weird, twisted and incomplete. Despite the huge number of kits, they still don't have iconic space marine gear like terminator armor, drop pods, land raiders etc. Some people are reporting rumors that the split range will be merged back together in the next edition which may at least result in a complete feeling model range so here's hoping
What made the scale change worse, was that they also released new Death Guard and Chaos Marines, so they could have just increased their scale too, it was such a missed opportunity. Chaos feels so short now, even though they're bigger than they were. Chaos is Kevin Hart, Primaris is The Rock.
In 2015 I moved to a different country. I had no friends and was thinking of starting a gray knights army so I can meet people at the local games workshop store. Then I saw the Age of Sigmar land marines. They were bigger than 40k space marines and I knew as soon as I saw them that GW would one day very soon release true scale marines. So I decided to not buy any models until I saw the new stuff that was inevitably coming. I was right. But I also didn't care when they finally came out.
Mecha, 100% agree on your main point. The Primaris was a blatant cash grab by GW to FORCE players to restart from scratch, with ZERO SHYTES given as to the impact on the lore, which is the foundation of the game. (Obviously, the "forced" players are those who allow themselves to be tied down by the GW meta of no proxies, no 3D printing, etc.). I love your Disney Star Wars analogy, because both companies discarded what gave their IP value (the depth of lore) and ignored canon because it was inconvenient in the manner in which they wanted to monetize their product. Both companies are also recycling dead characters because they wanted to monetize the nostalgia of the fans and lack the creativity to produce new characters who fans have the same love and respect. I used to play Confrontation by Rackham, which was an amazing skirmish level fantasy game. The problem was the Company went public, and then had to show continual revenue growth to keep the shareholders happy. Their approach to show the revenue growth then destroyed what made the Company successful in the first place. Just feel like GW is going down that same path, but because they're the 800 pound gorilla in the gaming sphere it's harder to see the affect.
@@PKM9107 yeh its just a silly little game with silly little toys idk why anyone even plays it right? People who frame the hobby like you are the fucking problem, go tear up at a marvel movie trailer and get away from warhammer
Primarius and first born are practically identical when it comes to the outside perspective, if you wanted a more tacticool army you wouldn't choose to get into 40k, let alone space marines, if you were to choose based on just liking tacticool stuff you'd go off of tau because there infantry makes decent sense for a tacticool approach, there vehicles are sleek and rounded off, and everyone knows battlesuits are like the epitomie of tacticool approach, big guns to shoot well, missile systems and are either able to fly or are a weapons platform for shooting bigger guns
@@PKM9107 True. Man children is the wrong term. They are actually trying to appeal to people less man child than us and that’s the problem. The “I play Fortnite/CoD and like the MCU” crowd Remember when they first introduced Primaris and tried to basically retcon all unique chapter fluff? Like the BA no longer having the black rage etc? That was basically GW’s attempt to do what Disney did with Star Wars - purge the old lore because it’s baggage when it comes to marketing to casuals.
I have a Macca and Perun mashup fever dream going through my head. The scathing dry humor of Aussie analysts washing over me, as I'm powerpointed through the finer points of Imperium armor logistics.
So I'm in a weird edge case here: I started after the Primaris release, but got gifted a slew of old school Space Wolves (Including Pewter Terminators). I have a soft spot for the classics, and honestly dread the day when I basically lose my army. As such, I'm looking to get a different army that won't "rotate" as it were and simply let my pile of Astartes sit and never see tabletop use again. This predatory sales stuff GW has pulled from deep within the chasms of their anuses really annoys the hell out of me, but for now, not much I can do save not buy Space Marines
I owe a lot to the Primaris Marines: They came out and I hadn't played 40k in years at the time. When I found out that there are now "new" Space Marines, I took a look. With the result that I was horrified by what GW was doing there. However, a GW Store Manager brought me back to the TT hobby because he brought me to a new club. To my surprise, they played a bunch of TT systems there, not just GW. (Infinity, flames of war, kings of war etc). So I started my new adventure in the TT world and one of us started to get interested in 3D printing. I'll fast-forward a bit now, otherwise it'll be too long: Today I am self-employed and work in the 3D printing sector as a designer. I have established my own small brands and work for various companies such as Printminis etc. So the Primaris Marines have changed my life for the better and I am grateful for that. yet: I can only agree with you 1000%. A lot was done wrong there.
I got into 40k not long after 8th edition came out. And for probably a year before that I was absolutely immersed in the lore of the universe. And one of the biggest things that drew me in was the idea that the imperium was decaying and backwards. The fact that only priests with the vaguest knowledge of science and mechanics kept the machines of the imperium running. The various space marine chapters and their quirks and gene seed deficiencies. But after reading up on the lore, it became clear to me what exactly the primaris were. And it didn’t sit right with me. First off, I felt like they just looked like upscaled Mk. IV. Then obviously the lore, I already had a huge appreciation of firstborn marines. And the ‘super space marines’ really irked me. Now I have over 2000 points of firstborn for my custom chapter, and not a single primaris model. Sure the neglect firstborn have had is disappointing, especially rules wise. Although I am going to stand my ground, no primaris in my army! However, with even worse looking primaris consistently coming out, essentially making firstborn useless, I am slowly making the flip to Horus Heresy. Even though it has its own issues as a game system, it still seem overall better than 40K right now.
Primaris being shoved into the 40k universe with absolute disdain for how they'd impact the setting is epitomised by their introduction as inherently better than all previous Space Marines in all possible ways. This superiority came with no trade offs and no new flaws, they weren't Thunder Warriors 2.0 hurriedly churned out in a time of crisis. No, they're just better, and any new lore will be written specifically to emphasise that! A prime example would be how absolutely iconic Space Marine armour is: all that barely understood technology, using variations from Mark 2 all the way up to the incredibly cutting edge and rare Mark 8. Then Primaris come out of nowhere, fully kitted out in the never before seen Mark 10 armour! Wow, these guys must be a whole new level of bad-ass!... but wait, why is it Mark 10 and not 9? Well that's simple really, because 10 sounds better and it can be written as a X which looks cooler. That's it. That's the extent of effort in justifying decisions we now get from GW.
At the time of this, I remember discussing concerns with a store manager at one of the flagship stores. Their response was "it's our lore we can do what we want"... Grim... Second on the design choices, I think that as you say there are likely committees involved in all design decisions. And those committees very likely contain more 'business' incentivised people than they used to.
"People have no incentive to buy new stuff if you just scale up the old models" The incentive would be to match the scale. We have mix primaris/mini marine armies now and mixed IG ones, that both look terrible. I've definitely trimmed lists to be less effective by cutting out the one terminator or vanguard squad that didn't match the rest of the list visually.
Eh, well-painted IG look completely fine with old standing by new unless your army is a display piece meant for close-up beauty shots (In which case why were you using the 2005 potato-cadians instead of pretty third-party guard!)
100% this. I loved the 40k setting, I'm completely indifferent to the story since 8th dropped. If HH hadn't been a thing I wouldn't be a games workshop customer anymore.
I think the fact that Primaris marines exist to serve as a seemingly forced "upgrade" rather than an addition to Space Marines as a faction is what makes them unwelcomed. It's the fact that older 40k gamers who've been in the hobby for years now and stuck with several editions are being potentially forced to give up their firstborn marine armies that they've spent hundreds if not thousands building just to spend a large extra fee for the exact same models but 1.5x times larger if they want to keep playing. I'd understand if it were specialist units like Khaine or Abbadon, but we're talking about entire armies here.
Primaris represent the company chasing the “wider audience” and watering down the setting and aesthetic, several years in we can see the results of it.
I would feel better about the primaris in the lore if there was more depth to their creation and that the process to make them was 10 000 years of hell. You could add so much in on when and where the breakthroughs came through, who came in to help, where old technology was pieced together. If the primaris were finalized 20 years ago instead of 10k, and he finally got a forgeworld (stygies) to start production, it'd make their creation so much richer than Cawl going lol, I'm a genius.
You know what they've could've done instead of rolling out this goofy Primaris lore? Just make new models and say "hey we have bigger and nicer Space Marine models now, have fun" like how they did with CSM
To understand the complete mishandling of 'super' marines everybody should check the cursed founding article from Index Astartes 2. The mechanicus had been working with an inquisitor to try and make better marines and at first they seemed to be, but they are inherently wrong and go on a killing spree in the facility. In the end its obviously implied that Fabulous Bile found them and he then had more knowledge on how to make 'improved' and unstable marines. That seed was there for over a decade and unexplored when the accountants decided duuuur we need new spesh muhreens and cracked the whip on the writers to spit out cawl and his magic.
They need to fire the designer who keeps insisting Space Marines needs to be "Tacticool" because it's getting worse and worse. You can't even really convert around these. I have absolutely no idea why they aren't in heavier armour. I mean I know why, they wanted a cheap new kit that could be slapped on to existing Primaris marine bodies but it looks so cheap and goofy.
They used the same gameplan that they did for the Stormcast in AOS. Tons of "chambers" that come out with new variants of the same old. At least in my circle Stormcasts are not popular and thats one of the reasons why.
Thank you! You summed up my problems with primaris marines so well. Primaris marines were such a cool launch, that I decided to stop playing space marines and lean into my second army. So I guess in a way primaris marines helped sell me some Eldar models.
On the names-- they're not as terrible as you think. Intercessors is a play on intercession: they intervene on behalf of another. Really generic for a battleline unit, but it fits given how generic they are as a unit. Incursors is a play on incursion: "an invasion or attack, especially a sudden or brief one" they strike suddenly and quickly as the more aggressive, frontline phobos units Inceptors is a play on intercept, but they already have intercessors so they cut out the "ter": they intercept the enemy And I think the rest of the infantry are pretty obvious Outriders: outrider definition, "a person in a motor vehicle or on horseback who goes in front of or beside a vehicle as an escort or guard" Bladeguard: they are guards with blades rievers: rieve definition, "carry out raids in order to plunder cattle or other goods." (they're raiders) Invader ATV: it invades (mediocre, but its good enough when you compare it to "bikes" and "attack bikes" as if both of them don't still attack) Eliminators: they eliminate the enemy; eliminate has connotations with more precise means eradicators: they eradicate the enemy; eradication has connotations of more destructive means Hellblasters: they blast the enemy to hell (for these three, I agree they could've done better, but it's no worse than "devastator") Suppressors: they suppress the enemy I think it's unfair to lump in the invictor: naming conventions for space marine vehicles/walkers has never been accurately descriptive. If you think it's a serious, *new* issue, I posit this: what is a "deredeo" and what does that word indicate? I love the deredeo, probably tied with the BA librarian dread for my second favorite dread under the leviathan. But I know that the naming of it, along with many other vehicles and walkers is vaguely descriptive at best.
I agree totally. I joined WH40K in 7th edition. Taking Space Marines from the broken former human to the hero’s of mankind as super humans and twisting them into essentially the clone troopers from Star Wars ruined it for me. I still have yet to buy a single Primarus model.
Gathering Storm/Primaris Marines have more or less killed 40k as a setting. What we have now is more or less a skinsuit. Horus Heresy is the setting with actual depth, but from what I can tell, Abnett is setting up to do some very horrible things to the lore in the last Siege of Terra book
@Hydra Dominatus He has basically twisted the entire Horus Heresy metaplot into becoming a prequel for his Eisenhorn Cinematic Universe, and has somehow convinced all the other authors thats a good idea
@A McC Horus Heresy has always been the essence of the whole setting, and for large parts of the novel series it was done extremely well. What brought it down was the usual greed from GW combined with the narcissism of authors like Abnett and Bowden, who want to twist the entire setting to reflect their own vision rather than writing within it. For example, Echoes of Eternity was pathetically used by Bowden as a metaphor for his own ridiculous mental problems, to the point where he wrote Sanguinius to sound like a depressed teenager scared of his own refrigerator. Abnett is cynically using HH to beef up his 40k work, and is willing to destroy the entire metaplot to do so. But these arent symptoms of a story that cant be told well, a la Mass Effect, but instead are redolent of the indulgence of the writers
I agree. I have lost any interest toward the universe almost exclusively due to the primaris bs. It's a good thing the Heresy exists, but I'm not fine with its rules.
Last year's HH2.0 Age of Darkness release was the best thing to happen for the hobby in a while. Not because I'm particularly interested in the Heresy but that it made such a excellent start point for building pre-Primaris forces. Particularly small armies for skirmishes set during the Badab war. Alan Bligh rules!
definitely, Heresy is where the old style hobby is at now. I've lost all interest in 40k (except for playing old editions) and every new thing they do makes it worse. The novels are Ok but the game setting, Primaris and a lot of the other new model lines are just garbage now compared to heresy
@@paulyg405 I've just assumed GW recognizes the interest in HH models that stretches beyond the Heresy setting itself, the fact they've recently re-released the second half of the originally Japan exclusive Space Marine Heroes series 1 is certainly an indicator they're not quite ready to discontinue contemporary firstborn model lines just yet.
@@fransaacs I think you're right, and I would add that there's a market still for grittier, more historical, less cartoon/video game style models particularly with older gamers who have been around the IP for (sometimes) 20, 30 years. Plus, they would be mad to alienate that base of players, even though it's way smaller than for current 40k, because those gamers have disposable income and want to spend it on new toys. Carving that market off to Heresy and the upcoming Old World reboot is a smart move.
yeah when you think about it from a normal old marine army perspective it's great - 4 tactical squads, land raider, dreadnought, terminator squads and 2 captains.
@@paulyg405 absolutely, been away from the hobby for 20 years or so, that’s exactly how the box reads - it’s how I saw it, it ‘s how I’ve built it - there’s some Space Marines Heroes characters thrown in with a half a kit of MKIIIs - and right there, I’ve got all I need for old school Badab - using (atm) the Space Weirdos rule set - just because it’s so easy to navigate. Feels like GW gets it right more often by luck than design.
they realized they created a static setting where the imperium opposes technological advances, which makes it difficult to make new units that are different enough to where people would want to buy them and because thats bad for business, they decided to make up a reason for why they could, with cawl pulling primaris out of his behind and making new stuff, which conveniently works well for a company trying to make and sell new things all the time thats literally the only reason they exist
It doesn't though. The imperium was against new tech, but the imperium uses more vehicles, rifles etc than represented on table top. And then you have stc. Discovering a new stc, or a new fragement that completes an existing partial stc, or 'it was always there, just less popular' is all the lore they needed to justify new stuff.
They could have made sooo many units that were in fluff but not the tabletop; I don’t even think we got a unit with a power lance at all, hq or otherwise
The old marines models would have to be updated eventually. People were going to bitch and whine no matter what. I can remember people constantly whining about the "plot" not advancing in both 40k and fantasy.
The big thing that frustrates me with the Primaris is how separated basic unit roles are from one another. Why can't the intercessor box also contain the bits to create assault intercessors? Or Hellblasters? It makes the buyer feel like they're getting ripped off when all that really changes is the weapons they can hold, and it makes the units feel so one dimensional. You're telling me that this Primaris Intercessor can't understand how to use a plasma gun? Its not possible for them to wield a chainsword or a hammer? That doesn't scream "elite of the elite" to me.
@@kamilalfler9467 price of miniatures have nothing to do with how much plastic is in the box. If that were the case a primaris character would cost 1/10th as much as a box of primaris. I like having more options and the primaris boxes limiting them so drastically isn't great. It also gives them such a weird feeling in the lore world sense. Like this guy is a perfect warrior psycho trained to be the ultimate warrior, but theres no way that he would be able to understand how to use a chainsword? That's for a completely different trained force?
Could you adress the growing politicizing of warhammer. How they always have to remind you that the imperium is evil and that the Tau are good. No form of nuance just black and white.
@@aerodynamism5438 I kinda dabbed into to subreddit of 40k lore. There were entire posts dedicated to calling the imperium evil and fascist and if you disagree you get banned. They almost always bring up the Tau as the “good” guys. I do not think you should not be allowed to have those meanings but when you censore those you disagree with then it becomes weird.
@@derpaderpderp8166 No offense, but idiots on reddit are idiots on reddit. If anything, GW has been leaning into portraying the Imperium more heroically, and downplaying its evil, kafka-esque traits. There are a great deal of self proclaimed Marxists who collect 40k now, so they like to proclaim that space Catholicism is totally evil.
@@derpaderpderp8166 they always had to remind you the imperium was evil so the preteen and teenage boys that are drawn to the world of 40k didn't get attached to them as protagonists. The political problem for GW is that a lot of the extremism and intolerance of the Imperium can be deemed morally acceptable because they exist in a context where you have demons, aliens and traitors ready to exterminate the human race. I'm not a leftist and I find the politicization of 40k and everything else tiresome, but that idea of the morality of remorseless force in the face of a perceived existential threat is a big aspect of Fascist thought. However I'd actually say that rather than remind you about how evil the Imperium is, since Gathering Storm there is a pivot to trying to make the Imperium acceptable to modern, 'woke' sensibilities: Reawaken the meritocratic, reasonable and civic minded super hero Guilliman, astroturf in a few women here and there in the lore, a few characters of african descent - because all the flak they've got on twitter and reddit by your sigmarxists has got the investors anxious not to have the product too heavily associated with wrongthink.
@@ndalum75 yeah its just really tedious to say that you like something and then get bombarded with “yOu KnOW ThE iMpErIUm iS EviL rIGht?” They really want you to be ashamed
You might have forgotten this because of the drink but I believe Tim did a wonderful job explaining the GW process for naming units in the new year's stream.
My biggest frustration is that it ruined the sense of scale of the galaxy. The most interesting thing about 40K was the space it gave you to tell your own story, most of the campaigns I was part of were set in distant parts of the imperium with new worlds and relationships to explore. Getting to the Sol system might take decades, getting to another part of the Imperium might take centuries. Here in this part of the galaxy you could introduce new tech or units for the Imperium, and not need to answer why Terra didn't have the 'Crighton' pattern landraider or something. It was because only the tech priests of Saralis, proud of finding the STC for it, were willing to build it without formal approval of the technology from mars. Here were worlds which had never seen a Tyranid. An Eldar craftworld demanded tribute of Plasma Fuel from imperial worlds, in payment for a long forgotten service in war. It felt big, huge, complex. The idea that things can just change immensely in a few years just makes it more boring.
Cant rerelease new marines at an existing scale and have them sell... Idk if thats entirely true. The new cadians have spurred at least 3 people I know to totally rebuy their guard armies, despite the fact that the now old guard models are completely functional. I do not understand that mentality but enough people have it to not really be an issue for GW sales it seems
I never liked the book 'The fall of Cadia', it seemed to focus too much on the big characters, apart from Creed and Kell, there are no IG chars, and the Cadians come across as almost useless (apart from the 8th right at the end). But it makes sense if the fall of Cadia was not about one of the IG's most important planets, but rather a way to have all of these people get together at a time of need.
Where are the 2 webway gates located on Terra?? I know of only 1 located in the Throne Room of The Imperial Palace, so were is the other one, please and thank you.
I'm new to warhammer so all the sets available to me have been Primaris. I went to an actual hobby shop and bought a First Born Tactical Squad on accident. The size difference is startling.
I started warhammer again in late 8th edition and was excited to do a primaris army but immediately stopped because of how stupid the heavy weapons squads were. Why would i take up slots for hell blasters and eradicators and now the new rocket launcher squad when i can just first born devastators with all the weapons in one squad? There’s just way too many specific squads for primaris when first born squads are like Swiss Army knives that let you just swap out gear depending on the situation. Why do i need incursors, rievers and infiltrators when i can just run scouts?
There are two things that I am not a fan of when it comes down to Primaris Marines. First is that like you said with the weapon swap models. The intercessor design while I like the design is probably the most used when it comes down to them. Hellblasters are just intercessors with a different weapon. The second one is the fact that when it comes down to chapter identity I feel that the only one that still has a style to them is the Black Templars with their crusader squad. For example for what I mean look at Primaris Death Company. Regular Death Company had a cool look to them. The ornamentation on them feel like its all part of a ritual to honor that they have fallen to the Black Rage. And then theres Death Company Intercessors which doesnt have any of that. Its just intercessors with a Blood Angel upgrade sprue. The Space Wolves are also a victim of that with Hounds of Morkai and they are just Reivers with a Space Wolf upgrade sprue.
I only got into Warhammer at the very beginning of 8th edition. So, I have very few non-Primaris marines. But, nothing you said is wrong. And as someone that still has a mainly Primaris army, I want to occasionally play them (they're not my main army, and play for 30K now), I don't want to buy those terrible desolators. I'll probably just kitbash or 3D print something that looks better. As an aside, I sure hope that whoever is making these design decisions stays the hell away from my Custodes.
The basic Primaris look good. But all the special troops, the jump troopers, the heavy weapons guy all look ridiculous to me. Its just too much. I also hate the Primaris vehicle designs, be those Mario Karts or tanks with so many weapons, it looks like a Mekboy went crazy. And lets not even get into transport "options". 30k all the way.
The "I am just a tool to show how cool Space Marines are" isn't really a new thing. I remember in my early days of 3rd to 5th edition, there always was a change that pretty much ruined my previous advantage. Playing mostly Xenos, a few situations I remember were "tactical marines outclassing Banshees in close combat", even though they should be THE best troops against them, "Space marine weapons beating Tau weapons in strength and AP value", "Terminators getting 3++ save" without any existing counter in at least half of the armies, Space Wolves ignoring the "mount does not count against your double strength = instadeath rule" because [q] wulves [/q], "having tanks with 14 armour all way around ignoring melter weapons" (in times were this actually mattered) and so many more. Heck, they even wrote a rule about fearless and losing moral in the main rulesbook with the sentence "no special rules can prevent this" and then overruling it with space marines "semi fearless", which was just better than fearless, that they now overwrote this rule. And it was not much different in the background either, with for example the Avatar of Khaine and the Swarmlord getting the Lieutenant Worf treatment of losing pretty much to every major character, or 10 Space Marines holding against 1 Million of whatever enemy. If you did not have the feeling before as a CSM player, then I say "welcome to the club" ;)
Generally my opinion is they gotta put primaris on the backline and stop making them a focus, horus heresy is in decent shape rn and if they wanna get 40k back on track I really think a new badab book and a renewed focus on “first born” marines would really just bring more people back to marines as right now consistent players aren’t interested and the new players who buy up all this primaris shit are starting to ween off GWs earnings are showing this and I think it’s the only way forward, look at the difference in response to new world eaters Vs this latest primaris horse shit and it’s clear the fan base knows what they like
I mention in my corporate thinking points that "a scale change won't be enough on its own to sell" and I think people missed the second half of that sentence. Remember, this is marketing thinking, they want to do EVERYTHING in their power to sell to you, a scale change, aesthetic change, rules change etc. on their own will have appeal, but all of them at once is designed to have the broadest appeal, that's why it's done.
And as a result of doing something with "the broadest appeal", I and many others are actively disgusted and repelled by these practices. May the company and individuals involved in damaging the setting like this suffer. I have zero desire to continue putting any money at all towards them.
@@Thalanox For many of the reasons touched on in this video my Dark Angels stopped expanding with the release of primaris. I was working towards trying to pretty much build the entire chapter, but I will never include a primaris model. Now what is the point in continuing if 1st born are simply inferior in every way? This leaves them in the predicament of existing in a game of factions balanced vs the new and pretty much universally better in every way, for basically the same points, super space marines and so will be forever now be at massive disadvantage in any game. So they sit gathering dust probably never to be expanded upon again and only rarely played as every time I look at them it feels like a massive kick in the teeth.
Does anyone remember that old flashgitz animation from about 10 years about GW in their evil lair? They jokingly talked about the brilliant idea of selling a “super space marines” for half the models worth twice the points and twice the price. Absolutely prophetic.
I remember that, thanks for.jogging my memory=)
Hah, yeah. IIRC, that was a direct response to Centurions, which came out at roughly the same time. But in hindsight, those were probably an early tester for the current "bigger and better Space Marines" thing we've got going on with Primaris.
What if we made... Space marine Space Marines?
The fact that their creation is a slap in the face to fans of the franchise everywhere?
The lore behind them goes against everything we've been told?
Maybe because they want to phase out regular space marines for these corporate trash nobody but the normies want?
I stopped playing this garbage years ago and now I'm glad I sold everything. Not only did I make a chunk of change, I freed myself from ever playing a GW money trap again.
If you're dumb enough to play a game made by a company that obviously could care less about it's fanbase like WH40K, slap yourself.
I thought that was about the Grey Knights. They were the original army / faction that was extremely well known for being extremely expensive, points-wise. I was literally reading poetry and haikus that were written on the subject.
Primaris should have just been an armor upgrade and that's it. A new Mark. No stat change no nothing! just new armors.
Even the stats don't bother me much. It's the keywords that give me a headache.
@@AAhmou The keyword was indeed full of shit. But that's sorta what i mean by stat change. They split the marines in two.
This.
Exactly right, and if they really were desperate to a stat change they could have made it come from the upgraded power armour.
We all wanted truescale marines. But instead we got new crappy units.
I think my biggest gripe was it took us like 6 years to get a lieutenant kit that only just barely manages to get some multi-part options for customisation.
GW have yet to top the old space marine commander kit for customisation/spare bits/unique things to combine together to really make it not just 'a' captain, but 'your' captain.
None of the Primaris kits have even come close. Not a single one.
The squads are cookie-cutter or ETB monopose, and the characters are just monopose. As has been said, this strips the individuality that made Firstborn such a popular range.
I'm of the opinion that current GW want to make people work hard for their kitbashes, which involves people having to buy full boxes of almost proprietary parts just for a fancy head, as one example.
Beyond the limited chapter packs for PriMarySue, there is functionally nothing to offer personal creativity in this range.
yep, it's the same concept as the "4 scout-like marine units" - Reivers, Incursors, Infiltritors, eliminators should have all been a single unit with multi-options, instead it's multiple kits forcing more buying
Because they are killing the hobby/modelling aspect of the game.
Have you tried kit-bashing?
@@darko-man8549 right. Like those should just have been a plastic box of primaris scouts that could use either bolt carbines, optional scoped sniper bolters, or pistols and knives. And then optional sniper rifles too.
The answer to the title could be resumed to 2 very short answers, one for the lore and look, one for the product :
1) Primaris totally missed the point of space marines and 40k as a whole, turning the astartes from monk warrior using long lost tech weapons considered as relic to defend a crumbling imperium in often glorious mele combat to generic masse produced space soldier (with literlaly not a single cosmetic variant in their gear, not even the chest aquila) using brand new tech that literally didn't have any single mele troupe at release.
2) A product clearly designed to force the mass of marines players to throw their old army and buy a new one.
The simple fact that half of the original primaris release was about the phobos armor, a weirdly out of play tacticool spec ops marine line, kinda replacing scoot but not really, some wearing a skull mask because CoD made it a cool thing a decade before, while the other half was almost shot for shot a copy pasta of Starcraft 2 designs should be enough to tell you how badly off the mark GW was on that one.
Absolutely spot on.
You nailed it!
"Chaos marines have become guys for the good guys to beat to show how tough they are."
- Macca
"First time?"
- Me, an Eldar player, looking at the Avatar...
Chaos marine: i am a veteran of the great crusade, Horus Heresy and the legion wars. I have fought against and alongside daemons. I have the blessings of my patron god and I even get to use all the old crusade era stuff that’s now been mixed with warp sorcery and forbidden archeotech. What are you?
Primaris: im the author’s pet *kills the chaos marine in one hit*
I think pretty much every single character in the setting has killed at least one Swarmlord.
@@hydradominatus3661 then the primaris dies in a Blaze of Glory.
8:01 Sadly primaris explode if they use or enter anything not made by Cawl in canon. Many a Primaris lutennat died because a grot switched the sighs on the vehicles and tricked him into entering a landraider
Lolwut? That's retarded
_"Fantastic! Now all the people who want to integrate a few of these models in their army have to buy all new transport truck models, too, if they want to move them around quickly!"_
Never liked the shoehorning, a few people i know would have prefered the old Thunder Warriors to be reactivated as an emergency stop gap by Crawl and Gurlyman. Get more troops to the frounts of poorer quality but in quantity, sometimes you don't need a precision strike just a really, really, REALLY violent club
Yeah that would make more sense. Cawl couldn't top the Emperor's work of the Marines, so he made a cheaper, alternative. One could make them just as nutballs as the Thunder Warriors, causing tension. Or have them more loved by the Guard for their closer nature to humans (and cheaper price). Eating away the prestige of the Marines. Lots of conflict to work with either way.
It would have been cool if Cawl just helped streamline the process of making regular astartes and girlyman retconned his no legions rule. Instead girlyman is hiding behind bread boxes and cawl is a heretic ungrateful for the emprahs gifts.
The words of an Ork player :)
I want Chaos Thunder Warriors perfected by Fabius Bile tbh, I feel Khorne would have wisked some away at the last moment
That line of thinking 'more troops to the line but of poorer quality' was how I always thought of SM vs CSM when I first started in the mid-90's. I remember reading somewhere that the pre-heresy marines were more tailor made, were larger and in every way better than what came after. That is what made CSM so terrifying and potent, they were legions of these pre-heresy marines (with thousands of years of experience AND powers of the warp/dark gods) who were better than what the Imperium was capable of churning out to combat them. The Imperium was on the back foot always and the run of the mill SM's were essentailly power armoured cannon fodder which is why their heroes were so impactful/special. But now that everyone is special none of them are. Having said all of that I am glad the marines are actually larger than the models they are supposed to tower over, that bugged me to no end.
There's an old Flashgitz animation they did like 10 years ago, after they had all their old Warhammer skits nuked by GW legal, called 'Inside GW' . In it the evil GW CEO comes up with a new model range to revitalise the IP, 'Space Marine - Space Marines, a Space Marine inside a Space Marine'.
Since they came out I've been unable to take the Primaris range in anyway seriously as to me they're literally just the Space Marine - Space Marines with extra Space and Marine that Flash managed to predict a good four or so years before they came out.
Not to mention how the entire range just takes the personality out of all the unique marine chapters.
With the exception of the Black Templars
@@kohlerxxx yeah that's why I like the dark angels. They've retained their characteristic
Yeah I just listened to devastation of Baal and it was amazing listening to how the blood angels struggle against their gene seed flaws. Then in the last chapter the primary sues show up and just don’t have the black rage at all and are immune to it. Even one of the chapter masters calls it out that they will just all become ultra Smurf’s in red plate.
@@mp5284 I mean in fairness it then quickly turned out that Primaris were susceptible to the Red Thirst and Black Rage still
@WavingSmileGamer ya, but that was revealed long after.
Back in 2nd edition, they improved the marines statlines (Adding +1 Toughness and increasing Power Armour to 3+ Sv) with the designers notes at the back of the rulebook stating it was to represent the marines' elite status within the lore.
Marine players had been excited with the idea of 'truescale' marines as far back as I remember. So they could have just said 'Hey, new truescale marines! We increased some stats as well. Enjoy.' In the manner of what they did in 2nd ed. Even head off detractors by stating that it's been done before.
New toys and gadgets for the marines could have just been that Cawl lead an expedition where he recovered an STC and he's been working on interpreting some of the readouts under internal AdMech and Inquisitorial suspicion mitigated by Rowboat vouching for him. So they can even have their Fix-It-All Cawl as well. STCs are a huge thing so it shouldn't break lore. Replacing characters with Primaris versions? Same thing: 'New sculpt, bigger scale. Enjoy.'
The real reason I think is probably the spectre of Chapterhouse once again. Copyright. 'Space Marine Tactical Squad' probably isn't as copyrightable as 'Primaris Intercessor Squad'. The 'tacticool' look is likely just to appeal to a broader audience - I think GW has been wanting to become more of an IP Factory in the future and toning down a lot of the Neo-Gothic look might fit in with that strategy. I stick to 2nd and 3rd ed. 40k these days. 8th and 9th edition were a bit bloated for me.
Liked the video. Cheers.
"Superkrak" and "Superfrag" :D
And I don't like how GW turned the Space Marines into the Craftworld Eldar with the Primaris Aspect Warriors and Primaris Grav Tanks.
Yeah quit stealing my units Gaymes Workshop!
What is killing 40k is the same that is killing Disney Star Wars.
Lack of internal consistency!
Nothing makes sense anymore.
Looks at new 'desolator' squad...
Primaris Marines should have just been regular marines in upgraded armour. MkX could have been a new improved design, based on a recently-discovered STC template.
Or Cawl doing millennia of research to produce not only a next-gen armour, but build the infrastructure to deploy it en masse.
Either way, there was no reason to tinker with the geneseed!
To be fair, the Primaris aren't the start of terrible looking vehicles and infantry. The planes from 5th and Centurions from 6th were already extremely dumb.
Planes filled out a slot we really needed....centurions, well they were pushing it, but still within parameters...I hate the primaris with a burning passion though.
@@helgi1921 The planes didn't make sense (how are they flying so slow?), threw the entire game balance out of whack and in the case of Space Marines looked stupid.
@@Warpwaffel never said they made sense.
But we needes something other that thunderhawks that could fly.....and we got ...stuff.
But I agree they look kinda derpy
That's not the issue
The primaris looking like StarCraft marines makes sense when you consider how the tyranids have become increasingly similar to the Zerg design wise. I’m honestly just waiting for them to start turning the eldar into protoss
Edit: also the NASA primaris actually look like they’d make for a pretty good home brew chapter especially with the NASA logo in place of the Aquila
That'd require them make new eldar models
@@calebbarnhouse496
At risk of sounding like I’m on GW’s side here, didn’t they like, *just* drop a bunch of new and updated Eldar less than a year ago?
@@CrusadiaIX Guardians, Warlocks, Rangres (plus the new ranger jetbikes), Autarch, Avatar of Khaine, Shining Spears, Dark Reapers, and Maugan Ra. There _are_ some models they still desperately need to get around to updating and I'm not a fan of the new Maugan Ra, but I felt overall the it a very well done, very faithful update to some classic models.
The same with the Chaos Marines and the new Chaos Warriors. it's like Space Marines is the only faction GW _can't_ faithfully update.
@Son of Balder they did do some, but they still have no shortages of models older then the people they are trying to market it to, dawn of war has tons of models that you can't buy anymore, but I would be surprised if one model of the eldar line in that was refreshed before that wave
Luckily aos proved elves are popular enough to keep making.
That said I know eldar players who complained that the updated eldar are too similar to fantasy elves now. Although I think this is silly, they were always space elves.
I despise the lore behind primaris and I've begun souring on the models as well.
A space marine is already, by design, the biggest, baddest, most overpowered super soldier possible. Making them biggerer and badderer just cheapens it. There never should have been a distinction between real and primaris marines. It should have just been the IRL name of the true scale model line.
Hell, if they had said Cawl had been busy inventing and stockpiling new weapons and vehicles, but he had to hide them until Guilliman came around and gave him the all clear would have been a hell of a lot better than saying he improved the miracles created by GOD. But these days the Emperor must be torn down in every way so we couldn't do that.
Absolutely agree. Primaris really shits on the entire feel of this faction.
@@aninternetuser4306same here, that’s why I now mainly enjoy 30k
Honestly what's even the point of the Emperor at this point? If Imperium Nihilis can run without him and Cawl can create his own Marines then fck it, might as well flush the Emperor down the toilet. Honestly I hate the Primaris, I hate the Imperium wank, and I hate the Ultramarines being positioned as these bland good guys.
Yep. Primeass marines broke me.
You could even say it's a better version of power Armour if you need to redesign the truscale but the lore violation made me stop caring about anything past their inception. I'm not even against the return of the primarchs but the lore for that sucks as well.
I get that GW had to do *something* to revitalize the Imperium. By the end of the 41st millennium they'd written themselves into a corner of certain doom as everything was unravelling, and enemies were swarming over them everywhere. But as soon as I heard about the Primaris marine concept, I knew it was written in as an excuse to sell a new range of models, and as you very eloquently explained: it's also introduced a whole series of contrivances that over-rode so much of the existing lore.
Should have let the imperium fall apart
The whole point was always that the Imperium is dying. Instead of saving it they should have let it fracture. Imagine all the new factions and conflicts we could have gotten.
Not even. The imperium could have had a revival of sorts but in a way that makes more sense. Eg. A well intact stc was found by cawl.
@@markcoroneos7811 everything is bloody cawl, f cawl, get the entire mechanicus in on it.
@@tarektechmarine8209 Cawl as a character has irreparable damage done to the lore
GWs next primaris tank may as well be a grav abrams, they could call it the abramis to match their incredibly well executed naming convention
*Abramser
@@matthiuskoenig3378 oooh thats good, you could then make them anti tank tank with fists called the abramzerfists
Abromitus Rex
Call it the Lorgar, LoL
The only thing worse than the designs is the naming conventions.
And the fluff.
Amen
I love how TOC lists literally EVERY bad name apart from 'Hellblasters' 🤣 oh well, I guess at least you can tell what they do from their name... even if it sounds absolutely cringe. Does the Imperium even still believe in the christian concept of "hell" considering they routinely travel through the warp, a literal hell dimension???
The lore is far worse.
@@BattlebrotherPhil I mean why would't they believe in Hell when, as you said, they have been to it plenty of times already lol.
"You can't rerelease the same models at a new scale, people will have no incentive to buy them"
I'd correct this, people would have less incentive to buy them not no incentive to buy them, going forward you'd have better marine sales overall. (Was GW afraid of no sales bump or longer term increased sales from the new CSM or Imperial Guard kits?) What they did with the Primaris was to get greedy and do something they wouldn't do to another army line because the potential additional sales wouldn't be anything like what they got in the big bang of early Primaris sales to existing SM whales who'd finished their armies by making a totally new army inside an army. No doubt the upscaled Marines would have sold a bucketload too and probably been one of the best selling kits of all time. (Given how the sales of 40k spiked so much since 2017, though granted they had no way of anticipating the spike)
The fallout is obvious though, short term you get a bonus but long term you have a problem of supporting all the kits in the Marine codex (When was the last time GW squatted a marine codex choice? They do it all the time with other armies but never with marines, the market is just too big with any dissent being a PR and sales issue) and you have this model line that is inferior in terms of variety, (Despite highlighting it all the time on their website, GW has seemingly gone to war against kitbashing with their monopose infantry since 2017. Special mention to the idiots who actually believe it would be literally impossible to have slightly longer or just upright legs or torsos and also have them be separate pieces, they show up in every comments section complaining about this) aesthetics (Again, people love Intercessors, even with their monopose, clone trooper ethos but has anyone ever called Inceptors or Aggressors cool? Even uber-fanboy Valrak is excited about a CSM style slightly bigger Terminator kit) intuitive simplicity (All the vague Latin names for trademark purposes and general messiness of Parimaris army structure. Tactical, Devastator, Assault, Terminator, it just made sense and was clear) and thematic conflict. (40k is all about grimdark Space Marines as warrior monks but your flagship model line has 1 unit, Bladeguard Veterans, which embraces that, the tactical suit ruined dreadnoughts)
What's annoying is that GW has done all this at the time it has become autisticly dedicated to having the models match the fluff and for the fluff to be un-retconnable, what a time to start to go down that road. Thus GW can't, for instance, resolve whether the Black Templars who are very popular, are Primaris or not. They are Primaris scale now but, yeah, maybe they are Primaris now, maybe they aren't. They can't make the core of their valuable IP make sense anymore. In my opinion GW have been feeding off pre-2017 background and people being familiar with it, but as times goes on, the post 2017 background is going to be more and more what people will remember and will it really make sense or capture anyone's passion?
They've made a mess out of their flagship model line for a little bump of sales from the whales they'd mostly have gotten anyway. (The Valraks of the world would have bought a whole new upscaled army, let's be real and you could have added some OP weapon options to the new kits for the other whales, lunatic guys who buy whole armies for a meta cycle of competitive 40k)
Going forward this will be a problem, Primaris aren't cool and don't embody the ethos of 40k that has made GW so much money. Since 2017 they've been living off the pre-2017 40k Space Marines and just ignoring how the Primaris aesthetically don't fit into that. As more time passes this contradiction will become more prominent since fewer and fewer people will have their impressions shaped by what was but rather what is. 40k is defined, is unique and interesting for it's 'grimdark' a combination of the ideas from the Foundation novels and Dune (A declining, technologically stagnant somewhat feudalistic civilization, hell GW recently made a lot of cash from releasing a Mechanicus army with their background now being very well known and popular with their STC dogmas and monopoly on technology) with the 80s British cyberpunk of 2000AD along with heavy metal fantasy topped off with the gothic aesthetic best defined by John Blanche. The Primaris break and defy so much of that simultaneously it's amazing.
It's notable, for example, that the new Space Marine 2 game has given Assault jet packs to Parimaris marines (Because the old protagonist must now be Primaris, you aren't allowed to feature non-Primaris marines in your licenced products) because the Primaris line is so broken and lost so much like the assault jet packs.
As for the setting being 'stagnant', it's a setting not a narrative, by default it has to be stagnant. What GW and FW used to do, focus on campaigns on previously unknown worlds that expand the setting horizontally rather than push the broader timeline forward (And even created narratives with beginnings, middles and ends without broadly impacting the timeline) was the correct way to add to the setting to keep it from being stagnant without ruining it by resolving and ending things. (Like how the Primaris have resolved the gene seed faults to the detriment of the hobby setting) We can see the issues this has caused Star Wars in that the sequels (Due to the influence of the RLM critiques about lots of boring talking and world building in the prequels, necessary since the prequels were a new addition into an existing world and we needed to know what was different as opposed to the original films which just built the setting frame by frame) failed to establish a new setting set 30 years later. So scared were they of losing the Imperial architecture and stormtrooper aesthetic that actually glued together the otherwise quite disparate setting of Star Wars, that they broke the setting by just keeping the Imperials around and failing to explain anything about the state of the sequel universe. Thus new Star Wars is now being set during the rough era of the original films and a little after as a setting, we know how it ends and so it is stagnant but they keep making new media set during that time rather than continue to try to move the timeline forward since they botched that by not really creating a new setting with the new films. (Seriously we see maybe 3 or 4 planets and have no idea how anything works in the sequel films because they mistook the fact that the original films were the original films and thus didn't need a great of exposition with the sequels 30 years later which do require exposition about what is happening to set the scene because the prequels also had to do this.)
And I'd add that the Bladeguards are all copy pasted and they have no lore. Literally. There's no explanation as to what is their lore and where did primaris veterans came from or if they are primarified veteran marines.
I aint reading allat
aggressors are a very cool kit
Yeah Primaris are just culturally neutered and bland. I liked the height increase, but the armour is dull (it hasn't a spot on prior armour marks that I could mix and match), their tanks are now boring (grav tanks just feel lazy and don't fit the Imperium generally). The contradictions in both GW recent products, like the sudden increase in height for the IG and the major contradictions lore wise (lets be fair, there were always contradictions in the wider lore/history, but tis understandable), just puts me off buying.
@@djangofett4879 I can list you 10 reasons as to why they aren't but I'll just stick to the obvious. They are just Calgar clones.
I know you touched on it, but I was also very disappointed by the design decisions in Primaris Marines. Appearance notwithstanding, it's hard to get anything remotely like the old Dark Angels Veterans. Also, it bothers me that there is no equivalent to the Space Marine Commander kit, where all of those options existed to make a unique Captain. I have to conclude that this decision is absolutely deliberate, and it doesn't sit right with me.
And in general, there's a lot of that kind of hostile design in GW these days. I remember when a huge amount of 40k was about telling your own stories, and converting your own models, but it really feels as if everything from rules, to the way they design the connection points, arms and shoulders on models, seem to disincentivise that. Maybe it's just me being a grognard, but I miss those things.
Also I used to love the imagery of a proper drop pod assault, and I would love to recapture it someday. I'd hoped that Heresy would let me do that, but it appears that's easier said than done.
What i find weirdest is the random mixes between Grimdark and Tacticool, most notably in the Assault Intercessors, the Vambrace and Pauldron trim is cool and all but now i can't have a guy with a Chainsword in the other hand? Why do they have weird Smart Watches on the other, they got trig homework? I wish they allowed you to 'spec into' grimdark or tacticool, not shove them both in.
I await MKII then I will be tapping out on marines - permanently.
I cannot help but consider the Rubicon Primaris to be a freudian slip on a corporate scale. As in if they can get away with this, they can get away with the full conversion of their model range.
And the funniest thing is that whoever named it likely just knew it was a famous river crossing and meant the name to just refer to crossing from Oldmarine to Primarysue.
Lol why do you think that. The idea of a Rubicon as a point of no return is by far the most will known use of the word - many people who use it wouldn't even know that it's a river, or how the idiom came about from historical events.
They absolutely meant it in that sense - a marine becomes primaris irrevocably, therefore you cross that Rubicon. It's very obvious and very straightforward.
I like using the term crossing the rubicon. Meaning there is no way back after you cross. Turn a blind eye has a good story behind it as well.
Someone also had a video on the primaris as well that made me think that primaris are a Further set for Space Marines to go away from their human roots. As they seems to get themselves killed alot either by Self Sacrifice or because they are Green and decided to argue with a Bunch of Custodes that ended up with their chapter and them dying.
I’d been playing 40k for 32 yrs when 8th edition dropped. GW have just killed 40k for me and luckily I play Horus heresy.
I am an Chaos Marine player since late second edition 40k. I completely stopped playing after nearly the end of 8th edition. I never stopped Collecting since then too. I think you are absolutely correct with your video, again. Gathering Storm and its aftermath broke my heart, but Gw's decisions what to push, marketing and ignorance broke my soul.
I was buying the Gathering Storm throw-away books as fast I could, still could not get a hold of Book 3... always sold out. Turns out, all these sloppy, poorly written rushed books where in the *guise* of a nice Hardcover Forgeworld book, but where just a bullsh*t cash grab. At $60 CAD each
hey man. Table top simulator. play what ever version and army you want. Just supply your own books.
Your take is bang on. I started an SM army after Primaris were released, mostly down to liking the aesthetic of the first Mk X, and there have been some hits for me that I added (Indomitus worked for me, Sword-and-board + tabards, Outriders, the knightly aesthetic, especially as I play Dark Angels). The Redemptor also slaps. Buuuuuut that's about it. Lorewise I hate that they're apparently "immune" to Chaos, or more resistant to it, and I've done everything I can to keep a knightly aesthetic for them. So many kits they've received have been misses it's untrue, and my biggest pet peeve is giving them such easy access to certain tech. How is plasma special for DA when any chapter can take entire units of it ? How is antigrav fun for Tau (which I play) and other Xenos when the Imperium also gets it ? How the hell did they bring back volkite under a new name ?
And the way they've replaced Devastators is just embarrassing. If they want Bobby G to bring back the idea of heavy support squads all having the same loadout, cool, but just make it the one kit with all weapon options in there. Why are there separate units for all these weapons and why are you releasing them over the span of YEARS, just milking an entire unit out of each loadout ?
Mirrors my experience exactly except i play Black Templars.
Because they want you to buy 4-5 squads instead of 1 devastator.
"This is what happens when you inherit someone else's universe, and you didn't earn the privilege to write in it, but instead are just handed it on a plate" ... feeling sudden and constant dejavu
Shoutout to Chris Wraight for having four banger white scars books, Path of Heaven, Scars, Jaghatai Khan book, Warhawk. The white scars models have the most character in forgeworld and the white scars actually came out of the Horus Heresy novels better for it, not worse. Feels like white scars are the only thing worth collecting anymore.
No kidding. The HH books were so good for White Scars and World Eaters. And Word Bearers, when they had ABD writing them.
@@fjardim14 ah yes, the good ol “i have savage daddy issues” ADB treatment 😉 theres a reason hes good at writing CSM’s - all im sayin
Primaris split the space marine range in two, along with creating a massive plot cancer (cawl) that continues to fester and grow.
Yeah, some of the new models are nice on their own, but the Primaris range is so weird, twisted and incomplete. Despite the huge number of kits, they still don't have iconic space marine gear like terminator armor, drop pods, land raiders etc.
Some people are reporting rumors that the split range will be merged back together in the next edition which may at least result in a complete feeling model range so here's hoping
The Redemptor Dreadnought was probably the only new sculpt out of the new range that ACTUALLY looks good.
What made the scale change worse, was that they also released new Death Guard and Chaos Marines, so they could have just increased their scale too, it was such a missed opportunity. Chaos feels so short now, even though they're bigger than they were. Chaos is Kevin Hart, Primaris is The Rock.
In 2015 I moved to a different country. I had no friends and was thinking of starting a gray knights army so I can meet people at the local games workshop store. Then I saw the Age of Sigmar land marines. They were bigger than 40k space marines and I knew as soon as I saw them that GW would one day very soon release true scale marines. So I decided to not buy any models until I saw the new stuff that was inevitably coming. I was right.
But I also didn't care when they finally came out.
Mecha, 100% agree on your main point. The Primaris was a blatant cash grab by GW to FORCE players to restart from scratch, with ZERO SHYTES given as to the impact on the lore, which is the foundation of the game. (Obviously, the "forced" players are those who allow themselves to be tied down by the GW meta of no proxies, no 3D printing, etc.). I love your Disney Star Wars analogy, because both companies discarded what gave their IP value (the depth of lore) and ignored canon because it was inconvenient in the manner in which they wanted to monetize their product. Both companies are also recycling dead characters because they wanted to monetize the nostalgia of the fans and lack the creativity to produce new characters who fans have the same love and respect.
I used to play Confrontation by Rackham, which was an amazing skirmish level fantasy game. The problem was the Company went public, and then had to show continual revenue growth to keep the shareholders happy. Their approach to show the revenue growth then destroyed what made the Company successful in the first place. Just feel like GW is going down that same path, but because they're the 800 pound gorilla in the gaming sphere it's harder to see the affect.
Can't sell space knights to the CoD/Marvel/Star Wars man-children. Everything must be "TACTICOOOL"
We don’t really have any right to be calling anyone man children when we literally play a game painting plastic toys and throwing dice lmao
@@PKM9107 yeh its just a silly little game with silly little toys idk why anyone even plays it right? People who frame the hobby like you are the fucking problem, go tear up at a marvel movie trailer and get away from warhammer
@@PKM9107 Dang, blue on blue lmao
Primarius and first born are practically identical when it comes to the outside perspective, if you wanted a more tacticool army you wouldn't choose to get into 40k, let alone space marines, if you were to choose based on just liking tacticool stuff you'd go off of tau because there infantry makes decent sense for a tacticool approach, there vehicles are sleek and rounded off, and everyone knows battlesuits are like the epitomie of tacticool approach, big guns to shoot well, missile systems and are either able to fly or are a weapons platform for shooting bigger guns
@@PKM9107
True. Man children is the wrong term. They are actually trying to appeal to people less man child than us and that’s the problem.
The “I play Fortnite/CoD and like the MCU” crowd
Remember when they first introduced Primaris and tried to basically retcon all unique chapter fluff? Like the BA no longer having the black rage etc? That was basically GW’s attempt to do what Disney did with Star Wars - purge the old lore because it’s baggage when it comes to marketing to casuals.
I have a Macca and Perun mashup fever dream going through my head. The scathing dry humor of Aussie analysts washing over me, as I'm powerpointed through the finer points of Imperium armor logistics.
So I'm in a weird edge case here: I started after the Primaris release, but got gifted a slew of old school Space Wolves (Including Pewter Terminators). I have a soft spot for the classics, and honestly dread the day when I basically lose my army. As such, I'm looking to get a different army that won't "rotate" as it were and simply let my pile of Astartes sit and never see tabletop use again. This predatory sales stuff GW has pulled from deep within the chasms of their anuses really annoys the hell out of me, but for now, not much I can do save not buy Space Marines
I owe a lot to the Primaris Marines:
They came out and I hadn't played 40k in years at the time. When I found out that there are now "new" Space Marines, I took a look. With the result that I was horrified by what GW was doing there.
However, a GW Store Manager brought me back to the TT hobby because he brought me to a new club. To my surprise, they played a bunch of TT systems there, not just GW. (Infinity, flames of war, kings of war etc).
So I started my new adventure in the TT world and one of us started to get interested in 3D printing.
I'll fast-forward a bit now, otherwise it'll be too long:
Today I am self-employed and work in the 3D printing sector as a designer. I have established my own small brands and work for various companies such as Printminis etc.
So the Primaris Marines have changed my life for the better and I am grateful for that.
yet:
I can only agree with you 1000%. A lot was done wrong there.
I've been in the hobby since 1997. Primaris are the main reason I've abandoned 40K in favor of 30K.
I got into 40k not long after 8th edition came out. And for probably a year before that I was absolutely immersed in the lore of the universe. And one of the biggest things that drew me in was the idea that the imperium was decaying and backwards. The fact that only priests with the vaguest knowledge of science and mechanics kept the machines of the imperium running. The various space marine chapters and their quirks and gene seed deficiencies.
But after reading up on the lore, it became clear to me what exactly the primaris were. And it didn’t sit right with me. First off, I felt like they just looked like upscaled Mk. IV. Then obviously the lore, I already had a huge appreciation of firstborn marines. And the ‘super space marines’ really irked me.
Now I have over 2000 points of firstborn for my custom chapter, and not a single primaris model. Sure the neglect firstborn have had is disappointing, especially rules wise. Although I am going to stand my ground, no primaris in my army!
However, with even worse looking primaris consistently coming out, essentially making firstborn useless, I am slowly making the flip to Horus Heresy. Even though it has its own issues as a game system, it still seem overall better than 40K right now.
Primaris being shoved into the 40k universe with absolute disdain for how they'd impact the setting is epitomised by their introduction as inherently better than all previous Space Marines in all possible ways.
This superiority came with no trade offs and no new flaws, they weren't Thunder Warriors 2.0 hurriedly churned out in a time of crisis. No, they're just better, and any new lore will be written specifically to emphasise that!
A prime example would be how absolutely iconic Space Marine armour is: all that barely understood technology, using variations from Mark 2 all the way up to the incredibly cutting edge and rare Mark 8.
Then Primaris come out of nowhere, fully kitted out in the never before seen Mark 10 armour! Wow, these guys must be a whole new level of bad-ass!... but wait, why is it Mark 10 and not 9?
Well that's simple really, because 10 sounds better and it can be written as a X which looks cooler. That's it. That's the extent of effort in justifying decisions we now get from GW.
At the time of this, I remember discussing concerns with a store manager at one of the flagship stores. Their response was "it's our lore we can do what we want"... Grim...
Second on the design choices, I think that as you say there are likely committees involved in all design decisions. And those committees very likely contain more 'business' incentivised people than they used to.
"People have no incentive to buy new stuff if you just scale up the old models"
The incentive would be to match the scale. We have mix primaris/mini marine armies now and mixed IG ones, that both look terrible. I've definitely trimmed lists to be less effective by cutting out the one terminator or vanguard squad that didn't match the rest of the list visually.
Eh, well-painted IG look completely fine with old standing by new unless your army is a display piece meant for close-up beauty shots (In which case why were you using the 2005 potato-cadians instead of pretty third-party guard!)
they dropped the ball when they turned 40k into a story, from a setting.
You hit the nail on the head
100% this. I loved the 40k setting, I'm completely indifferent to the story since 8th dropped. If HH hadn't been a thing I wouldn't be a games workshop customer anymore.
Reminds me of the SW sequels, new writers with limited respect or understanding for what came before and why that history is important
I think the fact that Primaris marines exist to serve as a seemingly forced "upgrade" rather than an addition to Space Marines as a faction is what makes them unwelcomed. It's the fact that older 40k gamers who've been in the hobby for years now and stuck with several editions are being potentially forced to give up their firstborn marine armies that they've spent hundreds if not thousands building just to spend a large extra fee for the exact same models but 1.5x times larger if they want to keep playing. I'd understand if it were specialist units like Khaine or Abbadon, but we're talking about entire armies here.
Primaris represent the company chasing the “wider audience” and watering down the setting and aesthetic, several years in we can see the results of it.
I would feel better about the primaris in the lore if there was more depth to their creation and that the process to make them was 10 000 years of hell. You could add so much in on when and where the breakthroughs came through, who came in to help, where old technology was pieced together. If the primaris were finalized 20 years ago instead of 10k, and he finally got a forgeworld (stygies) to start production, it'd make their creation so much richer than Cawl going lol, I'm a genius.
You know what they've could've done instead of rolling out this goofy Primaris lore? Just make new models and say "hey we have bigger and nicer Space Marine models now, have fun" like how they did with CSM
Almost word for word my own feelings on the issue. Great video.
I pray Geedub sees that Crawl clip! Great show. Thanks for sharing.
Cawl conspired with a C'Tan for sure
To understand the complete mishandling of 'super' marines everybody should check the cursed founding article from Index Astartes 2.
The mechanicus had been working with an inquisitor to try and make better marines and at first they seemed to be, but they are inherently wrong and go on a killing spree in the facility. In the end its obviously implied that Fabulous Bile found them and he then had more knowledge on how to make 'improved' and unstable marines.
That seed was there for over a decade and unexplored when the accountants decided duuuur we need new spesh muhreens and cracked the whip on the writers to spit out cawl and his magic.
They need to fire the designer who keeps insisting Space Marines needs to be "Tacticool" because it's getting worse and worse. You can't even really convert around these. I have absolutely no idea why they aren't in heavier armour. I mean I know why, they wanted a cheap new kit that could be slapped on to existing Primaris marine bodies but it looks so cheap and goofy.
They used the same gameplan that they did for the Stormcast in AOS. Tons of "chambers" that come out with new variants of the same old.
At least in my circle Stormcasts are not popular and thats one of the reasons why.
Awesome video. I just love the point about earning the universe
Sounds like you drank Chapter Master Valrak’s coolaid… 😂😂😂
Thank you! You summed up my problems with primaris marines so well. Primaris marines were such a cool launch, that I decided to stop playing space marines and lean into my second army. So I guess in a way primaris marines helped sell me some Eldar models.
I listened to your whole argument 👍
Gave up with 40k. We all play HH now and if we wanna bit of 40k we go back to 2ed! which has a pretty sweet community out there and is very fun!
On the names-- they're not as terrible as you think.
Intercessors is a play on intercession: they intervene on behalf of another. Really generic for a battleline unit, but it fits given how generic they are as a unit.
Incursors is a play on incursion: "an invasion or attack, especially a sudden or brief one" they strike suddenly and quickly as the more aggressive, frontline phobos units
Inceptors is a play on intercept, but they already have intercessors so they cut out the "ter": they intercept the enemy
And I think the rest of the infantry are pretty obvious
Outriders: outrider definition, "a person in a motor vehicle or on horseback who goes in front of or beside a vehicle as an escort or guard"
Bladeguard: they are guards with blades
rievers: rieve definition, "carry out raids in order to plunder cattle or other goods." (they're raiders)
Invader ATV: it invades (mediocre, but its good enough when you compare it to "bikes" and "attack bikes" as if both of them don't still attack)
Eliminators: they eliminate the enemy; eliminate has connotations with more precise means
eradicators: they eradicate the enemy; eradication has connotations of more destructive means
Hellblasters: they blast the enemy to hell (for these three, I agree they could've done better, but it's no worse than "devastator")
Suppressors: they suppress the enemy
I think it's unfair to lump in the invictor: naming conventions for space marine vehicles/walkers has never been accurately descriptive. If you think it's a serious, *new* issue, I posit this: what is a "deredeo" and what does that word indicate? I love the deredeo, probably tied with the BA librarian dread for my second favorite dread under the leviathan. But I know that the naming of it, along with many other vehicles and walkers is vaguely descriptive at best.
I agree totally. I joined WH40K in 7th edition. Taking Space Marines from the broken former human to the hero’s of mankind as super humans and twisting them into essentially the clone troopers from Star Wars ruined it for me. I still have yet to buy a single Primarus model.
Gathering Storm/Primaris Marines have more or less killed 40k as a setting. What we have now is more or less a skinsuit. Horus Heresy is the setting with actual depth, but from what I can tell, Abnett is setting up to do some very horrible things to the lore in the last Siege of Terra book
Honestly, much like the forerunners from halo and the reapers from mass effect sometimes things are best left to the imagination of the reader.
Honestly, beyond just having big name power, I don’t see why Abnett is still allowed to work on the HH when he’s done the most damage to the setting.
@Hydra Dominatus He has basically twisted the entire Horus Heresy metaplot into becoming a prequel for his Eisenhorn Cinematic Universe, and has somehow convinced all the other authors thats a good idea
@A McC Horus Heresy has always been the essence of the whole setting, and for large parts of the novel series it was done extremely well. What brought it down was the usual greed from GW combined with the narcissism of authors like Abnett and Bowden, who want to twist the entire setting to reflect their own vision rather than writing within it. For example, Echoes of Eternity was pathetically used by Bowden as a metaphor for his own ridiculous mental problems, to the point where he wrote Sanguinius to sound like a depressed teenager scared of his own refrigerator. Abnett is cynically using HH to beef up his 40k work, and is willing to destroy the entire metaplot to do so. But these arent symptoms of a story that cant be told well, a la Mass Effect, but instead are redolent of the indulgence of the writers
I agree. I have lost any interest toward the universe almost exclusively due to the primaris bs. It's a good thing the Heresy exists, but I'm not fine with its rules.
Last year's HH2.0 Age of Darkness release was the best thing to happen for the hobby in a while. Not because I'm particularly interested in the Heresy but that it made such a excellent start point for building pre-Primaris forces. Particularly small armies for skirmishes set during the Badab war. Alan Bligh rules!
definitely, Heresy is where the old style hobby is at now. I've lost all interest in 40k (except for playing old editions) and every new thing they do makes it worse. The novels are Ok but the game setting, Primaris and a lot of the other new model lines are just garbage now compared to heresy
@@paulyg405 I've just assumed GW recognizes the interest in HH models that stretches beyond the Heresy setting itself, the fact they've recently re-released the second half of the originally Japan exclusive Space Marine Heroes series 1 is certainly an indicator they're not quite ready to discontinue contemporary firstborn model lines just yet.
@@fransaacs I think you're right, and I would add that there's a market still for grittier, more historical, less cartoon/video game style models particularly with older gamers who have been around the IP for (sometimes) 20, 30 years. Plus, they would be mad to alienate that base of players, even though it's way smaller than for current 40k, because those gamers have disposable income and want to spend it on new toys. Carving that market off to Heresy and the upcoming Old World reboot is a smart move.
yeah when you think about it from a normal old marine army perspective it's great - 4 tactical squads, land raider, dreadnought, terminator squads and 2 captains.
@@paulyg405 absolutely, been away from the hobby for 20 years or so, that’s exactly how the box reads - it’s how I saw it, it ‘s how I’ve built it - there’s some Space Marines Heroes characters thrown in with a half a kit of MKIIIs - and right there, I’ve got all I need for old school Badab - using (atm) the Space Weirdos rule set - just because it’s so easy to navigate. Feels like GW gets it right more often by luck than design.
BEHOLD! ...am I not invisible? WELL WHY NOT!
"Ok but what about space marine, space marines. A space marine inside of a spacemarine but you know." - Flashgitz
they realized they created a static setting where the imperium opposes technological advances, which makes it difficult to make new units that are different enough to where people would want to buy them
and because thats bad for business, they decided to make up a reason for why they could, with cawl pulling primaris out of his behind and making new stuff, which conveniently works well for a company trying to make and sell new things all the time
thats literally the only reason they exist
It doesn't though. The imperium was against new tech, but the imperium uses more vehicles, rifles etc than represented on table top. And then you have stc.
Discovering a new stc, or a new fragement that completes an existing partial stc, or 'it was always there, just less popular' is all the lore they needed to justify new stuff.
They could have made sooo many units that were in fluff but not the tabletop; I don’t even think we got a unit with a power lance at all, hq or otherwise
The old marines models would have to be updated eventually. People were going to bitch and whine no matter what. I can remember people constantly whining about the "plot" not advancing in both 40k and fantasy.
@@Icspiders247 it can advance in a good way
@@matthiuskoenig3378 against new tech argument doesn't work for astrates, neither does it work for the universe as a whole.
Don't question the warp squirrel's actions. Just buy, consume, repeat.
The big thing that frustrates me with the Primaris is how separated basic unit roles are from one another. Why can't the intercessor box also contain the bits to create assault intercessors? Or Hellblasters? It makes the buyer feel like they're getting ripped off when all that really changes is the weapons they can hold, and it makes the units feel so one dimensional. You're telling me that this Primaris Intercessor can't understand how to use a plasma gun? Its not possible for them to wield a chainsword or a hammer? That doesn't scream "elite of the elite" to me.
because this way you are forced to buy multiple boxes.
@@darko-man8549 exactly. Very annoying.
Becouse you would have to have like 8 sprues in box to do that ? So cost of boxes would increase and you still would complain
@@kamilalfler9467 price of miniatures have nothing to do with how much plastic is in the box. If that were the case a primaris character would cost 1/10th as much as a box of primaris. I like having more options and the primaris boxes limiting them so drastically isn't great.
It also gives them such a weird feeling in the lore world sense. Like this guy is a perfect warrior psycho trained to be the ultimate warrior, but theres no way that he would be able to understand how to use a chainsword? That's for a completely different trained force?
The primaris are corporate fanfiction because of how painfully derivitive they are
Could you adress the growing politicizing of warhammer. How they always have to remind you that the imperium is evil and that the Tau are good. No form of nuance just black and white.
Either I kinda missed that point when the Tau empire became a part of real-life politics, or you don't really understand what you talking about.
@@aerodynamism5438 I kinda dabbed into to subreddit of 40k lore. There were entire posts dedicated to calling the imperium evil and fascist and if you disagree you get banned. They almost always bring up the Tau as the “good” guys. I do not think you should not be allowed to have those meanings but when you censore those you disagree with then it becomes weird.
@@derpaderpderp8166 No offense, but idiots on reddit are idiots on reddit. If anything, GW has been leaning into portraying the Imperium more heroically, and downplaying its evil, kafka-esque traits. There are a great deal of self proclaimed Marxists who collect 40k now, so they like to proclaim that space Catholicism is totally evil.
@@derpaderpderp8166 they always had to remind you the imperium was evil so the preteen and teenage boys that are drawn to the world of 40k didn't get attached to them as protagonists. The political problem for GW is that a lot of the extremism and intolerance of the Imperium can be deemed morally acceptable because they exist in a context where you have demons, aliens and traitors ready to exterminate the human race. I'm not a leftist and I find the politicization of 40k and everything else tiresome, but that idea of the morality of remorseless force in the face of a perceived existential threat is a big aspect of Fascist thought. However I'd actually say that rather than remind you about how evil the Imperium is, since Gathering Storm there is a pivot to trying to make the Imperium acceptable to modern, 'woke' sensibilities: Reawaken the meritocratic, reasonable and civic minded super hero Guilliman, astroturf in a few women here and there in the lore, a few characters of african descent - because all the flak they've got on twitter and reddit by your sigmarxists has got the investors anxious not to have the product too heavily associated with wrongthink.
@@ndalum75 yeah its just really tedious to say that you like something and then get bombarded with “yOu KnOW ThE iMpErIUm iS EviL rIGht?” They really want you to be ashamed
I hate that templar gut tabard as well.
You might have forgotten this because of the drink but I believe Tim did a wonderful job explaining the GW process for naming units in the new year's stream.
My biggest frustration is that it ruined the sense of scale of the galaxy. The most interesting thing about 40K was the space it gave you to tell your own story, most of the campaigns I was part of were set in distant parts of the imperium with new worlds and relationships to explore. Getting to the Sol system might take decades, getting to another part of the Imperium might take centuries. Here in this part of the galaxy you could introduce new tech or units for the Imperium, and not need to answer why Terra didn't have the 'Crighton' pattern landraider or something. It was because only the tech priests of Saralis, proud of finding the STC for it, were willing to build it without formal approval of the technology from mars. Here were worlds which had never seen a Tyranid. An Eldar craftworld demanded tribute of Plasma Fuel from imperial worlds, in payment for a long forgotten service in war.
It felt big, huge, complex. The idea that things can just change immensely in a few years just makes it more boring.
I mean, how does the Primaris Marines and their related stories stop you from doing exactly that? Legit question
Best material of all GW f.cked ups of last years. Bravo!
I think cawl and vashtorr are secretly working together to take down the Imperium.
Intercessor is a real word at least.
An Intercessor is a person who intervenes to help someone or prays on their behalf.
Cant rerelease new marines at an existing scale and have them sell... Idk if thats entirely true. The new cadians have spurred at least 3 people I know to totally rebuy their guard armies, despite the fact that the now old guard models are completely functional. I do not understand that mentality but enough people have it to not really be an issue for GW sales it seems
I never liked the book 'The fall of Cadia', it seemed to focus too much on the big characters, apart from Creed and Kell, there are no IG chars, and the Cadians come across as almost useless (apart from the 8th right at the end). But it makes sense if the fall of Cadia was not about one of the IG's most important planets, but rather a way to have all of these people get together at a time of need.
This video is 100% on point!
Where are the 2 webway gates located on Terra?? I know of only 1 located in the Throne Room of The Imperial Palace, so were is the other one, please and thank you.
He's referring to the one that's on the moon
Bro, you are in my head!
--> 31:49 ".....That's When *_I Walked Away_* ....."
I'm new to warhammer so all the sets available to me have been Primaris. I went to an actual hobby shop and bought a First Born Tactical Squad on accident. The size difference is startling.
Never change the opening cinematic
Primaris literally look like marines who have gone renegade and joined the Tau.
Honestly would’ve been a much better way to take the primaris as you could also use this as an opportunity to establish the Tau as a major power.
My 5th "why people hate Primaris" video i've tried watching so far. Fella's, brevity is a virtue.
My half-wit brother loves his Primaris Incestors.
I started warhammer again in late 8th edition and was excited to do a primaris army but immediately stopped because of how stupid the heavy weapons squads were. Why would i take up slots for hell blasters and eradicators and now the new rocket launcher squad when i can just first born devastators with all the weapons in one squad? There’s just way too many specific squads for primaris when first born squads are like Swiss Army knives that let you just swap out gear depending on the situation. Why do i need incursors, rievers and infiltrators when i can just run scouts?
There are two things that I am not a fan of when it comes down to Primaris Marines.
First is that like you said with the weapon swap models. The intercessor design while I like the design is probably the most used when it comes down to them. Hellblasters are just intercessors with a different weapon.
The second one is the fact that when it comes down to chapter identity I feel that the only one that still has a style to them is the Black Templars with their crusader squad.
For example for what I mean look at Primaris Death Company. Regular Death Company had a cool look to them. The ornamentation on them feel like its all part of a ritual to honor that they have fallen to the Black Rage. And then theres Death Company Intercessors which doesnt have any of that. Its just intercessors with a Blood Angel upgrade sprue. The Space Wolves are also a victim of that with Hounds of Morkai and they are just Reivers with a Space Wolf upgrade sprue.
It’s been a long time coming.
I only got into Warhammer at the very beginning of 8th edition. So, I have very few non-Primaris marines. But, nothing you said is wrong. And as someone that still has a mainly Primaris army, I want to occasionally play them (they're not my main army, and play for 30K now), I don't want to buy those terrible desolators. I'll probably just kitbash or 3D print something that looks better.
As an aside, I sure hope that whoever is making these design decisions stays the hell away from my Custodes.
I don't always agree with you, but I pretty much agree with everything you said in this video.
Good takes. As usual
The cawl part earned you my like
Primaris marines just put me off from ever collecting a SM army. The tanks in particular are appalling compared the firstborn ones.
The basic Primaris look good. But all the special troops, the jump troopers, the heavy weapons guy all look ridiculous to me. Its just too much. I also hate the Primaris vehicle designs, be those Mario Karts or tanks with so many weapons, it looks like a Mekboy went crazy. And lets not even get into transport "options". 30k all the way.
Absolutely agree with everything said.
The "I am just a tool to show how cool Space Marines are" isn't really a new thing. I remember in my early days of 3rd to 5th edition, there always was a change that pretty much ruined my previous advantage. Playing mostly Xenos, a few situations I remember were "tactical marines outclassing Banshees in close combat", even though they should be THE best troops against them, "Space marine weapons beating Tau weapons in strength and AP value", "Terminators getting 3++ save" without any existing counter in at least half of the armies, Space Wolves ignoring the "mount does not count against your double strength = instadeath rule" because [q] wulves [/q], "having tanks with 14 armour all way around ignoring melter weapons" (in times were this actually mattered) and so many more.
Heck, they even wrote a rule about fearless and losing moral in the main rulesbook with the sentence "no special rules can prevent this" and then overruling it with space marines "semi fearless", which was just better than fearless, that they now overwrote this rule.
And it was not much different in the background either, with for example the Avatar of Khaine and the Swarmlord getting the Lieutenant Worf treatment of losing pretty much to every major character, or 10 Space Marines holding against 1 Million of whatever enemy. If you did not have the feeling before as a CSM player, then I say "welcome to the club" ;)
Also in Space marine 2 lol they for some reason game Primaris armor to Chaos marines too.
That ATHF intro was a nice touch, from a more civilized age...
I actually rebuilt it from scratch, it's not the original intro....
Generally my opinion is they gotta put primaris on the backline and stop making them a focus, horus heresy is in decent shape rn and if they wanna get 40k back on track I really think a new badab book and a renewed focus on “first born” marines would really just bring more people back to marines as right now consistent players aren’t interested and the new players who buy up all this primaris shit are starting to ween off
GWs earnings are showing this and I think it’s the only way forward, look at the difference in response to new world eaters Vs this latest primaris horse shit and it’s clear the fan base knows what they like