When will AoS be finished?

[Guest]

So here we are, on the cusp of the release of a whole new edition of Warhammer: Age of Sigmar. I guess the design studio must not have been entirely happy with their first effort and thought it needed some improvements before they could call it done - like a final patch for a video game or the definitive version of Monopoly with the card reader instead of paper money. Is the game finished now do you think?

[Swooper]

Finished? It should never be finished. There should always be something more to add - new armies, new models, new spells, allegiance abilities, updated warscrolls and errata for all the rest. Games develop as they are played, it is in their nature.

[flemingmma]

We're up to 8th edition 40k soooooo

[Deja vu]

I think it will be done when it is retired for the next fantasy based Warhammer game... So several years at least.  I have to say I am happy with the great majority of the changes. 

 

[sorokyl]

WFB lasted over 25 years....

[Barkanaut]

A loooong time lol. Honestly I see it lasting at least... 12 years. 

[Gorthor21]

Even back in the days of Fantasy Battles the rules were changed every edition sometimes in small ways and some editions in big ways like from 7th to 8th.  Being human with human fallibility I don’t think any edition of Age of Sigmar will be complete and succinct as there will always be people who want different things from the game and thats the great thing about Age of Sigmar in that they are actually listening to what the players have to say and making the changes that we as players want to see.   I think that it is good that it will never be a completed system.

[Skabnoze]

When it is no longer profitable.

But if you mean when will they lock the rules in place permanently then I don’t think they will ever happen.  Rules changes, model resculpts, battletome revision, and campaign books will continue to be produced because that is how GW makes money.  This is not an artistic endeavor that will be completed at some point like a novel or movie.  This is a product sold by a large publicly traded company.  

I have played tabletop games for a long time now and the only games that have been “finished” are the games that were ultimately retired.  The successful games have always gone through multiple revisions.  The companies have to continue to sell things and they cannot sustain those sales by expanding with new items endlessly.  Every game has a tipping point where there is simply too much junk and games can actually sink under endless bloat.  To combat that some companies mix in revisions of old stuff, including full rules rewrites.  That strategy has worked fairly well for GW since the 80s and so I don’t see that changing anytime.

[Qaz]

11 minutes ago, Skabnoze said:

[..] only games that have been “finished” are the games that were ultimately retired.  

This. Example, 40k Conquest and Warhammer Fantasy. Warhammer Fantasy finished with the End Times. 

[Skabnoze]

7 minutes ago, Qaz said:

This. Example, 40k Conquest and Warhammer Fantasy. Warhammer Fantasy finished with the End Times. 

Warhammer Fantasy did not finish - it simply morphed into Age of Sigmar.

When I say “retired” I mean games like Dark Future, Vor: The Maelstrom, Man O War, Chronopia, Uncharted Seas, etc.

[Baron Klatz]

^ So much this. It's Warhammer fantasy and it'll keep going and evolving until the end. The setting itself might never really go as it's really GW's own creation instead of how they piggybacked off DnD model players and Lord of the Ring in the their beginning which aged and tied their hands going onwards.

So like their other original property 40k, I honestly see AoS growing and prospering until the company itself hits it's limit. Easily several decades down the line and hopefully so far in the future i'm too wrinkled and shaky handed to paint a model anymore.

[Nin Win]

The single best thing that happened to AoS was Josh Reynolds injecting his own influences of early and mid 20th century folklore and weird fiction into the backstory by being given so many novels to write for the setting.  Some was obviously intentional (like when Lovecraft is requoted or paraphrased) but I'm sure much of it is the result of the way influences rattle around inside our brains.

If the malign portents stories are any indication, it looks like the departure from Lord of the Rings and D&D style generic fantasy is going to continue.  I'm very happy about that.

[Orsino]

It's a lot more profitable for GW to keep on getting people to buy new versions of their games every few years, otherwise they would reach market saturation where everyone who was interested in the game owned it and had an army they liked, at which point players would be spending less money.

I do hope that they'll stick with AOS 2 for a while but if they thought they could get people to buy a new edition every week they'd do it.

[GeneralZero]

It is funny that you speak about Monopoly because do you know that it took decades to give us the actual version of the game which was at its start a complete oposite game?

[Toddy]

What we're seeing from GW in the last few years (and certainly since the release of AoS) is a move towards more 'iterative', 'agile' product development. E.g. an attempt to make smaller changes more often. Even though we're hitting the 2.0 release (as some have put it!) the AoS we had by the time Malign Portents hit was a very different beast than the one GW released back in 2015. It's an interesting challenge with a product like this, as it isn't easy to 'patch' a ruleset that is printed in physical books (and hence we end up with FAQ and errata documents). But I think they've done a pretty good job. A new major release is just a great opportunity to consolidate and clean up all the changes they've made in the last three years.

In all likelyhood, we can expect more of the same for as long as people continue to buy little plastic fantasy soldiers  

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[sandlemad]

I'm not sure being 'finished' is a useful concept to apply to AoS or any GW game really. Bar retired games like Skabnoze says, you just get updates and new editions. Same with other miniature companies and RPG companies, for that matter, it's not even a recent innovation on GW's part.

Dungeons and Dragons has been going for something like 40 years. It's forked into different games and been revised even more times than the strict five editions Wizards use for their titles but it's not finished as such.

[erasercrumbs]

The Skaven aren't dominant yet so clearly there is much to be done.

[bsharitt]

Narratively, it seems like GW has designed the moral realms to give themselves plenty of breathing room to expand AoS and evolve the story line without blowing the world, so I don't think we'll see another "end times" where the mortal realms are blown up, coalesce into a single world, and we start over again.

[Nos]

The actual world is currently in more danger of blowing up before the Eternal Realms do 

[AaronWilson]

I don't think AoS will ever really be finished until GW stops trading. 

[Redmanphill]

The important question here is:

"Why would you want the game to be finished?"

[GeneralZero]

The game is ALWAYS finished

 

 

...until you want to change it (supposedly to improve/blance/change/reboot it - you choose the word-)

[Urauloth]

Never. It's a living game with an evolving setting and constantly updating rules. I think it's safe to say that it's fairly stable now at 2E, though - we probably won't see any wild changes of direction for a while.

[Wraith01]

This type of game is never "finished". 

[Overread]

For me finished means that every basic army has a battletome. Sure it won't end there, but at least then each army has had its own attention paid to it ; balance, lore etc... Of course once that happens there's new units, new armies, new endless spells, new twists like throwing in a new mechanic or something etc.... 

 

So yes in theory it will never be finished, however with 40K 8th we are about to have the first time when all armies are updated at once (with only Sisters lagging until next year). I hope Sigmar follows suit.