The Rumour Thread

[RexHavoc]

29 minutes ago, Skabnoze said:

They said that this is not all of the upcoming models in today’s article, so I expect a release this big will come in multiple waves just like they did with Deepkin and Nighthaunt.

Yeah, thats what I took away from the article too. I'm fine with this as long as the battletome, warscrolls and dice are all week one. I'd personally like to see the squigs as a week one kit too, as thats what I want to grab as many off as I can. The loon king would be great too, but I can pick him up at a later date.
Everything else will be on the to-buy list later on anyway (As I just have too much to paint as it is right now) but they are the must have, day one buys for me.

[Ungface]

Pretty sure everything we saw in the first announcement is what will be released in the first week, just like ID and NH

[Rungi]

This is already my favorite AOS release, and I'm a collector of an old WHFB order army just for the painting and hobby of it. It has been said before, but this shows that alongside the completely new AOS factions there's room to build of and expand old favorite. The idea of variety and lack of boundaries is what AOS seems to be all about. As a dwarf fan, I absolutely love goblins for all the ways they contrast my own army - they're the perfect nemesis! But what we saw in earlier releases had me worried that everything in AOS might go the way of overly-specific micro factions, which might be fine for order but doesn't fit the randomness of grots at all. This is instead a beautiful example of GW creating a framework around an idea and then opening up the possibilities for hobbiests to run wild with. I'm so excited to see where this release allows people to take their armies!

[JackStreicher]

Now I am even more exited for Malekith‘s...erm...Malerion‘s elves 🥺🌋🧨🎇🙌🏻

I can‘t wait for them, until those are even to be in concept-work I might already work as a sculptor for GW 😅 (or at least have applied)

[Chikout]

These new models are fantastic. Another awesome looking army, the best endless spells yet and an extraordinary scenery kit. The only problem is that gw is making it extremely difficult to settle on an army. I don’t have the time or money to paint a whole army every couple of months. I just got the awesome new black coach for Christmas to add to my small nighthaunt army, but I am already getting way too excited about these grots. The only thing stopping me from rushing out and spending way too much money on these guys is the knowledge that the Darkoath, Slaanesh and who knows what are coming soon.

Still I am very excited to see the rest of these minis, especially the big kits. 

[Turgol]

2 hours ago, Ungface said:

WAR was a great game, sad that it just didnt pick up.

It was pretty awesome. They had too high expectations without enough marketing to back it up, linked to an awful handling of release that made them bleed customers when they needed it. It was AoS level lf awful release handling, without the company backing them long enough to revert the situation.

Sad for the history ofgaming. Had it achieved a numerous continous customer base, it had the potential to make gaming history as a second (and better) ever evolving MMORPG world.

[Chikout]

Looking at blurry screen grabs from the battletome you can see the pitched battle profiles. Not counting endless spells, battalions or scenery there are 31 warscrolls. If you add the existing Moonclan, spiderfang, troggoths and gargants together including forgeworld kits you have 21 warscrolls. So that makes at least 10 brand new warscrolls. So far we have only seen two new units which are not reworks of existing units; the Loonking and the alternative build for the fanatics. Given that some of the blurry kits we have look to be new versions of mangler squigs and sourbreath troggoths, it makes you wonder how many kits are in this release. I think we will probably be seeing quite a few new heroes and several multibuild kits. 

Blurry screenshot for reference 

Edited December 27, 2018 by Chikout

[Skabnoze]

31 minutes ago, Turgol said:

It was pretty awesome. They had too high expectations without enough marketing to back it up, linked to an awful handling of release that made them bleed customers when they needed it. It was AoS level lf awful release handling, without the company backing them long enough to revert the situation.

Sad for the history ofgaming. Had it achieved a numerous continous customer base, it had the potential to make gaming history as a second (and better) ever evolving MMORPG world.

I was in the early stages of Beta all the way until after the Tomb Kings expansion when the game ended up in a complete death-spiral.  The game had some real moments of brilliance and a lot of obvious love of the IP from the developers.  But at the same time there was gross mismanagement, lack of focus, and a myriad of other issues on the part of the developers.  The developers pivoted their entire game-design in a different direction late in the development process to chase ideas from World Of Warcraft.  They also set unrealistic timelines that they could not reach which caused them to pull huge chunks of content from launch and also launch with a lot of content that was very heavily bare-bones. 

The game had balance issues across the two main allegiances and class balance was terrible.  There were also poorly-implemented or flat-out broken mechanics all throughout all parts of the game.  Much of this stuff was never addressed.  They had some great ideas, and some of it worked well, but there was a lot of poor execution.  The heart was there but they failed to execute.  Post-mortem this is really a case-study in many of the things not to do for a game.  I really wanted it to succeed, but almost all of the fault for the failure lies in the hands of the developers and not a lack of marketing.

A bit of thread-derailment there, but I feel like it needs to be said that this game honestly deserved to fail.

[Austin]

14 minutes ago, Chikout said:

Looking at blurry screen grabs from the battletome you can see the pitched battle profiles. Not counting endless spells, battalions or scenery there are 31 warscrolls. If you add the existing Moonclan, spiderfang, troggoths and gargants together including forgeworld kits you have 21 warscrolls. So that makes at least 10 brand new warscrolls. So far we have only seen two new units which are not reworks of existing units; the Loonking and the alternative build for the fanatics. Given that some of the blurry kits we have look to be new versions of mangler squigs and sourbreath troggoths, it makes you wonder how many kits are in this release. I think we will probably be seeing quite a few new heroes and several multibuild kits. 

Blurry screenshot for reference 

Don’t forget one warscroll will be for the Fungoid shaman, and one for the Underworlds crew also. Unless you are already counting those. 

[Yoshiya]

3 minutes ago, Caladancid said:

Don’t forget one warscroll will be for the Fungoid shaman, and one for the Underworlds crew also. Unless you are already counting those. 

The underworld crew will be two warscrolls too as the leader has a separate warscrolls (even though they have to be taken together) so that makes three in total.

[novakai]

Sometimes I wonder if it a good idea for GW to do that flash flip through of their books in their trailer knowing people will just do an in-depth video forensic to spoil stuff. Or maybe it just an advance marketing strategy to get people hype for stuff

[Chikout]

5 hours ago, Yoshiya said:

The underworld crew will be two warscrolls too as the leader has a separate warscrolls (even though they have to be taken together) so that makes three in total.

I counted the fungoid shaman but not the underworld guys. I do think there is some stuff I counted which probably won't make it into the book like the squig gobba and rockgut troggoths.

It will be very interested to see what new units are added. 

Edit. GW are wise to people freeze framing of their videos as many of the pages in the flip through are blurred out. I assume GW is very happy for us to do this kind of speculation as it fuels excitement for the release. 

Edited December 27, 2018 by Chikout

[Overread]

6 minutes ago, novakai said:

Sometimes I wonder if it a good idea for GW to do that flash flip through of their books in their trailer knowing people will just do an in-depth video forensic to spoil stuff. Or maybe it just an advance marketing strategy to get people hype for stuff

It's certainly a marketing trick and GW knows people will be pausing to try and grab screen pages. That's why the speed flipping through varies and why some pages are blurred out and others clear. GW does it for marketing, it soaks up peoples desire to hunt down those rumours and hints and secrets and builds up a little hype and interest of its own beyond the "hey here's all the info" dump. 

 

GW knows people like rumours so they are feeding that desire directly rather than relying on internal hints. It might even be that it helps reduce internal leaks when staff feel that the marketing division is doing stuff like this. 

[Turgol]

1 hour ago, Skabnoze said:

I was in the early stages of Beta all the way until after the Tomb Kings expansion when the game ended up in a complete death-spiral.  The game had some real moments of brilliance and a lot of obvious love of the IP from the developers.  But at the same time there was gross mismanagement, lack of focus, and a myriad of other issues on the part of the developers.  The developers pivoted their entire game-design in a different direction late in the development process to chase ideas from World Of Warcraft.  They also set unrealistic timelines that they could not reach which caused them to pull huge chunks of content from launch and also launch with a lot of content that was very heavily bare-bones. 

The game had balance issues across the two main allegiances and class balance was terrible.  There were also poorly-implemented or flat-out broken mechanics all throughout all parts of the game.  Much of this stuff was never addressed.  They had some great ideas, and some of it worked well, but there was a lot of poor execution.  The heart was there but they failed to execute.  Post-mortem this is really a case-study in many of the things not to do for a game.  I really wanted it to succeed, but almost all of the fault for the failure lies in the hands of the developers and not a lack of marketing.

A bit of thread-derailment there, but I feel like it needs to be said that this game honestly deserved to fail.

I did not mean to suggest it was all caused by lack of marketing. Rather that two months after release, the game had its death sentence because of not making up with huge financial expectations (2 million player base, never got past 1,1, which was already very high). 

 

Why it did not reach those levels certainly lies in a mix of execution problems (an extreme mix of some servers crashing because of excess of players and some others feeling like a graveyard was a huge problem, appart from what you mention) and simply dropping the ball quite early out of too high expectations.

 

And yes, the original design with three parallel wars, six capitals, and so on, had so much potential that it hurts. 

[Skabnoze]

16 minutes ago, Turgol said:

And yes, the original design with three parallel wars, six capitals, and so on, had so much potential that it hurts. 

We are off on a tangent here, but the original design did not have battlegrounds anywhere in it.  They were originally shooting for just open-world faction conflict to be the core of the game as with Dark Age of Camelot - but on a bigger scale than that game.  The PvE dynamic content they added in was also a late idea (although public quests were a brilliant idea).

One of their problems (amongst many) was that they had a very great and achievable core idea for a smaller game, but it would have a somewhat niche (although probably dedicated) audience.  They decided to pivot to something with broader appeal too late in the development process to truly pull it off.  They also decided not to abandon the original core of the game and the end result was a bit of a design mess.  

Hard to tell exactly who or why those decisions were made so late by management, but as a software engineer I can say that major project pivots late in the process lead to bad results unless you are willing to delay release.  

Regardless, that experience is done and I think we can both agree that it had serious promise but a conglomeration of events conspired to sadly squander that promise.  Hopefully sometime in the future someone else can make a better attempt at a great Warhammer RPG video game.

[Barkanaut]

I think I seen two pictures of giant arachnaroc spider entries in the book too so I think we'll be seeing those getting update too but it was really blurry so grain of salt. Also I love some of the models and others are simply good its not my fav destruction faction but its definitely one I would add to my eventual grand alliance destruction. I have always planned to do a BCR/Ironjaws vs my KO/ID. Now I'll add some Gloomspite Gitz. Loonking is definitely the coolest model so far though he has this sort of crazed grandiosity to him other leaders lack and that's saying something given how small he looks lol. 

[Deepkin]

3 hours ago, Skabnoze said:

I was in the early stages of Beta all the way until after the Tomb Kings expansion when the game ended up in a complete death-spiral.  The game had some real moments of brilliance and a lot of obvious love of the IP from the developers.  But at the same time there was gross mismanagement, lack of focus, and a myriad of other issues on the part of the developers.  The developers pivoted their entire game-design in a different direction late in the development process to chase ideas from World Of Warcraft.  They also set unrealistic timelines that they could not reach which caused them to pull huge chunks of content from launch and also launch with a lot of content that was very heavily bare-bones. 

The game had balance issues across the two main allegiances and class balance was terrible.  There were also poorly-implemented or flat-out broken mechanics all throughout all parts of the game.  Much of this stuff was never addressed.  They had some great ideas, and some of it worked well, but there was a lot of poor execution.  The heart was there but they failed to execute.  Post-mortem this is really a case-study in many of the things not to do for a game.  I really wanted it to succeed, but almost all of the fault for the failure lies in the hands of the developers and not a lack of marketing.

A bit of thread-derailment there, but I feel like it needs to be said that this game honestly deserved to fail.

To be fair to the developers, much of these issues were directly due to EA, not the choices of the Mythic devs. The company was purchased partway through development by EA and absolutely gutted by them shortly before, or after (can't remember) release. A lot of the nonsensical decisions stem from this: the game was made, and then maintained, by totally different teams of people. 

It truly was a very fun MMO and it nailed the Warhammer aesthetic so thoroughly that the armor sets and zones in the game still rank among the best in any MMO ever released IMO.

Also, there is a private server for the game out there that is decently active. The developers for the private server are legitimately unpleasant people however, which is a shame because it was great to be able to play WAR after all these years and relive the glory days.

Ironbreaker and Marauder are two of the most fun MMO classes to date. Uuuuugh, the nostalgia, it is getting to me! Curse ye!

[Sleboda]

3 hours ago, novakai said:

maybe it just an advance marketing strategy to get people hype for stuff

That's precisely what it is.  It generates a ton of discussion without really giving anything too specific away.

[Skabnoze]

44 minutes ago, Deepkin said:

To be fair to the developers, much of these issues were directly due to EA, not the choices of the Mythic devs. The company was purchased partway through development by EA and absolutely gutted by them shortly before, or after (can't remember) release. A lot of the nonsensical decisions stem from this: the game was made, and then maintained, by totally different teams of people. 

It truly was a very fun MMO and it nailed the Warhammer aesthetic so thoroughly that the armor sets and zones in the game still rank among the best in any MMO ever released IMO.

We are going quite far off topic now.  We should probably move this to private chats.

I don’t disagree that EA had a lot to do with decisions once Mythic accepted the deal to be acquired in order for a bigger cash fusion.  But it’s impossible to say how much of this was consciously done by the main execs at Mythic. I am pretty sure they knew to a fair degree what they were doing and the potential issues for a sale such as that.

But a number of large changes to the core design of the game, such as the shift from primary open-world combat to instanced battlegrounds, was made before EA came on board.  I was part of the beta from about as soon as it left closed Alpha.  I saw a lot of what they did and how they changed design.  But it is also hard to say if they made those pivots on their own or if they were already in talks with EA behind the scenes and were trying to actively court acquisition by positioning themselves as  sort of possible WoW-killer.

Most of the Mythic devs did the best that they could, and they did a lot of cool things.  It is obvious that a lot of love went into the game even if it did have issues.  But in the end you can trace most of the game problems back to Mythic upper management. They mismanaged the fundamental game design too far into the process.  They mismanaged the budget and timelines.  They handed the keys over to EA.  And they grossly mismanaged the game post launch.

If you want to talk about this in more specifics I am happy to in private messages.

Edited December 27, 2018 by Skabnoze

[Skabnoze]

3 hours ago, Overread said:

GW knows people like rumours so they are feeding that desire directly rather than relying on internal hints. It might even be that it helps reduce internal leaks when staff feel that the marketing division is doing stuff like this. 

I am glad that they finally figured that out.  Their older policy of complete radio silence was terrible.  The community team is doing a much better job over the last year and I applaud them for it.

[Skreech Verminking]

Damm Gw, I really am loosing my money here. First Boc, now gitz.

And what next, skaven?

[Shearl]

A decent shot of a new troll is this picture! I need to get back to work and finish painting my grots from bfsp.

[RexHavoc]

One thing I have noticed that I find kind of odd with this release is the fanatics kit has an odd model count. I don't recall a time far back enough where they were not always taken in groups of 3 (or at least 1-3 per unit) and the new model count is really bizarre then (of course the picture they put up may not be a true indication of what's in the box but I'd be surprised if they were to show off a new kit with bits from multiple kits)

There appears to be only 5 fanatics and one dead/sickly looking grot, who's having a miserable time. 5 models seems on par for other duel kits (especially as they look like they might be crammed with bits and a lot larger than the last set of fanatics)

Which means either they have had a huge rule overhaul from every other edition, meaning you can take 5 (6 if the sick grot counts) per unit now, the dead/sick grot is some sort of negative rule affect (Perhaps we are seeing a return of negative rules like animosity) that is going to crop up on a regular enough basis that they decided to actually include the model of it (perhaps they all have a chance to pop their guts on release) or perhaps this is the issue of not enough models/weapons in a box. I had thought GW were moving away from that kind of thing, but from what little I've seen of competitive threads, the KO suffer from not enough of the desirable weapons in the boxes.

If it's case that we are just going to be a model shy per box, I'm fine with that, I have a huge collection of various fanatics (from snotlings to the god awful to build Brian Nelson ones) and it won't take much to find a spare to bulk a unit out. Also with it being a duel kit, anyone that doesn't have a stash of older models to work with, there should be enough bits left over from the mushroom version to add to a spare grot from the core box or somewhere to build a decent enough conversion. Also, for those that intend to pick it up, there is one side the shadespire set, which will have a height difference, but that is also a good option for those of us that pick the set up for the hero model.
 

[Furuzzolo]

You need Stormcasts to fight Chaos.

You need Free People to fight goatmen.

You need Duardin to fight filthy greenskinz 😡

(I hope, at least. Dispossessed and free people next!)

[Carnelian]

27 minutes ago, RexHavoc said:

One thing I have noticed that I find kind of odd with this release is the fanatics kit has an odd model count. I don't recall a time far back enough where they were not always taken in groups of 3 (or at least 1-3 per unit) and the new model count is really bizarre then (of course the picture they put up may not be a true indication of what's in the box but I'd be surprised if they were to show off a new kit with bits from multiple kits)

There appears to be only 5 fanatics and one dead/sickly looking grot, who's having a miserable time. 5 models seems on par for other duel kits (especially as they look like they might be crammed with bits and a lot larger than the last set of fanatics)

Which means either they have had a huge rule overhaul from every other edition, meaning you can take 5 (6 if the sick grot counts) per unit now, the dead/sick grot is some sort of negative rule affect (Perhaps we are seeing a return of negative rules like animosity) that is going to crop up on a regular enough basis that they decided to actually include the model of it (perhaps they all have a chance to pop their guts on release) or perhaps this is the issue of not enough models/weapons in a box. I had thought GW were moving away from that kind of thing, but from what little I've seen of competitive threads, the KO suffer from not enough of the desirable weapons in the boxes.

If it's case that we are just going to be a model shy per box, I'm fine with that, I have a huge collection of various fanatics (from snotlings to the god awful to build Brian Nelson ones) and it won't take much to find a spare to bulk a unit out. Also with it being a duel kit, anyone that doesn't have a stash of older models to work with, there should be enough bits left over from the mushroom version to add to a spare grot from the core box or somewhere to build a decent enough conversion. Also, for those that intend to pick it up, there is one side the shadespire set, which will have a height difference, but that is also a good option for those of us that pick the set up for the hero model.
 

There is no chance that you would not be able to field the unit straight out the box - they are new types of fanatics so they will definitely have new rules. Maybe you field them in units of 1,or 5, or units of 1 to 5, but the old rules will deffo have changed.