Warhammer - The Old World

[RuneBrush]

20 hours ago, Public Universal Duardin said:

Has anyone heard any recent rumours about TOW? I had a slight realisation that I hadn't heard TOW mentioned in a while, when I was thinking on how GW seems to push HH. Seems the latest direct rumours are over half a year old...

There's not been anything recently.  Normally people get odd snippets of information from Open Days and similar, but we've not had (m)any of those this year for people to quiz the developers.  I did hear that the pandemic had caused TOW to be pushed back by a chunk though.  My gut feeling is that we're looking 2024 for release.

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

1 hour ago, RuneBrush said:

There's not been anything recently.  Normally people get odd snippets of information from Open Days and similar, but we've not had (m)any of those this year for people to quiz the developers.  I did hear that the pandemic had caused TOW to be pushed back by a chunk though.  My gut feeling is that we're looking 2024 for release.

The original announcement of TOW was certaily at a very early stage. The whole pandemic situation will certainly not have helped them hit their initial targets, either.

I kind of wonder if announcing TOW as early as they did was really a good strategy. Even though it's probably not true, it might feel to casual observers like no progress is being made. I have also observed TOW taking away some interest from AoS.

"Should I rebase my Fantasy army to rounds with TOW coming soon?" , "I was planning to ge into AoS, should I wait for TOW instead?" or on the more extreme end " AoS will be dead from lack of players/get discontinued in 3 years when TOW comes out. " are all questions/sentiments I have seen online since TOW was announced.

Edited August 22, 2022 by Neil Arthur Hotep

[Nos]

9 minutes ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

The original announcement of TOW was certaily at a very early stage. The whole pandemic situation will certainly not have helped them hit their initial targets, either.

I kind of wonder if announcing TOW as early as they did was really a good strategy. Even though it's probably not true, it might feel to casual observers like no progress is being made. I have also observed TOW taking away some interest from AoS.

"Should I rebase my Fantasy army to rounds with TOW coming soon?" , "I was planning to ge into AoS, should I wait for TOW instead?" or on the more extreme end " AoS will be dead from lack of players/get discontinued in 3 yearsn TOW comes out. " are all questions/sentiments I have seen online since TOW was announced.

When they made a big announcement as advertisement for making a big announcement I knew it was going to be a weirs project

Realistically going to be 4 years minimum before TOW is established for itself. By which I mean, as a unique product with its own fanbase and draw.

If people want to play Warhammer they already can and do. There's also frankly much better and easier and cheaper systems like Oathmark and KOW both of which are friendly to using Warhammer armies on round or square bases 

For GW to get back in on square based rank and file action without hurting AOS is going to take a long time, regardless as to when they release.

[Public Universal Duardin]

1 hour ago, RuneBrush said:

There's not been anything recently.  Normally people get odd snippets of information from Open Days and similar, but we've not had (m)any of those this year for people to quiz the developers.  I did hear that the pandemic had caused TOW to be pushed back by a chunk though.  My gut feeling is that we're looking 2024 for release.

Ouch, that's what I feared 😭

Understandable, though, that the pandemic would have affected any plans negatively. Also seems that any hopes of seeing TOW be supported like (current) HH are overly positive at best, if those old rumours are true.

[Black_Templar_Lad]

1 hour ago, RuneBrush said:

There's not been anything recently.  Normally people get odd snippets of information from Open Days and similar, but we've not had (m)any of those this year for people to quiz the developers.  I did hear that the pandemic had caused TOW to be pushed back by a chunk though.  My gut feeling is that we're looking 2024 for release.

I think that may be the case.

I was watching one of Valrak's streams and he heard that it's been pushed back to at least 24/25.

Now of course Val is mostly 40k rumours, he does get insider info and he is not the rumourmonger, and that snippet may have been taken from somewhere else, so not to hold it to him of course, but that seems to be the latest info out there. 

Honestly I'm happy waiting, with Immortal Empires out this week and Chorfs for Total Warhammer soon after, I think we'll have a good chunk of the Old World to enjoy for now. 

[Baron Klatz]

6 hours ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

I kind of wonder if announcing TOW as early as they did was really a good strategy.

For TOW, no. Tons of interest is dying off now, announcing around this year would’ve been better at keeping hype up.
 

For GW in general, yes. Itrobbed almost all the Thunder out of Kings of War’s third edition announcement.

Which is likely the main reason they even said anything despite only having a logo ready at the time.

6 hours ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

I have also observed TOW taking away some interest from AoS.

Not as bad it did at the start. Last year on the Warhammer general Reddit someone posted on the TOW revealed map “Is it just me or is there not much of a reason to care? AoS is in a really great place now and me and my friends are having a blast with 3rd edition.” to which it became a top voted comment in the thread because AoS keeps going strength to strength while the new specialist game only has nostalgia going for it which the rules, resin and costs can easily nullify if old players decide to take their old armies to better rank and file games.

 

Plus a Lot of comments of new hobbyists asking “What’s the Old World? A Age of Sigmar expansion?” because we are hitting an area in time where the old guard are getting replaced with new players who don’t even know what a Bretonnia or Mordheim is nor ever seen a empire soldier on a square base.

As the years go by the nostalgia selling angle gets less and less weight to offset what are likely to be egregious prices.

Edited August 22, 2022 by Baron Klatz

[RuneBrush]

15 hours ago, Baron Klatz said:

For TOW, no. Tons of interest is dying off now, announcing around this year would’ve been better at keeping hype up.

Without the pandemic I think they announced it around the right time.  There was always a caveat that it was a long project, but covid effectively stuck 2 years on it and meant we've lost the momentum and enthusiasm.  What I do think has been a mistake is going completely radio silent and not communicating a renewed timeframe - which they must have worked out by now.  But lack of communication is something we're seeing fairly commonly if I'm being critical.

16 hours ago, Baron Klatz said:

while the new specialist game only has nostalgia going for it which the rules, resin and costs can easily nullify if old players decide to take their old armies to better rank and file games.

I think it's far too early to make a call on this with the sparse amount of information we've been given so far.  The Specialist Design Studio have got a reputation for creating pretty solid rulesets without a horrific amount of creep, so we may actually find the new ruleset to be really solid.  GW lost a large number of customers when they moved away from a rank and file based game and it's those that the bean counters will want to get back.

16 hours ago, Baron Klatz said:

As the years go by the nostalgia selling angle gets less and less weight to offset what are likely to be egregious prices.

Again, I think it's too early to talk about prices.  Personally I think the prices and box composition that we've seen coming out for the latest Age of Darkness release have been pretty decent on their price point.  If we see similar for TOW then GW could be onto a winner on that front.  Who knows thought!  Certainly I expect an army to cost less then they did towards the end of WHFB 😂

[El Syf]

Unpopular opinion: The End Times killed off the World That Was. It should stay dead.

I am not hating on WFB, many of my favorite units in AoS are only so because their WFB counterparts were much better as far as on the tabletop goes (Blood Knights and Vampire Lords really were rather good). I was also a massive advocate of the customization you had in WFB. 

It just feels like a massive step backwards when they went to such great lengths to kill it off. I'm sure most people at the time heard the rumor GW spent a lot of money to have the Archaon book shipped via an alternative route to make sure it was on sale on time. Why bother just to revive a dead setting years later?

Edited August 23, 2022 by El Syf

[Twisted Firaun]

1 hour ago, El Syf said:

Unpopular opinion: The End Times killed off the World That Was. It should stay dead.

I am not hating on WFB, many of my favorite units in AoS are only so because their WFB counterparts were much better as far as on the tabletop goes (Blood Knights and Vampire Lords really were rather good). I was also a massive advocate of the customization you had in WFB. 

It just feels like a massive step backwards when they went to such great lengths to kill it off. I'm sure most people at the time heard the rumor GW spent a lot of money to have the Archaon book shipped via an alternative route to make sure it was on sale on time. Why bother just to revive a dead setting years later?

If the IP was "dead" then we wouldn't have gotten Vermintide, Total War: Warhammer, or Chaosbane. There're clearly enough fans of both 30k and 40k to warrant a division between the two settings, why should TOW and AOS not share the same divide?

[Beliman]

5 hours ago, RuneBrush said:

The Specialist Design Studio have got a reputation for creating pretty solid rulesets without a horrific amount of creep, so we may actually find the new ruleset to be really solid.

I completely agree. I love what they did with HH. It is a blast even if some units or interactions are a bit weird (mainly contemptors). But the whole game feels like a war in the age of darkness, and that's something really hard to achieve these days.

I hope that SDS do a similar work with TOW. And just looking at blogs, tubes and streamers playing other Fantasy medias, it seems that everyone want to see what TOW will become.

Edited August 23, 2022 by Beliman

[El Syf]

4 minutes ago, Twisted Firaun said:

If the IP was "dead" then we wouldn't have gotten Vermintide, Total War: Warhammer, or Chaosbane. There're clearly enough fans of both 30k and 40k to warrant a division between the two settings, why should TOW and AOS not share the same divide?

I just find it odd/amusing given the obscene lengths they went to and number of people they annoyed to kill it off.

It also stands to alienate players who have only played AoS or those that use to play WFB and went through the rigmarole of rebasing entire armies to rounds when they could have just waited a decade or so for WFB to make a return; that's a pretty sour taste in the mouth. I'm not against it but I know I'll never play it as my regular opponent has no interest in going back to that.

[Twisted Firaun]

https://www.warhammer-community.com/2022/08/23/champions-of-chaos-spread-ruin-in-new-total-war-warhammer-iii-dlc/
 

With the latest DLC drop, what are some units/characters from the game everyone  hope/wish to see in TOW?

My choices:

1. Dual wielding Tomb Guard

2. Vampire Coast (all of it)

3. Doom Knights.

[Jefferson Skarsnik]

7 hours ago, El Syf said:

I just find it odd/amusing given the obscene lengths they went to and number of people they annoyed to kill it off.

It also stands to alienate players who have only played AoS or those that use to play WFB and went through the rigmarole of rebasing entire armies to rounds when they could have just waited a decade or so for WFB to make a return; that's a pretty sour taste in the mouth. I'm not against it but I know I'll never play it as my regular opponent has no interest in going back to that.

Idk, they probably just feel in retrospect that the way they blew it up and rubbed people's faces in it was a mistake, they alienated some people and left money on the table, and they might as well try to rectify the mistake in a way that makes them some money without it being at the expense of the bigger cash cow in AOS.

I kind of gradually lost enthusiasm for playing AOS as a game over the last year with the kinda botched launch of 3rd edition, too many revised army books, a general sense that it's turning into a Magic-style shiny new thing meta that you have to try to keep up with etc. I have kind of a hankering for some basic rank and flank stuff with artillery, psychology rules and cav charges etc. I guess I basically just want to play 1500 point games fighting over tiny run-down villages with grizzled empire captains, no wizards higher than level 2 etc etc.

The timing of the announcement and the lack of news isn't ideal though, who knows if I or anyone else will still feel that enthusiastic by the time it actually comes out. It was like the Simpsons episode where they rushed out Malibu Stacy with a new hat to crush the competitor in its cradle, only the Malibu Stacy with a new hat won't be available for three to four years, or more if there happens to be a global pandemic

[Beliman]

7 hours ago, Jefferson Skarsnik said:

I have kind of a hankering for some basic rank and flank stuff with artillery, psychology rules and cav charges etc. I guess I basically just want to play 1500 point games fighting over tiny run-down villages with grizzled empire captains, no wizards higher than level 2 etc etc.

A 1500p game fighting over a tiny run-down villages with grizzled empire captains, no high level wizards can still be emulated by AoS. But I think that the problem is not AoS, it's just that you want to play Warhammer Fantasy.

But if you want to play a more actual Rankd&File game, I suggest Conquest: The Last Argument of the Kings. It can be played as an skirmish game (First Blood) or up to a Mass Battle (Conquest). It's easier to start playing than Fantasy with even more depth of play.

[RuneBrush]

8 hours ago, Jefferson Skarsnik said:

Idk, they probably just feel in retrospect that the way they blew it up and rubbed people's faces in it was a mistake, they alienated some people and left money on the table, and they might as well try to rectify the mistake in a way that makes them some money without it being at the expense of the bigger cash cow in AOS.

A few GW staff have admitted that if they were able to go back in time and change how they introduced AoS they'd do a number of things differently.  Without getting too far down the rabbit hole (as it's not healthy and now firmly in the past), WHFB wasn't making GW any real money and the entry cost was horrifically high, so "something" had to change.

Where The Old World has grown from is a realisation that there is a wealth of lore and love for Warhammer as a setting.  That's been proven by Total War and Black Library amongst others.  The key thing as hobbyists to bear in mind is that The Old World will not be a regurgitated version of WHFB.  The intention is something akin to the Horus Heresy in terms of setting and narrative flavour (or at least that was the intention the last we heard).

[RuneBrush]

9 hours ago, Jefferson Skarsnik said:

a general sense that it's turning into a Magic-style shiny new thing meta that you have to try to keep up with etc.

I think we've always had that in one form or another.  My own feeling is the difference is that AoS has become a less casual and more competitive focused game in the past few years with quite a significant creep in battletomes, so not "keeping up" can sometimes result in one-sided games even in a friendly environment.

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

19 hours ago, El Syf said:

Unpopular opinion: The End Times killed off the World That Was. It should stay dead.

I am not hating on WFB, many of my favorite units in AoS are only so because their WFB counterparts were much better as far as on the tabletop goes (Blood Knights and Vampire Lords really were rather good). I was also a massive advocate of the customization you had in WFB. 

It just feels like a massive step backwards when they went to such great lengths to kill it off. I'm sure most people at the time heard the rumor GW spent a lot of money to have the Archaon book shipped via an alternative route to make sure it was on sale on time. Why bother just to revive a dead setting years later?

In my opinion,  the only reason GW is even in a position to put ressources into The Old World right now is because they took such drastic action with the release of AoS.

Near the end of Warhammer Fantasy, I think it was pretty clear that things were not working. The barrier of entry had become too high and whatever enthusiasm the player base had did not translate into model sales or new players. Given this state of the game, some kind of drastic action was definitely necessary to keep the Fantasy universe alive. GW, at the time, decided on a big, decisive cut: Kill off the old setting and fundamentally rework the mechanics. Of course, the launch of AoS was also semi-bungled, but the game did manage to build its own dedicated player base over time out of both new and returning players. And personally I think decisively killing off Warhammer Fantasy was an important factor in this. It made it so that, for both new and old players, if they wanted to play the newest edition of the game, they had to play AoS.

It is only because of this clear break that we can now look at bringing the old world back. The setting still has its charm and I think a separate rank and flank game can coexist with AoS. But only because the AoS community has become self-sustaining at this point. Maybe we could have got here without destroying the Old World. Maybe really committing ressources to Warhammer Fantasy, both in terms of marketing and codex/model updates, could have been enough. But in that world, I am pretty sure GW would not be in a positions to successfully launch AoS as a new spin-off right now the way they are trying to launch TOW.

[Gaz Taylor]

1 hour ago, RuneBrush said:

I think we've always had that in one form or another.  My own feeling is the difference is that AoS has become a less casual and more competitive focused game in the past few years with quite a significant creep in battletomes, so not "keeping up" can sometimes result in one-sided games even in a friendly environment.

I think that’s GW games in general at the moment. I’m currently trying to change my mindset a little bit around competitive gaming. I love competitive games but the meta chasing gets too much when you want to spend time with family. 
 

Im a bit excited about Old World but if I’m honest, I’d have preferred something similar to Warmaster or Kings of War rather than a tweaked version of Fantasy. Fantasy was fun to play back in the day but I think it’s had it’s time. 

[Skreech Verminking]

19 hours ago, El Syf said:

rebasing entire armies to rounds

And I’m still rebasing.

hopefully the old world or third party companies will have a solution for that

[Jefferson Skarsnik]

I

6 hours ago, Beliman said:

A 1500p game fighting over a tiny run-down villages with grizzled empire captains, no high level wizards can still be emulated by AoS. But I think that the problem is not AoS, it's just that you want to play Warhammer Fantasy.

Ah sure it's both

 

I think "meta-chasing" was a bad choice of words on my part; there's always been that element to these games and it's always been possible to avoid it to some extent, I guess what I really meant was that the maybe premature (due to covid stopping so much 2nd Ed game time) new edition of AOS came with new rules (that in some cases felt a bit bolted on to solve existing balance problems), and all the seasons of war type stuff, that suddenly made it feel a bit bewildering and like there was this need to do loads of homework to continue being able to play. People can always say "there's nothing stopping you playing the game and ruleset you exactly want and ignoring all that" but if you're a bit reliant on finding games at clubs or within a scene the general state of the game and the "meta" does have a bit of a knock effect on the more casual players too in the way RuneBrush identified. Not to say that my experience is universal, but certainly the pendulum might have swung back a bit for some of the "AOS is the low barrier to entry easy fun game with no baggage" people.

I broadly agree with NAH's assessment of how we got here, and certainly AOS got me painting models again when there was no prospect whatsoever that I would have ever taken the decision to buy and paint a 2000 pt 8th edition army with a load of blocks of 24 infantry. I guess I'm just interested to see if, with the decks cleared and the baggage of the old game gone, whether they can come out with a more focused experience for TOW that scratches that rank and flank square base itch while still having the Warhammer lore and production values etc.

anyway, Immortal Empires dropped yesterday so I've certainly got options in the meantime

[RuneBrush]

2 hours ago, Gaz Taylor said:

I think that’s GW games in general at the moment. I’m currently trying to change my mindset a little bit around competitive gaming. I love competitive games but the meta chasing gets too much when you want to spend time with family. 

The group of people I game with most often have all deviated towards more skirmish games in truth, so Necromunda, Aeronautica, Titanicus.  They need less models, have more stable goal posts and because they're shorter length games you can get more games into the same timespan.  Still plenty of releases to spend money on if wanted of course!

2 hours ago, Gaz Taylor said:

Im a bit excited about Old World but if I’m honest, I’d have preferred something similar to Warmaster or Kings of War rather than a tweaked version of Fantasy. Fantasy was fun to play back in the day but I think it’s had it’s time. 

I think we're going to get something completely new rather than a tweaked version.  Could well be wrong on that front of course, but I think the rules devs working on TOW are very aware of all of the problems that the last few versions had.

[Jator]

3 hours ago, Gaz Taylor said:

Im a bit excited about Old World but if I’m honest, I’d have preferred something similar to Warmaster or Kings of War rather than a tweaked version of Fantasy. Fantasy was fun to play back in the day but I think it’s had it’s time. 

Agreed. I think most of us are exited about playing battles again in the world of Warhammer Fantasy, but only feel ok about playing Warhammer Fantasy per se. I had fun with 8th edition, but games took forever. In fact, just deploying and picking up the casualties take longer than playing some other games (I played Skaven, so your mileage may vary!).

 

11 minutes ago, RuneBrush said:

The group of people I game with most often have all deviated towards more skirmish games in truth, so Necromunda, Aeronautica, Titanicus.  They need less models, have more stable goal posts and because they're shorter length games you can get more games into the same timespan.  Still plenty of releases to spend money on if wanted of course!

I think we're going to get something completely new rather than a tweaked version.  Could well be wrong on that front of course, but I think the rules devs working on TOW are very aware of all of the problems that the last few versions had.

Dunno about that, the last article we got about ToW seemed to imply that we're getting WFB 9th.

[Sception]

6 hours ago, RuneBrush said:

A few GW staff have admitted that if they were able to go back in time and change how they introduced AoS they'd do a number of things differently.  Without getting too far down the rabbit hole (as it's not healthy and now firmly in the past), WHFB wasn't making GW any real money and the entry cost was horrifically high, so "something" had to change.

oldhammer fantasy had a lot of problems, but the biggest one was something I don't think the devs and decision makers were even aware of until it was too late - narrative stagnation.  Nothing ever really happened in the lore, even relatively minor changes got retconned away a few years later rather than building into bigger events.  There was nothing to get excited about, nothing to shake things up or stir up interest.  Nothing to attract new players or get existing players to come out of their insulated basements playing the same armies against the same opponents.

End Times shook things up.  Suddenly there were big events happening, big things changing, characters dying, armies combining or being destroyed.  It was controversial, but it was also exciting.  Players got motivated, they came out to speculate, they revised or added to their armies, tragically new people started playing the game.  From the outside, there was so much activity.  I don't have the inside perspective to know whether that translated into sales, but it's hard to imagine it didn't.  But even if the End Times did demonstrate that there was life to be found in the Fantasy game and product line after all, by that point it would have been too late to change course.

Still, it's hard not to imagine a different course for Age of Sigmar if the devs had embraced and built on the renewed interest in fantasy and the old world rather than abandoning it.

[Gaz Taylor]

2 hours ago, RuneBrush said:

The group of people I game with most often have all deviated towards more skirmish games in truth, so Necromunda, Aeronautica, Titanicus.  They need less models, have more stable goal posts and because they're shorter length games you can get more games into the same timespan.  Still plenty of releases to spend money on if wanted of course!

That’s the direction I’m heading in. I love AOS but getting older I’d rather have smaller games. The core Warcry rules getting published is ace as that’s something to play with as I love the IP.

2 hours ago, RuneBrush said:

I think we're going to get something completely new rather than a tweaked version.  Could well be wrong on that front of course, but I think the rules devs working on TOW are very aware of all of the problems that the last few versions had.

I’m pretty sure it’s a tweaked version as they mentioned that last year. That could be very different now with where the world is now and how they think people will get it. It’s possible they will try something new but I’m doubtful. Ideal scenario in my head is them doing a range of models at a slightly smaller scale and doing them as blocks rather than individual models (I used to hate the “wound” markers after the fighting ranks 🤣). That could be cool and different enough for people to pick it up. 

[CommissarRotke]

1 hour ago, Gaz Taylor said:

I’m pretty sure it’s a tweaked version as they mentioned that last year. That could be very different now with where the world is now and how they think people will get it. It’s possible they will try something new but I’m doubtful. Ideal scenario in my head is them doing a range of models at a slightly smaller scale and doing them as blocks rather than individual models (I used to hate the “wound” markers after the fighting ranks 🤣). That could be cool and different enough for people to pick it up. 

Yeah I had the impression they were going for like a "revitalized 8th ed" ruleset from the info so far