Future Of AoS

[The Lost Sigmarite]

Just now, Flippy said:

GW is also known to cut some sub-factions entirely and/or replace them with something same-but-different (HE --> Lumineth). I'm specifically concerned with Bonesplitterz and Spiderfang. But it is safe to assume that even if these go, we will get something in return.

This debate has been done a thousand times before, please, I don't wanna do it again... Just so you know, Spiderfang appeared in Reign of the Brute and Bonesplitters in the CoS BT. 

[Sathrut]

End Times for AoS isn't happening for the foreseeable future. It's currently in a good place, with an enthusiastic team who show no signs of stagnation when it comes to rules, lore and miniatures. The only issue I can see arising depends on how many new armies they add within the next five years. It's likely a matter of when for Malerion/Chaos Dwarfs, but there's every chance of a brand new army. We all know which factions have received little attention throughout AoS lifespan, which GW only recently started remedying with huge refreshes or smaller waves. They seem to be hitting a balance between updated existing minis and new minis at the moment, so I wonder if they're holding off on Malerion/Chaos Dwarfs until the current refreshes/additions to existing armies are done.

 

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

7 hours ago, Dawi not Duardin said:

I think ToW is a bit of a test rocket here. It might well be possible that, in the light of the success of Total War, old-school fantasy proves to be more popular than AoS. Then I wouldn't put it past GW to nuke AoS to return to the old system.

If the rumours about the two new Bretonnia and Tomb Kings boxes full of old models are true, I don't see that as a realistic scenario, to be honest. I hope that ToW does well and we get cool new models of old WHFB factions over time, but given the level of support GW is showing the game right now (barely any new models, only putting old stuff back into production) I don't really see how a game that got discontinued due to lack of interest is going to realistically overtake the current second most popular war game worldwide. It seems to me that very little has fundamentally changed (as far as we currently know) between old WHFB and ToW, so I really struggle to see how that game will be more than a specialist side game and a way to keep old kits in production for longer.

[Snarff]

8 hours ago, Dawi not Duardin said:

What I hope will happen is however that they find some lore way to make WHFB and AoS compatible. In particular I hope they will write them as settings that are part of some sort of eternal cycle of worlds dying and repopulating. (They already hinted at that quite excessively in the End Times lore.) Then you would be able to treat both settings as living as a player, and I could have my classic dwarf shieldwall cake and eat my Kharadron spaceships too, while feeling that both of them are active...

I hope they don't. AoS has proven immeasurably more popular and profitable for GW, and it's the only setting I have any interest in. WFB died, it's getting it's 30K side game, but let's leave it there.

[Flippy]

1 hour ago, The Lost Sigmarite said:

This debate has been done a thousand times before, please, I don't wanna do it again... Just so you know, Spiderfang appeared in Reign of the Brute and Bonesplitters in the CoS BT. 

Sorry! Apparently I was mislead by the name of the topic 😕

[The Lost Sigmarite]

1 hour ago, Snarff said:

I hope they don't. AoS has proven immeasurably more popular and profitable for GW, and it's the only setting I have any interest in. WFB died, it's getting it's 30K side game, but let's leave it there.

Yeah I think the same. AoS shouldn't embarass itself with associating too much with what is essentially a dead game. I hope we don't lose all WFB kits in AoS (especially the large ones from the 2010s), because I like having fine looking monsters that aren"t huge money sinks, but I'd rather have the 2 games separate. Maybe they do a little something like Custodes who share kits between 30k and 40k, but keep it small if so. 

[Sathrut]

As far as GW are concerned, TOW/WFB are canonical to AoS, even going so far as to state that TOW will eventually lead to the End Times, thus AoS. It's impossible to separate the two, not when you have Sigmar, Nagash, Teclis, Tyrion, Morathi, Arkhan, Mannfred, Neferata, Alarielle, Drycha, Light of Eltharion, Gotrek, Ushoran, Kroak, and others.

Regardless of what happens miniature wise, many of the refreshed ranges fit the WFB aesthetic (SBGL, Seraphon). I've seen people saying that thanks to the change in base sizes, they'll be making TOW armies from AoS minis, so maybe, just maybe, the two systems can co-exist without people saying one is worse than the other?

I'm interested in seeing how they handle Beastmen, given their status as a core faction in TOW. I can't see them appearing in TOW until they get a range refresh in AoS, given how the majority of kits currently sold are WFB kits.

[ArcLight]

On 9/19/2023 at 5:31 PM, KriticalKhan said:

My optimistic view is that we'll keep getting "second waves" to AoS concepts and maybe even new sub-factions for existing armies---ideas like the Kurnothi for Sylvaneth, or what the Witch Elves used to be for the Dark Elves in Fantasy: new units with new aesthetics and functions that still fit in the broader theme of their base faction. That would keep the overall number of factions to a reasonable level while still allowing new ideas and releases that might draw someone into a faction more than "old infantry but in a new pose with more greebly bits" updates might.

Beast snagga orks for 40k are a good example of something like this as well and lends some validity to this being the potential long term route.

[CommissarRotke]

12 hours ago, Dawi not Duardin said:

I posted this in the rumour thread once and it was not a popular thought. But, as they did not shy away from an End Times before, I could see them End Times-ing AoS if it doesn't prove profitable enough over time. 

TBQH seeing how open AOS still is, I would bet on a 40k End Times before AOS got axed. only one of these settings got written into a corner

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

25 minutes ago, Sathrut said:

I'm interested in seeing how they handle Beastmen, given their status as a core faction in TOW. I can't see them appearing in TOW until they get a range refresh in AoS, given how the majority of kits currently sold are WFB kits.

It really is an interesting question. Beastmen seem like the one outlier of the current TOW core factions in so far as all the other core factions are armies that have had their ranges substantially changed from their WHFB counterparts and have the potential to put "classic" kits back into production (with Chaos Warriors being the other potential exception). The willingness of GW to update non-hero plastic kits for WHFB seems low right now, as far as we know (Bretonnian knights are still the old kits). So it seems unlikely that Beastsmen would get new bespoke kits for ToW. I don't personally believe that the development plans for TOW affect the plans/models/designs for AoS, but I think the other way around is somewhat plausible. I hope that points towards Beasts of Chaos getting a range refresh sometime in the near future, with TOW keeping the old kits in production. They definitely set up some kind of plot thread for Beasts of Chaos and Morghur in Seasons of War: Thondia, but that has not gone anywhere so far.

[Marcvs]

1 minute ago, CommissarRotke said:

TBQH seeing how open AOS still is, I would bet on a 40k End Times before AOS got axed. only one of these settings got written into a corner

IMHO, narrative got nothing to do with it.

AoS will not have an End Times as long as GW sees more money in AoS than in AoS:End Times + new product. The only honest statement about this sounds more or less like this: at the moment we assume* that AoS is doing fine, so no reason to predict any End Times event in the forseable future.

*unless someone has seen more pecise numbers

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

1 minute ago, Marcvs said:

IMHO, narrative got nothing to do with it.

AoS will not have an End Times as long as GW sees more money in AoS than in AoS:End Times + new product. The only honest statement about this sounds more or less like this: at the moment we assume* that AoS is doing fine, so no reason to predict any End Times event in the forseable future.

*unless someone has seen more pecise numbers

The WHFB End Times were definitely an exceptional event that happened because of exceptional circumstances. Like extremely low sales over a long periode of time and no obvious way to get new players into the game without drastic changes. We should definitely stop pretending that GW has a habit of just discontinuing their systems left and right as soon as sales start to stall. An AoS or 40k End Times scenario is not realistic when they are still the most popular and second most popular tabletop games in the world. Even if ToW proves to be a hit, I don't see it. Nobody thinks that 40k is in danger of getting squatted in favour of Horus Heresy, after all.

[CommissarRotke]

36 minutes ago, Marcvs said:

at the moment we assume* that AoS is doing fine, so no reason to predict any End Times event in the forseable future.

*unless someone has seen more pecise numbers

we know it's doing fine from the investor report ;o

[Snarff]

45 minutes ago, CommissarRotke said:

we know it's doing fine from the investor report ;o

Not just fine, but steadily growing and well received IIRC. And unless they expected it to sell worse than black primer (like a certain other game), it sounds like it's thriving rather than surviving.

EDIT: Dominion was even described as: "…best fantasy launch to date by a considerable margin." by GW themselves.

Edited September 21, 2023 by Snarff

[Dawi not Duardin]

2 hours ago, Sathrut said:

As far as GW are concerned, TOW/WFB are canonical to AoS, even going so far as to state that TOW will eventually lead to the End Times, thus AoS. It's impossible to separate the two, not when you have Sigmar, Nagash, Teclis, Tyrion, Morathi, Arkhan, Mannfred, Neferata, Alarielle, Drycha, Light of Eltharion, Gotrek, Ushoran, Kroak, and others.

Regardless of what happens miniature wise, many of the refreshed ranges fit the WFB aesthetic (SBGL, Seraphon). I've seen people saying that thanks to the change in base sizes, they'll be making TOW armies from AoS minis, so maybe, just maybe, the two systems can co-exist without people saying one is worse than the other?

I'm interested in seeing how they handle Beastmen, given their status as a core faction in TOW. I can't see them appearing in TOW until they get a range refresh in AoS, given how the majority of kits currently sold are WFB kits.

I am not so sure it is impossible to separate the two. What they could say in lore is that there is an infinite number of WHFB worlds, but only with certain probabilities of it developing in one way or another. Then from the perspective of WHFB End Times, you could have the setting branch off in to Chaos wins, Order wins, Orcs win, etc, scenarios depending on those probabilities. That would give you the leeway to fight over the WHFB setting in way where the outcome of your battles still matter, while also allowing AoS to emerge organically in the version(s) of the setting where Chaos wins. This would be my ideal interpretation of having the two systems coexist. (It also helps to make sense of a lot of other things, such as how you can start playing various campaigns where sometimes one side wins and sometimes the other at various points in time, whether on the tabletop or in Total War.)

5 hours ago, Snarff said:

I hope they don't. AoS has proven immeasurably more popular and profitable for GW, and it's the only setting I have any interest in. WFB died, it's getting it's 30K side game, but let's leave it there.

This however seems a little bit unnecesarily dismissive. I get that there still are WHFB fans who think AoS never should have happened. But saying "x is the only setting I have any interest in the other one died, get on with it" just seems to attempt to put people who have other preferences down. Surely it makes sense for GW to try to cater to both tastes? (Just because some people prefer football to athletics, that doesn't mean athletics shouldn't get to matter for those who prefer it.) And also quite a few of us who do enjoy one setting also enjoys the other, meaning that we'd be interested in seeing both developed.

[ScionOfOssia]

It’s highly unlikely that they would do anything like that soon unless TOW sells particularly well- They’re taking a gamble that enough people will jump from the video game sphere to the wargaming sphere that they can make a suitable ROI and old players who got burned by the End Times will not only return, but buy more models.
 

It’s entirely possible that the anticipated playerbase will end up much smaller than expected and continued support would be considered unprofitable, resulting in it getting dropped again. 

[Rebluff]

On 9/19/2023 at 5:51 AM, Gitzdee said:

Ok im just thinking out loud here. If 3rd edition is finished a substantial part of AoS will have decent sculpts. After 4th edition all armies should be updated or have received a 2nd wave. What will they do after that? Release more armies? Start refreshing all over again? Another End Times? My guess is GW already has to be planning what they want to do in the future. Any ideas?

Some armies desperately need something new to make them interesting again.

Daughters of Khaine have been EXACTLY the same army, with slightly different numbers, since Broken Realms: Morathi came out. Two Battletomes later and they haven't managed to add a single interesting wrinkle to the entire army.

Either role them into Malerion Aelves (blech) or give them something new to do. Morathi+15 Bow Snakes got old before second edition was done.

[novakai]

All thing point to them separating their games setting more then any unifications at least between their mainline games and Specialist games.

what happen in 40K where they basically legends all the Horus heresy is probably the indication of what they will do going forward with AoS and Old world

[CommissarRotke]

1 hour ago, Dawi not Duardin said:

That would give you the leeway to fight over the WHFB setting in way where the outcome of your battles still matter

the thing is, this leads into the problem with GW's writing in general: they essentially create settings where Chaos is already destined to win... Since Chaos feeds off how the Imperium/Empire/Order react to it, it's almost inevitable. AOS seems to get slightly more nuance and hope about this, but WHF and 40k never did.

[Gitzdee]

7 minutes ago, CommissarRotke said:

the thing is, this leads into the problem with GW's writing in general: they essentially create settings where Chaos is already destined to win... Since Chaos feeds off how the Imperium/Empire/Order react to it, it's almost inevitable. AOS seems to get slightly more nuance and hope about this, but WHF and 40k never did.

I do hope GW changes the way the story builds. So far we have had these events that always reverted back to the way its supposed to be thanks to the order super heroes. I quite liked Chaos winning for once. I hope Destruction actually effects the mortal realms somehow. A failed siege on Excelsis doesnt cut it.

[novakai]

40 minutes ago, CommissarRotke said:

the thing is, this leads into the problem with GW's writing in general: they essentially create settings where Chaos is already destined to win... Since Chaos feeds off how the Imperium/Empire/Order react to it, it's almost inevitable. AOS seems to get slightly more nuance and hope about this, but WHF and 40k never did.

TBF for 40K, Chaos and chaos space marines are sort of lightweights compare to other factions in the game. They are not the most inevitable force to take over the galaxy because Tyranids, Orks, and Necrons exist.

but yeah the whole premise of 40K which was probably base on WHF was that the setting was always on the eleventh hour before bad stuff hit the fan. Which also restricts the narrative and how the story can move foward.

edit: where it leads to moment where you can’t have the bad guys wining to hard all the time. Like if the Blood angel world of Bael is being swift by Tyranids who are supposedly the most unstoppable force in the galaxy. You have write in that a Khorne daemon prince appear out the warp to defeat the Tyranids and saves the Blood angels because he still has an honorable beef with Sanguinius.

Edited September 21, 2023 by novakai

[Dawi not Duardin]

49 minutes ago, CommissarRotke said:

the thing is, this leads into the problem with GW's writing in general: they essentially create settings where Chaos is already destined to win... Since Chaos feeds off how the Imperium/Empire/Order react to it, it's almost inevitable. AOS seems to get slightly more nuance and hope about this, but WHF and 40k never did.

I disagree with this. Chaos has never been deterministically destined to win (in the fantasy settings at least, and they are the ones I am the most familiar with).

In Storm of Chaos, Grimgor headbutted Archaon to give us the status quo back. In End Times, Order would have won were it not for Mannfred von Carstein. In both cases, what ultimately sealed the fate of the campaigns was the intervention of a neutral joker-style character whose actions could have gone either way. 

And then in AoS you have the Sigmarite narrative of hope, the Lumineth narrative of harmony, the reappearance of the Seraphon great plan, and even Kharadron techno-progress...

The chance factor in WHFB and the good guy progress in AoS to me clearly indicate that Chaos victories are never the sole possible outcomes. Sure, the settings are dark. Sometimes very dark. But it is the idea of standing up against the darkness with clenched teeth and true grit and faith, steel and gunpowder that truly makes Warhammer shine dramatically. You're going in against the odds, and you're surrounded by demons... but somehow you gotta win anyway. 

 

 

[CommissarRotke]

1 hour ago, Dawi not Duardin said:

I disagree with this. Chaos has never been deterministically destined to win (in the fantasy settings at least, and they are the ones I am the most familiar with).

I mean yeah, because GW still needs to sell their wargame Chaos will never actually win (ET-AOS outlier not included). what I mean is that the way the literal world is constructed, Chaos is constantly battering at the gate or whispering in ears. The Storm of Chaos is bookended by other massive Chaos invasions. 40k has the galaxy cut in half and the Eye of Terror is a full blown warp portal now. The "only war" mentality of Warhammer settings means that, in text, Chaos is an inevitable victor because they are designed to not only thrive on the endless conflict, but they can corrupt (most) mortal beings that have souls/warp presence/whatever. They are written to have wriggled their way into the Mortal Realms to start this cycle all over again.

I do agree that AOS has been better about this, but the way Phil Kelly wanted to pivot the perspective for 3.0 tells me that they LIKE Chaos as this inevitable victor--most of the realms are still under Chaos control, with Order only carving out "beacons of light" amongst the corruption. So while I also WANT Destruction to do big plot things, what does losing one of these beacons mean? If Chaos is still the baddest enemy out there, why wouldn't Destruction attack them instead? Is it because Chaos is pulling their strings (again)? Etc etc.

All that being said, I do understand selling a wargame means your lore isn't going to make much sense versus a world created to tell stories. It's just...frustrating growing into an adult and realizing the maturity you saw as a teenager is more of a facade. Again, I get it's because they're selling products not stories. But I love Warhammer a lot and it still sucks realizing it hasn't really grown up like you did.

[KriticalKhan]

I see Chaos as a metaphor for entropy and the inevitability of failure/death. You can't escape it, it's always coming, and no matter what you do, it's going to win in the end. Does that mean everything before was worthless? Unless you're an anti-natalist suicidal hyper-doomer, most people would say no. The goal has never been to beat Chaos, only to fight for another day. And that means that Chaos is "overpowered" and no one else is "balanced" against it, but the narrative is not dictated by rules or fairness. Complaining about that is like saying the Tyranids or the original Necrons are boring because they don't have named characters or personality. It's not a flaw in the writing: it's practically the whole point.

Of course, none of this is to say that GW writes Chaos in an interesting manner. One can only see "That cool, nuanced villain/xeno/underutilized faction character was actually only the setup for CHAOS! Again! Never saw that coming, eh?" before you get bored. Someone should teach them that not using something all the time actually gives it more of an impact. Shocking, I know.

*They do, and it comes from the style, designs, and the mood and atmosphere they evoke

[Ejecutor]

20 hours ago, Snarff said:

Not just fine, but steadily growing and well received IIRC. And unless they expected it to sell worse than black primer (like a certain other game), it sounds like it's thriving rather than surviving.

EDIT: Dominion was even described as: "…best fantasy launch to date by a considerable margin." by GW themselves.

I am surprised about that Dominion sentence. We saw lot of stores throwing its price to levels that we've never seen in AoS history in terms of big boxes (even lower than some Start Collectings), and that is a hint about it not selling so well.

Maybe it was too overproduced? I don't know, but that sentence is really surprising.

Edited September 22, 2023 by Ejecutor