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What make the Old World and Mortal Reamls different?


DarkBlack

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Let's not pass the fact that the reason for the whole change is that GW needed to change things up drastically to improve sales. Not a bad thing but I don't believe for a second it was because they felt limited by the fluff of the old world. 

8 hours ago, Oppenheimer said:

 

They turned it from fantasy to high fantasy. Crazy space dragons and floating islands.

I prefer Gothic fantasy but like the AoS rules better.

 

And I agree with this fully. They went from basing armies on old cultures to high fantasy that lost their connection with the real world. And that doesn't draw me in. 

Game wise this adds massive opportunities which I am very excited about. Floating islands at different heights, amazing. Tunneling and deep striking can disrupt a well laid plan, amazing. Big *ss monsters dominate (if only visually) on the battlefield, amazing. 

So for me its a mixed bag. I still have no emotional response to the new armies. But I love the new gameplay and the effect the 'realms' have on it. So for GW: please flesh out the narrative so I feel a connection with it or the freedom to make your own narrative feels a bit useless. 

That being said the lighter gameplay keeps me connected to the game and curious to the future. Curious if I'm the only one who is still searching for the connection. 

 

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15 hours ago, CaptainNippon said:

It is much harder to relate to anything in the mortal realms, because the "rules" of this new setting are so vastly different from the old world, which pretty much mirrored our own. It has the potential to become a nice sandbox with a bigger focus on the fantastical and otherworldly, but in its current form it's not suited for any sort of compelling narrative. Once the realms have been flashed out and a sense of geography has been introduced, that might change eventually.

This is why i hope they dont make the mortal realms to big or infinite.

I like that the size of the setting has increased dramatically but i dont want these battles to become just a drop in an ocean.

However with an advancing storyline and a fairly vague detail about everything thats taken place since the age of myth there is SOOOO much space to put in the most epic battles you like without it becoming impossible.

But yeah i would like some edges to the map and perhaps so major cities/ settlements that have a real influence

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Likes depleted, so I just want to point out that this is the most amicable discussion on the death of the Old World I've seen on the internet. Some other forums got utterly vitriolic over it. Good job staying civil and positive everyone. :)

Personally I miss the existence of Simple, Honest Humans, but then they're the character I always root for in any setting, from the Imperial Guard to the UCM to Mumen Rider. To be honest, I think AoS has a need for a faction like that, if only to show from a human perspective how terrifying the Mortal Realms are and how powerful many of the entities that inhabit it have become.

Because well, to paraphrase a great Pixar movie, if everyone's super, no-one is.

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14 hours ago, Oppenheimer said:

They turned it from fantasy to high fantasy. Crazy space dragons and floating islands.

I prefer Gothic fantasy but like the AoS rules better. Fingers crossed realm of death has something more down to earth in it.

I agree that stormcast aren't as interesting as the Empire used to be.

Hopefully the stormcasts wont become the equvilant of the empire.

just like the space marines (I know their not exactly the same) they are a flag ship team. which is something WHFB never really had as i certainly never considered the Empire to be THE good guys. it was always very balanced.

but in 40k they have the marines as the flagship with all their weird combat doctrine and talk of heresy but behind that you have the rest of the imperium. Impreial guard, inquesition as well as the general poplulas.

Hopefully we will see the development of something similar. We hear alot of names mentioned about smiths and groups of wizards perhaps AOS will eventually develop in the same way starting with some council of Azyr that governs the repopulation of the mortal realms.

Although AOS has given us the Age of Chaos and the Age of Myth as a history. While i dont want to make to many comparisions to 40k, the AOS setting is not in the same stage of the story as 40k. If anything the realmgate wars a similar to the pre heresy great crusades reclaiming the galaxy.

Imagine if GW had started at 30k and developed the story from there with 10000 years of war to play with before they reached the current status quo rather than the opposite way round.Maybe one day they will release Unification war models and stories set on earth (AKA Age of myth for AOS).

I wouldnt be surprised if that is there plan. Keep the story moving. keep the balance of power shifting and keep the mortal realms growing rather than just landing us with a setting.

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5 hours ago, CoffeeGrunt said:

To be honest, I think AoS has a need for a faction like that, if only to show from a human perspective how terrifying the Mortal Realms are and how powerful many of the entities that inhabit it have become.

You sir/mam, are a lot better at putting it into words. This is exactly what I need to connect to the narrative. I need that point of reference apparently. 

And after thinking about it a bit more I realise that the settings I place all my narrative battles in are in the old world still. (Mostly that none of my friends play the updated armies when I think about it. Almost everyone plays compendium lists).

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We certainly have had snippets of what life is like for "ordinary" humans in the Realms other than Azyr.  

Spoilers: it ain't nice.

Devoted of Sigmar like groups have appeared more than once both in BL stories and the Realm Gate wars. Warbeast also has something on the surviving human lines I've been told but I haven't got round to it. 

Nothing wrong with setting games in the Old World using the compendiums, no one had a problem with using character s like Gorbad Ironclaw or Grom the Paunch who were dead long before the End Times happened in WFB. In my mind it's a bit like playing 30K.  

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23 hours ago, Kramer said:

Let's not pass the fact that the reason for the whole change is that GW needed to change things up drastically to improve sales. Not a bad thing but I don't believe for a second it was because they felt limited by the fluff of the old world. 

 

 

The two arent mutually exclusive. A cramped setting make it almost impossible to introduce new and fresh armies.

GW had to retcon the setting so many times to incorporate new units into the armies. which upset quite a few people. I cant imagine how many people would have kicked up a fuss if the suddenly just sprang a whole new race into that world and tried to make them seem credible.

In AOS they may be able to mention vast quantities of creatures in passing or perhaps even wars against races their are no models for. (Anyone remember when kroot and necrons were just random xenos species briefly mentioned in the rule book?)

Happy customers dont always equal more sales but excited ones do so the more opportunity we see in this setting the more invested we will be willing to become.

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9 hours ago, KHHaunts said:

The two arent mutually exclusive. A cramped setting make it almost impossible to introduce new and fresh armies.

Agreed that they aren't mutually exclusive but I don't believe the narrative restrictions that the old world were in any way the instigator of the change. Remember they started this proces by releasing the end of times narratives. 

It would have been easy to update armies and even add SE from that starting point for a Warhammer 9th. But they decided to rebrand completely with Age of Sigmar.  

For example from the End Times: The war forced the Slann to activate ancient spawning points. Et voila, Carnosaurs.
The Gyrocopter development did not stop with the gyrobomber but the dwarfs developed zeppelins and jump/jetpacks. Et voila, jet pack/steampunk dwarfs. 
From the Realms from Chaos gods Sigmar scores some new skills and reforges the heroes that died during the end times.

Just of the top of my mind. 

 

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1 hour ago, Kramer said:

Agreed that they aren't mutually exclusive but I don't believe the narrative restrictions that the old world were in any way the instigator of the change. Remember they started this proces by releasing the end of times narratives. 

It would have been easy to update armies and even add SE from that starting point for a Warhammer 9th. But they decided to rebrand completely with Age of Sigmar.  

For example from the End Times: The war forced the Slann to activate ancient spawning points. Et voila, Carnosaurs.
The Gyrocopter development did not stop with the gyrobomber but the dwarfs developed zeppelins and jump/jetpacks. Et voila, jet pack/steampunk dwarfs. 
From the Realms from Chaos gods Sigmar scores some new skills and reforges the heroes that died during the end times.

Just of the top of my mind. 

 

A rebrand must be easier to work with than bolt ons though. I belive the chief reason for the change is a combination of a stagnant settingand a ruleset that is very off putting to new gamers.

They done that one right this time round by making a core ruleset that wont be changed and just adding supplements. I dont belive 'Vanilla' Aos will ever change much which makes it easy for newbs.

They could have done a post armegeddon setting and have the exisitng faction rework and split as well as add new ones but then i think they would have a similar problem down the line.

Also i belive that given the choice GW wouldnt have hardly any of the old models/races in the new setting. They only did this because expecting everyones models to be completely useless would have resulted in their HQ being burnt to the ground. They have had a lot less freedom with this setting because of out constant critisim and comparision to the old world.

Its like the whole model to model not base to base. I reckon they would of happly made the rules base to base however didnt want the aggro of telling everyone that they HAD to rebase all their models.

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11 minutes ago, Double Misfire said:

The Mortal Realms are round, the Warhammer World was square and flat.

 

On 10/26/2016 at 0:59 PM, DarkBlack said:

I don't mean the actual "physical" differences or characters. I want to talk about what the setup of each setting offers the game and fluff.

 

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As someone who loves to write fluff for his army, AOS is so so much more freedom (see blog to read fluff so far). Trying to make an army unique fluffwise was incredibly difficult without shoehorning them in somewhere in the old world and having someone tell you off because at some point GW wrote something there already blah blah.

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24 minutes ago, Soulsmith said:

As someone who loves to write fluff for his army, AOS is so so much more freedom (see blog to read fluff so far). Trying to make an army unique fluffwise was incredibly difficult without shoehorning them in somewhere in the old world and having someone tell you off because at some point GW wrote something there already blah blah.

what he said ^

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I'll be honest... I'm completely ignoring and in denial of the Mortal Realms existence. My army is the Free Guild of The Empire and we proudly wear the colours of Altdorf. I struggle to connect with the Mortal Realm with floating island, realm gates and high fantasy story telling. 

I will say that the Old World was not as restrictive as people believe. There were a lot of areas such as Cathy, Nippon, the Hinterland, and Araby which remained unexplored in the old setting. 

 

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6 minutes ago, CoffeeGrunt said:

Tbh you could just argue that one of said Realms is basically a chunk of the Empire that, for the most part, got on with life as best as it could.

... or my Realm is the Old World realm ;-)

Things might change I get a battletome and fluff is written about the surviving humans. 

When we stepped through the realm gates our bases did swap from square to circle 

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4 hours ago, MrCharisma said:

I will say that the Old World was not as restrictive as people believe. There were a lot of areas such as Cathy, Nippon, the Hinterland, and Araby which remained unexplored in the old setting.

Not restrictive as in where units could come from, or even what history you could tell.  Restrictive in where the story could go moving forward.  The story of the Old World could go to exactly one place, and eventually it went there (after a couple false starts and resets).

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Why couldn't the story move forward in the Old World? 

I don't see any reason that realm gates couldn't be discovered (or created) in the Old World, or that the Stormcast Eternals join, or that the humans are whooped in the End Times and forced into hiding in Ayzrheim type setting. 

At the end of the day, it happened due to wanting IP and to create another asset for the company (which I appreciate). The Old World now sits in video games and GW's annual report shows how licencing is a strong revenue generator now. 

Fireslayers, Space Lizards, and fleshing out armies like Ghouls and Moonclan could have happened in Old World. 

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The only real directions for the Old World were for Chaos to win (END TIMES!) or for Chaos to lose (boring).  They tried moving it to a conclusion a couple times, but for various hotly debated but never confirmed reasons they reset it.  It was ramped up too far the stalemate to extend any longer.  So Chaos won, in the only manner they could have.

"the humans are whooped in the End Times and forced into hiding in Ayzrheim type setting " is a pretty good first-approximation of what actually happened.

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It's a similar argument to the Black Crusade in 40K. Either Abaddon fails again and Chaos players get salty about it, or Abaddon wins, Cadia is eradicated, several other Chapters and worlds are eradicated, Terra is under siege, etc, etc. Either way they go, they wipe out a faction, which leaves players salty. They could go for a pyrrhic victory, but people will still complain.

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