8th Ed. Old World revamp

Look who comes, crawling back.

https://www.warhammer-community.com/2019/11/15/old-world-new-warhammer/

Jokes aside, having an actual 9th edition, in the same vain as the Horus Heresy is a thing for 40K, not a bad idea at all. What do you think?

 

I sense the death of my beloved 8th edition.

I feel:

50% fear
49.9% sadness
0.1% hope

 

I am experiencing similar emotions. I really don't know if anything they would make would actually resonate with me.

 

That's my fear as well. Plus it makes financial sense for them to tie in ALL the AoS models into WFB. I really don't want SCE in WFB.


Don't get me wrong, if GW produced a legitimate and faithful successor to 8th Edition, I'd be happy. I just don't want to see 8th edition tarnished by some WFB-AoS hybrid (AoS models in WFB, simplified rules, integrated fluff, etc.).

 

Oh my gaawd it's happening!

As someone who only got into this hobby because of Total War Warhammer consider me on the HYPE train!

 

This can only be a good thing - if it sucks it doesn't matter because 8th edition isn't going anywhere. I don't think it will tie in too much with AOS because a lot of the models will not rank up.

They have announced that the release is at least 2 years+ away. This suggests to me that they are going to possibly release new models or at least re-release the old ones they have been slowly removing from the store. Why do I think this? I am not sure it would take this long to just produce the rules, why announce so far in advance if they hadn't been working on it already and have something substantial to work from? the 8th edition rules are already there they just need adapting. It must be for production right?

 

Well yes, but if they really had made a lot already I doubt they would say it would take 2-3 years before we see anything, I mean it really seems like all they have done is make the logo, make a team to find out what they actually want to do and post a message basically saying: 'Hey you remember the old world and warhammer fantasy? That was great right?! Why don't we revisit that'.

In no way are they saying what it will actually be. It could just be rules for special characters and making some scenarios, maybe spell lores but the game could be just AOS, which probably is the most likely, but there is no way to know.
I do hope it will be a true successor to 8th and that they will keep the weird AOS stuff out of it.

 

my thoughts exactly

 

They would somehow have to contend with the fact that there is a lot of hate for AoS.

To think about what I want, I would want something that is akin to 8th, with nerfs to things like WoC, cannons and some spells. I personally feel like that 9th age strays too far from 8th, with the wholly different point system and heavy nerfs to some units (let me play my skink cloud dammit!).

 

Exactly what I want to see changed too!

Have a thumbs up from Arnie

 

Something I'm very curious about, is whether Games Workshop will take the chance to delve into more areas of the Warhammer World. Albion, Vampire Coast or Cathay, for instance.



Nippon in the 1980s, not seen in miniature form ever since.

This could be especially doable if the new Warhammer Fantasy take is more limited in scope than the vast army books of the past, with all their demands for miniature kits. The army book format in and of itself became a creative straitjacket for the GW studio. In the 1980s, they were free to release a handful of new figures whenever they felt like it, and thus explore Nippon, Halflings, Norsca, Fimir or a plethora of monsters with small investment of resources. In the 1990s-2000s, they were increasingly bound up in the demands of the army book threadmill. If they wanted to release something new, it had to either be a complete new army, or just something small on the spin-off side such as specialist games and Dreadfleet (for which the market wasn't good in those days, or at least marketing under Kirby wasn't up to the task) or summer campaign miniatures such as the Hellcannon, Middenheim and Albion miniatures delving into niche concepts.



Kislev during 6th edition: A mini-army, later unsupported.

We did see Dogs of War and Chaos Dwarfs as a small new army in the 1990s (unsupported after 5th edition up to 8th), and a small army for Kislev in 6th edition, unsupported thereafter. Warmaster sported Araby, but Warmaster was not a great hit. Ogre Kingdoms was the one new big army, or one of two if you count the Daemons of Chaos' expanded range, and it needed an entire miniature range.



Chaos Dwarfs: 1990s army, yet left out in the cold for most of Warhammer Fantasy.

Then there were fun thematic armies in White Dwarf, such as Kemmler's Barrow legion, Vampire Coast, Clan Moulder and the Gnoblar Horde. Building on existing modelling ranges and often requiring conversions: Which was part of the fun, for sure, but ensured it stayed a tiny niche and opened up for small companies to produce models GW weren't. This problem of inviting in the small competition to open new niches was much exacerbated when studio designers during 7th edition introduced new units in army lists which did not yet sport official models, such as Forsaken.



Dreadfleet: One last exploratory hurrah before the End Times.

This commercial bind ultimately put dampeners on Warhammer's creative potential: It is huge, and can be explored to much greater extent with a more limited setup than army book-threadmill WHFB of old. But ultimately GW would want to produce models for anything peripheral they delve into, and that mean they may well shy away from introducing more things on the periphery of the background, to not give competitors possible bones to snatch.



Fimir: A weird 1980s creation because the CEO wanted Warhammer to have its very own fantasy race. Resurrected lately by Forgeworld after decades of hibernation.

So there may be little in the way of brand new additions to the glorious setting, such as Inca Dwarfs in Lustria, fantasy Songhai and so on. And there may potentially also be little in the way of covering already existing periphery stuff such as Khureshi Nagas, Albion, Ind, Norsca and so on; this obviously depends on commercial success, how limited in scope the new game and miniature ranges will be, and on budget or will within the studio.

This is a long-standing limit to driving the creative potential of Games Workshop's own grimdark, historically based, classic fantasy smörgåsbord setting to the hilt. It remains to be seen if and how GW will tackle this obstacle.

Cheers

 

Certainly if GW want to keep this new Edition of Fantasy rolling after the initial release, investing into hitherto nonexistent or underdeveloped factions would be a good way to do it, and certainly I would prefer to see that than them just giving all the existing armies more and more units until it becomes as bloated as 8th Edition 40K. However, we'll just have to see what they come up with!

 

If you nerf WoC, you better nerf High Elves (and Dark Elves) as well. High Elves are often considered to be equal to or even more powerful than WoC. Not to say that WoC isn't deserving of a nerf, but so are others. Give the top tier armies a bit of a nerf and the bottom tier armies a bit of a boost and let everyone happily meet in the middle.

I agree. I was excited for T9A at the onset, but was quickly turned off of it. I bet they ain't happy about this GW Old World announcement.

 

I'm all for that as well!

You can have a thumbs up from Arnie too for that statement of wisdom

 

As someone who is just getting into the hobby and therefore building an AoS army right now, this is really exciting as I've known about the lore of the Fantasy setting for a while and definitely think it's more interesting that AoS. I personally hope that they release it as sort of an alternate timeline where the whole End Times thing either never happened or where the Chaos forces didn't have as much plot armor and thus ended up failing. That would actually give people an opportunity to continue the story of the Old World instead of just re-doing the End Times story.

 

I'm very excited about this. Take my money already, GW!

That being said, here are my thoughts. I think it's going to be a slow rollout, comparable to how they've done things with 30k. Maybe a couple armies at a time. If they're smart they'll give us very nice, very pretty resin models to play with that can double as alternate sculpts for Age of Sigmar. Anyway, I'm excited and will start saving my pennies.

 

Love this post made over on EEFL

 

Definitely. Of course, I can claim I never left as I still have at least three fantasy armies I can run that I never rebased. I have enough that I can run Empire in both square and round, Lizardmen in both, and never rebased my Orcs.​