GW News: BIG N' SMALL WAAAGH! COMIN'

And does each new core set essentially invalidate the one that came prior? Is it like a brand new edition with new core rules?

 

I believe it plays the role of a new edition in that it replaces the previous one and changes the rules enough that you have to switch to the new set if you want to keep competing (which has always put me off playing Underworlds because I don’t want to have to buy a new Core set every year) but the changes in each new Core set are a tune-up of those that came in the set before it, rather than brand-new rules.

I imagine you could easily just buy one Core Set you like and stick with it like, for example, you and I stick with 8th Edition Fantasy and I stick with 6th Ed 40K, so long as you have friends that want to play the ruleset from that era, but there is always the concern that you’ll get left in the past as the competitive scene shifts to the rules from the next new Core set every year.

 

That sounds terrible!!

Who wants to try to constantly keep up with such a frantic release schedule? I think it could be hard to find players for an older edition that was around for only a year. 8th WFB was a major release that stuck around for a good number of years and had many army books and models released. It had both the time and released material to build up a dedicated fan base. I just can't see that same thing playing out for an edition that is only released for a single year with a couple of warbands thrown into the mix.

Thanks for the info!

 

It doesn't necesarly invalidate, but it does expand to the point not having acces to the new core rules in some way means certain key-words and stuff don't make any sense. For example, casters were only introduced in edition 2. So unless you had the edition 2 core-rules any caster card was just kind of a mystery as to how it actually works.

Meh, I don't think you should compare it to a WFB edition. More like a major patch in a videogame.
Still pretty terrible, but it's manageable

 

The difference being that a major patch for a video game is free.

 

mwha, in between subscriptions, battlepasses & sunk-cost fallacy for skins and whatnot to hook people in, that may not be entirely true

 

Depends on your gaming/spending habits I suppose, exceptions do exist. For the most part it remains true.

 

Lemme rephrase it. As a general rule, videogames that use a similarly aggresive "at-least-once-a-year-the-game-significantly-changes" patch-cycle don't exactly have particularly great monetization. And sure, not everyone is affected by it in equal measure, especially if they focus on whales. But that doesn't exactly make the approach they use ethical.

 

Fair enough. I'm talking about games like Horizon, God of War, Red Dead Redemption, Borderlands, Skyrim, Gears of War, Dark Souls, etc. These games get patched all the time to fix issues or to simply improve the gamer experience. They don't cost extra and are taken care of in the background. If someone is a casual gamer, they might not even know anything about it, it just happens and the game will perform better as a result. No extra effort is required on the part of the user and no additional cost is incurred.

If we're talking about those supposedly "free to play" games (often seen on the mobile platform), then I agree with you. I don't waste my time with those, so whenever I use the general term "video game" I'm talking more along the lines of legit triple A titles.

 

There's plenty of triple A titles that use the same monetization schemes as mobile games use, just with an additional 60 (or well, 80 now I guess) cost upfront

As for the examples you gave, I think a big difference is also that the patches they get are primarely focused on fixes, not on big overhauls. You're not going to come back to Skyrim after 15 years to find a whole bunch of new skills or entire new storylines. Generally speaking as long as the updates are focused on bugfixing the monetization stays relativly fine. The moment it goes beyond that you get DLC if you're lucky, which is generally at least still vaguely fairly prized. Or you go into free-to-play model of selling skins and lootboxes (despite it not actually being free to play...)

 

Yeah, but that game is a million times bigger than Warhammer Underworlds will ever be. It is a complete and immersive experience, even without any DLC. Obviously you have to pay for a video game DLC (unless you wait a while and buy the GOTY edition). I never claimed that DLC was free, my original post was clearly in reference to patches being free...

 

Back to Warhammer Underworlds, GW are now putting that new Nethermaze Core Set on pre-order on Saturday alongside that second warband for Harrowdeep (unless it's going to count as a Nethermaze warband, in which case Harrowdeep will have only introduced 3 warbands, whereas all previous editions have introduced 8). Such a strategy makes very little sense given Harrowdeep hasn't been out for less than a year, unless they're getting it out of the way early so they can get on with releasing the new edition of Horus Heresy.

 

From what I understand, production and shipping delays are still a big problem for some things. I imagine that is really contributing to GW's odd release schedules.

 

This is a combination of ripples from the supply chain implosion after the initial rise of COVID-19 AND GW's rumored attempt to open a warehouse in the midwest that then got tanked due to said covid supply chain issues.

 

Interesting. I didn't know about the midwest warehouse.

 

Again, that was a rumor I heard. Not 100% sure of its accuracy but supposedly the project was canceled early in the covid-19 pandemic

 

So the ancestors in 40K are apparently replace by computers.
Interesting twist I guess. Though I do hope they're going to deviate a bit more from the warhammer dwarf archetype.

 

They'd get along well with House Van Saar, at least.

Still, the uploaded memories of ancestors in pseudo-AI cores still a unique take on "machine spirits".