Warcradle Announce The Dystopian Age
December 4, 2017 by dracs
Warcradle Studios have released a video discussing their plans for some of their games and how they are bringing them together into a new shared universe they are calling the Dystopian Age.
The big news of this is that Dystopian Wars will be seeing something of a reboot, with its background getting melded with that of Wild West Exodus.
The two steampunk settings should go together well, with their differences providing plenty of room for new developments and unexpected additions. I believe it will also allow Wild West Exodus to expand beyond its enclosed, American setting and let us see how the rest of the world looks and acts beyond its borders.
Dystopian Wars
In the video, we also got a look at some new ships that will be sailing out for Dystopian Wars.
Each of these designs looks to be a pretty cool update on the original Spartan Games one. The Celestial Ninjing Class Battleship (centre) is particularly impressive and has me tempted to turn away from my Brittanian fleet.
However, the most intriguing has to be these concept pieces.
OK, that is pretty cool, very high tech and... Wait a minute, does that say "whale construct launcher"?
That is both incredibly cool, and rather disturbing. Given the level of technology, I initially thought this might be the new Covenant of Antarctica, or maybe it's Wild West Exodus' Watchers. Could the two factions be working together?
Armoured Clash
Moving from sea to land, we also have some previews for Armoured Clash.
With these vehicles, we see more of the cross-pollination of styles between Wild West Exodus and Dystopian wars, particularly the the Rolling Thunder (centre) and Ironhide Utility Vehicle (bottom).
Even with the smaller scale, they are very well detailed models and they looked the part for this new Dystopian Age.
If you have any questions you want to ask Warcradle, they have announced that they will launching a live Q&A session on December 8th.
What changes do you hope to see with this new Dystopian Age? What do you want to stay the same?
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I believe the Covenant of Antarctica will now be the Covenant of the Enlightened, tying them in with WWX’s Enlightened faction, but don’t quote me on that. I just saw it somewhere!
Ok, the video isn’t playing, but its great to see these lines coming back, and the match up of the three systems could work really well.
That’s a perfect way to continue these lines! I am mucho impressed and I am keen to get into this world.
Video link fixed, sorry about that everyone.
the ships look great.
Well my feelings are mixed. While I am glad to see dystopian wars get picked up. I am not happy about the complete gutting of the fluff. In addition them changing the armoured clash scale to 10 mm is off putting. The building sized tanks was one of the appealing things about the setting. Also the getting rid of the whole alternate War One concept and at least some of the factions (FSA) disapointing.
Well, the FSA aren’t really gone, they’re just WWX’s The Union now.
I am glad to see this happen. I have the utmost faith in Warcradle to handle this as I am having a blast with their new version of Wild West Exodus. They have said that they aren’t getting rid of any factions though may merge some as alliances, keeping their individuality within those factions (check out the Outlaws faction if you want to get an idea of how they did it in WWX) . I have no special attachment to the old fluff as if you knew a bit of history , even as an alternate history, it had major… Read more »
Interesting way of combining different games that makes a lot of sense. It clearly shows their dedication to the games they’ve taken on as they have literally taken them to heart.
Does this mean they might dust off the Dystopian Legions minis? Aren’t they about the same scale as Wild West Exodus?
Well, they did hint at a second 35mm game somewhere down the line, and the removal of The Crown and The Celestial would make sense if there was a second, less magical game.
I think making an expanded Dystopian Age rule set that covers both WWE and Dystopian Legions would probably be a sensible move. Even if it’s done in two books, perhaps a small skirmish set and a larger Battles set, if the core mechanics are compatible that would probably give people a lot of scope to play with.
Will my current DW armor pieces still work?
Depends what you’ve got. Anything naval should still work, but the scale will change with the land stuff. They will be releasing conversion rules so that anything you have can be used, but the scale may well be off.
Even then if you ae using your land pieces for landing actions (ie sea to ground) you’d still be okay by my understanding , it is just the land only ruls which are jumping up in scale for more detailed minis and to be able to use the 10mm scenery which is available on the market.
The landing action thing seems, from the vid, to be only tokens, not “playing pieces”. Which makes sense, the disparity between naval and land units made any sort of “combined arm” between them laughable.
When I heard about the announcement of Dystopian Age, I was kind of wary. After giving it some thought, I can see it maybe working out.
I can see it working especially well if they have a common scale and rules set for all their 35mm games. So you could pit your British Redcoats against some of the WWE models and vice versa.
Well colour me excited I used to play both dystopian wars and wild west exodus but kinda walked away from them, now however I think my bank account will start crying
Also would be good to see factions like warrior nation getting African units as part of Thier fraction list, as well as maybe a Chinese or Asian faction entering WWX or even then British finally dealing with those “damn colonials” and seeing the old pith helmet squaring off against bandits or union riflemen…. So excited
Well… this is brave! I wonder if Warcradle had this planned all along when they bought up the properties or whether it’s something that came together once they had them all and were wondering how to market and/or develop them? I don’t play any of the games, so don’t have a dog in this fight (perhaps that not the right metaphor – I have no stake in this game). I can imagine being quite concerned about one or more games I’d invested in being changed up… But if this works, it could of course bring much more life to all… Read more »
No, you chose your metaphor correctly 🙂 . I do believe that they are not using the same rules for different games but they do want the factions to have the same style of play across the different games.
I think it’s an interesting thing to think about. Is anyone who invested in Dystopian Wars when it was Spartan really losing anything by the scale change? No. They lost their game when Spartan went out of business. Warcradle bought the IP which included but was not limited to the game itself, they have no obligation to maintain the previous game. It’s obviously disappointing for players of Dystopian Wars that the new game will be in a different scale but they aren’t actually losing anything they hadn’t already lost
That’s all true, but perhaps not quite so simple. When news came out that the properties had been picked up, I assumed – and probably others did too – that while the settings might develop in ways the original owners hadn’t intended that they would at least pick up from where the owners left off. A new edition on a relaunch of a game might be an opportunity to do a bit of retconning, but I would think most players would assme that the properties were going to remain more or less intact. I don’t know any of the settings… Read more »
Opinions and all, but I really like all the new models they’ve shown, and thus am looking forward to seeing what it all eventually looks like when it is released.
I don’t mind the jump in scale in terms of the land stuff, but then I didn’t really have any of the old stuff.
Very excited, especially if they also look into adapting legions as well. I always thought dysleg was missing a trick with their characters and they came across abit soft. Warcradle can really work on this as the characters are brilliant in wwx. Fsa will become the union, enlightened prussian zombies, britianna becoming the crown, antarticans becoming the order and the Japanese become the celstrials. I think it makes alot of sense. I have the infantry for dystopian legions so i would love to see some vehicles and larger than life characters added. Great news all round and glad to see… Read more »
Stupid question – does this mean the models are getting bigger or smaller?
Interesting that Forgeworld’s Adeptus Titanicus is aiming for 8mm as well. Might be a way to combine the lot together.
No such thing as stupid questiions .. (well there is but asking for info isn’t by any chalk)
Dystopian Wars stays the same scale
Armoured Clash smaller scale to a larger scale
Wild West Exodus stays the same
The game is changing scale, but individual models will stay the same.
So the existing models will be perfectly usable, and if those models have new versions they will be the same size.
For example if a model used to represent a tank 10m long, in the future it will represent a tank only 5m long. But the model will still be the same 2cm long piece of metal/plastic it always has been. This will allow the introduction of (very small) infantry models, which previously would have been impossible.
If you missed (this morning my time) probably yesterday / last night’s for the rest of you Q&A that Warcradle did on Facebook it alays most of the concerns raised in this post. it should be posted for replay sometime over the next couple of days…. I really recommend watching it.